Update: the soil of Eden
Prompted by something Archie asked in Shed’s journal about whether anyone was using
@Doc Bud ’s High Brix Blend outdoors, I realise I haven’t said much about the soil in the raised bed, really - except for when I was a bit stressed that the custom ammendment was stuck in customs. Anyway - even if I did, it’s worth repeating
The plants in pots all have first run DBHBB soil, so that’s fairly straight forward - it’s just the same as other kit grows, except outside (although I have mentioned that there’s no ProMix HP here so I had to buffer some peatmoss myself with Doc’s guidance - and I think we’ve got that right now).
The raised bed is the soil I built for my grow last summer (2017-18) and I grew these in it... A CBD Critical Cure
and a sativa dominant hybrid, Professor Chaos
The original soil was a mix of humus from various worm composted sources and lots of little rocks (that are just in the ground here, lots of quartz) and some veggie garden mix from the garden centre and the ‘dirt’ and clay from our forest and around the garden.
I amended it with Oyster shell flour, crushed limestone, basalt and gypsum (aiming for the 6/5/3 ratio), along with small amounts of neem, wood ash and biochar, kelp meal and dead insects, a little borax and a little epsoms.
I used my own-made lactobacillus serum and fermented teas made from seaweed and another from stinging nettle (this was awesome - until i let it go anaerobic and had to ditch it). I foliar sprayed regularly using seaweed and casuarina - which is a big tree that grows here and is equivalent to horsetail so is very nutritious and a great antifungal agent. It was the first time I’d done something other than stick a seed amongst the ornamental garden and water it wth Seasol only for the duration
- I was pretty happy with the soil and the grow.
Here’s the interesting part. All along while I did this soil build and grow I was reasearching Doc Bud’s work on developing the high brix kit and high brix farming in general. So, I tried to reduce the amount of compost in my soil mix and lean heavily towards the minerals and other amendments etc. My garden helper at the time was convinced I needed more compost etc. - we “stood off” a bit about it and in the end I compromised and so did he
. He thought I had way too little, I thought I had way too much
By the end of the grow (well, by about half way through, actually) I knew enough and had seen enough to know I’d be ordering the kit to work with here and testing the raised bed soil for it as well. Not incidentally, by the end of the season that garden helper was asking me to remind him what I did to the soil
On to this season - I had that soil tested last year to see if it was amendable and one of the results of the test was the strong directive to
add no kind of organic matter/fertiliser to the soil!
Way too much organic matter for a high brix grow in there already. It was also lacking in some micro nutrients and had too much of others, so not great balances. There’s no way to know any of this without a test.
The soil was still, obviously, amendable though
and that’s what you see the Candida and the Critical Mass growing (like the clappers!) in now.
So the results of my soil test, after a full grow and a winter, looked like this:
Doc sent me this report, along with a recipe to do up my own ammendment to make it compatible with the kit (which will take 2 seasons to reach a baseline). I also had the option of having him make it up for me and send it. Seeing as that sounded better and easier and I needed kit supplies anyway, I got Doc to do it
Beacasue of the micronutirent issues, I’m to use Snake Oil - a very powerful booster for such things. It goes in with the brix foliar spray, but only once per month. It’s had one dose through each plant already and another is due next week.
I now, at very little cost including the cost of the soil test itself, have enough ammendment to do it next season as well and then I’ll test again. I also have enough ammendment to do the same amount of soil again, twice, so I plan to dig out - more accurately employ someone else to dig out - the bush pod soil pits from last season (which was the same mix of soil) and i will ammend that and see how it goes, either in another raised bed somewhere or in pots, next season.
So that’s what’s happening in the raised bed. It’s my own soil, previously grown in and then tested and amended especially and appropriately with a custom ammendment in order to grow using Doc’s High Brix Blend system of drenches, tea and foliar spras.
So this, my friends is the becoming of a high Brix Eden in my garden, and considering this is a sub-par year (for a few reasons, one of which is that it’s the first year amending it this way) it’s looking pretty fine to mine eyes so far
Cheers Doc,
to you to my garden. I am very pleased to have you join me 
