Hey
@con - so, thinking about the Dark Side eh? Lol. Well….
There are differences. First, I’d go with one or the other - soil or coco. Mixing them 50/50 doesn’t work.
Coco will give you much faster growth. There are days when you will swear you’re seeing them grow in real time.
Coco is likely to produce significantly larger plants. Probably lots of reasons for this, but I believe the salient point there is that in coco, you feed every day. Once they are out of seedling and have say three sets of leaves, they tend to take off. You’re basically nute-ing the plant to death in coco. Lol. So they get big. You are unlikely to get as many veg days with photos in coco as in soil for this reason.
It’s is almost impossible to overwater coco. Once they are of the above mentioned size that is - you still can drown one in the very beginning. It’s also not at all necessary to go through the watering rigamaroles with coco that we go through in soil. Once they have a bit of size you just douse them to runoff every day. I literally fill an entire gallon and just let that pool drain down. The roots will fill the pot - any size pot - every time regardless of how you water.
This is sounding pretty good, right?
Not so fast. Lmao. There are plenty of downsides too, depending on your perspective. One is, the workload compared to soil is way way higher. If for no other reason than you have to fill and lug water every day. Two - you have to mix nutes every damn day. Besides being a PITA, it gets expensive pretty fast. Three - you have to get the nutes right, or coco will bitch faster and louder than soil. Coco is really responsive. I often see the effects of an additive that same day, especially cal mag. But with that responsiveness comes potential pitfalls, cuz if you screw up, the plants shows it immediately. The upside there is that fixes are faster too. Four - you can’t use threes and I wouldn’t even use fives. 7s at least. Which again costs you lots of medium, and money. I mean, you can, but what’s the point? If you go coco you do it for only one reason (to me) - bigger plants and buds. It’s not a small plant game. Finally - you have to add calmag before mixing every gallon. Not sure why, but apparently coco leaches calcium and magnesium faster or more so than soil - it wants to hold on to it is my understanding. So you gotta watch that too.
So there’s a bunch of positives and negatives. I think of coco kind of like hydro in a medium, so hydro with friction. It’s super fun. Just takes a lot of attention. You can’t really decide you’ll wait an extra day to water with coco. If they dry all the way out they get very unhappy. It’s not like building roots in soil. You become, in effect, slave to your plants.
If you decide to try coco, my number one most important suggestion for those who haven’t tried it is to pick a nute system you like and run it by the book from day one. This will give you the best results first time. If you like it, later you get into altering base mixes and additives and such. That, and strap your seatbelt.
Hopefully some of that is helpful.
