Gee, what is the best way to ensure adequate calcium and phosphorous in an organic grow? Will healthy Brix also protect against bud rot and other moulds? Will microbes from a bottle and myco from a pack travel through the wicks to the soil on my swick? I am thinking of giving a weekly dose of all of that good stuff if it will work on the swick. Or, I could top water like I did the last time. I fed the plants from the top and wicked that water out onto a towel before returning them to the swick.
Phos is easy, build it into your soil before you plant. It needs to be cooked in to get some available early.
We have all been programmed to think phos is a flower thing, but the plant needs phos in veg, just like it needs nitro in flower. It just needs more phos in flower and more nitro in veg.
Bone meal and high phos guanos are excellent phos ammendments and of coarse soft rock phosphate as well as granular rock phosphate. In Canada we have a product called glacial rock dust and I add some of that too. It also is high in silicates.
It all needs to be cooked in, and if you decide you are going to add extra just cuz, it could go wrong, so just follow a good reputable soil recipe and phos will be fine. Too much phos is not good in organics.
I like The Rev's recipes but Subcool or Coots or any of the other popular ones are all good. Rev's just pays a little more attention to detail is all, but it's also a bit more complicated to get all the ingredients.
Calcium is the same in that it needs to be cooked in but calcium is heavy so it leaches down.
Thats not a problem for the nutritional calcium the plant eats, but its a huge problem for the vitality of the soil as calcium keeps soil open and un-compacted with its double positive charge. It allows water and air in, and air is 78% nitrogen. Free nitrogen is nice.
If you let your pot dry out and the top is crusty you need calcium up top. Your air is being restricted.
I use oyster shell flour, gypsum, and dolomite lime in my mix that gets cooked in, and I constantly add EWC as a top dressing, which is loaded with calcium, (phos too
) and gently top water it in.
The real thing to remember when raising brix is you have to photosynthesize more to create more sugar. To do that it requires more cal, phos, O2, carbon, and more or stronger microbes. At a certain point it may require more light too.
I don't try to raise my brix as the grow progresses. I track my brix, but if I am not happy with the results I make an adjustment on the next grow and see if I get higher brix.
Also if I try something new like say a liquid kelp in place of kelp meal, or adding weed meal to the mix, I monitor brix and see if its better, worse, or no change.
Then I transfer the brix knowledge to my veggie garden to increase the nutritional value of what I grow.
I posted an hour long video in Geespot a few days back. Its a slow starter but it has excellent brix info in it. Its actually about bugs but bugs and brix go hand in hand.
You just need to get thru the 1st 15 minutes, which is pretty boring, then it gets interesting.
) claim. It’s a noticeably muted scent that has harsher overtones in the smoke. Similar to synthetic, which makes sense, because you’re doing exactly what synthetic growers do, and making decisions for the plant.
