I’ve been growing in coco for about two years usually hand watering once a day. I occasionally use drippers feeding multiple times a day. Anyone care to share their methods if you use coco? Dryback? Constantly wet? I feel like I err on the side of overwatering most of the time and waste nutes and my goals are to reduce effort and costs. Any tips appreciated!
Use less expensive nutes. Mega Crop kicks ass!
General Hydroponics Flora trio are awesome nutrients and $35 makes hundreds of gallons. They store well. Plants grow fast and produce excellent bud quality.
No need for drippers unless you’re having trouble reaching all your plants. I use a “Battery Operated Liquid Transfer Pump” (they’re on Amazon or at Home Depot) which lets you water many plants quickly, even in the back. I give enough water so they’re ready to be watered every 1-2 days. Watering more often with nutrient water (“high-frequency fertigation”) makes plants in coco grow faster, but only to a point, and only if they’re not getting overwatered. Their roots need a lot of oxygen to thrive too.
You can use Flora trio by itself without any supplements besides PH Down. I often add Calimagic but it’s probably not necessary. Calimagic is helpful to buffer and raise the pH if you’re dealing with low pH, and if you have soft or filtered water you need to add it, but otherwise the three bottles of the Flora trio work awesome by itself. They already contain a lot of Cal-Mag. I give the pH at 6.0-6.5 and never have deficiencies. I have been getting excellent buds from Ethos strains. This is a Mandarin Cookies V2 bud I grew with GH Flora that tested just under 27% THC at the lab.
If you want really cheap easy nutrients for the vegetative stage, you can use Dyna-Gro “Foliage Pro”. It’s 1 tsp/gallon and vegetative plants love the stuff. However, Dyna-Gro “Bloom” isn’t as good as General Hydroponics Flora trio for bud formation, so I’d switch to something better than Dyna-Gro for the flowering stage.