I purchased a few bottles of snowstorm and gravity a year or so ago since gravity was being phased out. I have used these before and know the results. This time (with the newer bottles) it seems the gravity had no effect and the snow storm added fluffiness. Any one heard of counterfeit gravity bottles out there? The price people are trying to get is crazy.
I am looking for a replacement for gravity and am leaning towards
bush load any one try it and at what dosage.
PS-I am not interested in hearing BS about don't use these products etc etc..
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Wow! No shortage of yahoos on this site posting garbage that has nothing to do with the original post. Useless! All of them!
First of all, thank you for bringing this up because my experience coincides almost exactly with what you describe. I first encountered gravity when made a purchase of new ballasts and there was a sample in each. I used them, not knowing what would happen, but at such a low dose I didn't think it could hurt. The results were amazing. After continued use of this product and not using it sometimes, I realized that it was the secret ace in the hole. When I heard it was being phased out, I did the same thing as you and obtained a quart (something like $80). This quart had a new label that stated that it could be used all the way until the end of harvest. This is very suspicious since (upon extensive research) I found out the active ingredient has a long residual presence in the plant. This "new" gravity seemed to have absolutely no effect. The old stuff (on the bottle) recommended that the lights be raised, and indeed the plants seemed much more sensitive to light; the fan leaves got all yellow, but did not die. I called the company to ask those guys how and why the product changed to allow the new application schedule. They were not forthcoming and seemed to give me the canned response that "the product had not changed." BS!! These guys were caught lying about what was in it originally, and once they got caught, it is my suspicion that they took the paclo out of the mix and just left the kelp extract, while still selling it for regular price. The guy even said to me that there were bottles out there being sold that were counterfeit, which even they at the company could not tell apart from their own. That gives them plausible deniability.
To answer your question, the active ingredient can still be purchased, but it requires an ag license, at least where I am. The original gravity, from what I have found contained a 561ppm concentration of paclobutrazol. The products on the ag market are 4000 ppm and run about $180/gal. Not a bad price comparatively. It will take some jumping through hoops to get though. I have not succeeded myself, and therefore still do not know 100% if that is the secret ingredient by itself, or if it was a mix of ingredients.
About the snow storm: this product is also available in raw form as Triacontinol. I found it in powdered form from a great site called mbfert.com. It does take a process, which is explicit on the site, to dissolve the Triacontinol powder into a liquid solution that can be mixed in with a res or spray solution. Basically, after learning this, it is evident that the snowstorm is just another diluted rip off product by the same company to be bought by ignorant growers. Sometimes it takes a shake-up like what happened with the gravity to find this stuff out.
I suspect that the gravity in it's original form was a mix of the paclo and the Tria, but I can't be sure until further experimentation. Cheers!
