Do these products work with living soil??

I'd never use chemical fertilizers in a living soil. They don't mix well.

J

 

It's kind of an oxymoron because a well made living soil would never need hydro nutrients. I know promix has included mycrorrizha and I feed it hydroponic. There are many hydroponic nutrients out there that are all or partially organic these days.

People can say that a root zone innoculant doesn't work in hydro but I've personally seen a huge difference in root development from using them. I'm not sure that was placebo. There's a pretty dramatic increase in root mass. Most people I see growing hydro on here that pull their roots out the bucket don't look like mine. I have a bucket shaped mass filled all the way up to the net pot that suctions as I pull it out. My first few crops before root zone microbes were not like that. The roots actually look different with the supplements with many more fine hairs.

 

These are old. I don't take enough root pictures. The first one is a white widow clone just dropping down in the bucket after I added AN piranha, Hydroguard, and GH rapid start. See the fine hairs on the roots? The mycorrizha that the innoculants added to the root mass? It's clearly there. The second is a smaller GDP that's just been flipped to flower.

 

Organic is a great method but I think many organic growers are fooling themselves into thinking that hydro is some kind of dirty chemical cheat. Even in an organic garden fed with the greenest of green compost and ground up rock in the end the plant has to have the nutrients in a pure chemical form to be able to uptake and process them.

In the end your compost or whatever else you feed the organic plant ends up the same chemical salt that you call toxic hydro nutrients after it's processed by soil microbes. In organics the "chemicals" are fed to the plant in an organically chemically bonded form so the plant cannot feed on them directly. The organic chemicals must be broken down to their more pure forms for the plant to actually do anything with it.

This can be good in that a plant cannot be burned like this or it can be bad in that it limits the feed rate. In hydro the feed rate is unlimited as long as you always provide a minimal amount of the chemicals the plant needs in the solution. They are already in plant usable form unlike organic chemical compounds which actually contain vastly more impurities, potential heavy metals, ect. then pure hydro nutrients.

The advantage of organics are those millions of compounds and enzymes that it includes that current plant science doesn't even fully understand so they cannot be included in hydro nutrients. You can do a blend of some plant based supplements to fill the holes in the micronutrients and enzymes, ect. that is present in a hydroponic feed schedule.

 

I agree. I was only responding to your post that Hydro nutrients won't harm a living soil because I believe they will.i don't have any experience using mycorrhizal products in a Hydro garden but yours have certainly shown that they respond well.

I was referring to Hydro/chemical nutrients in a living soil. Microbes don't respond well to these fertilizers.

J

 

I think it depends on how rich the medium is. The hydro nutrients don't seem to harm the soil microbes in promix if you examine the root structure, but maybe they do and I just don't know it.

I agree with you because essentially an organic soil is a feeding machine. There is a continual process going on with the microbes processing the organic ingredients for the plant and the plant trading sugars. There's a city in there on a microbial level with commerce all over the place. If you just add more pure chemicals for the plant it's going to throw a monkey wrench in the whole process. If you are feeding like that from the start though in a barren soil and supplying sugars directly to help nourish your microbes the whole time I'm not sure that some hydro nutrients would kill everything. There's a different process going on from the start and a different balance of cultures. Why don't they just wipe out root rot then if hydro nutrients are so deadly to microbes? ..hehe.

 

The short version is that chemical fertilizers feed plants directly while organic "fertilizers" (ie: amendments & organic matter of various types) feed soil organisms - who in turn assist in feeding the plant instead of direct intake of chemical fertilizers. Not all, but many of the various kinds of chemical fertilizers will kill off soil organisms; the same organisms that break down organic matter into usable plant food in a living soil dynamic.

J

 

I thought the fundamental difference was in organic the plant "decides" what it want to take up, and in hydro the plant is forced to take in whatevers dissolved in the water.

 

the main problem with using chelated nutrients (bottled nutes or w/e you call them) is that, as Jerry explained, they feed the plant and not the soil.
but why is that important?
the soil is a ecosystem. we all heard the term "soil food web". what this means in a nutshell is that the soil is basically kind of a self sustaining closed loop factory if you will. plants secret sugars to feed the microbes, microbes break down organic matter in the soil and provide them to the plant while providing structure to the soil a the same time. plants use the nutrients to grow. in nature plants die (or shed) and organic matter is returned to the soil to repeat the cycle. in containers we add mulch instead since we take the mature plant for use.

so what happens when you add bottled nutes? plants get an abundance of available nutrients and are no longer required to secret sugars into the soil. this also stops or inhibits the plants control over the microbial population in the soil btw. so now the microbes are not getting fed or regulated and the microbial population suffers. the whole food web suffers in a chain reaction. the amount of damage done is in correlation to how much you bypass the system by adding chelated nutes. add a little, small damage. add a lot, big damage to the soil web. add it continuously enough and you get a dead soil, just like so many farmers across the world discovered their land turned into after using chemical fertilizer for so many years.

 

pretty much yeah.