Jesus!! There is a plantation behind you!!!
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Coconut coir (abbreviated to coco or coco coir) is the dry hair and husk from the outside of the coconut. They cut it up and soak/ wash it in sea water and it absorbs salt and other minerals from the water.
You can buy plain coconut coir in bricks (basically a rectangle block of dry coconut coir) and you re-hydrate these by soaking in a bucket of water. I add a lot of calcium and magnesium to the water when re-hydrating it and let it soak for 24 hours. You don’t need to let it soak that long but I make it up one day and sort it out the next. After it has been re-hydrated, I put it into a big garden pot with shadecloth in the bottom to stop it washing out the holes in the pot. Then I use a watering can full of calcium and magnesium water to water it. This gets rid of any sodium and loads the coconut coir with calcium and magnesium.
You can buy bags of re-hydrated coconut coir but it’s a lot more expensive than buying a dry brick and adding your own water.
You can also buy bags of potting mix that contain coconut coir and perlite. The most common mix for cannabis usually contains about 30% perlite and 70% coconut coir. The perlite and coconut coir are measured in volumes, not measured by weight. So they might add 3 cups of perlite to 7 cups of coconut coir. The coconut coir is re-hydrated but excess moisture is squeezed out so it’s damp but not wet, before measuring the amounts.
Normal potting mixes for regular garden plants regularly have coconut coir in too now. They used to add peat moss to potting mixes to help hold moisture but peat moss has become a taboo word due to it being destroyed by land clearing and used in potting mixes. So now they add coconut coir to the potting mix to help it retain moisture instead of using peat moss.
Side note for anyone using perlite. It contains fine dust when packed and this dust can irritate your eyes and damage your lungs. If you use perlite you should cut a small slit in the top of the bag and poke a few small holes in the bottom of the bag. Put a garden hose in the hole in the top of the bag and turn the tap on a little bit. Let the bag fill with water and then turn the hose off. Allow the water to drain out the bottom of the bag and then you can use the perlite. Wet perlite is much safer than dry dusty perlite.
When you fill the bag with water, do it on the lawn so any dust goes into the soil.
Perlite itself is safe but the dust associated with it is harmful to our lungs. Once the dust has been dealt with the product is safe to handle.
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Basicly, Im a cultivation tech for a cannabis company. That room prolly had 800+/- plants in it, one of 12 rooms I help care for. I love my job, first time that has ever happened in my life.
Autopot, especially when used with a coco based media, is considered “hybrid” hydroponic growing. In hydroponics there is no runoff so you just focus on maintaining the reservoir ph. Because of how the autopot functions the plants feeder roots grow at the bottom where the nutrient solution is so there isnt the same need to monitor the soil the same way.
Not at all
Speaking to the difference between autopots and hand watering. When I grow without autopots (hand water) my plants will take 1-1.25 gal liquid every 3 days on the avg. When I do use the autopot my plants will consume 3/4-1 gal liquid each day.
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That’s roughly a 3X difference! Do you reduce the nutrients to 1/3rd for the autopots, or do they remain the same and you get 3X growth? I don’t understand why the autopots cause the plants would pump so much more water up and out of their leaves, but I’d like to.
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