PeeJay's Perpetual Organic Homebrewed Soil - Stealth Cabinet And Greenhouse Grow

gardenfaerie said:
That's what I do also. I prepare the soil with about everything it needs and let it sit for a week before potting plants. I do this with all container plants, not just Canna. PeeJay, I said in other posts I want to move my autos out into the greenhouse soon. I have them on 18/6 inside under the CFLs. They are flowering now. Do you think putting them out will ruin my bloom?
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I've never grown autos, faerie. I can't answer your question. It seems like it would be ok, but I don't know for sure.
 
beautiful Plants
Chronic Weekend to you Pj
i don't think putting your autos out will do anything bad
 
Hi PJ! Thanks for popping in :) I actually came by a week or so ago, but got distracted and never actually posted my comment, so lame I know! Great info about planting the seeds deeper to escape the seed case. I actually used that to sprout some spinach and broccoli recently. I have also heard of people sand the ridge on a cannabis seed to help. I am yet to try this, but it sounds logical. Keep up the beautiful work!
:circle-of-love:
 
Been contemplating the soil on hand supply. If you'd asked me back in November I would've told you I'd run out the soil I amended and go with Doc's kit instead - it's always appealed to me.

The mixes I've made seem to work very well. I'm seeing all the high-brix attributes and have a large stock of amendments on hand. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Instead I decided to buy more castings, Sunshine #4 and Ocean forest and extend what I have at the same ratios. From now on when soil goes out of a bin, I'm going to replace it with freshly mixed soil. I'm going to stick with three amended soils, one for seedlings, one for vegetative growth, and one for flower. Here is what I use.

ingredients1.jpg


For the seedling mix I combined 3 gallons of Sunshine, 1 gallon of FFOH, one gallon of chunky perlite, and 1/2 cup of granulated mixed mycorrizial inoculate. From what I've been reading, seedlings benefit greatly from a soil biota dominated by fungus. There is plenty of food in the FFOH to feed the seedlings, the Sunshine is not nutrient rich at all, and the perlite improves drainage.

The base added to both the veg and flower soils is the same. Nine gallons of Sunshine, three gallons of FFOH, three gallons of worm castings, one and a half gallons of chunky perlite, five cups of Yum-Yum mix, and one cup of Excelerite. Here is a blurb from the Excellerite web-site about this product:

"U.S. Rare Earth Minerals has been blessed with the rights to mine what is widely considered the rarest source of ancient lake bed sediments in Panaca Nevada found to date. A host of scientists recognize it as the richest known source in the world for natural occurring macro, micro and nano nutrients. These minerals and trace elements have been naturally chelated in the presence of Humic and Fulvic acids to produce the powerful combination of Panaca minerals,that we call Excelerite; Excelerite is approved by the Organic Materials Review Institude ( OMRI ) listed, and may be used in certified organic production or food processing and handling according to the USDA National Organic Program Rule.

The only other thing the veg soil gets is 1 cup of 10-1-1 Mexican bat guano.

The flower soil has no Mexican guano. It gets 1 cup of 0.5-13-0.2 Indonesian bat guano, and 1 cup of soft rock phosphate.

I started some tea with a quart of veg soil (before adding new stuff) 1/2 cup Yum-Yum mix, and a tablespoon of molasses. It is bubbling away. Tomorrow I'll use some of the diluted tea to moisten both the veg and flower soils and give the micro-army a slew of new troops.

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The veg and flower soil bins are hanging out in the greenhouse where the temperatures are more moderate than the extreme swing seen outdoors here this time of year. The bins work for plant stands. The veg soil hangs out in a bin out on the deck.

I'm somewhat reticent about not running out what I had and trying Doc's kit. The reticence is tempered by the knowledge I gain by reading about soil biology, our favorite plant, and the knowledge I can apply to growing other things besides cannabis.
 
PeeJay,
Just read through your entire journal, it really is great. U sure have progressed as a cannabis grower in a very short amount of time! Having a pre existing green thumb and 420mag forum help sure is nice isn't it?

I have to say I really learned a lot about sprouting seeds from the info here. Thanks. I've been using clones for my past grows and just now have seeds to play around with, timely info my friend, glad I didn't skip any pages.

Been listening to mellower GD tunes in the growroom and reading up. Time flys, but I'm a niteowl anyways.

