I find that the best result are when you can give the roots the longest amount of time in the final pot. That being said, it’s a balance with pot size, veg, and flower time. I would give yourself at least 2 weeks veg after TP. I would at least go with 5 gallon. 7.5 would be better in that space. @Mangul has given some excellent advice. Find what works for you, as long as you care for the microbes you’ll be fine.
Thanks, I think i have a pretty good handle on it and what i need to do now. I'm going to run my 7 gal pots for a while and see how it works for me. I have room in my veg space to transplant right into the 7 gal pots from the solo cups and run them the rest of the way in those. Regardless i'll still have my dirt and will try to maximize my pot size a little bigger after i settle in to this method a little. No till certainly interests me.
I was running a perpetual flower room like your talking about. I use 15 gal pots and was transplanting 12" clones into the 15gal in the flower room. Wasn't ideal. I've since revamped my set up. Still planting clones into the 15 gal in veg. Grow bigger for few weeks then carry 15 gal to flower room. A lot less stress and it seemed as they stalled for about 1 week or so. My 2c Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk
Fungus Gnat infested soil that was cooking in a rubbermaid. Any ideas/suggestions on what options i have? thanks
Is the soil fairly damp? Try letting it dry out a bit if it is. A good mulch layer will make it more difficult for them to access the soil to lay eggs or exit the soil to breed. A fan will help too as they're poor fliers. Sticky traps near the soil surface to reduce numbers. A good top dress of MBP and EWC may help as well. Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
Is there an updated version to this somewhere in the 700 pages? Brand new grower and poster here! Thanks!
I'm doing my first run in my own soil mix (ITG's original recipe from page 1), and I'm also trying out fabric pot/perlite SIPs. The SIPs are working amazingly well. The soil seems to always be moist, and the growth rate has been spectacular. However, I am seeing some signs of deficiency, and I'm hoping some veteran organic soil growers could offer advice on the best way to treat this. Looks like magnesium deficiency to me? Epsom salts? Wanting to treat this as naturally and organically as possible. Thanks!
What was your original Mg source and how much did you start with? There's only two reasons for any kind of deficiency in plants; One, there's not sufficient quantity of the required element or two, some type of chemical reaction is occurring which prevents the availability of the required element such as root zone pH, cation or anion competition resulting from myriad issues with an imbalance. Let me ask you this, say you were give a solution for a Mg "deficiency", how much and in what manner would you apply 'the fix'. An answer of " IDK" is correct. Go back to your starting point and account for every single plant required element and how much of each was added. You have to know your starting point when diagnosing garden problems because "deficiencies" all pretty much follow a similar path from light chlorosis to full blown crispy necrotic. Go back to your starting list. If you have sufficient quantities of the 'minimum 16' elements all plants need to grow then your "deficiency" is not due to insufficient quantity, rather, it is more likely due to soil chemistry. Right now you would be making a potential fatal mistake by applying a solution for a problem that is incorrectly diagnosed. You gotta know where you started from.
I started with exactly the mix ITG posted on page 1 of this thread, so peat moss, perlite, EWC (local brand), glacial rock dust, kelp meal, Tomato Tone, and pelletized garden lime. All in the ratios specified by ITG. But what that means as far as nutrient availability, I do not know. And I haven't thrown anything at it yet. Figured I'd wait for some feedback from people who know more than I. Oh, and I'm using well water with Pro-Tekt silica added. So far, they've been watered with nothing else.
Hello Everyone! I'm just about a month away from my first grow being over, a week or 2 of grow room renovations, and starting my second . I'm currently cooking my new soil as per the original post's recipe (Thanks, ITG from the past) and following everything exactly, and I'm wondering whether trying to cook the soil in the 2 gallon grow pots they're going to be in is viable. I stumbled onto a forum somewhere else where they were talking about the subcool super soil needing to be cooked in very large quantities and mixed very often, that got me wondering whether letting the soil sit in small grow pots with nothing covering the top of the pot, and not mixing the soil, but just keeping it moist, will actually cook the soil, or am i supposed to be turning it in the grow pot (and making a giant mess in the process), I've read the first 20 pages of this thread (great info!) but no one questioned the viability of cooking soil in pots so far, and i want to make sure I'm not doing something that will kill some absurdly expensive seeds, and i don't want to experiment with bag seeds until I have the free sun available. Has anyone had success or failure cooking soil in pots? do the pots get warm? if so, how long after the initial mixing can one expect heat to occur? is there a minimum amount of soil required for a good cook? would it cook better if i put all 7.5 gallons back in the big tupperware container and mixed regularly until the soil's needed? Is there any other way to tell if it's cooking? once cooked, should soil be continually turned or dampened or both to maintain viability? would partially covering the containers be helpful? would fully enclosing the containers be helpful in any way? I still have plenty of time before I need the soil, so just trying to establish what to expect in the coming 2 or 3 weeks, in case i need to start over (which is not a problem). Sorry for long post, thanks, everyone EDIT: I did the initial mixing of the soil 4 days ago, in case that's relevant.
