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Old 10-17-2010, 07:49 PM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
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You will want nutrients that are made specifically for hydroponics. Even if water soluble, soil nutrients will be lacking the micro elements needed for healthy plants. I don't know of any tractor supply, wal-mart or lowes that carry hydroponic nutrients. You may find a nursery that carry's them, I know of a local nursery here that's planing to sell organic hydroponic nutrients this year. Just make sure the containers say for hydroponics, and the sales people are not just trying to sell you what they have on hand (that's happened before).

The first run/ first try is really the most important one (for most people anyway). After all, most people that don't have success on the first try generally give up on hydroponics thinking it's to hard or doesn't really work. I know many clam to use soil nutrients and have good luck, but not for long. In order for (water soluble) soil nutrients to work, you will need to add the micro nutrients that are missing. I used Miracle-grow myself on some plants when I was running low on hydroponic nutrients. They lived for about a month on them but started going down hill after about a week (as I expected), I finally got some more hydroponic nutrients and they started coming back, but never really fully recovered (to much damage was already done). The reason there is so much confusion on how strong to mix soil nutrients for hydroponically grown plants is simple, there not intended for hydroponic plants, and no mater how they mix them eventually there are problems. So they don't have directions for that, it's just a guessing game.

Bottom line, I wouldn't recommend using anything other than hydroponic nutrients unless you were prepared for problems from the get go, and were willing to deal with trying to figure out the problems. For the first time hydroponic grow, you should try to eliminate as many problems as you can. Personally I used General Hydroponics Flora Series nutrients when I first started. There not the cheapest hydroponic nutrients, but I knew that General Hydroponics had been around for decades, so they had a lot of experience making hydroponic nutrients and I shouldn't have any problems with them (trying to eliminate as many problems as I could).
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