It's all in the additives

By Scott Misener

Now that you've found the right nutrient solution to fit both you and your plant's needs, let's talk additives. There are more additives on the market than actual nutrient formulas. Although many additives have a N-P-K analysis, they are not a primary food source for your plants. They are used in conjunction with a complete feeding program. There are hundreds of additives that supplement every stage of growth one way or another. Some people use them, some don't. What they do offer is an additional kick to your preferred nutrient program in the form of growth stimulators and high nutrient doses. Nutrient programs are formulated to give your garden all the essential building blocks for plant development in the form of a grow formula, a micronutrient, and a bloom formula. Some additives just make your plants facilitate the nutrients faster.

Doc's Simple Solutions manufactures additives that fall into this category. Doc's offers a wide array of products that range from cloning gels to foliar sprays, but it is two products in particular, Liquid Carbon Grow and Liquid Carbon Bloom, which put them on the map. The grow and bloom formulas provide your plants with added carbohydrates, simple proteins, phospholipids, and kinetin. These are elements your plants have to produce themselves. By providing these elements your plants get to skip to the next page. That means accelerated growth. Since your plants are kicked into overdrive it is important to dilute the nutrient solution by twenty to thirty percent. Products like Doc's will open up your plant's root system and uptake nutrients like never before. That's the whole point of using these products. But if your plants take in twice the volume of an already strong nutrient solution, they will burn up and turn crunchy. As always, read directions and use measuring cups and spoons!

Other additives are used to hold plants in a desired stage of growth, or to push them to the next. B'cuzz and GreenFuse are two popular products that fall into this category. Both product lines are kelp based, super concentrate, and expensive ($40 a quart). They come in three flavors - root, growth, and bloom. They are fermented plant tissue cultures from rooting plants, from vegetative plants, and blooming plants. Let's say the plants in your garden have reached a desired size. Now you're ready to cut back the lights and jump into the bloom cycle. These bloom additives will help push your plants into bloom and keep them there. When a vegetative plant takes in blooming cells through the root system, those blooming cells set off a chain reaction within your plant. Coupled with the lights being cut from 18 to 12 hours, your plants will have no choice but to stop growing and start producing fruits and vegetables. The continual use of these bloom additives will ensure your plants will stay on the right course. Stresses such as an interrupted light cycles and temperature variations that come with cold mornings and inevitable power outages will be minimized with these products.

These benefits also apply to the root and growth formulas. Since a cutting is an exact replica of the host or parent plant, a cutting is still a vegetative plant. It takes time to change the cutting's train of thought from growing to rooting. The rooting formula will supplement this change. If you have a garden full of Pomodoro tomatoes that have been harvested and you would like to bring back the plants vigor before the second harvest, use the growth additives. This will help your plants get back on their feet. The stresses of a fruiting cycle followed by a harvest are immense.

Fulvic and humic acids are considered additives and provide your plants with powerful growth accelerator. Humic acid is an organic compound extracted from shale, or Leonardite. Fulvic is refined from humic. What these elements do for your plants is fill in the gaps in your plant's diet while stimulating new growth. On a chemical level, these elements will break down the nutrient solution, or chelate them, preventing nutrient lockout and deficiencies.

The most commonly used additives are fruiting/flowering supplements. There are a wide variety of fruiting supplements on the market today and they usually come in the form of a powder. Organic gardeners take note, with N-P-K numbers like 2-52-48, there is nothing organic about them. For those not afraid to use a little chemical supplement, this is the additive for you. With high levels of phosphorus and potassium added to your feeding schedule, your fruits and vegetables will increase in size. That is a fact. But please consider two things. High levels of phosphorus and potassium contribute to nutrient lockout. There is such a thing as too much. Be sure to provide your plants with plenty of calcium to facilitate all that phosphorus. It is also imperative to provide a seven or ten day water flush, which means water with plain water, before you harvest your plants. Failure to do so will result in metallic flavors.

To cover all the additives available on the market today would require a hundred page essay. For all practical purposes, use this as a general guide. This is a gimmicky industry, and in the state of California it is legal to purchase someone's else's product in bulk, slap your own sticker on the bottle, and sell it as your own so a lot of additives do the same thing. Do your research on additives only after you have mastered your preferred feeding program. One step at a time! When in doubt, refrain from complicating things. Leave it out!

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