I don't know if I agree with your thinking Yeti. I found the liquid in the bottles to be more than was absolutely necessary for a full run, but then I've used Graytail's
guidelines from the beginning, and they aren't slated to over feeding the soil.
Gazoo, I hear you. This is how my brain feels during this discussion. There won't be a way to get it precise, but there's certainly a range that's more acceptable. I've been growing rather decent plants in the kit soils for about two years now, and for the most part they respond well to between 0.5 -1 ml of drench per gallon of soil, chemovar-dependant. Scrubby's concentrations from a couple years back were more precise at 0.36 per gallon, and his plants made most of ours look like wannabes.
Where I messed up before was not loading enough Trans into the soil before the CAT. This idea of loading more Trans at the beginning sounds workable. Doc?
100% Sue. I agree with your assessment and Gazoo's recommendation.
There must be both kinds of nitrogen in the soil prior to the Cat Drench. Organic nitrogen needs microbial action, while nitrate does not.
GE is nitrate....while Transplant and Cat Drench are organic NH3. Urea also breaks down into ammonia....organic nitrogen.
So, if the soil never gets any organic nitrogen during veg, the crew of Nitrogen fixing microbes is understaffed, under trained and out of shape.
Bouncing off of what you said, I think the "mind" of the grower comes into play here. Back a while when some folks were making applets and spreadsheets for drenches and feeding schedules I think a bunch of people who think along those lines became interested in High Brix and started growing/trading ideas and so forth. I never did feature one of those spreadsheets in the directions, neither did I actually "endorse" one past saying, "It looks good to me." I was basing that off the fact that his plants looked really nice, and if he was following his program it was a good idea.
Meanwhile, I approach the whole growing thing differently. Many of us "veteran" or OG High Brixers did all sorts of things early on: Growing a whole crop with just GE. Growing a whole crop with just Cat Drench, feeding WAAAAY past the directions trying to see if it killed plants, etc.
All of us were fixated on the living, 3D, analog, real time retinal images, real time olfactory, auditory and other sensory information associated with the plant's response to this or that. None of the really advanced of us pays too close attention to exact measurements....we kinda know how long the plume of Tea should be when it hits the water. We know how loud the "plop" is for an ounce....and we don't care too much if it's a bit over.
We can sense and understand what to do because we understand the living applications of the products.
Contrast that type of thinking with a highly analytical, scientific mind that sees things in terms of EC, ppm, mils/gallon, and application rates.
The method of learning and teaching the first group of growers is not going to be at all like the method for teaching the analytical/engineering minds.
I have neglected explaining things in clear terms for those folks. Hopefully, we can all get on the same page via this journal, seeing how the stuff is really applied.
So far so good!
