NFTG. Nectar For The Gods

thehashjournal said:

Day 23 update of my very very first grow. So happy I went with NFTG as my first nute line! Popped 5 reg seeds, but only 2 turned out females

Strain: Oni Seed Co's Strapicanna (Strawnana x Tropicanna Cookies)

She's reeking of Bubble Gum/ Strawnana terps! Cannot wait to wash her!

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calvin.m16 said:

That is some epic results under BLURPLE LED. I'm tempted to get into the NFTG gang but I'm not sure how it'd do in coco....

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RetiredToker76 said:

Take this for the 2 cents it's worth but here's my personal philosophy. A line is created to be used in a certain way, it doesn't matter what line it is GH or NFTG. To get the optimum results claimed by the manufacturer, it's best to use the products in the method intended.

That being said, there's a Nectar - Coco crew that does hand watering and adjusts a few things to make it work in coco. As that goes back to my thinking, I'm glad they got it to work but I would question if the results were as ideal as if it were used as Scott & Frank designed it. This is growing a plant, until it goes to the lab and is given a full GCG workover, the results are 100% subjective based on mass, effect, and flavor. So success has a wide range of qualifications.

I personally wouldn't use it in anything but Nectar #4 soil, as it's specifically charged with Calcium and designed to work with bacteria, fungi and the roots to feed the plant. Coco, you'll have to be vey careful of the source of your coir because you can get both pH issues and calcium mag problems because the coir keeps it all. Scott's talked a lot of about how Coir needs to be washed to a high degree to prevent it interfering with the calcium.

So ... it can work. You have to wash the hell out of your coir, possibly "charge" it with a soak in Gaia and Medusa and Herc. before ever using it. I'm going with 3 cycles of soil, one in use, 2 sitting in 30gal containers with a few cups of OneShot. My goal is to not buy soil again for 3-5 years.

Or... you can switch to soil, re-use your soil just as effectively as you would your coir and not be trying to force a square peg in a round hole.

My first two grows with Nectar were in soils other than Nectar, I wasn't happy with the way the plants behaved. I got some dark bars on the leaves, that I'm starting to suspect was a lockout from FF soils... at the time I wasn't doing slurry tests and have no idea what my actual pH was, I just always fed my Green Planet or Roots Organic at the 6.5 - 6.8 they suggested.

You can see my post above, I've started with this grow, taking data every time I feed the plants. I have two more meters I'm intending to get, a Brix meter to measure the sugars in my leaves and a Alkalinity meter just to confirm my suspicions of having a relatively high alkalinity in my city water.

Throw it all together and it's literally the best I can achieve in my little closet using this method. My wife won't let my turn the AC any lower or the dehumidifier any lower, so my environment is locked at Wife-allowable limits. Hydro would drive me insane since I work 10 hours a day, 5 feet away from the plants, the pumps would last a week before I put them back in soil. Coco was too water intensive for me, I only ran it for one cycle about a decade ago. I would have had to flood-drain or something because hand-feeding coco had to happen several times a day, so pumps would have had to be a thing again. So soil it was, I personally chose organics as my core philosophy to avoid salt burn, no other hippy reasons, just don't want to burn them.

So there's food for thought. When I ran Roots Organic, all I ran was roots soil, roots nutes, and roots amendments. Then microbials that were well known to play nice with the Roots line. Same when I ran Green Planet and General Organics. To this day I've never had bad results, sometimes sub optimal yields, had some mag issues with almost every other line I've used; but never had bad results when sticking to manufacturers preferred methods.

Some say it's being a victim of marketing, but I personally worked in a digitial environment where if our customers added random crap to the workflow it literally blew up into office-wide work stoppages because they didn't bother to ask the people who installed all the toys in the first place. Given that the state was our customer, it was fun when we'd go in and find they installed a firewall office wide that blocked the ports our software used, then called us to biatch that our software failed. That's kind of how I look at it. You can do whatever you want, but you reduce the number of people who can help every step further you take away from design specifications.