I like your soil mix(es). Its funny i saw your journal before and began reading but quit at the GO nute line. Nothing wrong with that just doesnt grab my attention. No tea's or folliars though huh?


Ill be around...
 
Thanks for dropping by, Org. I abandoned the GO line about half way through the first grow. All the bottles and crud just weren't for me. I did teas the second half of the last grow - haven't done any this time except I have the batch I started bubbling yesterday. Primarily I started that one to add lots of beneficials to the newly mixed soils. I did give the darkstar a shot of tea diluted 4:1 and a foliar with the same tea diluted 8:1 to see if she likes it. My main reason for not doing tea so far is I want to see how the soil does solo before I start monkeying around with other things. I've done some minor topdressing with the Yum-Yum and Guano, but that has been it.

The top dressing was associated with re-potting from the veg soil to the flower soil. I figured that the soil/root mass from veg would be depleted somewhat - I went from a 3 gallon veg soil pot to a seven gallon flower soil pot. Top dressing around the stem was a way of raising the phosphorous with the Indonesian guano and replacing many of the other macro, micro and nano nutrients with Yum-Yum in the three gallons of veg soil.

Teas are something I've been doing off-site reading about. I'm a little puzzled by what some people are doing with teas. They tend to add a little bit o' this and a little bit o' that in a haphazard fashion. When I was a chef I was always skeptical of other chefs who were excessively proud of their barbecue sauce or marinara sauce. In both cases they were generally throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the pot and producing a product that was muddy, confused, and totally lacking in finesse. Most of the time those guys were shoemakers.

My current thinking about tea is this: if you have a good well balanced bio-active soil available that the plants love and show no signs of deficiency, that should be the foundation of the tea. All you really need is some of that fresh soil and something to activate and multiply the beneficial aerobics - like molasses.

Obviously there are opportunities to use specialty teas and foliars at various stages of the plant's life to boost overall health and nutritional status as those needs change. Doc has done a lot of research on the subject - one of the major selling points for his kit. That is vastly superior to some of the "crap shoot" concoctions I see others bubbling up. I need to read through Doc's older, pre-kit, journals for clues as to what he was doing as he developed the current system. Those are great journals, but they were/are so popular that there is a lot of signal to noise ratio in them. You've got to wade through hundreds of pages and distill out the relevant things.

For me, it is fun to sort it out for myself. If it isn't fun, then go with the kit. I don't see myself sending samples away for analysis or even getting a brix meter. I want trouble free and no stress. Plant it, water it, watch it grow.
 
I hear you on the teas. Off site reading in regards to AACT's has been very helpful to me. I like your BBQ/marinara recipe analogy. Standardized recipes are the basis for consistency with is paramount in restaurants. I use standardized teas very frequently on all my container plants. I don't quite agree with you though in that I think if one fully understands compost teas, I feel he could "wing it" with great, consistant results.
I really feel teas are an awesome addition to any living soil. I think even when we put all the right stuff in our soil mix (like your's) and cook it, and add some tea to introduce microbials... We still can really benefit from brewing and adding more teas as the grow progresses. The bigger the microherd the quicker they can process all the organic matter and minerals in the soil.

Just stuff I've been thinking of lately. Is that the "best" way? Prolly not, but it works for me. I am Learning more and more every day.

Have a great day. Later.
 
We are mostly on the same page, Org. Standardized recipes are the foundation of quality in mediocre restaurants. In the environments I worked in the standardized recipe provided a framework, but my crews were selected, in part for their adeptness as creating a standardized flavor profile from that framework. For example, in a recipe for a roasted tomato sauce, the quality, liquid content, sweetness of the tomatoes, etc, is not standard. It varies. A clove from one head of garlic may be twice as pungent as a clove from another. Achieving the closest to ideal product involved a "feel for it" more than anything else. The "feel for it" was based on experience and intuition about, at one fundamental level, the interplay between acidity, sweetness, and salt -as well as many other factors. Educated winging it, if you will.

One of the interesting things I've noticed reading about foliar feeding teas is it fosters development of a beneficial biofilm on top of the cuticle. The biofilm is unattractive to pests and fungi and provides an added barrier to viruses, etc. If you have a biofilm that contains cyanobacteria, say, then the plant can absorb fixed nitrogen directly through the stoma and epidermis on the leaves. Biofilms are fascinating things. You can't really learn about this stuff on e-how dot com. The ag universities are researching this stuff. I poke around the scholarly journals and gather info at a leisurely pace.

