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RE: Organic Workshop: Making Italian Style High Brix Soil
Your potting soil mix is a lot like what goes into my worm bins. I even add the bio char into my worms bins to let it get nice and activated before it comes out and makes it into the planting. Another great way to do your bio char is soak it in worm tea over night. It will super charge your soil base. This is what mine looks like when it comes out of the bin.
Yeah I hear about people charging their biochar, but it's gonna be in the soil for very long time, so it's gonna get colonised with bacteria and fungi anyway. I mean this soil is already as alive as it gets... and it'll cook for at least 6 weeks to charge, but more like a battery. The objective now is to start mineral breakdown and adsorption, so there are no major problems till the end of plant's life. And the soil will get boosted later with compost tea and whatnot :)
It is good you have quality alive soil then. I had to start with sand 6 years ago and after years of hogs improving soil I almost have a type of soil that is not sand. I get really nice rich black soil where piles of hay have decomposed over several years and makes a nice base for my compost. Everything else has to be charged up with good worm castings because when it dries out here in the hot summers all the microbes in the sandy dry soil start to die off so I always use worm tea in my pastures and padlocks for growing to add good microbes back.
Yeah I get it's a hardship in many places in US. I saw Californian soil and I understood straight away the problems of agriculture such as low CEC and bedrock everywhere... so everything is on drip like grapevine and orange trees :) I mean there's no way it'd happen here, these plants have naturally long roots and they'll find water even in a drought.
I don't have a clue what you have to deal with in Florida though! But imagine that here I actually have to fight AGAINST organic matter in soil. There's so much of it and as en affect the soil is so saturated with nitrogen and potassium, that you need to be very careful with any type of compost. You can actually run 3-4 seasons of potatoes or tomatoes without any fertilisers and this is why #HighBrix soil is the best way to go for me. It's about finding the balance between major cations such as calcium and magnesium.
I am jealous! I can have nice rich looking dark soil and in one crop of corn it is all light sandy soil again. Never thought someone would be fighting from the other end with to much nitrogen. 3-4 season is wow. I know many farmers around here that spend 30k to 40k a year on fertilizer for hay or corn crops.
Hmmm it's interesting that corn is your original crop... native American to be exact, but it's been cultivated in Italy since XVI century and we used to have shitloads of heirloom varieties to make polenta from :D
It's still corn-growing country though, so it's everywhere and people don't really fertilise it if they grow it for their own needs... now intensive agriculture is a different story, we have it too and it's become a real problem for groundwater, rivers and lakes in the north.
I like to use corn because after I get what I want it still produces a good amount of food for my livestock. I toss soaked corn into my padlocks and pastures after rotating the livestock into the next. It won't produce corn in the 6 to 8 weeks before they make it back but the corn will be over waste high and produce a good amount of food for the animals.
I just seen that you are growing organic cannabis. Yeah good luck growing that were I am in the ground. Maybe in raised beds or pots with high grade compost. From all my reading I would almost say cannabis has close to the same requirements as tomatoes as far as the intakes. Would you find that is close. I have been working on growing DWC tomatoes with only worm teas as fertilizer waiting for them to legalize it here so I can start selling to growers.
Not very far, but there are few important differences... tomato is a fruit bearing plant and cannabis is a flower producing plant, where fruit is the seed, which we don't want if we shoot for the smoke :) This makes optimal nutrient absorption of cannabis slightly different. In a nutshell excessive potassium and phosphorus should be avoided while nitrogen and calcium/magnesium diet should be a priority. I use a refractometer to monitor Brix levels, so I know how efficient my plant is in producing carbohydrates.
It's gonna be hard to dial it in hydro though as you don't have the right root biology.
What do you want to sell to growers? Setups? Weed? EWC? Sorry, I didn't get that :)
I sell high quality aerated worm tea. I have been playing with different recipes for different types of plants during different growing stages. I use a variety of different ingredients with my castings like frass, bio char, kelp meals, bat guanos, urea, sea 90, rock dust, etc etc, etc. I have even played with different brews with fish bone meals and blood meals based on what I was feeding it to and what I thought it was in need of. I have had good results using only worm tea in DWC buckets from blue berries to peppers and tomato plants but legal marijuana creates a whole new market for high quality worm teas. I have even looked at just selling my mixtures for people to brew themselves instead because shipping aerated worm tea comes with lots of problems.