Vegetable fertilizer; Hydroponics fertilizer vs. Commercial fertilizer

Vegetable fertilizer...which do you use? In hydroponics gardening systems, the two most expensive items are water pumps and fertilizer. Today I'm talking fertilizer. You may be tempted to use a cheaper commercial fertilizer as your hydroponics nutrient rather than the more expensive hydroponics blend.

This is not really a good idea...

First, commercial blends generally come in small hard nuggets that take some time to break down and release their nutrients and in hydroponics, nutrient is needed immediately making most commercial brands unusable.

Secondly, commercial brands do not contain all the nutrients needed for a healthy plant - they rely on dissolved nutrients already present in the soil as a supplement.

Click here for a comparison of nutrients in different fertilizers compared to a hydroponics blend. As you can see, commercial fertilizers are woefully inadequate when it comes to nutrient value.

The one main exception is Miracle Gro. Not only is this produced to be instantly usable (no time release nuggets), it contains a very good blend of nutrients.

Miracle Gro still lacks many of the trace nutrients contained in a balanced hydroponics fertilizer but does have a large amount of nitrogen. It would be a good experiment to use Miracle Gro mixed with some fish emulsion and seaweed extract as a hydroponics nutrient solution. It just may work...

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