Click to expand...

RetiredToker76 said:

Take this for the 2 cents it's worth but here's my personal philosophy. A line is created to be used in a certain way, it doesn't matter what line it is GH or NFTG. To get the optimum results claimed by the manufacturer, it's best to use the products in the method intended.

That being said, there's a Nectar - Coco crew that does hand watering and adjusts a few things to make it work in coco. As that goes back to my thinking, I'm glad they got it to work but I would question if the results were as ideal as if it were used as Scott & Frank designed it. This is growing a plant, until it goes to the lab and is given a full GCG workover, the results are 100% subjective based on mass, effect, and flavor. So success has a wide range of qualifications.

I personally wouldn't use it in anything but Nectar #4 soil, as it's specifically charged with Calcium and designed to work with bacteria, fungi and the roots to feed the plant. Coco, you'll have to be vey careful of the source of your coir because you can get both pH issues and calcium mag problems because the coir keeps it all. Scott's talked a lot of about how Coir needs to be washed to a high degree to prevent it interfering with the calcium.

So ... it can work. You have to wash the hell out of your coir, possibly "charge" it with a soak in Gaia and Medusa and Herc. before ever using it. I'm going with 3 cycles of soil, one in use, 2 sitting in 30gal containers with a few cups of OneShot. My goal is to not buy soil again for 3-5 years.

Or... you can switch to soil, re-use your soil just as effectively as you would your coir and not be trying to force a square peg in a round hole.

My first two grows with Nectar were in soils other than Nectar, I wasn't happy with the way the plants behaved. I got some dark bars on the leaves, that I'm starting to suspect was a lockout from FF soils... at the time I wasn't doing slurry tests and have no idea what my actual pH was, I just always fed my Green Planet or Roots Organic at the 6.5 - 6.8 they suggested.

You can see my post above, I've started with this grow, taking data every time I feed the plants. I have two more meters I'm intending to get, a Brix meter to measure the sugars in my leaves and a Alkalinity meter just to confirm my suspicions of having a relatively high alkalinity in my city water.

Throw it all together and it's literally the best I can achieve in my little closet using this method. My wife won't let my turn the AC any lower or the dehumidifier any lower, so my environment is locked at Wife-allowable limits. Hydro would drive me insane since I work 10 hours a day, 5 feet away from the plants, the pumps would last a week before I put them back in soil. Coco was too water intensive for me, I only ran it for one cycle about a decade ago. I would have had to flood-drain or something because hand-feeding coco had to happen several times a day, so pumps would have had to be a thing again. So soil it was, I personally chose organics as my core philosophy to avoid salt burn, no other hippy reasons, just don't want to burn them.

So there's food for thought. When I ran Roots Organic, all I ran was roots soil, roots nutes, and roots amendments. Then microbials that were well known to play nice with the Roots line. Same when I ran Green Planet and General Organics. To this day I've never had bad results, sometimes sub optimal yields, had some mag issues with almost every other line I've used; but never had bad results when sticking to manufacturers preferred methods.

Some say it's being a victim of marketing, but I personally worked in a digitial environment where if our customers added random crap to the workflow it literally blew up into office-wide work stoppages because they didn't bother to ask the people who installed all the toys in the first place. Given that the state was our customer, it was fun when we'd go in and find they installed a firewall office wide that blocked the ports our software used, then called us to biatch that our software failed. That's kind of how I look at it. You can do whatever you want, but you reduce the number of people who can help every step further you take away from design specifications.

Click to expand...

calvin.m16 said:

Fox Farms is trash end of story. Probably 70% of Problem threads are people using Fox Farm soils.

I did a bit more digging I think I'm going to stick with House & Garden Cocos for my coco plants & Botanicare CNS17 for my hydro. They seem to be the least bullshit products I've used thus far and give very good results for the cost.

