Just wondering what soil amendments are necessary? I use fox farm happy frog or ocean forest soil with jacks 321 nutes. Should I add stuff too or is it just a waste of money?
There’s just so many things that sound like it would be good to add like earthworm castings, bone meal, gypsum, fish emulsion and the list goes on. Seen one guy say he uses 50% vermiculite and 50% peat moss with dolomitic lime and gypsum added in. Do any of these have a significant effect or is the result more negligible?
Keep it simple and less is best Growmie, the Jacks will provide all the nutrients to successfully grow cannabis. A bi-weekly dose of beneficial microbes would be the only thing I would recommend. Additional perlite would help with drainage
Most of the amendments you have listed are good for making soil or refreshing soil. Your soil will already have most of these ingredients or something similar in it. Since your adding nutrients you don’t really need to enrich your soil.
I don’t use jacks. From what I’ve seen stated it is decent nutrients. I wouldn’t add anything if the current line you’re using has everything the plant needs.
Now if I was you and since you seem curious about the amendments. Start looking into organics. If you want to do organics there are quite a few members here that can/will share any information they can.
So I say to you keep using jacks it’s good! With chemicals you just mix and spray!
Organics is there if you want to learn! Organics is easy but requires work to be done mostly beforehand so get to sweat and get your hands dirty!!
The guy who uses vermiculite said that it contains silica as well. Seems like most people use perlite now, not sure if it’s because of cost but it’s harder to find than perlite. It’s online but I try to buy in store to avoid large shipping fees and I haven’t found it anywhere
I’d love to learn about organics. This last grow I was trying out a few amendments but I’m unsure if it’s really worth it. I mixed in earthworm castings for veg stage and was planning on reporting into soil with bone meal, seaweed extract and fish emulsion for the phosphorus and potassium when I get close to flowering.
It’s just hard to know if I’m falling for marketing or what stuff is worth buying.
Mind sharing what happened to make you want to keep everything simple? It can get pricey adding stuff when I don’t really need to. I’m just curious if anything has a significant on plant growth if they’re already in good soil.
Your plants can only consume so much, additives like potassium and phosphorus boosters throw off the balance of the base nutrients. An overload of one can lock out the absorption of other vital nutrients needed. Jacks 321 has balanced macro, micro and secondary nutrients and very cannabis friendly from start to finish🤟
Ocean Forest has all of this and more.
Composted forest humus, sphagnum peat moss, Pacific Northwest sea-going fish emulsion, crab meal, shrimp meal, earthworm castings, sandy loam, perlite, bat guano, granite dust, Norwegian kelp, and oyster shell (for pH adjustment).
Use your Jacks 321 and you are good to go without anything else. You could add some mykos and/or Azos and the occasional molasses watering to feed the microbes but that is choice.
I use tps billions for microbes and I have a fox farm fertilizer I use a bit when repotting that is supposed to have mycos.
Is there a way to know if there is a healthy colony of myco? I’m sure I could send a soil sample to a lab but that’s too expensive for me. Just wondering if there’s a simple at home method to test for it.
This advice from