@Bill284 method. Maybe he’ll see the tag and add to the convo a little bit. Frass, and bokashi are similar to EWC. Nutrients that have been bound up in organic matter. The difference is usually in how the nutrients get bound. When you buy these items in the store they have some decent amounts of what we’re looking for but they’ll never match something like
@Gee64
EWC because he intentionally feeds all of the nutrients we’d need to his worms for them to bind it up into EWC. Meaning he really only needs that EWC plus some stuff to keep the structure.
I know Bill also layers his mixes, however I know he also likes coco. If he’s layering with coco over soil then this would require additional nutrients since coco really only breaks down to K mainly, so you would need an extra boost in there. If it’s just coco you’re gonna need a little more than if it was soil.
If he’s not putting bands of nutrients in the pot then he would need to provide the oomph himself likely in his watering. Even if he was using soil over coco there would still be a need to add nutrients somewhere in the pot for the micro life to break down and deliver to the plant. However if you’re using soil you’d need less than if you were using coco.
For example, I use soil and store bought EWC, however, on the very bottom of my pot I put in a bunch of different meals like blood, kelp, alfalfa, crab, etc. plus an all purpose 4-4-4. Then I add my aerated compost layer then a soil layer. This gives the microlife access to the matter for consumption which will result in the specific nutrients we want being delivered to the plant. That’s an entire process that involves movement, consumption, death, etc.
I also put the same stuff on the top of my pot just below my mulch. So I’m adding nutrients in as well, they’re just added in specific spots meant to be slowly broken down instead of watered in. I didn’t provide a good source of slow burning calmag so now I’m forced to provide it myself during watering with dolomite lime or the calmag I have.
The living soils need to have access to resources that will provide the nutrients when being broken down by the microlife. Depending on what your setup is, this may mean putting dry nutrients in specific places in the pot, or using water soluble nutrients and watering them in each time.
I would need Bill to clarify his setup before I could make definitive statements about what he’s doing.
From my memory I thought Bill was essentially supercharging a coco grow by basically creating a high quality soil in layers with the frass and bokashi. If you mixed up frass, bokashi, and coco, you’d have a very strong base for a high quality potting soil.
Does that make sense or did I make it even more convoluted
?
That's a good one! I see amazon has a ton of it for people. Same use in horticulture you think?
