Ok first off don't despair. You set out to create a soil from your own property that would successfully grow cannabis.
CANNABIS IS VERY HARD TO GROW.
Don't every lose sight of that. When you fully get organics you will instantly see that the best additive to a worm farm or a soil mix or a composter is weed. Thats because it is an apex hyper accumulator.
It can go from sprout to a 15 foot tree in 8 months and produce tons of extremely nutritionally dense seeds as well. It requires a massive amount of carbon, nitrogen, and minerals to do that.
You are only a few tweaks away from acheiving that.
Calcium is a bitch, you may have to spend a bit on that for awhile, but otherwise you are a bit of P away from acheiving it and really, now that you've corrected your O2, this is your 1st try at high brix and full health. I'm amazed, you should be too. To be 100% honest, the only reason you aren't high brix yet is because it took me 2 years to get you to lay off the water
What would be a good ratio of molasses to say a cup of castings to have it all used up over the 24 hours?
When I brew a microbe tea I use either 1 tbsp molasses or 2 per 16 litres of water and 1 heaped solo cup of my own EWC. I only use 1 or 2 microbe teas per lifetime unless something needs a rescue, so if the microbes in the pot seem sluggish, I use 2 tbsp molasses. If the plant is A-OK and it's 4 weeks old and myco is established really well, I only use 1 tbsp molasses. 1 will support that much EWC in the tea for 18 hours. More is a boost for the pot.
What's the threshold that begins high brix and the sequesterring of carbon? I know at least 12 to get beyond a bug issue, and I'm sure the higher the better, but what kind of level kicks things off to be self perpetuating and spiraling?
At 13 brix the plant can now pull more CO2 out of the air to make more sugar than is required to support itself with enough energy and to support all the microbes in the pot with carbon, and still have a bit left over. That extra bit gets stored in the soil. Sequestered. As brix in the plant climb higher sequestration goes up too. The plant keeps getting better.
I think I'm getting it but then every once in a while you throw out a comment like "you don't want carbon from the soil but rather the air" and I'm back to questioning my understanding.
Carbon from the soil gets eaten and humate, the lattice-like skeleton of carbon gets left behind. It holds a charge and cations attract to it and it is the big player to run your CEC, which moves minerals.
When enough carbon gets eaten to grow the CEC to be able to supply enough minerals to allow photosynthesis to occur at a high enough rate to make enough sugars to start sequestration, all you need is enough calcium and phosphorus to allow for that elevated rate of photosynthesis to occur.
So to summarize, microbes start out eating soil carbon and when the CEC gets high enough the plant can flip to high brix if Cal and P are abundant, and now the microbes don't need to eat soil carbon, they chase exudated sugar carbon that the plant and myco squirt onto whatever the plant wants the microbes to eat.
At this point you only want microbes to eat what they are told to eat, not eat any soil carbon they wish.
Microbes like sugar so once you are high brix this isn't a problem. Now the plant controls it's destiny as long as you keep ahead of what the plant will need to squirt future exudates on.
Earlier today I was thinking that I've got plenty of microbes from my castings and compost both as part of my mix as well as a mulch layer and regular topdressing and now tea, air for the microbes seems good based on the stick, I should have plenty of carbon in the soil from old soil with roots, compost, castings, aged leaf mold, and dry leaf crumble (although I'm now wondering if you only consider the old roots and dry leaf crumble to be the type of carbon that counts in this scenario?),
They get turned into humates. Thats your CEC.
calcium should finally be good in this round of soil, so that leaves phosphorus which I readily acknowledge is likely lacking.
Yup, yup, and more yup. Your close dude. Amazingly close considering the difficult task you took on.
Next rebuild for sure if you get a fair bit more P in, and the rebuild after that should likely get to high brix within 4 weeks of planting because your floor will be above 12 in your mix.
And I understand the concept of getting global P into the mix via the bellies of soon to be deceased microbes so I'm looking forward to seeing if that helps.
P is tough to catch up on, because to work properly it needs to snowball. You don't have enough time to roll the snowball in this grow. Thats not to say you can't get over 12 this grow, but if you were eating more P at day 1 you would already be high brix. The rest of your mix is solid enough for it.
In addition to the target plant, I'm giving the same tea to the next round which is getting established on the Netpot SIP so hopefully that one will show continued progress in the journey to higher brix.
You can feed molasses every week if you want. Not saying that you are implying you would, just saying you could if you wanted to, and get good results, but never what I think you are working for because the you will never establish good humate and the plant never gets to control it's future.
BTW, about 24 hours after my disappointing brix reading we got rain so hopefully that was a part of the low reading.
I kinda figured. Your brix was too low. Add 2 points. A real storm, an ass-kicker with thunder and lightening can drop you 5.
So here is what I see as your best way up. Every homegrown ingredient you use should be coddled into high brix by you and then all your inputs go up in sugars and minerals, and your floor rises dramatically.
I just go buy them, thats cheating really from your perspective, but it's easy.
If you want it from your yard you need to do the work, but as your plants get healthier in your yard, so does your compost, and the snowballs start rolling.
Start with your refractometer and a bag of dolomite. Observe the brix, but correct the calcium. Always start with calcium.
Once it's corrected then revisit brix readings and assess what you need to do.
Once your yard is high brix your soil can't help but be.
. They ain't your typical designer weed.
