Always Do It the Best You Can

My son’s finding that out. He’s in our garage right now, fixing his classic Chevy with a flashlight in one hand and a wrench in the other. I hear him using profanity and dropping the wrench, or maybe it’s the flashlight.

He’s not a happy young man right now. He’s having a hard time with something he keeps trying to fix, but can’t get it right.

I could go out there and tell him he could clip our shop light underneath the hood and free up both hands so he could see better and do the job faster, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He’s a teenager, you know?

So I say nothing. Sooner or later, he’ll remember that his old Dad uses that clip-on shop light, and he’ll clip it and turn it on, and his fix-it will get a lot easier.

Years ago when I was growing gourmet hydroponics flowers and veggies for restaurants and florists, I made frequent trips to a hydroponics store near San Rafael, California. The store had a big selection of equipment and supplies, so I assumed I was getting the latest, best technology for my indoor grow room.

A lot of growers hung out at that shop, trading grow room stories and advice. You know how guys are always bragging and trying to prove they know more than anyone else? People would get into some serious arguments about the right kind of lighting or the best way to make plants green and productive.

My son just came in to tell me he cut his hand because he was holding the flashlight and couldn’t see very well, and the engine block had a sharp metal piece on it that cut him.

Sooner or later, I know he’s gonna discover that shop light!

One afternoon about six years ago a grower told us he was going to stop buying the general purpose hydroponics fertilizer that all of us were using.

He’d been using that stuff for many years. It had three parts that were colored either green, brown or gold. You mixed those parts in different ratios according to what kind of plant you grow and what season the plants were in.

It worked ok for him and the rest of us sometimes, but all of us had experienced times when that three-part fertilizer just didn’t work very well. Sometimes it was too strong and it fried your plants’ roots. Other times it was too weak and you had to double the amount you usually used just to get an adequate parts per million.

Before the time when the crops we grew became high value crops, most of us didn’t much care if we had occasional crop losses due to bad batches of fertilizer.

Oh my, looks like my son doesn’t mind if he has a few cuts on his hand, and now he is asking me to come outside and hold the flashlight. I told him I’m busy writing an essay about doing things the smartest way possible. He gave me a dirty look when I said that, and went back out to the garage.

When us growers started earning big dollars off some types of plants, we got a whole lot more serious about the process of growing, and all the equipment and materials used in doing so.

We started looking for ways to increase the size of our harvests. Some of us figured that fertilizers might be a key factor in whether we got huge harvests or puny harvests.

This renegade grower (the one who said he was gonna stop using the general three part) told us he visited Canada and heard about a new, improved brand of hydroponics fertilizer that worked better than what we used.

Well, you know how it is when you are used to eating at a certain restaurant and then even though the food starts to taste spoiled and nasty every time you go, you keep going to eat there…mainly because in the past the food had tasted so good, and your mind just can’t accept that your favorite restaurant is now serving swill.

That’s why lots of us argued with the renegade grower, until finally he said he didn’t care if we all kept using the general-purpose hydroponics fertilizer, because he was going to use the new Canadian stuff.

According to him, the Canadian fertilizer was totally different than what we had been using and would produce a lot more product that was better quality and would sell for more money.

He also claimed that the American company that made the three-part ferts we all had been using for so long was not making fertilizers for the gourmet crops we were growing. They were instead making formulas only good enough for amateur granny gardeners who were growing backyard peas and cucumbers.

My son burst into the room just now with an angry, almost-insane look on his face and said that from now on he was going to work on his car outdoors- and only in daylight. Then he stormed out. Guess he still hasn’t thought of that shop light!

Three of us who heard the news about the Canadian fertilizer were intrigued. We didn’t want to get left out of anything that was newer and would make our gardens grow better. So we decided to take a field trip over near the coast where the American three-part fertilizer was made, and ask them if their stuff was still the best.

When we got there, we asked to speak to the company’s hydroponics plant expert, but the receptionist said her company didn’t have a plant expert on staff. She said the owner was on vacation in the Caribbean but he had a shop foreman and some temporary hire people running the place.

She joked that the only “scientists” that the company had on staff were those that studied Corona beer bottles.

We told her we were long-time customers who wanted a tour. She told us to just wander around and stay out of the way.

I remember once when I looked into a room and was surprised to see my parents in there kissing. It was something I never expected and it kind of shocked me. I guess you never really know what’s going on until behind closed doors, until you look behind them. And then all of a sudden you find out what’s going on that you never knew about, and it makes you worry.

So we wandered around and saw that the gardens were poorly tended and had a lot of bugs and diseases. Most of the plants being grown were pole beans and vine tomatoes. Lots of yellowing leaves and drooping plants.

The manufacturing of their fertilizer was being done with cement mixers. There were piles of powdered chemicals that had different colors. The piles were sitting on the ground and some were partly covered in tarps. We tried talking to the guy who was shoveling chemicals into the cement mixers, but he didn’t speak English. He smelled like Corona, and ammonia.

