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I've always heard .... You get what you pay for.
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Yes, but have you ever heard "theirs a sucker born every day?" Fact is the raw chemical elements that make up the
nutrient solution are very cheap. Your not paying for better quality by paying more, your just paying for flashy packaging, being sold on manufactures propaganda and marketing, and higher profits for the company. The ingredients themselves are actually cheap. Some places mark up the price as much as 80-95%. The shipping cost more than the ingredients. Bottom line the plants don't know how much money you spend on them, they only care about how you take care of them. You just need to know what to look for, where to find good cost effective hydroponic
nutrients, and how to use them.
That's why I don't bother to make my own nutrient solution recipes, good cost effective nutrients are out their, and it's simply not cheaper to make my own if you know where to get them already made. But you wont find them on the shelves at your local hydroponics shop vendor. They only want to put high profit products on their shelves. You need to get them from the manufactures making them. I'll let the chemists that know what their doing do that for me, and just buy what they make.
You don't think that commercial hydroponic farms pay those high prices do you? Commercial farms aren't going to use low quality products either. Their livelihood depends on producing the best possible product. No, your just paying for flashy packaging, being sold on manufactures propaganda and marketing, and higher profits for the company when you pay high prices. Unfortunately that is a big reason a lot of people don't continue to grow hydroponically, or never start. Because they don't know any better, and it seems to expensive to do so with what the hydroponic store's want to sell them.
Also if you have and are using a well balanced nutrient that's designed for the type of plants your growing, additives are unnecessary. If you need an additive, then your base nutrient solution is missing something because your using the wrong type, not fallowing directions, not mixing correctly, or to weak in general. And/or your growing to many different types of plants with the same type of nutrient. None of that is because it's not a good quality nutrient.
Essentially additives just make your nutrient solution stronger. If you read mixing charts they reduce the base nutrient strength, and want you to use many different additives to add as well. The reason is they make much more money when you buy all the extra additives (that's called up-selling). But if you don't reduce the strength of the base nutrients, your nutrient solution would be to strong when you add all the EXTRA products you bought.
P.S.
I plan to experiment with compost teas, I even wrote an article a few years back about them for this blog "
Organic Compost Tea for your hydroponic system" So it's nothing new to me, but With all the things I've got going on, it's just one of those things that's on the "TO DO LIST" that's on the back burner for now. Though I'm not interested in buying any. Like the article talks about I would make my own. However I would want to do some side by side tests to see if their were any real benefits.