I'll start. I picked up two 3 cf bales of premier mix and four .5 cf bags of lava rock for $35 at home depot yesterday. Premier is the parent company of pro mix. It is peat without the amendments. With some espoma plant tone, some dolomite lime, a bag of compost and or ewc, and a few other things you have laying around, you could have over 8cf of soil for around $60-80 dead presidents. No too shabby, eh? If you added marine cuisine from fox farms you would have a ff ocean forest type mix for less. Add some neem/karnja cake, some crab meal for their obvious helpful qualities, and your really rockin. Anyway I'm sure you all have something to contribute, and we all could all learn something in the process........MIW
That's the best way to build a potting soil is to start with straight sphagnum peat moss. The Premier label is one of the top 3 out of Canada (Alberta Province specifically) and has been tested as to its high microbial colonies as it was tested using this peat moss alone in an AACT. That's a lot of soil base for $35 even by the pricing found in the People's Republic of OryGun. LD
MI/LD, that is defintley the way to go with the Premier Peat. I bought a bale of the Black Gold Peat at a Nursery, 2.8 cuft., for a whopping $22 + tax. Should have gone to the Big Box first as I saw the Premiere for $11 and the Lava Rock for real cheap(less than $4/bag). My bad! Should have went there first. Lastly, I just have to find a place down here where I can get my kelp and alfalfa meals cheaper and quality EWC locally for the future. Well, next time, but my Black Gold Peat is going to last a good long time and I can't see it going bad no matter what kind of heat it is exposed to down here in the devils frying pan. JaK
I paid $9 something per 3 cf bale of the premier peat at home depot. The rest of the 35 was for the lava rock. For me compost and ewc are basically free monetarily but do require a sweat equity investment. Check out where farmers shop for good deals too. Alfalfa meal is $12 for 50lb. I use it to heat up compost and in teas. I get it at the local farm store. Also I can get 50lb of dolomite lime, espsom salt and gypsum all for $12 per bag at the farm store. A twenty lb bag of espoma's plant tone ( 5-3-3) was $16.99 even when I had to shop on the net, I have split heavy orders with friends to get 50lb bags for less shipping, and still beat the crap out of hydro store prices......MIW
@Jak Feed stores for the Alfalfa. Look for rabbit food or horse food. It might be in meal form, or nibble size pellets (rabbits), or larger pellets (horses). Kelp can be a toughie. Took me quite a while to locate it locally, but that's the only other heavy item I would have shipped besides Azomite. BTW, been using the 'Premier' brand peat moss since 1972 or 73. Good stuff! Wet
I have not been able to source large bags of kelp meal locally either. Drat, and double drat. I might ask if the farm store can order it and compare the price to what I would have to pay on the net for shipping. I got 25 lb of espoma's bio tone that way and as long as I waited until the farm store's regular order came in there was no shipping cost. It took over a week but I saved a bundle. kelp meal really is an important amendment too......MIW
I can find pellets of alfalfa, but not the meal at an Ace Hardware. Plus, it doesn't say that it is organic, so I doubt it is. Have any of you done the crushing of the pellets? Is it worth the labor? Ace also has the Pacific Pearl Oyster Shell/Crushed, but not the powder in like 30 or 40 lb bags. I still don't know if I should get that or not, but I am opting not to for now.I found another feed store that just sold small bags of it, but I wasn't sure about pulvering it or macerating it in a processor. I found a feed store that had 50lb bags of soybean meal for $18. Don't know if 50lbs is worthy of getting as compared to the alfalfa, but that's not a bad deal.
