Hey Maritimer
. Garden Love right back atcha brother
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What brix is, is a scale to show the percentage of sugars in a plant's sap. Depending on who you listen to, a brix level of either 13 or 14 is where plants become too high in sugars for bugs to consume, and too healthy for pathogens to take hold.
I'm not sure about the pathogen part because I live in a desert and the nearest fungal spore is a few hundred miles away
. It's just too dry here for budrot and PM and such.
How it works in a plant is quite simple. The more you can photosynthesize sugars, the higher your brix levels will be.
Plants create sugars and send roughly half of those sugars down to the roots to exudate out into the soil for the soil microlife to eat, as it's a pure high carbon diet. It's soil microbes favorite food.
So when the roots squirt it into the dirt the microlife eats the dirt to get the sugar, and the root waits for the sugar-dirt poop to come out of the microbe.
The limitation in general growing is that if you use synthetics there is no longer a need for microbes, therefore no need for exudates, therefore less sugars internally and a long story short.... You can get high brix with synthetics but it's hard work and you have to force it from start to harvest.
Now in Living Soil, like I use, my plant will strive as hard as it can to become high brix because it has a pot full of microbes to support in order to get some poop to eat, no free ride synthetics kicking around.
So now it comes down to efficiency, because the plant needs to create twice the amount of sugars it needs in order to feed itself and the soil.
When it reaches the point that it can support everything running full steam and still turn a profit on sugar, you are now both high brix and sequestering carbon.
At this point the plant is simply too healthy for bugs.
The trick is in how do you get to lets say brix 14 to be really safe?
It's actually really easy and there is hard science behind it.
You need to reach optimal levels of 5 things, and it needs to be achieved in an environment with adequate light and abundance of all minerals so photosynthesis itself isn't compromised, as really all you're doing is boosting the photosynthesis of sugars.
Once you have light and minerals covered it these 5 things in balance.
Carbon, oxygen, calcium, phosphorus, and beneficial aerobic soil microbes/myco fungii.
The calcium feeds the plant as it needs to intake calcium, but it also creates tilth in your soil if it is correctly balanced with magnesium, such as dolomite lime.
That tilth gives water and air unhindered passage between your soil particles, so if you water correctly then proper soil calcium creates proper oxygen. That's 2 down. Carbon comes from the air. Thats 3 down. Innoculating the pot with myco fungii and EWC brings the beneficial aerobic microbes, so now it's just phosphorus, and all you do there is make sure it's in your global soil mix.
That's it really, but calcium is the lynch pin. If it gets low, brix crash. If it get's too high, leaves fry and now you can't photosynthesize so brix crash.
The trick is to buy a 20 dollar analog, not digital, refractometer. It will tell you your brix levels but it will also tell you your calcium levels. That's extremely handy.
And a cheapo $5 single probe soil moisture meter. I know what you're thinking, but you need a guage to dry or wet your soil just a smidge to control oxygen, or again, if it goes out of balance, like from over watering, brix will crash.
So you need a good LOS mix, a refractometer and water stik, and cloth pots will greatly aid the cause, it's an oxygen thing, but you can do it in hard pots too.
If you have any questions or if you decide to try it and want a hand, please ask, I don't mind helping.
If you follow the rules of LOS, and build a good calcium and mineral rich soil high brix just happens.
If gou want or need a soil recipe I can give you the one I use. If gou're familiar with growing organically then getting brix up is quite easy.
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