I realized that the liquids inside the three bottles of hydroponics fertilizer that I mixed to feed my crops were the same color as the piles of chemicals.

I guess it’s easily seen that we didn’t like what we saw. About a month before I ran out of my general three part fertilizer, I called the hydroponics store and asked them to order the Canadian fertilizer. I had found out that it was made by a Canadian company called Advanced Nutrients. I knew that the general hydro fertilizer I had been using wasn’t so good, and I was very much ready for something far better.

But the hydroponics store boys were strangely reluctant to order Advanced Nutrients. They pretty much said that they had a contract with the American fertilizer company that prevented them from ordering fertilizers made by other companies, especially the Canadian company.

I went to the store and talked to the owner, who had made a lot of money from me. I shared a Cuban cigar with him while I slyly asked him questions about why his store wouldn’t carry the Advanced Nutrients products.

Basically what he said was that most of the hydroponics industry was just like any other industry: it was mainly interested in profits for the manufacturers and it had power cliques and unofficial pressure groups that tried to shut out new competition.

He said that everybody had heard that the Advanced Nutrients company was making really good fertilizers that would give you bigger harvests, but that other manufacturers had threatened to stop selling their products through his store if he carried the Advanced stuff. The other manufacturers were trying to choke Advanced Nutrients in its cradle, before it could get a foothold.

The store owner admitted that he felt he was being unfairly hamfisted into not carrying the products from Canada, but he didn’t want to buck the American manufacturers and their allies.

Yet secretly he ordered me several gallons of the three part fertilizer made by Advanced Nutrients along with some other Advanced Nutrients stuff that had what they called beneficial bacteria in it that was supposed to make roots get bigger and function better.

And that was how I became the first grower in California to use Advanced Nutrients!

Mixing the Advanced three-part formula I immediately and readily noticed that this was obviously of a higher quality than what we had all been using. It blended better and had a pH that was very much in the ideal range of what you want for hydroponics.

The hydro fertilizer I had been using before would often mix up with a very wrong pH and I would have to adjust it with pH Up or Down solutions.

I also noticed that I used less of the Advanced product but I got a higher ppm for mixing even less than their instructions said to.

Within about three weeks of using the Advanced three part along with the microbe “Voodoo Juice” stuff, one thing I noticed was that the leaves were a really nice lime green and the plants were maintaining a growth rate that was about 40% faster than ever before. I also noticed that my plants were sprouting big masses of roots, and were taking in nutrients really fast.

I had to back off on the ppm and give the plants more diameter room to accommodate the faster growth. I was able to kick the crop into production phase about a week earlier and the plants were huge when I did it.

I found out that I could call the Advanced Nutrients company and ask their technical guy about mixing the three part to max out the production phase. He was super nice and really knew growing- he sounded like he had been working a grow room just like mine.

By the way, my son just asked my wife if he could borrow our car because he has somehow disabled his own. I’ll fix my car tomorrow, he says. I think he needs to stay home and fix the car now, using my shop light.

Bottom line is that I have been using Advanced Nutrients products ever since. I still use the Voodoo Juice. It makes the roots bigger which means that the plants can handle more nutrients and grow faster.

Harvesting took me nearly twice as long for my first Advanced crop and was so profitable that I was able to invest in a high-end reverse osmosis unit to clean up the filthy water that we have around here.

I have continued to invest in my grow room and in the Advanced Nutrients line of fertilizers and the benefits to me have been huge.

Some of my fellow growers resisted the changeover. Those poor suckers are still using the general hydro mixture that they’ve been using for years. They just can’t believe it when I tell them that they’re wasting their time and money, and losing out on bigger harvests.

They told me recently that the American fertilizer company tells people that it has new products that are as good as the Advanced. But when I look at that American fertilizer at the hydro store, it looked to me like they haven’t changed anything in ten years. It’s the same old stuff. The stuff they make in cement mixers.

Do you know the definition of insanity? It’s doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results!

The pride and ego of some growers, along with blind loyalty, has got them stuck using the inferior three part. Which is fine with me. If they don’t need the extra profits, I do.

And the cool thing is, I just found out that Advanced Nutrients is making a super new fertilizer called Connoisseur, which will make me even more money. I am on a waiting list to get me some.

I learned a long time ago that if you want to do something right, you have to be willing to use new information and new technology.

My son just arrived back home with a brand new shop light. The clerk at the auto parts store recommended it. I’m glad he’ll be able to fix his car tonight instead of tomorrow, and have enough light to do it right.

I chuckle to myself as I suppress the notion to tell him that my shop light was hanging there in the garage ready for him to use the whole time. I figure sometimes you have to let people discover on their own that they need better tools to get the job done right.

And isn’t that one of the main lessons of life, that there’s always a better way to get better results. You just need the right attitude and the right tools. Then you’ll fix your problems and get great results.

And that’s precisely what I got when I started using Advanced Nutrients, and it’s what I still get today.