Markshomegrown
Well-Known Member
How big are your pots, my plants are small compared to the pot, 22" plant in a 29ltr pot
No Cal Mag
- Thread starter Frank Nitty
- Start date
Markshomegrown
Well-Known Member
Every bag of soil has added nutrients, you can buy it or build it yourself.Yes if they’re getting added nutrients, you’re feeding them nutrients.
Wattzzup
Well-Known Member
So just to be clear your plants ARE getting nutrients in flower? That you added to the soil? Perfect thanks have a nice day mark
Markshomegrown
Well-Known Member
my first comment was "I don't feed my plants in flower"So just to be clear your plants ARE getting nutrients in flower? That you added to the soil? Perfect thanks have a nice day mark
You can twist it any way you like, I am not going to give the plants any extra food in the flowering stage.
I have 2ft high/wide plants in 29lt pots, I am growing Indica plants that take 7-8 weeks in flower.
myke
Well-Known Member
I transplant 2g into 10g.
Markshomegrown
Well-Known Member
You have some very nice plants in your diary, your containers are larger than mine but your plants look massive, what are they 3ft x 3ft?
myke
Well-Known Member
Yup about that,my room is just over 5' x 10'
Markshomegrown
Well-Known Member
That makes sense, that's why you need to top dress your plants, 6 weeks in flower.
my plants are less than half the size of yours.
The tomato plants were impressive, looks a good 10ft high
myke
Well-Known Member
Just over 15’ when they froze. Thanks for looking.
xtsho
Well-Known Member
All you need to do is feed what the plant needs. There are plenty of nutrients that do that. I've never used calmag in decades of growing. That includes hydro, coco, and soil. So yes you can grow without calmag. I never even thought about calmag until I started reading cannabis forums and saw that many consider it an essential. I've never once used calmag when growing cannabis.
Frank Nitty
Well-Known Member
I'm a victim of that,I thought that it was totally necessary... Maybe that is why my plants are always looking crazy??? I'm adding things that my plants don't really need??? Hmmmmmm... Back to the drawing board...
speedwell68
Well-Known Member
It isn't really twisting anything. You are feeding your plants. Be it a liquid feed you mix up and apply with water or a dry feed you mix into the medium, it is still feeding.
RetiredToker76
Well-Known Member
In short, yes. There are many ways to get the magnesium to the plant, most of which have already been talked about.
I haven't used Cal-Mag since 2019, when I switched to Nectar. The whole line is calcium based, the soil has magnesium in it; if the plant really loves magnesium they have a chelating agent in their line called Demeter's Destiny that makes more mag available to the plant. Switching to this line basically made Cal-Mag a redundancy in my grow. So the long answer is yes, quite a few ways to ditch Cal-Mag, from commercial to home/organic like adding Egg-Shells and a little lime to your soil mix, as long as it's available to the plant.
From the Nectar Bible.
"Demeter’s Destiny: 0-0.5-0
Product Details: Demeter’s Destiny is Nectar for the Gods’ answer to calcium-delivered magnesium, correcting and preventing deficiencies. This special blend of different calcium sources and chelating acids naturally chelate the magnesium already present, locked in your soil medium and then deliver it to the plant in a non-metal form."
PeatPhreak
Well-Known Member
Hopefully your well water does not contain at least 200ppm calcium and 75ppm Mg. But your nute mix plus well water probably does.
Markshomegrown
Well-Known Member
For years I wanted to stop using bottle food and top dressing in late flower, read endless threads on no-till.
Finally got there, 3 different soil mixes for different stages, early veg, late veg, and flower, finally I could say I don't feed my plants in flower and everyone jumps on me saying the foods in the soil because you build your own soil?
Taken me a long time to get this right, have you ever tried this?
The soil has to hold just enough water, so it takes 3-4 days to dry out.
When you water you can't have any runoff because you're losing food, but you need to soak all the root mass.
you need to keep the plant as small and bushy as you can, massive pots, it's really not easy.
Keeping the temps low(23c-25c) and the humidity high 50-60, so the plants don't lose to water through the leaves.
Rurumo
Well-Known Member
The problem here is that every nutrient line has different amounts and ratios of cal:mag, and there is ZERO agreement on the "perfect" ratio of cal to mag. Some say 8 to 1, some say 1 to 1, and honestly, you can get excellent results within those ranges depending on the other aspects of your grow-lighting, vpd, strain, etc. LED lighting really does increase the need for magnesium, but you can't just add calmag when you see a mag deficiency, because nothing locks out other nutrients quite so well as excess calcium. Another issue is, some of these bottled nutrients hardly have any cal/mg in them to begin with, instead the company tells you to buy calmag separate just to sell yet another bottle, so in that case, YES you need the calmag or some other form of cal & mg. This is why so many folks here use and recommend Jack's a/b, because it actually has everything you need in a two part formula. Even then, you still need to make adjustments for your individual conditions, for example, my tap water has around 40-50 ppm of calcium (likely carbonate) and my LED lighting and beloved OG strains both increase the need for magnesium. So, rather than just run Jack's a/b, I run close to Jack's 321 ratios, but reduce the calnit (to compensate for my tap water) and slightly increase the epsom salts. My point is, you can't make blanket statements like, "no one needs calmag" or whatever, because everyone is using different nutes and run different strains/lights, etc. In general though, if someone is running nutes that have an adequate amount of Ca to begin with, most likely they will just need epsom salts if they begin to see mg def, and adding more calmag will just make the problem worse. Yuck....sorry for the block of text lol
Billy the Mountain
Well-Known Member
Well stated, the need for CaMg will be contingent on the nutes and source water.
A few examples:
DynaGro Bloom:
FloraNova Bloom:
My Lake Michigan tap water (0.3 EC):
A few examples:
DynaGro Bloom:
FloraNova Bloom:
My Lake Michigan tap water (0.3 EC):