Thank you again. And thanks especially for the personal glimpse. We appreciate those here. Well, I do indoor mostly cuz I’m in a chair. So I’ll have to come up with some way to mix and store soil that I can handle. Small batches I suppose. So I suppose you reuse the soil and amend it? If so, how many runs can you get from one batch of say 4 7s worth of soil? (or pick a smallish volume) Three or four or a million? This is a challenging plunge and not nearly as easy as you make it sound by ten miles. You know this, right?
Typically when I mix everything up, it’s 48 gallons of useable soil. This soil can be rerun an infinite amount of times as long as I replenish the organic matter, minerals, and carbon. If you really want to make it special, you reuse the soil for the same strain repeatedly. This will allow the strains preferred microbes to colonize and will increase quality and yield. You’ll also be able to really dial in which amendments the plant prefers.
In your situation we could scale the soil quantities up or down with relative ease with a few tweaks to the recipes. The hardest part would be mixing the soil. A compost tumbler or cement mixer would likely be ideal that way the majority of the mixing is done by the machine. Currently I mix it up on a tarp then toss it in a 50 gallon Rubbermaid bin where I lightly water it and turn it every few days. The most important aspect is ensuring the soil is mixed thoroughly and stays moist. The less soil, the easier this would be to accomplish.
A lot of organic growing information will tell you to go with 10 gallon containers minimum. I’ve found 7 gallon containers to be the minimum size needed to go from seed. With a few spikes of some fertilizers or good EWC you can easily produce robust high quality yields.
If you go from clones you can go as low as 2 and 3 gallon containers with some heavy layering and spiking of dry nutrients like bone meal and blood meal.
If you wanna jump in right away while figuring everything out, Geoflora is a good organic line that will help you produce a nice harvest in a 3-5 gallon container.
Also, I do tend to forget how much of a learning curve organic can be lol.. It can seem really overwhelming at first, especially when we start talking amendments and biology. It’s a lot more involved than following a feeding chart at first, but eventually it’ll all click and feel natural.
How do you account for this? This strikes me as exactly the opposite of what I’d expect. I would assume the sun wins all battles, yield, taste, terps, all of it. You’re saying the exact opposite, except for yield, which is to be expected. When we both know that despite your nice LED words, the reality is it isn’t even close and never will be. So why on earth do you think LEDs would provide a better end product? (I don’t mean I don’t think your perception is accurate, I mean for real, do you have a theory on this?)
So beyond the quantity vs quality of light argument, there is also environment/climate. This is a huge factor on the quality of the plant. I posted it earlier but I live in Michigan so the environment hasn’t been ideal for cannabis growth for a while.
The temperature swings alone that we experience are enough to shock a plant and slow down the soil biology. Then there’s days of hot weather with no wind, and days of cold rain with high winds. We have overcast days, aggressive PM, bud rot happens constantly, thrips, spider mites, the list goes on and on. All of these things can greatly impact the plants health and force it to focus resources and energy that should be spent on flower and resin production.
Then there’s the soil itself. Is it in a container or in the ground? Has the soil been worked, mineralized and amended with cannabis in mind? Is it the same exact soil being used outside and inside? It typically is not. If it is then there’s a high likelihood the environment is impacting the plant. In my situation the soil the plant dug into was severely lacking in Calcium and sulfur. Calcium is one of, if not the most important nutrients cannabis uses. Sulfur also greatly enhances smells and flavors, so there again I’m not surprised the indoors won out.
