ttystikk
Well-Known Member
Nice to see you around, brother.
Jacks (JR Peters) nutrients
- Thread starter Growerguy420
- Start date
Skybound420
Well-Known Member
So I've been running with this Brix fixation and got it in my head that we can also grow high brix weed. Maybe not as high of a high brix as the organic growers are getting, but still better than the avg hydro grower, I got a refractometer and tested some of my leaves and though my plants are extremely healthy, my brix level was only 5, and one was 7. In the brix discussions, 12 is considered acceptable so I clearly have a ways to go. I also stumbled onto this chart in one of the grow rooms regarding the search terms "high brix leaf sap". The chart is pretty self explanatory in that ideal leaf sap PH is 6.4 and there is a perfect ionic balance and the result is high brix. I so I bought the meter needed to test the PH of a few droplets of leaf sap and low and behold, my calcium and potassium are both low. I've been increasing the K slowly through the weeks and months, but now wish to also bump up the Ca in the range of 120 to start and K up to 200. When I sent those targets through Hydro Buddy, the app all but sucker punched me in return it was so far from my targets. All of that said, I am back to the calcium discussion we had months back in that I need another source of Ca. The Biomin shit turned out to be a soil amendment or foliar spray so I stopped using it, plus I never used the Dissolvine due to the excessive sodium. I'm hoping one of you are using something besides Cal Nit as your calcium source?
mr. childs
Well-Known Member
glad someone else is mentioning brix... & jacks. i still use basalt for a higher brix. some of the fan leaves turned red. i need to find the article that mentions the reasoning behind it. jacks citrus & basalt among other ingredients works well. if i remember correctly, bugs dont have a pancreas & cant process the sugars in high brix leaves?
found the link https://highbrixgardens.com/what-is-brix.html
https://highbrixgardens.com/victory-gardens/the-path-to-high-brix.html
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Skybound420
Well-Known Member
@nxsov180db they no longer list the sodium in the listing for Dissolvine but I did remember Satori warning me months ago about the very high sodium content, so I went back and brought that post current. From what I've read elsewhere, sodium, even at 12 PPM can begin to express micro nutrient deficiencies, plus also I guess sodium takes place of potassium in the plant tissue if there's too much.
Skybound420
Well-Known Member
I've been fairly lucky in the bug dept, but yes, my studies also indicate that high brix plant life generally is not plagued by insects even though ironically Doc Bud's HiBrix kit users are always plagued with bugs lol. Still, it would make perfect sense to me that the perfect balance of nutrients for cannabis will produce high brix plants and be as healthy as can be imagined which is what we all seek anyways.
Edit - Thanks for those links, I will read both this evening for better comprehension. It looks to have a lot of info therein and I bet I'll learn something new from it/them. Thanks again bro!
mr. childs
Well-Known Member
i know you are a hydro guy but i really like nftg demeters destiny for calcium, and i would like to believe it helped raise the brix level on my black triangle last year
Skybound420
Well-Known Member
Seeing as how Doc Bud advertises that he packs his soil with 18x as much calcium to the next strongest element, I presume your belief is spot on. I predict high calcium and potassium will be a generalized objective and the focal point will be finding exactly how much nitrate will be the key to achieving high brix. From what I've read, excess nitrate makes the plant work harder to process and as the result burn up carbs in the process that would otherwise store in the tissues as sugars. That said though, I absolutely need another source of calcium if I am to jack up the Ca w/o also raising the nitrate levels.
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
This brix thing rears its ugly head every once in awhile and I have to remind people that we aren't growing kale or tomatoes.
We're growing a plant that expresses the desired product, resin on the surface of its tissues, not the plant itself. Brix doesn't really matter as long as the plant is healthy.
I use mag sulfate, aka epsom salt, and that does a great job of improving quality and quantity of resin production. Is it brix? No.
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
Yes. Salt your vegetables AFTER harvest lol
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
Maybe but all that calcium isn't soluble. Since this is a hydroponic nutrients thread, I feel it's important to point out that soluble calcium must be held in an appropriate ratio to other available nutrients, else antagonist reactions occur.
