Begin part 2
Once the plants are sexed and grow roots to the bottom of the one gallon pots, I get out the 7 or 15 gallon pots that they will be in for the rest of the grow season. At that time I make a lot of soil in a wheelbarrow. No need to buy Ed's bagged special soil for a fortune. I was at a weed supply store in Portland and looked at the insanely priced soil mixes that they sell there. Along with the insanely priced special fertilizers that they sell there. No need to pay a fortune for soil or fertilizers. Pee is free! Also at my place, compost is free, silty loan is free, the worms are free, and well, the Perlite is about all I buy any more. Though I may buy blood meal, cottonseed meal, kelp meal, hoof and horn meal (if I can find it), and fertilizers on sale, or even at Goodwill. If you need to, you can buy potting soil at the store and it will work just fine. The cheap stuff at WalMart or the 'black gold' at the rock and sand supply place. I have used them both as well for growing weed.
Anyway, my final soil mix is basically half screened silty soil from my property here, and a quarter fine and coarse screened leaf matter mixed with hardwood sawdust 'noodles' from chainsawing my firewood here from the previous fall cold composted from piles on my property. Then I add some Perlite, some sand, some gypsum, some wood ash, some stomped with a 2x4 wood charcoal bits (so called biochar), and any of the meals listed above if I have them around. They are slow-release fertilizers. I also add a few more earthworms per plant pot as I find them screening the soil. I plant the Cannabis in the soil, label the pots with marked tape, and move them into the greenhouses. I do not use any manure any more for my soil. I used to use steer manure, but it is really dense and mostly composted sawdust. Alpaca poo is good, but hard to get any more.
Horse poop is good chit.
We ran our entire barn grow with half horse manure, half commercial topsoil. There's a load of fiber in it - aerates beautifully. But it's gotta be old. Ours was 5+ years old - nice and mild.
Horse manure is good, but it has to be fully composted and 'old' as Graytail says here. Horse poop is dense stuff. My ex's sheep ranch was a horse ranch before she bought it, and there were huge piles of the stuff 6 or 7 years old that I dug into with a tractor tooth bar and used. Hard to get that aged stuff here though. Its all fresh, like the cow poop that I can get from my neighbors ranches here. So I do not use manures. I used composted barn muck at my exes for soil amendment as well, but that stuff varied in how 'hot' it was. It can also be too dense and make layers that water sheds off. I stopped using it tilled into the soil and just built a donut around the plants in the ground with sheep muck in a 4 foot diameter ring, and that worked really well. I used that for bamboos, roses and cane berries there. But I do not have mountains of barn muck here. I do not even have a barn. I could, but I have chased enough farm animals around for one lifetime.
At my brother's last year, he has hard very dense river bottom clay on his property. We double tilled the soil in the pot plant beds inside a greenhouse that he built. We then tilled in a large bag of compost, a small bag of gypsum to break up the clay, and small bags of meals that he had bought, including: kelp, cottonseed, blood, bone, alfalfa, and some others. He grew a Lebanese strain in there that was supposed to be "short" and they grew 12 feet tall! A lot of that was stretch from the heat, but a lot was from all the soil and added amendments. That is another reason I grow in pots; it keeps the plants down to a manageable size. Like less than 6 feet. My greenhouses are only 8 feet high. My brother grew his plants in pots for that reason this year as well. Far more manageable.
Anyway some things to avoid in soil are vermiculite, as that is puffed clay. It tends to revert back to clay over time. Perlite is puffed sand, and works better at water retention for longer periods of time. If crushed, it turns into fine sand. I avoid using fresh manure, and I do not compost using manure. Manure is not needed and it adds a lot of bacteria to the soil. That can be good or bad, depending. One thing about using cold compost (which I use to feed worms with) and sawdust is that microbes will rob nutrients from the soil to digest the compost and sawdust. So you have to be aware of that. When they break the amendment down they return the nutrients to the soil though. I prefer to be able to control and vary the fertilizer with weed as it is needed, which is one reason I use water solubles so much. I also mostly cold compost as opposed to hot compost to feed my worm army. Cold composting can be done by piling up smaller amounts of leaf matter. Once you get about a cubic yard of leaf material, sawdust, pine needles and wood chips it will start to cook all on its own. It will get hot here even in the dead of winter. It becomes good stuff to use in soils, I just do not use it for growing weed. I use that for my bamboos which I propagate and sell in pots. They love the stuff. Oh, and you never need anything called 'compost starter'. What a rip-off that is. Leaf material, bark, sawdust and whatever has all it needs to crank up the oven and cook. You do not need to add anything to get it going. I used to have a large Brush Bandit wood chipper and I would grind up shrubs and trees into a pile and within a few days it would always be getting hot inside, no mater what time of year or what type of trees and shrubs. It is magic.