There are more teas and foliars in my future, probably. With my limited grow space and small legal plant count, it isn't possible to experiment with too many things at once. I've gotta restrain the mad scientist in me - not always easy.
 
Before we are done here folks, PeeJay will be issuing us all degrees in Biology. I better study for the final exam......LOL

I have to admit PeeJay, I have to read through your posts at least twice. ( 3 or 4 if I'm medicated) Then I absolutely understand it. You have a keen sense for writing things in laymen's terms. Kudos!
 
Happy Skunkday Pj :thumb:
 
I agree, PeeJay. I have a degree in horticulture and have been using foliar sprays for, oh, 20 or more years. Way back before aerobic teas were understood and we thought the smelly anaerobic teas were quite useful. There is even research using manure teas in large Fire Ant mounds to disperse them and force them to move their nests and I have had very good results with this method. I don't like to kill anything, even insects.

When you say "...then the plant can absorb fixed nitrogen directly through the stoma and epidermis on the leaves..." From where does this nitrogen come? Do you mean atmospheric, after a thunderstorm, or do you mean something new which I'm not up on yet?
 
Right from the atmosphere, Faerie. It you have a bacterial microfilm on the leaf and a good percentage of the bacteria can break the pesky nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond, then the plant will be able to absorb some of it's needed nitrogen from above ground. Most of the bacteria that fix nitrogen are funny aerobes. They need oxygen to live, but too much oxygen is also bad for nitrogen fixation because it binds up the iron cofactor in the nitrogen fixation enzymatic chain. A biofilm environment can make survival and nitrogen fixation happen on the leaf surface.

I'm not suggesting I could have any success making a tea that produced a nitrogen fixing biofilm... That's just one example of what I'm sort of interested in - foliars that feed beneficial biofilms.
 
Cannafan said:
Before we are done here folks, PeeJay will be issuing us all degrees in Biology. I better study for the final exam......LOL

I have to admit PeeJay, I have to read through your posts at least twice. ( 3 or 4 if I'm medicated) Then I absolutely understand it. You have a keen sense for writing things in laymen's terms. Kudos!
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That's a nice compliment, Canna. Thank you. My biofilm reply to Faerie... not much in the way of laymens terms in that one. lol
 
PeeJay said:
Right from the atmosphere, Faerie. It you have a bacterial microfilm on the leaf and a good percentage of the bacteria can break the pesky nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond, then the plant will be able to absorb some of it's needed nitrogen from above ground. Most of the bacteria that fix nitrogen are funny aerobes. They need oxygen to live, but too much oxygen is also bad for nitrogen fixation because it binds up the iron cofactor in the nitrogen fixation enzymatic chain. A biofilm environment can make survival and nitrogen fixation happen on the leaf surface.

I'm not suggesting I could have any success making a tea that produced a nitrogen fixing biofilm... That's just one example of what I'm sort of interested in - foliars that feed beneficial biofilms.
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This is very interesting. I mean, I know the stomata will uptake nutrients if open and not too hot, but I didn't know the microbes can actually fix N from the air. There has been many developments since I stopped working in greenhouse operations. I'm looking forward to your findings. Compost tea is so popular here in this area most upper scale garden centers have huge aerobic brewers and sell it by the gallon. It's an interesting science.
 
very informative pj :thumb:
 
I got a refractometer and took brix readings from the darkstar. It's been two days since it was watered. I water every three or four days right now. I squeezed juice from a lower fan leaf, a middle fan leaf, and a sugar fan and took two samples from each. I tossed the highest and lowest readings out and averaged the rest. The average brix was 13.25 - not bad for a dude growing in a "less than high brix" growing medium. Brix is interesting, but there are a lot of confounding factors in the actual prismatic readings.

Thanks for the primer on juice sqeezings, Graytail! It was most helpful.
 
13 is good n solid. :thumb:

Did the sugar fan have the highest readings?
 
No, the highest reading came from the second sample on a lower fan on the second juice reading. I dragged the smooshed leaf across the prism to get a good coverage and got a 19.5 from that one. It was tossed as the highest reading. The lowest was from the second squeeze on a mid fan, 9.5. The sugar fans were the biggest juice producers. I got 14.25 and 13.5 on the two squeezings there.
 
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