Hi i am looking for a good organic fertilizer to go with a aact that i make. Just for an extra boost or to correct any nutrient problems. The tea I make usually consists of worm casting, alaskin humisoil, and alfalfa and sometimes kelp meal tea, Mostly just worm and alaskin humisoil tea though.
guano is nice but it throws the pH ime. i don't quite buy into the notion that pH is of no concern in organic growing. i've seen guano/casting/kelp tea that wreaked havoc on plants because it wasn't pH adjusted.
Same here! But have had many people swear it won't. How do u adjust the ph of an organic grow? Should I add something to the tea to keep it ph safe?
I do alot of work with high pH fertilizers (12). You should only add substances to a soil mix that won't screw up the pH. Everything you mix in needs to end up with a pH around 6.5 (lower for coco and other soilless) or else you'll have a hard time correcting it later. Only mix in high or low pH ferts when you're also adding enough of another substance to neutralize the dangerous pH. Getting the right pH by mixing aicidic & alkaline fertilizers can still be tricky, and in my experience it's usually better to leave ferts with extreme pH's out of the soil mix. It's much easier to regulate the pH of ferts before they go into the soil. Once you have a soil mix that will generally stay around the right pH, the only way it can become messed up is through the waterings & feedings. Liquid ferts are fairly easy to regulate. You just mix with water & set the pH. Organic teas can be more difficult, however. As long as there are solids in the tea, its pH can still change. But, the longer they sit in the liquid, the less they'll change the pH further, until the pH stops changing. Very acidic or alkaline ferts should be steeped with at least some pH adjuster, imho, and then the exact pH is set after removing most of the solids. A little heat while steeping facilitates the neutralization process. Since no grower filters all of the suspended solids out, the solution's pH can still change after filtering if the solids haven't soaked long enough. This fact here is very often why teas change the soil's pH, even after setting them to the correct value.
I am currently using a .5,.5,.5 worm casting+kelp extract tea. My baby is 3 weeks old from soil in happy frog. i just started applying fox farm grow big at 2/3 strength. Ill let you know how the plants respond. They are outdoor and a bit behind schedule but i plan to being em under some cfl's instead
I would recommend adding whatever nutrient you might want as a top dress. I have recently read that adding guano to a compost/ewc tea can kill the very microbes we are trying to culture. This advice has come from those who have microscopes, and know what their doing. We need to keep in mind compost tea in general has not been around for a long time and the science is evolving as we speak, and my advice is just the latest availble, not written in stone......MIW
I understand your feelings about ph. PH is a concern for many, less in organic soil, but still. Then the issue becomes how to deal with it. The best way I know of is to provide humic content to your soil mix. In my case i use both homemade ewc and homemade compost. These amendments do have the power to self adjust the ph, or more properly i should say your plants and the microbes in the soil will work with the soil mix to make the ph were they want it to be, and hummus makes it so. I have a probe style soil ph/moisture meter. When i feed something with low ph, the meter will show the soil has low ph, then in one to three days the ph rebounds to where it started from. One possible advantage to this is as the ph varies while the microbes/plants adjust it, things are made available at different ph's. So something that is available at say ph 6 is used when the soil ph is 6. If it was always say 6.8, only the nutrients that are available at that range are being used. Does this make sense? Truthfully I rarely even check ph anymore, it just gets boring, because the same things just keep happening, and it does not warrant me making changes based on temporary readings.....MIW