Vulx Volcanic Soil Amendment: Corporate Introduction

Vulx said:
Are you putting Vulx in the new soil when you up-pot the next time as well? A couple of people told me recently I wasn't clear enough on that.
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Yes, 5% of the weight of whatever soil went into the final pots also, watered to significant runoff with full strength nute (from half at first up pot), then not watered again for quite a few weeks until I flipped them. I haven't tried starting clones or seeds in Vulx'd soil yet though, I'll have to try that!

This next round of Vulx'd clones is reminding me I did foliar spray some cal/mag here and there last time. This time around I'm doing a maintenance neem,silicone,cal/mag mix every week or so if I remember...or if I have to react to some little outbreak of the latest pesky visitors (lately spider mites) because I didn't! The silicone (free sample) is supposed to supple them up and help me beat the crap out of them better...I just supercropped them all and no snaps...so it's not not working anyway!

That's happening on all my girls now no matter what they are in, but I think the Vulx plants especially needed the extra cal/mag foliar jolt that maybe got used up since I let them cook so long between feedings. Cheers! :yahoo:
 
Yeah since you're watering so infrequently you have a couple options the way I see it:

1. You say you're watering to significant runoff - that's a lot more water than you may think. Look at the leachate test above.

I'm just going to use an example since you may not be measuring how much runoff you have. Assuming you were watering untreated soil to 100mL runoff, that same amount of water would only create 50mL runoff with Vulx soil - perhaps less.

So if you're watering until the same level of runoff this time you're actually adding an additional 10-25% water in there every time.

Go ahead and give it a test! Put in the same amount in treated vs untreated soil and note the difference in runoff amount.

So the short of it is you could water less, but more frequently, and create a faster wet/dry cycle. The plant will be fine.

Emilya, of course, would have a lot more information and insight for you here.

2. Try feeding it a little more.

If you're not seeing burning, add a little more. Kind of tricky since you're saturating your soil, because flushing it when you notice burn may be deadly.
 
The only problem I see for me changing to less water more frequently is I kinda used that runoff as a mini flush every time to whatever amount it ran off, and your right I wasn't measuring! Once they are in the 5 gal pots, everybody always gets a full gallon and whatever goes through goes through.

During flower I ran every watering at full strength nutes, got maybe a touch of burn but nothing significant. I did have need to water much more...probably every 7-10 days after the flower period was well established, and my runoff amount shrank as I went.
 
Sounds about right for watering more as the roots become well-developed.

Try it without the mini-flushes, I think you can push your plants to be even bigger by taking option 1. Just my two cents. Let me talk to the Cultivator that works with me and get his opinion here, though, and I'll post back here.

:)
 
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Looking forward to House of Humboldt this weekend!
 
Hey y'all I just thought I'd let you know I was going back through my pics, showed I up potted those clones on 10/22. I I took the shot of 6 of them together on the 29th. I still haven't needed to water them, and I'm seeing fine growth from some riffy starts! Some of these plants have already been through mite attacks so all in all I'm very pleased with their progress and the consistency between this and my first Vulx grow. Cheers! :yahoo:

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@Pbass I did ask, by the way about your watering habits. If you like to get those mini flushes in, you can do that in a different way.

So if use less per watering and water more frequently, you can do a heavy feeding and then do straight water the next time. Then this way you would not have to water to runoff. :) I bet if you did this, your plants would see a benefit.

You could also just up your feed amount and water the same way as well to get rid of those deficiencies that are coming up as a result of your soil being too wet to feed again.

Either way, though, honestly, you do not have to water to 20% runoff to prevent the salt buildup - rest assured that whatever nutrients you put in that soil are being used thanks to Vulx. Salt buildup is a result of these nutrients not being used effectively by the plant.

Particles in substrates are large, and the roots expend energy interacting with those particles because they are rather inefficient at exchanging nutrient cations. Having a high CEC does not mean that you will have great availability necessarily in the same way that you can have a ton of food on the table ready to eat but can only eat what's in front of you unless you want to play musical chairs... by that time the food is cold, or in the case of the soil solution mineral salt nutrients have become salt buildup.

Because Vulx is made of microns-wide particles with extremely high surface area and negative charge, nutrients are condensed onto exchange sites in a small area. To use the previous metaphor, it's like having a shelf with all the food on the table right in front of you - you can eat as much as you want without having to expend effort getting to it.

Make sense? Sometimes I'm not so good at 'splaining.
 
The science makes sense to my t-rex brain but I just lifted those damn pots and they feel water heavy and the plants aren't asking me for food. How do I know when to feed them if they aren't asking me?
 
I was curious so I flipped one of the girls out of her house to see what the water content in the soil felt like at the bottom of the pot compared to the top...there is no difference. It feels dirt i might get out of a fresh bag of nice potting soil from top to bottom...kinda damp but not "wet" by any stretch. I'm naturally resistant to change, but I'm also down with changing my style to get bigger growth...so I'll give em a push and see what happens!
 
Operation Overdrive in effect! Watered last night after 5 days with very little or no runoff. Amazing to see nute full water going in and clear water coming out. Someone likes those molecules!
 
Doing a little experiment for fun where I planted 3 tomato seedlings.

One in FFOF
One in cheap topsoil with Vulx
One in Roots Organic

I want to see if even the otherwise unamended topsoil will grow better plants than the more boutique brands with their organic amendments and perlite, etc.

So far the Vulx plant (in the middle) has two little fruits going along, while Roots Organic as one and FFOF has zero. They all had about 3 blooms when I picked them up, and the Vulx plant was the first to put out a fruit.

Time will tell with this one, and because the other blends have NPK-containing amendments for that reason alone they will likely have better growth. But this is just for fun!

Will be interesting to see the results. They all seem to be taking similar amounts of water, which is great because without Vulx the topsoil gets bone dry in a day.

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Vulx said:
Doing a little experiment for fun where I planted 3 tomato seedlings.

One in FFOF
One in cheap topsoil with Vulx
One in Roots Organic

I want to see if even the otherwise unamended topsoil will grow better plants than the more boutique brands with their organic amendments and perlite, etc.

So far the Vulx plant (in the middle) has two little fruits going along, while Roots Organic as one and FFOF has zero. They all had about 3 blooms when I picked them up, and the Vulx plant was the first to put out a fruit.
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I feel like one of those useless drunken frat dinks doing that "barking" thing, because I hadn't even thought of that kind of scenario and now I'm smiling. Mothers can be... different, and while mine is more different than most, many in our older generation are poor, grew up with nothing (and nowhere to put it ;) ) - which permanently affected them - or both. Meaning that they don't like to "waste" things. I go to Mom's house during gardening "season" and all her plants are in need of water. I'll pick up a houseplant and the soil is dry, dry, DRY. The plants outside in the ground are almost as bad unless it has recently rained. The last few years, I've set up a few tomato and/or pepper plants in various-sized buckets on her porch, as this is sometimes easier for her to deal with than the ones in the regular garden space. They can really take a beating.

I get grief for "wasting" water pretty much every time. Especially when the soil is so dry that, even pouring s-l-o-w-l-y, much of the water runs out the drainage holes faster than it goes into the container.

Again, Mom is a special case. But mothers everywhere (lol) ought to appreciate being able to water less. This isn't a "cannabis growing product," it's a plant-growing product. Should help with any type of plant that is being grown in anything approaching a normal environment.
 
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