Thanks for the words of wisdom.
For background, I have decades (6?) of serious soil gardening and about 3 weeks of floundering around with hydroponics. My oldest "crop" is 2 radishes about one inch tall.
My usual MO is to avoid commercial products whenever possible. It's not just the money, it's more of a life style.
I have experiments using everything from distilled water to a soup starting with 19-19-19 and every diy suggestion I could find.
None of them look much better than the plain tap (well) water and most have been scrapped.
I have been pouring over the Scienceinhydroponics web site for the last few days and have learned a lot.
I will take your advice and get a known working
nutrient as a control instead of stuff predicted not to work as a control.
Having said that, I am trying to use Hydrobuddy to come up with a mix that will simply provide the NPK that I need so I can then play with the other variables.
By using Potassium Nitrate, Nitric Acid and Ammonium Dibasic Phosphate, I can juggle around to get what I want.
I have two questions on this mix:
1. I have a bag of Triple Super Phospohate and I am having trouble fitting this into his list of substances and the closest I can get is Ammonium Dibasic Phosphate. Is this reasonable or is there a better choice?
2. I need to come up with 8.3 g of Nitric acid and need to know how to convert that to ml or grams of 30% acid.
Any help here? I am clearly not a chemist.
Thanks,
js