FINALLY! :')
My peat and coir finally showed up today, so it was time to get cooking!! I'm making a similar mix to my original batch, with a few small changes and a heap of extra minerals to load the heck out of this soil... let's see how many cycles it lasts me!
So my goal with this mix was to have a massively water retentive soil, as water may be kind of tight around here... while obviously having the necessary aeration to let my roots breathe, and hopefully still be a fluffy, clumpy enough soil that I can possibly use this beyond just cannabis (although luckily for me, the sage, rosemary, and chili plants that I am currently working with enjoy pretty much the same conditions as cannabis... hell yea! Total fluke, as I got them on impulse because I just really wanted them! Haha)
The Recipe:
-50L Canna Terra Professional (i.e. Peat Potting Mix)
-25L Canna Terra Professional Plus (i.e. Coco Coir Potting Mix)
-25L Rice Hulls
-25L " Organic Supersoil Compost Mix" from local distributor (i.e. some of the amendments i would typically use, just already broken down into a nice rich black compost. Probably not necessary, but may speed the cooking along slightly if need be)
-So roughly 125L of base mix. Now for the amendments! (Let's load it up correctly right from the beginning!)
**I'd like to add that I would probably add like 25L of some small-chip biochar as an aeration amendment if I wasn't such a cheap-ass, especially if I had larger pots that I wasn't intending to have to play with/reamend or "till" in the next few years; makes for a fantastic long-term aeration amendment that will benefit your soil and not break down or float to the top of your mix like perlite will (and technically rice hulls will be broken down into silica and stuff and disappear too). If you are growing using larger pots and aiming for true no-till, definitely would recommend. Anyway...
-100g Volcanic Rock Dust
-100g Palagonite
-150g Kelp Meal (love this stuff! It's in pretty much every plant tea I brew...)
-90g Neem meal
-150g Crustacean Blend
-125g Coconut Meal
-50g Azomite
-100g Alfalfa Meal
-100g Gypsum
-125g Soybean Meal
-100g High-Phos Guano
-80g Purasil (Raw Diatomaceous Earth)
-100g Malted Barley
I started with 50L of Canna Terra Professional (basically sphagnum peat moss, compost, and some perlite, but the main thing we're looking for here is just a nice volume of peat that doesn't have a bunch of fertilisers or other crud in there that will impact MY nutrient loading. The perlite is meh because I'll load up with other aeration additives to suit the total final volume). The coir is there to soak up additional water and provide better retention and less root saturation (not too much though, as coco coir can bind up calcium, magnesium, and iron, making them unavailable to your plant friends!). Rice hulls are my main aeration this time instead of perlite, to beak up the soil and provide aeration, water retention, and some silica when broken down by the microbes. I also loaded up on amendments this time, as it can't hurt to have a highly mineralised soil that will break down over a long time, and I actually am planning on letting this mix sit and cook for a few weeks so I'm not too worried
Got it all mixed up nice and thoroughly (had to use two totes and then consolidate once I had well and truly mixed both batch halves)
Then gave a really nice watering to try and saturate it all without making it too soupy. I also watered my worm bin and added a nice amount of worm leachate to the soil to kick start the microbial activity. I also plan to add some of the teas that I brew for the plants into my soil mix over the next couple weeks as it cooks
So beautiful! Can't wait to put the current ladies into big ol' pots of this and see what happens!