Chelated Micronutrients

Hello all,

Ive been doing a lot of reading into starting to formulate my own nutrients. Where I live I have no nearby access to cannabis brand fertilizers, but alot of farming goes on here so I have easy and cheap access to commercial fertilizer salts and chelates/sequestered/complexed (EDTAs,EDHTAs,LSAs etc) micronutrient formulations.

I have the following question. I understand that the chelated micros are popular with soil culture because chelation complexes them so they are prevented from binding to various compounds in the soil in the same way as free anions/cations would, and they get around availabilty issues.

In the event that I use a completely inert medium, such as Perlite or Rockwool, which has no nutrient-binding nor availability reducing properties, with RO water (no trace carbonates, calcium, magnesium compounds to bind to) are chelated chelated/sequestered/complexed less or more readily available than their non chelated counterparts? Would you recommend their use in hydroponic mediums and why?

Not an expert on this, but my understanding is that the salts in fertilizer are prone to reacting with each other, forming insoluble precipitates. making them unavailable to the plant. chelation is supposed to wrap up some of them in protein making it harder for them to react with other fertilizer components. imo you are way better off using commercial fertilizers than ones marketed for cannabis regardless of which micros you decide to use. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCsQFjAA&url=http://scienceinhydroponics.com/2013/02/the-first-free-hydroponic-nutrient-calculator-program-o.html&ei=XGO0Uu2yBszjoASYxoG4Aw&usg=AFQjCNGt6wQytHk0iyaFLktSZOYhv1a8Cw&bvm=bv.58187178,d.cGU&cad=rja

Hey 1itsme this is what i understand too, salts dissolve into anions and cations in the water then react with eachother to form precipitates that make them unavailable. Chelation wraps them in an organic molecule making them unreactive.

Let me rephrase my question. My understanding was that the problem with organic fertilizers was exactly that they were complexed with organic molecules making them less available as there is the mineralisation step inbetween as the molecule breaks down.

I guess my question is whether this mineralisation takes place with chelates, and if so in hydroponics, when, where (res/substrate/root) how does it happen? Does it happen as part of the cation-exchange process or is it separate?

oh and btw thanks for the hydroboddy link, i'm already on my way to formulating my own, I just wanted to get a deeper understanding of the whole subject.

I'm not an expert in how chelation works, but I do know that the only chelated mineral you need is iron.

For everything else, you can just use salts, acids, and/or bases.

You can mix sodium borate, sodium molybdate, and manganese sulfate together in a stock solution without worrying about precipitates.

You do not need chelated iron if you're adding directly to the tank or have a separate stock solution just for iron. In that case you can use iron sulfate.

Iron sulfate is cheaper than the chelated forms usually, but is impossible to mix with other salts in stock solutions.