Considering all of the water you have flushed through, I would let the soil dry out and start again when you water next. Your plants may be runts because of their feet being too wet in hot soil so let them dry out and see if they perk up when they need to search for water. Your solid should provide adequate nutrition given your list of amendments and as I said, 7.1 is not so far out of the range. A picture would help diagnose if there are any lock out issues occurring.
If your run offs continue to be low PPM they I would consider adding a nutrient regime. I use GH Flora in hydro, so maybe someone else may suggest other solutions for FFOF soil.
Last runoff test was 7.3. water is testing around the same. Only one plant is runted. 6 are very healthy, 4 have marginal issues but may be light related, not nutrient based. The rest of the plants have not been touched/flushedā¦ Just this Little runt. All of them were just transplanted to 5 gals, so Iām gonna let them enjoy the new soil mix before considering nutes. Iāll post something tonight and tag you outside of this thread. Thanks for the ear!
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Kind soil directions
Total Living Organics - book
Cassandra Maffey master grower
Many many living soil growers Iāve watched or read
Itās simple to me anyway
You want to keep the critters in your soil healthy so they can feed the plants then use natural products like citric acid
The GH ph up/down is a chemical process made in lab with chemicals and is not living soil friendly.
I take it you donāt grow with living soil.
Thatās cool to each their own
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āChemicalsā you speak of are normally derived from natural sources so we are not talking differently. I would call nutes like GH Flora more ādefinedā media. I worked with organisms in a lab all the time and use phosphate buffered saline (PBS) often. All of our human cells are floating or being fed from RBCās in PBS (natural). Phosphates do not ākillā microbes, so the statements you are making are not true.
Again I believe you are talking the addition of concentrated acid and bases killing your soil microbes. Even your ānaturalā citric acid will kill soil microbes.
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@Skydiver Went to the Kind soil site and saw their instructions. I have inquired with them to also provide the scientific rationale? This just doesnāt make sense to me?
This is all I use for my organic grow, it works very well, a little goes a long way. Nutes drive pH way down and takes a bit more to get back up to 6.0. It is a whole nother learning experience with this stuff to drive it up or down, RO water reacts fast. But when you add nutes it takes a bit more to drive it up, 1/16 teaspoon - 1/8.
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Response from Kind
āThereās nothing that states itās detrimental to our soil. Citric acid is safer and for most growers simpler to use with organic soil grows. Growers have in the past overused phosphoric acid, which when overused or improperly used in plain water can cause issues to plants/crops. It will cause stretchy weak growth when itās over done and in more serious cases you will get rust color burns all through your plants leaves.ā
My take: Reason for the suggestion is that Phosphoric/phosphate is a strong buffer at pH 5-7 and when overused could throw off the pH balance of the soil and hold a lower pH than optimum (Nutrient lockout). If used properly and applied at the proper pH it will not effect the microbes in the soil.
Use of citrate/citric acid has buffering capacity between pH 3-5 so at natural pH of 6-7 it will not change the pH buffering capacity of the soil, and thus is safer to use if over applied.
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My last plant died. I wasnāt able to save it. The fox farm grow big at week 3 I guess it was too much. It turned yellow and died.