Hi
@brownredroost and welcome to the forum! Yes, the only time you really have to carefully adjust your pH within the narrow confines of the soil or hydro pH ranges, is when you are dealing with nutrients that are ready to be taken up to into the plants, but are locked up for storage in salt chemical bonds, that need the solution to be within a certain range for the nutes to become available.
ED is a special product that doesn't use any of that science, it is a micro-fine mixture of all of the raw nutrients that your plants will need. There are no salt bonds, and actually in the form it is in, it is not available to the plant. This is where the microbes come in, and the ED even has special nutrients in it specifically in the form that the microbes need. ED feeds the soil, and feeds the microbes, but take special note of this, it does not directly feed the plants. To complete this process, you need the microbes to step up and do their job.
In a typical super soil that has been taken care of to keep alive, ie it has not been allowed to go bone dry for an extended length of time, and you are supplying it with clean non chemically treated water, you will have plenty of microbes alive and well already in there. Give them the food in the ED, and the right microbes will thrive, and you should be able to get through the entire grow with just water.
These days there are some new tools for the organic farmer so as to help supply new microbes to your soil periodically. In the past, it was necessary to brew AACTs, actively aerated compost teas, so as to culture and incubate the proper microbes, but now you can buy them. There are several products out there that supply these microbes in very abundant numbers and up until now the liquid products were almost prohibitively costly for a lot of us, but many are using these products such as Voodoo Juice and URB. I have recently found a dry product that you add to water to instantly produce a very strong mix of all of the very best species of microbes that specialize in the elements that we need to grow pot, and it is comparatively very cheap. Look up RealGrower's Recharge, and this stuff is so alive that they laugh at even chlorinated tap water, saying that it wont significantly disrupt the population. Systems like this allow you to very easily replenish the micro life and keep things strongly on track, especially when working with a highly mineralized supersoil, or a system where you add in the micro-nutrients such as you get with Earth Dust.