Snag that soybean meal!!!!!!! It is PERFECT mixed with alfalfa and has like 3x the N. Even with the higher N, it is mixed/blended with the alfalfa @~3 to 1, soybean to alfalfa. Alfalfa by itself can get hot enough to burn roots. Great for starting compost, or when your mix is (literally), cooking, but not so much when you need to top or side dress and need a healthy shot of N. Found this out on a 'straight' gardening forum and then saw for myself. This was before I got the soybean meal, but was looking. I mixed up a couple 3 handfuls of alfalfa and ~ a coffee jug full of fresh EWC. Mixed it up and left it in the garage. Late afternoon the next day I went to apply it and almost burnt my fingertips when I went to mix it more! WOW!! Reading about it, yeah, yeah, it gets hot and then sticking your fingers into some................ I let it cool down some, and then applied it. LOL Now that I've located some soybean meal (on a visit to a dairy farm), I mix ~2 cups+ of the soybean meal to 1 cup- of alfalfa and ~1 1/2 coffee jugs of EWC, whatever feels good. I do most everything by sight, or by the handful and it will look and feel right when I think it's right. Of course, I'm not always right. LOL Oh, this is for top/side dress for longer term container plants. I also use the soya/alfalfa blend in my mix. But this gets mixed and used as needed, after it cooks for a few days. The pellets will work, no problem. You can add them as is when you are mixing everything, put them in a bit of water till they 'melt' and add to your mix, or crush them up and add to your mix. Simple. LOL Go snag both. I really wouldn't be all that concerned whether the alfalfa is organic or not. It's grown for fertilizer/food and not going to have much of, if anything, dumped on them. The benefits of alfalfa far outweigh worrying about a 'organic' sticker, IMO. Wet
Thanks for all the tips here guys. I'll be heading to the Co-Op as soon as they open. I've been looking around for the alfalfa but with no look. I just didn't look in the right places. I'm almost 100% sure the co op will have it. Thanks again guys. I've learned more on this site from you all than all my books and magazines combined.
You might want to check on the soybean meal...good chance its GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) = "roundup ready". As for crushing the rabbit/alfalfa pellets and oyster shells - do like my granny used to w/ her oyster shells = lay down a tarp, place shells 9or pellets) on tarp, flip other half of tarp over on top...run over it a few times w/ the truck (or car). If you're smart on how you lay out the stuff on the tarp (away from the edges) and stop to flip it back from the edges occasionally, you'll not spill much if any off of the tarp. You might get some strange looks from the neighbors (don't ask - just trust me on this one), but WTF: you do, anyways, right?
Wetdog, thanks so much for the info. I did a little reading on soybean meal last night and found out a lot of good stuff about it, so yeah, I am going to go pick some up. Should last a good long time. Excellent to hear from you on the subject. JaK
I sorta quit worrying about the large bags of kelp meal after seeing just how long a 5lb bag lasts. I'd like to locate it for sure, but 5lbs was good for ~15cf of mix and a bunch of teas and still not totally gone. I do make sure I have an extra full bag on hand though. LOL Winter is not the time to try and find organic amendments if you run out. Wet
MI wolverine are you re-using your media? It seems like a good way to save $$ but I wonder if it is worth the potential issues it can introduce. Right now i am have several plants, gnats, and hundreds of larvae worms. I am using neem oil and mosquito dunks so hopefully the infestation will abate... but it has been a few weeks... IDK there might be other issues with re-using media- like if the roots are not decomposed.
Good question. I do recycle my soil. My way is to put it in my compost bin, along with partially composted leaves and grass clippings and everything else I have collected. I then add in thin layers of alfalfa and, bakashi. Between the bakashi and the alfalfa those old roots don't stand a chance. This is also how I make my compost, thermo compost. The temps get up to somewhere around 160-170 F. Once it heats I try to mix it with a pitch fork and keep it damp. In a week or three it is finished compost with maybe twenty-thirty percent old soil. Then I use it in a fairly high percentage in my soil mix, and I consider it as hot, so I do not use the amount when calculating nutrients..... There are some knowledgeable folks who are having good success with repotting in a used pot, they simply remove the amount needed to get in a new plant. The old roots gets used as microbe food. Then they top dress meals/guano for nutrients. This seems to work pretty well, and I might give it a go next winter..... Early in my indoor growing I rested, then recycled my mix but i re- amended at the original amounts including lime. That made the mix way too hot and the ph was crazy. I also started me questioning adding lime. So after that i went with the compost recycle method and have not looked back......MIW Edit--I did not address bugs in the soil. Once I started using crab meal, neem cake and karanja cake as amendments bugs were a non issue. If you were to peel back some old leafs and looked at my current grow's soil, you might see any number of tiny creatures along with a stray worm or two. But no problems at all.....
