It's time for another experiment, this one inspired by Gee, and this time I'm combining a couple of different things, 1.) a new soil mix, and 2.) a slight design twist on my SIPs.
On the soil mix, I'm going to take the advice from
@Gee64 and
@Keffka and go with a more traditional blend. Out are the leaves and leaf mold (although I may still use them as a top dress) and in is coco for the carbon piece.
So the new mix is:
2P Organics split between worm castings and compost
2P Carbon from coco coir
2P Old Soil from a prior round of same strain
2P Perlite
1P Biochar
This should give me a good baseline with a mostly recommended, and successful, combination of inputs to which I've added biochar.
The second change is I'm going to add additional aeration to my 1L SIPs. In a normal SIP design there is an air gap between the water reservoir and the soil which allows for a much wetter mixture in the bottom of the container without producing the usual root rot typical in very wet soils.
The containers are watered through a fill tube, bypassing the soil and maintaining a moisture gradient in the pot, wetter at the bottom and less so further up.
The challenge with this setup is that in organic grows it is generally recommended to water from the top at least when adding nutrients to help activate the organics and microbes, and that can mess with the moisture gradient. In addition, in my small containers I seem to have excess moisture issues as I seem to have better results by letting my containers dry out a bit between waterings.
Letting them dry out a bit actually helps my plants grow better but that defeats one of the real benefits of the SIP design, that being the constant access to water and nutrients.
Soooo, I'm going to try adding extra aeration further up in the soil column and see if that extra air can help the upper roots benefit in a similar way to the bottom ones near the air gap. Initially I thought of adding another smaller dome on top of the one that defines the reservoir to accomplish the goal, but then had a classic Homer Simpson "Doh!" moment and realized I could accomplish the same outcome with no loss of soil volume by simply making holes all along the fill tubes already present in my pots.
I have two older clones that are almost identical in size and health that I've had sitting in the Limbo Land area of my veg space that I repotted into the new mix, one in the original SIP version and the other in what I'll call the vented SIP.
The normal one got watered from below and the vented one from above, and both will continue to be watered that way to see if the extra aeration up top can overcome my small pot moisture issue and the organic top watering messing with the moisture gradient issue.
I'll compare the two plants over time and each will get the same treatment, one from below and the other from above, and I'll see what I can learn in the process.