My question was about the 3 part soluable fertilizers - open sesame, beastie bloomz, and cha ching.... did you find it pretty easy to use/dummy proof?
Hell yeah! I think the soluables are VERY noob friendly, the feeding chart is really easy to use. Obviously I don't have a ton of experience with nutes, but I must have lucked out because I got it going pretty well. Here's what I did:
- For soil, in vegetation I had a custom organic soil from my local hydro store - potting mix, perlite and earthworm casings. Probably some other good stuff in there. I mixed that half and half with FF ocean forest soil (ocean forest alone can be too rich with nutes for young veg growth)
- Then about the third or fourth week I began using General Hydroponics Maxigrow - This stuff is cheaper than FF grow big and in my opinion just as good. I got amazing root and leaf growth out of it combined with a 400W MH.
- About a day or two before I switched the light cycle I gave a VERY light feed of Open Sesame (half strength or less). Open sesame is one of the strongest in the line of soluables, you don't need much.
- Continued to increase Open Sesame dose over next few waterings. I also continued feeding Maxigrow up until the 4th week, and also began incorporating their other nute into my solution, Maxibloom. Another great cheap alternative to Tiger Bloom / Big bloom. Also if you start on one line of products its a good idea to finish with it, even though also I incorporated the FF soluables. They seem to play nice together though.
- Starting about week 2 I increased the ratio of Maxibloom to maxigrow so they were only getting a bit of maxigrow every other watering, and more and more maxibloom
- Towards the end of week 2 I eased off the open sesame and began the Beastie bloomz, and holy shit, that stuff works. It's like plant roids
- So by now (week 5) I have stopped using any maxigrow, and am giving full strength maxibloom with a mix of beastie bloomz and a dash of cha-ching. I will be upping the cha-ching: beastie ratio soon
So in short, very easy to use, incredibly effective, and as far as special nutes go, not all that expensive. I can see my three pack of solubles lasting for at least another two to three grows. I say if you want to save money go with the Maxigrow/Maxibloom as your base fertilizers instead of grow big and tiger bloom... a $15 bag of each GH will last five or six grows in soil, vs. the FF liquids may only last you one.
Here's the link to the 1 lb soluble trio pack, for $74 shipped from amazon. I couldn't find a better deal than this. And trust me, they will add way more than $74 worth of bud to your grow!
http://www.amazon.com/Soluble-Tri-Pack-Beastie-Bloomz-Sesame/dp/B000HY2ODU/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1271958085&sr=8-7
Some last general tips
- never dry-mix your fertilizers, always dissolve one first completely in solution before adding different lines of nutes together. You can get bad chemical reactions. also large chunks of salts are never good and can burn the roots
- I have a separate container for mixing and a separate watering can for nutes only to avoid cross contamination.
- The way I fertilize is I mix everything together in a three liter jug, then water the plants with the concentrated nutes first when they're thirsty. THEN I water heavily on top with fresh plain h2o. While I don't *really* know what I'm doing, I like to think that this pushes the nutes directly down into the root zones first. Seems to be working so far.
- Always do a very light feed or plain water between heavy feeding sessions
happy growing. Oh and the LSD can take some serious punishment, it loves to be fed
