Although im pretty much set. I’m reading post that make me wonder. I was going to just buy the ILGM starter mix pack. But now i read about mallasus, bone meal, blood and other minecraft ingredients. So it’s got me wondering. So ill make a post just for nutes. Recommendations on nutes for a noob?
Oh man, there’s a lot more to it. Than a couple of posts. What are you planning on growing in?
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I’m going to go FFOF soil for the first grow then go from there. Mattybear recommended FFOF @dbrn32. Well for first time. I wanna use coco eventually but agree that on my first grow i sgould go simple with FFOF
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Ffof is a good soil. I use it. If you keep your veg short, It’s possible to go from seed to harvest with just ffof and properly pHd water. Sure you can tweak things to get better results, but for a novice I wholeheartedly recommend it.
First piece of advice. Get yourself a good ph meter.
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@Drinkslinger yea i plan on using FFOF the entire grow. My question is nutes and or supplemental nutes. For example. Ive hearf FFOF is good for nutes until flower. So at flower what nutes should i use and if i should supplement other nutes
I’ve successfully grown smaller plants (1 gal container) from seed to harvest with ffof. It was a short veg time, about 6 weeks from seed.
If you want larger plants, and a longer veg time, you’ll need to add nutes. The fox farm trio is a good and inexpensive way to go. Many of us started out with it. Just be sure to get a good ph meter and stick to their flush schedule.
There are also some great “start to finish” soils that you can layer with ffof, and not have to add nutes.
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Ok. I do plan on getting a good ph meter just cause. Ill look into the fox farm trio thanks.
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Thats a good choice. I’m not sure if he mentioned, but a lot of people feel its a little easier to start in a small cup of an inert seed starting mix and then transplant to the ocean forest. And you’ll maybe want to cut it with a little perlite to help keep the soil from compacting.
Going with a soil like that you won’t need to feed for a few weeks. When you begin feeding, just about any 2 or 3 part base nutes will cover basic needs of your plant… If you go with high efficacy lighting you’ll probably want a bottle of calmag too. Just about everything else is a more specialty item that shouldn’t really need to maintain healthy plants.
When you bone meal, worm castings, or stuff like that, it usually refers to growing organically. Where that stuff would be mixed into your soil and/or brewed as a tea and applied regularly throughout the grow. That’s kind of an art within itself, and can be a little difficult for a beginner to do well. But it’s not impossible either.
Molasses acts as a carb load, keeping microbial activity up within your medium. There are other products that can do this as well. But horticulture grade molasses is cheap, and there’s not really any ill effects from using it.
The latest trend seems to be going toward powdered synthetics. Most of which you can get super cheap, and are fairly easy to use. In the grand scheme of things, you’ll see a lot of varying opinions. Elemental items like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and others are all the same. There’s just some slight differences in how they can or need to be applied. The name or label on any particular bottle doesn’t make it any better than the rest of them.
I’m not really sure where the ilgm line stacks up price wise, but it is packaged in user friendly steps. Something that will help reduce stresses of first grow or two. But again, you can make just about anything work.
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Ok thanks again @dbrn32 ima just go with the ilgm nutes and ima look up that calmag cause ive seen it a lot in posts. As for the rest ill lesve it out and go as i learn.
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That’s a great idea! I think its a simple approach that should be easy to have success with. As you work through your grow and navigate the forum, don’t be afraid to ask questions. That will help you gain more understanding and possibly identify if there’s a better option for you.
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Dumb question…what is FFOF soil? Im using Miracle grow potting soil. It feeds for 3 months. Just put my plant on a 12/12 schedule.
Fox farms ocean forest.
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A lot of people have tried growing in Miracle Grow (I did on my first one) and had to deal with issues. The Fox Farms stuff is PH balanced and developed around cannabis specifically.
Miracle Grow is too hot with too low a PH to be a top performer. That said; if you are careful you will end up with a good finished product but you will definitely want to flush and monitor the solids at the end of the grow.
@StephenBro the two main problems growers experience is: using too many nutrients and burning/killing their plants and not PH’ing correctly. If you lick those you will do well.
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