It is not impossible to understand the interactions between minerals in soil. This was a new concept to me several years ago, but I studied it and through the work of Mulder and others, I now understand cation exchange, flow through rates, absorption and the reasons that various minerals affect the availability of the other minerals in the mix. It is simply intellectual laziness to accept that a soil mix is "impossible to study or that it has infinite variables... it does not.
Yes, properly running a TLO grow is a lot of work. It is totally possible however to go to the opposite side of things and make an organic grow work with nothing but water added, a totally easy way of growing. It just depends on how much you want to put into it and how much you expect to get get out. If you are afraid of a little bit of hard work, or getting messy, TLO is not for you.
Your jumping on Rev for using 3 gallon containers is not justified either. He does not say that this is how it must be done, he just states that this is what he does. I too find that I can get perfectly great results from 3 gallon containers, but my last 7 gallon and 5 gallon projects were also done TLO style... there are no restrictions in this regard.
Yes, Rev has changed his methods over the years and SubCool has changed his recipe. I also regularly change my methods and assumptions, and I use natural fertilizers in my grows, contrary to what many organic farmers would do. The early microbiology work done by Ingram, et. al. has been added to over the years too, and we now know many other beneficial microbes that can and should be added to our grows. You don't find many scientists that have written about the use of oatmeal in their teas for a very special form of desirable bacterium, and many organic growers are light years ahead of the old research by doing experiments with the growth hormones found in 7 row barley seedlings. Then let's talk about the work Doc is doing with the High Brix movement. The state of the art is changing constantly, and the work that I and many others do on these online forums is leading the way. I refuse to listen to the argument that if there is not documentable scientific research on some aspect of this, it doesn't exist or is not valid. What do you think we are doing with our grow journals? The refusal to accept that many of us are actually marijuana cultivation scientists is head in the sand nonsense, because I like others, try hard to keep as current as I can, always researching out several things in my grows, actively trying through our experiments, hypotheses and conclusions to advance the state of the art .