Excellent questions! Had them in mind as well. Plan to use 8-7 gal squat root trapper II pots myself.
I let soil cycle in pots fairly regulary, depending on what's available to put it in. Like, if all the 32 gallon trash bins are full, I'll use 5 gallon buckets. Never tried anything smaller than that. Whatever it's cycling in, drainage holes are a MUST! IDK about smaller amounts since I mix a bit over 2cf at a pop (wheelbarrow full, ~18 gallons). I can do that in my sleep and make that amount no matter how much I need. It doesn't go bad and, for me anyways, it's too easy to over do amendments with smaller batches. YMMV
I could probably make 15 gallons instead of 7.5, but half of it'd be cooking for 5 months waiting for the next cycle, I am growing in a closet after all, does the soil or container get warm when you do it? how long does it take to warm up? they're in regular grow pots so they do have drainage. should i be watering to runoff ?!?!?should i be mixing it with my hands daily? weekly? thanks for the info.
ITG's mix is kinda old now. It's what I started with too. Check out the no-till revisited thread in the organic section. First 2 pages has soil mix and watering schedule. It's not extremely different. Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk
Once you add water that starts the whole process and it will get warm in the next 24 hrs or so, depending on the N inputs. Something like blood meal or alfalfa will get it downright hot. For me, I get it thoroughly moist (no dry spots), put it in whatever containers and that's it. I do no further mixing. Won't hurt, but I haven't found it necessary. Generally I don't water either. The containers with lids stay moist for weeks and the open stuff like buckets are left outside and the rain is usually enough. Inside? IDK, it just needs to be moist and with nothing growing in it it dries very slowly. Perhaps a light misting every now and then, no watering to run off. All this is really dependent on your particular environment where it's stored. You'll see as you go along.
Have you ever pH'ed a mixture of Pro-Tek? It's very alkaline. Well water will tend to run neutral to alkaline but it also typically has a high mineral content (TDS) and typically has high "total hardness". Something to think about in terms of soil chemistry "deficiency". Have to cover all the bases and water quality is very high on the list of things to know about. @waktoo can talk to you about water quality like probably no one else. Did you make a checklist and check off "the base 16 elements"?
thanks everyone for the help, i don't know if I didn't get 'em moist enough or perhaps 2 gallon pots are too small to cook soil, either way it's been 4 days and no heat, and there is alfalfa meal in there. Think I should consolidate into original mixing container and further moisten and mix? there is some kind of smell, but it's not very strong so I don't know if that's anything. Yeah, I kinda figured that much, I like to add complexity to my new hobbies slowly, start simple, my last soil was roots organic with 3 different Dr. Earth dry ferts mixed in how the bag says, only watering RO. dead simple. I was gonna do another run while continuing study on no-till, but I saw the sticky and read it over and decided it was easy enough for me that I'd skip doing another round of basic-ass soil and try a better one, and it's simple enough that I didn't need a whole lot of new stuff to make it. But I will check out those mixes, thanks
Have not PH'd the mixture, no. I'm new to this homemade soil approach, but I must have read a thousand times that there's no need to PH when growing organically in this fashion. I was given to understand that the soil will do the work of balancing things out. Do you feel that is not the case? And I don't know what all of the base 16 elements are, to be honest! I'm sure I know what a lot of them are, but not well enough to make a comprehensive checklist. So if we were to assume my soil is deficient, what steps should I take to treat deficiencies in a plant that's already in its final pot and growing quickly? It's too late to mix a different batch of soil with better amendments - at least for this plant. I had already planned to beef up my mix with neem meal, crab meal, alfalfa, and oyster shell flour, but that'll be for the next run of plants. So do you have any recommendations on treatment? Thanks for the help, by the way. Edit: I think I was being dense. You're saying that if the soil is deficient, PH could be off anyway, and if it is, I may need to compensate by PH balancing the water?
You probably wouldn't notice it heating up unless you have been watching a soil thermometer with a probe in the middle of the container. If the alfalfa got wet and has decent aeration it will have gotten hot by now. It is not anything like a compost pile cooking. A couple Tablespoons to a gallon won't do much for heat, for very long. In theses amounts, we just be careful with alfalfa in the sense you don't want to make a soil mix and plant in it for a day or two, as the initial heat may damage young tender roots or cause unneeded stresses. Real big batches are usually given a lot more time in case they aren't mixed well and have a 'hot pocket' with a concentrated amount of alfalfa. Even then a week is plenty. The reason a lot of us mix our soils and let them sit for long periods of time is so that slow to become available nutrients are actually available once a plant is placed in the mix. This is a bigger advantage with a new mix on its first cycle. As soil is no tilled or recycled it becomes less important because things have had time to break down. hth cheers os