Once I start thinking of all the uncontrollable variables with organics it makes me go back to synthetic every time.

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RetiredToker76 said:

You're probably right about the FF, the only reason I used it for one cycle was because it was at the beginning of lockdown and my hydro shop was down to exactly FF and a budget brand that I won't even look at, that's it. It was kind of take what you can get at the moment. Ten years, that's the only time I've bought a bag of it.

I can't have an opinion one way or another on synths, never had any real experience using them. I know people who swear by them both soil and hydro, and have smoked amazing-balls bud grown by them. They in turn have loved my organic bud for a decade, honestly I think we all might just be glad to be smoking something different.

I'm an "all in" kind of person. Coco was my very first cycle or two, back in 2009. I was going with the Canna line. It cost a small fortune and I was hand-watering 3-4 times a day and still getting dry droopy plants if I went to sleep all night or didn't make it home due to service calls. A buddy suggested I do a 30/70 mix and add in some soil, grow two as better but still required a whole lot of daily work. I was still working out of the house most days, so I switched to soil and started looking at organic lines, just let the plants find food as they do in nature.

I don't really feel I'm dealing with any major variables, pH, ppm, for my soil and nute solutions, then ppfd for my lights, and temp/rh to get a small degree of a handle on my VPD. I've learned a truck load more about fungal and bacterial loads in soil than the IT nerd in me ever expected to learn 20 years ago. Even hydro growers are using bacterials and some fungals these days but they have to dance an even more delicate dance controlling them than soil grows. We're kind of throwing all the bacteria and fungi into the pot and telling them to fight it out gladiator style while the plants eat what they leave as they battle.

Changing from going off of feeding charts and reading the plants by appearance to actually metering how much of the nute solution they are actually eating every feeding has re-written my whole methodology, for the far better. Now I'm just getting greedy with data and want to know if I push which nutes when, what kind of sugar response to get from the leaves and then dial them into a custom diet that keeps them at optimum production their entire life cycle. Lockdown has allowed me to play with daily data taking, which when this is all over should translate really well into a set schedule I don't have to pay too much attention to.

Click to expand...

RetiredToker76 said:

You're probably right about the FF, the only reason I used it for one cycle was because it was at the beginning of lockdown and my hydro shop was down to exactly FF and a budget brand that I won't even look at, that's it. It was kind of take what you can get at the moment. Ten years, that's the only time I've bought a bag of it.

I can't have an opinion one way or another on synths, never had any real experience using them. I know people who swear by them both soil and hydro, and have smoked amazing-balls bud grown by them. They in turn have loved my organic bud for a decade, honestly I think we all might just be glad to be smoking something different.

I'm an "all in" kind of person. Coco was my very first cycle or two, back in 2009. I was going with the Canna line. It cost a small fortune and I was hand-watering 3-4 times a day and still getting dry droopy plants if I went to sleep all night or didn't make it home due to service calls. A buddy suggested I do a 30/70 mix and add in some soil, grow two as better but still required a whole lot of daily work. I was still working out of the house most days, so I switched to soil and started looking at organic lines, just let the plants find food as they do in nature.

I don't really feel I'm dealing with any major variables, pH, ppm, for my soil and nute solutions, then ppfd for my lights, and temp/rh to get a small degree of a handle on my VPD. I've learned a truck load more about fungal and bacterial loads in soil than the IT nerd in me ever expected to learn 20 years ago. Even hydro growers are using bacterials and some fungals these days but they have to dance an even more delicate dance controlling them than soil grows. We're kind of throwing all the bacteria and fungi into the pot and telling them to fight it out gladiator style while the plants eat what they leave as they battle.

Changing from going off of feeding charts and reading the plants by appearance to actually metering how much of the nute solution they are actually eating every feeding has re-written my whole methodology, for the far better. Now I'm just getting greedy with data and want to know if I push which nutes when, what kind of sugar response to get from the leaves and then dial them into a custom diet that keeps them at optimum production their entire life cycle. Lockdown has allowed me to play with daily data taking, which when this is all over should translate really well into a set schedule I don't have to pay too much attention to.

