4/9/11

E-mail - Best Fertilizers / Nutrients to Use

 Hello Dr. Myers,
Can you suggest suitable nutrients for vegetative and for flowering. I currently use Miracle grow with high N for veggie and high P for flowering. Do you sell something special that you have had good luck with?
Thanks in advance.

As you may know, the three numbers in a fertilizer are always nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. For vegetative, you want the first number to by higher, like 6-5-5. The actual numbers are not as important as the ratio. For flowering, you want the second number to be the highest, like 1-5-6. (I also recommend a high middle number and a 50% dilution of high phosphorus fertilizer for seedlings since phosphorus promotes root growth as well as flowering) You also want to make sure that the nitrogen (first number) is not high when you fertilizer plants that are flowering, as high nitrogen causes plants to have reduced or no flowering. I know many growers sometimes give their plants straight water for a watering cycle or two between switching from vegetative to flowering in order to get rid of any excess nitrogen. I recommed having potassium in all stage of plant growth; it is used in a lot of metabolic processes and does not hinder any type of plant growth like nitrogen does to flowering.


I have mentioned before I hesitate to recommend specific products since each person has their own indoor environment where they grow different plants, have different grow mediums, different light sources and different amounts of CO2 and air flow. However, I really like the fox farm products, and I am using roots organics now and it also seems to be of a good quality. I have used floralicious several times (love the name) I like to recommend organic fertilizers since they often have many of the secondary or micronutrients that would be lacking in a synthetic fertilizer (like the one you are using now) that was made in a factory.

Good Growing,
Dr. E.R. Myers

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