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General Hydroponics vs Fox Farms side by side

Grower-Aaron

Grower-Aaron

New member
Hey everyone. It's been forever since I have been on. Life gets busy some times.

Anyway has anyone else ever pondered the question of exactly what are the differences between different nutrient lines and if there really is any one line that really does work better than all the others? I know I have spent hours and hours researching different lines and there seems to be millions of different answers and no real solid yes or no on any specific line. FRUSTRATING 😡 Lol. Well I have decided to start a series of grow journals here on the GWE forum dedicated to pitting different nutrient lines against eachother in side by side grow comparisons. To me the big 2 are General Hydroponics and Fox Farms. They are also the two that I am the most experienced with so I decided to do these two against eachother first.

So a quick run down of my setup: I run a dwc hydro setup in a 4x8 tent about six feet tall. I light it with a 1000w lumitek digital ballast. I run hortilux mh and hps bulbs. Bulbs inside a sealed reflector with a nice wide footprint that is attached to a little track that moves the light back and forth all day. Then on the bottom there are 2 tables each take 4 plants and underneath them I have 2 of those little dog washing kiddie pools with the pumps and air stones and all that jazz. The pools tho, THATS THE TRICK lol.

So I just put my seedlings into the hydroton today. It's been 10 days since I dropped the seeds into the rooter plugs and started this adventure. The. Pools are each filled and I just hit my switches for the pumps and we are off.

Any questions or comments are always welcome. We are all trying to learn off eachother here to become better more knowledgable growers.
 
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A little hard to see these babies sorry about that but these 4 are the ones feeding off of the general hydroponics pool
 

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And these 4 are the ones feeding on fox farms

I'm excited to see how this turns out 😁
 

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So a couple things I didn't mention in the original post the strain is Power Plant feminized from msnl. It it the strain I am the most familiar with as well as one of my favorites to smoke 😛 I wanted a strain I really know inside and out for my first go at these side by sides

another piece of info is that I like to use the additives that go with the nute lines. I think they do make a pretty big difference is the speed of growth and overall bud quality in the finished product so for the gen hydro I I am using micro, gro, bloom, rapid start, diamond nectar, florolicious plus, and flora blend. For FF I am using big bloom, grow big (the hydro version), kanga roots, and microbe brew.

As the grow goes on and I change out the nutes/additives I will post it
 
If anyone has any nutrient lines they would like to see compared or pitted against eachother just put a post on here to let me know and I will do my best to get to it. The one I plan on doing next is Advanced Nutrients vs whichever does better out of this side by side. The price of the advanced nutes are so crazy that I can't imagine making enough of a difference to be worth it but I gotta know lol.

Happy growing everyone
 
Make sure your pools of water don't see the light..

Check out...emerald harvest nutrients..that's what I use..they've won awards every year since they have been out...
 
I made the tables so they fit right over the pools and are pretty close to them so that the light doesn't get in. I'm sure it's not as tight as using one of those totes that I see people using but I haven't had problems yet. What happens if light gets into the water where the roots are just out of curiosity?

I will check out emerald harvest. Thanks for the tip
 
I, like you, broke down the differences between popular fertilizers, even created a ppm chart of recommended dosages and calculated ppm values for them. It showed how similar they were and also how safe they play their dosages and how much more we usually use to bring it to a more appropriate level.

Its easy to understand the differences by breaking down the nutrients in the form they are added in. For example i think fox farm bloom uses bat guano as the main substance for phosphorus, where as GH bloom uses general rock phosphate. Thats how Big bloom is labeled organic but their other products are not.

A good deal of fertilizers are not organic and use nutrients that come from a raw materials such as salts and mineral rocks. You can, with careful chemistry math make your own fertilizer with raw materials and many, including myself do.

Both GH and fox farm are in my eyes the best, for different reasons however. GH is a tried and true recipe that was carefully engineered and has been so well over the decades that even nasa use their products.
Fox farm are well made but they appear to use higher quality sources of materials for their mixture, possibly including a better mix of micro, macro nutrients.

Veg fertilizers are less importent to me than bloom fertilizers, but i grow green house, however even indoors i would prioritize bloom still.

Keep up the journal il be keen to see how things turn out, be sure to keep the experiement as controlled as possible to rule out variables.
 
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Thanks for the info. What the end goal of this is to play with the different nute lines and then pick and choose what i liked from each line then kinda Frankenstein my own schedule. You said different lines get the nutes to the plant in different ways so by playin around with them hopefully I can find the best/fastest ones. About controlling for variables I have both of the pools in the same tent so they should get the same environment/atmosphere, At least that's the line of thought. I thought about just doing successive grows with a diff nute each time by I really wanna be able to look at them at the exact same time and be able to say "nope line-a works better than line-x"
 
unless i'm misunderstanding something not doing a side by side would mean you couldn't conclude what you set out to conclude, i would think. just for the reasons Danofdanger said...

that said, such a cool thing to do...thanks for doing it and thanks for sharing the results!!
 
I remember you mentioning a few months ago that you were going to run this experiment and I'm so excited to see how it goes! FF and GH are two of the most popular cannabis nutrients so I think they are great choices. Subscribed!
 
Emerald harvest won best nutrient company award again..today...several years in a row now...just sayin..might be something there folks...
 
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