Click to expand...

sweetleaf chongo said:

do you recommend a pre flush with the #4.....i opened a bag today and did my first slurry test using distilled water ph to 7 then mixed with #4 1for1 ratio after stir and sit for 15 min it came up 7.8 ph and 180pm....my first run with the nectar so any help much apprecciated

Click to expand...

The Science Behind the pH of Distilled Water

The most discussed question in the science group is about the pH of Distilled water. This blog can debunk some of the questions behind it.

www.westlab.com

RetiredToker76 said:

Your PH reading is unreliable because you're using distilled water. My first slurry test, I did it with Distilled too, it nearly broke my pH meter. It could be reading high, it all depends on how your sensor specifically reacts to the lack of ions in the water. My Hannah meter bounced all over the place and stoped giving good readings on any water until I soaked it in KCL for a week. I still ordered a BlueLab to double check my Hanna because it acted funky for a almost a month after using it in distilled, but it did recvover.

Check this article...

The Science Behind the pH of Distilled Water

The most discussed question in the science group is about the pH of Distilled water. This blog can debunk some of the questions behind it.

www.westlab.com

Could a bag come with a high pH? Anything's possible but I would put it as unlikely with Nectar, they buffer it with limestone. For slurries I personally use "drinking water" that I get by the gallon at the grocery store. In my area it's Publix and they have a website where you can check all the readings of the water from the gallon serial # you purchased. They call it "ozone filtered" which is a sanitation process, but I'm pretty sure it's RO filtered as well.

The only things I use this drinking/ RO for are my cloning chamber, foliar sprays, and slurry tests. Distilled/Purified water, I only use it for cleaning non-elecronic tools, spoons and cups and stuff.

For slurriess, I use the drinking water from Publix because it always comes at a PPM of 100, the pH usually starts around 7.2 and climbs up to 7.6 by the time I'm done with the gallon.

I feed with tap because I've got decent tap water, but first I use some Chloramine remover to dump any Chloramine or Chlorine in the water, my county switches back and forth between the two. Then it usually sits about 7.3 - 7.5 at around 330 ppm and an alkalinity around 120 by color strip, it's horrible for foliar feeding because its got so much calcium in it that leaves a white dust that looks like powdery mildew, but is really mineral and calcite deposits after the water evaporates. That's why I use RO for foliar feedings, no white mineral dust.

Hey There Bob goes over how to do a slurry test. I believe he's using Dasani Water, basically RO.

[/QUOTE
thanks for the feedback , my tap water is 8.2 ph at 156pm so i thought would be best to purchase and use strictly distilled water for feeds and slurry test as not to add any unwanted salts or lead , i live in the city and the water not so good here . i pick up some spring water today and try another slurry test...thx for the help

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sweetleaf chongo said:

thanks for the feedback , my tap water is 8.2 ph at 156pm so i thought would be best to purchase and use strictly distilled water for feeds and slurry test as not to add any unwanted salts or lead , i live in the city and the water not so good here . i pick up some spring water today and try another slurry test...thx for the help

Click to expand...

Zipz55 said:

did Nectar changed the formula of the PH Up?

I noticed im having to add way more ph up to my feeds than i did with previous bottles i purchased

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NewGrower2011 said:

Odd you ask this as I just cracked a new bottle of Herc and it seemed a bit watery to me. But I'm still new to the line so can't say I've observed a lot of batches.

Click to expand...

NewGrower2011 said:

Odd you ask this as I just cracked a new bottle of Herc and it seemed a bit watery to me. But I'm still new to the line so can't say I've observed a lot of batches.

Click to expand...

NewGrower2011 said:

Odd you ask this as I just cracked a new bottle of Herc and it seemed a bit watery to me. But I'm still new to the line so can't say I've observed a lot of batches.

Click to expand...