MI thanks for the answer, I will definitely look around the section it's remarkable how versatile growing techniques can be. I haven't used bokashi before, or re-used composted medium for that matter. I won't be able to attain a thermo compost machine, but I will look around for other fast-action options. I have seen it around these forums before so I'm sure I'll come across it in the next few months before I'll cut my plants down (just switched 12/12). I find it interesting that you have bugs in your soil and you're sure they are no concern. I only have four plants in veg in small containers and I am attempting to delay transplanting to larger ones (by pruning back) until I am confident all bugs are dead. Today I noticed tiny (>=1 mm length) bugs crawling around on one of the pots (it is a root maker with all the holes on the sides) and so I prepared a neem oil bath for it- about 1 fl oz neem, 1 tbsp silica blast to a liter of water and submerged the plant, then it's container in. when I removed the air pot five minutes later over a hundred of larvae worms were at the neem water's bottom. a thick layer of them about 1/3 an inch thick and 6 inches diameter. I poured more diluted neem oil on top they wriggled on the surface and disappeared under a while longer. altough I have been using the neem oil and dunks I will look into the Karanja and Neem cakes.... I just hope the little bugs aren't root aphids because they never go away! If things get worse I might consider buying some nematodes... as far as getting cheap, I have been pretty stoked about switching to pumice recently. It's $8 for 2 CF and my plants seem to like it a lot more than the hydro store stock of chunky perlite! I told the owners about pumice's benefits over perlite (porosity, water absorption, silica content) they didn't really care.
Forbins, In a healthy living soil there are a number of beneficial insects that have their role in the soil food web. There are several species of soil mites, springtails, nematodes and trichogramma (stingless wasps) to name a few. Several are parasitic and dine on the larva of the bad guys. It's always concerning when you see bugs in your soil, but IMO, it's good to ID them before wantonly slaughtering them. Its really easy to bring these critters into the grow room in your compost, but no need to freak out until you ID them. As MIW posted, neem cake, crab meal, karanja meal in the soil helps to control the bad guys and interestingly enough doesn't always interfere with the good guys. I have a healthy population of soil mites in my soil that came with my EWC and my soil has crab and neem. There are also pot worms which really resemble fungus gnat larvae, but I don't have gnats. Go figure. HTH chunk
I have soil mites and little tiny super fast red spiders. I wonder if it eats soil mites? I also have a small number of gnats, it was because i seen them that I pulled back some mulch and took a look at my soil and seen the bugs. I didn't see one this time but I have compost worms from time to time in pots from cocoons in the ewc. Because I grow in the garage, summer grows seem to bring in the wildlife attracted to the lights since I run at night. I have moths and mosquitoes all the time too, but the exhaust fan gets them pretty quick. All this is why I love the neem, karanja, crab meal thing. I know there will be bugs in the summer, and i can't keep them all out of my grow box, but having the soil amendments help take care of them helps, that and some neem/ lavender sprays keeps it well under control. And it's a lot less stressful on me wondering about poisons in my ganja.....MIW
I don't recall ever having soil born pests or pathogens for that matter in my mix (knocking furiously on wood computer desk ). For one simple reason IMO. I don't add thermal compost or anything from outside 'dirt' or whatever to my mix. My soil garden is a different story, but outside in the dirt, there is a natural balance of good and bad guys, more or less. But, inside, in containers, it's just too easy to brew up a perfect storm of bug problems. Everything I use to make my mix is pretty much pest free to start with and so far, stays that way. If I ever got bad bugs in my worm bins things could change I guess, but so far, no problems. It is a basic peat, perlite, EWC mix, much amended. A simple tip from the guy that showed me this mix almost 40 years ago told me, never add anything from the 'ground' to the mix. That was the easiest way to avoid introducing pests or pathogens. For me anyway, using my 'homegrown' worm castings/compost more than makes up for not adding thermal compost. IDK, I could be totally off base here, but it seems every time I see a thread about bug problems it seems that something from the 'ground' is in the mix somewhere. Now, don't flame me, I do use compost, just not in my container mixes. Wet
The best fertilizer also happens to be the least expensive - this one cost me $2.00 and will live for 25+ years and produce 100 - 150 lbs. of leaf material each year. Bocking 14 Comfrey from Horizon Herbs in Southern Oregon........
LD, that is one healthy looking plant. Holy shyte. I gotta give one of those a try. I am waiting until late fall here in the desert and I am going to dig a nice sized hole to start it in and hope when it reches out it can break through the caliche and get down into deep mother earth and survive through next summer. 150 lbs of leaf matter - WOW! Very cool, man!! JaK