Raw salt nutrients cost me pennies per gallon, here's how

Been mixing my own base nutrients from raw salts for about three years now and the savings are genuinely hard to ignore. A 25 lb bag of calcium nitrate runs around $20-25 and will last a home grower the better part of two seasons. Compare that to a liter of a popular two-part base nutrient sitting at $30-40 and covering maybe 50 gallons mixed. The math just doesn't hold up once you see it side by side.

My basic veg formula per gallon of RO water is roughly this: 0.8g calcium nitrate, 0.5g magnesium sulfate (Epsom), 0.3g monopotassium phosphate, and 0.4g potassium nitrate. That gets me close to a 150-50-200 ppm NPK baseline, then i dial from there based on runoff and what the plant is telling me. Total cost per gallon is maybe 3-4 cents.

The learning curve is real. You need a decent digital scale that reads to 0.01g, and understanding your source water matters a lot because calcium and magnesium levels coming out of the tap will change your ratios. RO or distilled makes it much simpler to dial in consistently.

If you want to start somewhere, magnesium sulfate is the easiest entry point. Most growers are already buying Epsom salt. From there, calcium nitrate is widely available as a greenhouse fertilizer at any farm supply store. Those two alone will solve most cal-mag deficiencies for almost nothing compared to bottled cal-mag supplements.