Thanks! Do you agree about mineralizing? I'm confused a little. I would have lost a bet that brix would be higher than 3. I do see room for improvement, Geoflora veg is 5-3-4. Their bloom is 3-5-5. They may be hungry. I haven't started bloom yet, next feed next week. Besides regular geoflora I've top dressed with compost once and ewc once and that's it. Time to go again.
Sorry Stone I was driving and misread your post. Mineralization and brix actually go hand in hand. I doubt your soil is low on minerals but it may be low on calcium and phosphorus.
Microbes don't particularly like eating minerals, they would rather eat plant matter or anything else containing carbon.
Carbon is what they seek.
jPlants, with the assistance of myco, have figured this out and perfected a system where the plant photosynthesizes sugar, which is largely carbon, gives it to myco, who in turn takes a cut as a middleman fee, and trades the rest to the microbes for minerals.
Adding Calcium, phosphorus, carbon, oxygen, and more or healthier microbes allows for more photosynthesis. More photosynthesis means more sugar so more bribery and trade. Brix is a measurement of sugar. The richer a plant gets, the richer a plant gets, until one input gets exhausted or reaches it's limit.
It's almost always cal and phos. Cal sinks and phos is hard to mine.
Adding calcium opens the soil which provides oxygen, so calcium is a twofer.
Carbon for the microbes starts from the soil, but once brix get rolling the plant provides it in the form of sugar.
Phosphorus must be added or mined, but once you have oxygen and carbon the microbes are happy and robust and will gladly mine phos for sugars.
So adding calcium and phosphorus is the quickest way to raise brix, which will raise microbes, which will mine phosphorus, all creating sugar via photosynthesis to provide carbon. And microbes breathe air so thats where the twofer fits in.
Its almost a closed loop except calcium keeps sinking and becoming unavailable and then soil tightens, oxygen gets cut off, microbes go to sleep, mineralization slows, and brix crashes cutting off free carbon (sugars) .
This is why I preach calcium so much. If you correct the calcium everything else aligns and all you need to do is add some phosphorus, and not a lot, and jumpstart the microbes with a mollasses or organic cane sugar drink to add some quick carbon.
That carbon is for the microbes so they can start mineralization, not for the plant to eat.
The plant gets its carbon from the air.
So once brix start to rise the plant can give the microbes the carbon and the barter system begins.
Now you can see that if cal and phos are always available, all you need to do is add more light to drive photosynthesis, which creates more carbon, which brings more phos, which increases photosynthesis, which creates more carbon, which brings more phos.....
And the plants empire grows.
If you do all that and brix won't rise, prime the pump. Give the microbes a shot of sugar water to get them partying and then it all starts to flow.
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