Hi I’ve been growing cannabis for a little over a year and a half now and I’m up to my 6th Grow. I’ve tested coco perlite using salts vs soil with organic amendments. I found I love the ease of growing and guilt free feeling of organics. This will be the 3rd grow in a row with organic living soil. I’m using my own blend of promix hp and gaia green 4-4-4, glacial rock dust, kelp meal, ewc, and stash blend. I’m planning to incorporate silica powder and charged bio char into my next blend.
I’m really interested in learning the reason why certain things work better than others and while I learned most of what I know now online and on my own, I don’t know what I don’t know and I feel stuck. I’d love to learn the science of the process to better understand and how each piece plays a part in the overall health of the plant. I appreciate all the help so far
@kaptain3d thanks for the recommendation! I guess for starters, what’s the difference between living soil and just using organics? My understanding is if there’s no living component to the soil then organics won’t really work thus any “organic” soil with amendments is a living soil right?
I don’t even know where to begin @Budbrother but I’m interested in learning best practices and I understand everyone does things differently but I want to know important/ necessary steps for anyone regardless of grow style.
How do you feed the roots with organics? Do you mean liquid organic fertilizer? I’m really interested in mostly pre mixing my soil and then sustaining with top dressings.
High @Weedmandude I’m growing in living soil with dry nutrients and I’m pretty good at what I do. That said I don’t really know crap about anything but what I do. If you want to learn more than that I recommend getting with others like @Budbrother@Caligurl and I’m sure I’m missing many more. They actually know what is going on. Here’s one of @Budbrother pages it dives into it. I try to follow along and learn from him
Critters distinguishes organic from living soil. All organics must be consumed by the micro heard to make them available, basic dry organics. Organics now have chelated or fermented soluble forms of nutrition that don’t require microbial intervention. So food isnt a factor Kap
The difference is that living soil has life other than the microbes and fungi. Worms aerating, rove beetles scavenging, pill bugs, earwigs, beneficial mites, etc. It’s a living soil with an ecosystem at play.
Very good to know, I saw a video where a guy described it as trying to replicate the forest floor in a pot. I’m really interested in living soil and learning why it works so well.
@Weedmandude if i was you and you wanting to learn how organics work i would suggest start making compost and get you worm farm going so you can make your own happy growing my friends
@Gl1tch@Reed71 I was more so hoping some living soil growers would knowledge dump in here, I’m finishing up an autoflower grow that I messed up so once that’s done I’ll be going onto some photos again and am planning to make these changes then. I wanted to get ahead of everything and try to be more prepared when it’s time for my next grow.
I would start by following @Budbrother , @Caligurl and @GreenJewels if you’re serious about Living Soil. Check out their journals and ask questions. Then chances are they’ll be more aware of your journal and efforts. They are really good at it, but very busy people. They will gladly help if you show interest, I’m sure.
Thank you guys and I appreciate that insight I’m new to message boards and stuff so I’m learning!
@Budbrother I’ll look for the tag and see what’s going on. Since I have some time before I’m mostly trying to amend my soil one grow at a time and not jump right into everything at once. My wife is horrified of bugs and the fact that the tent is in the bedroom of our 1 bedroom condo we don’t have much space for a worm bin and other stuff quite yet.
We’re gonna hopefully be buying a house this summer and I’m planning to up my operation but for now I want to see what I can do to help my soil and also sustain it in between grows. I’ll check out the other threads and thanks everyone for jumping on this to help!
Gotcha. You can start cooking soil for your next round with some cover crop if you have room for another pot in your tent.
You can just drop a few bait worms in your pots instead. No extra space required. Then when your ready for worm bins you can just grab a few from you pots. You can also do bokashi buckets for compost. It only takes up a bucket worth of space in the corner of the kitchen.