It to put it another way; the PhDs have worked very hard to make a balanced nutrient feed and package it for convenient use. Until you have dialed in the rest of your garden perfectly AND developed a deep knowledge of plant nutrition, your efforts are far more likely to screw things up than improve them.
Skybound420
Well-Known Member
Just because you're getting added resin (me too) from using Epsom, does not mean that all other aspect should be overlooked. Maybe it's just that most growers are totally content with "close enough", but something from within is driving me to desire to produce the best bud I know is within my ability and because of that, I seek to figure out what perfect feed is, and not what someone on the internet considers close enough, but what my eyes see after months of feeding my plants.
My overall point is that perfectly healthy plants will be high brix regardless, but if the plant isn't high brix, I'd question it's overall health.
Skybound420
Well-Known Member
You are correct, Doc loads his soil with 18x more calcium that requires the soil microbes to convert the calcium into something ionic that roots can uptake throughout the grow. You are also correct that in hydroponics the ratio of calcium and every other element is much different because we use soluble elements that available for uptake right now, but I disagree with the PHDs being needed to formulate a feed chart. After about a month long Q&A session with @im4satori , @nxsov180db and if memory serves me well, yourself, all learned me the basics of the ratios, and I've been using them for months now making my own tweaks and have been getting positive results. I no longer use Jack's or Peter's or any blend. I mix all of my own, micro nutrients too and I am very confident of all of my levels.
That said though, I do wish to proceed, I see much room for advancement. High Brix was never my end goal, but I'll be damned if that path doesn't look identical to the one I'm already walking on in pursuit of perfect nutrient ratios.
mr. childs
Well-Known Member
i apologize, i thought it was just a jacks thread. i like citrus, palm, all purpose, blossom booster, & the acidic one because of the sulfur content, all made by jacks/jr peters.
mr. childs
Well-Known Member
i really like to raise the brix being that i like growing outdoors, and really want to use a high brix level in the arsenal of my ipm. yes i also foliar with epsom & jaz rose spray.
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
I know it works on vegetable crops where we eat the plant tissue. That's not cannabis.
I know it works on fruit and vegetables crops where we eat the fruit. That's not cannabis, either.
For the specific material we are after, we're better off emulating approaches like those used to grow aromatic herbs like lavender.
Healthy plants are good, yes, but high brix? The debate rages on about its necessity in our little corner of the agricultural world.
mr. childs
Well-Known Member
would you be willing to experiment like you did with the vertical growing?
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
Can't do it now, I'm afraid.
I'm also building my startup in indoor growing environmental systems. The process I developed allows growers to cut their electrical costs by half or more compared to current practices.
Skybound420
Well-Known Member
Is this regarding coliseum-style growing where there's one vertical HPS and a plethora of plants growing from a cylindrical wall encircling that HPS?
As for High Brix, I'm not aiming to have high brix weed, but rather am using their tools to measure the health of my plants. I only want super healthy hydro plants. High Brix will be the byproduct of that goal. I use some organic supplements like fulvic and humic with kelp mixed in, and also just picked up some Amino acids, but that's about it, the rest of my goal is to really dial in the macros and secondaries, like to a super precise degree in my targeting. I'd like to be within 1PPM of nitrate, 5ppm of calcium and 10 ppm of potassium. I "feel" like this would be an allowable tolerance and high brix will be the byproduct. In fact, I only aspire to reach the acceptable level of 12 brix. I'm about 5-7 now. I presume most other hydro growers to be at 3-4 brix.
ttystikk
Well-Known Member
No that's not my tech.
Skybound420
Well-Known Member
Has anybody ever used Calcium Carbonate? I couldn't find any info to suggest that it's only a soil amendment, or should be used in foliar sprays at most, so I ordered it and lucky me, it was one of the preset solutions Daniel Fernandez created in Hydro Buddy, and that alone gave me a lot better/more confident feeling that this calcium source is good for hydro use. FWIW, when including it, Hydro Buddy has no problem getting 95N - 200K & 120Ca.