buffering organic nutes for hydro usage.

Hey all,
Well my quest to make my own nutes goes on.
i've been brewing up my own organic nute tea with chicken poop.
I do this by adding chook poop & water into a barrell & bubbleing for 2 weeks. I then drained off the liquid & keep it bubbling.
heres a more detailed breakdown into what goes into the tea;
1/2 a 10L bucket of chook poop
25L water
3 desert spoons of mollasis (mostly to feed the benifical bactereia)
1/2 a spoon of bio-bugs (this is an aussie source of benifical bacteria)

I use the tea at a rate of around 15:1

My problem is getting the chook poo tea to stay at the correct PH level.
It naturally wants to stay at around 7.5 - 7.8. I use normal hydro PH adjusters, adjust it to around 6.4 then in as little time as a few hrs its back up to around 7.5

Any idea what i can add to my tea to buffer it at around 6.4?

Has nobody ever used pure organic nutes & needed to buffer them to the correct PH?

hey mate. Humic and fulvic acids are great organic PH downs. (of course they have many other benefits as well) I use a product called GT Fulvic from Growth Technology. That nutrient I use Cultivator Plus contains humic acid and is an awesome PH buffer. I never need to adjust my ph now it stays rock solid at around 6.2 You can try coco coir in the medium for PH buffering. It tends to buffer the PH down closer to 6. Water is a major factor for ph. dont use tap water at any cost! (dont know what your water is like in Tas, but mine is really bad (high EC and makes ph fluctuate and rise too high.) PS I use bio bugs also.

What about pine needles or pine mulch? i know they are very acidic, perhaps a tea made from these then added to my chook poo tea till i get the required PH would do the trick.

Anybody know much about pine needles or pine mulch?

what ezra said. you should include ewc/compost tea for the humics.
finely crushed eggshell is a good ph buffer, but it's not water soluble.

sorry, ewc/compost tea? what is that. i think i must have missed that.

Ezra my water is exellent mountain water.

earth worm castings tea or compost tea.

yeah rattrap you'd get a better thing goin if you fed the chook poop to the worms then took the worm castings and made your aerated tea.

1. less health hazard to you, first and foremost
2. fully decomposed, so more stable in terms of pH
3. downright pleasant smell compared to the chicken shit soup

the exact process you detailed would work, just replace the chicken shit with worm castings (you can feed the chicken shit to the worms, just make sure they have some good carbonate matter too, like some straw, shredded newspaper, woody stems, dead brown leaves, you get the idea).

i got a worm farm that i collect a little bit of worm wee for an N boost. I've measured the ph of the worm wee & its also right up in the 7's.

I've got a test system going at the moment. I've got 6 new purple power seedlings in pots of lava rocks or scoria as its called here, fed by drippers on a 15min per hr schedule. bubbler in the res tank, recirculating system. My idea is that if i can get the nute strength right for seedlings that are very sensitive then clones should be fine.
I've had the test system running for a week now & the seedling are still going strong!
The PH has been stable for the last 4 days, don't know y tho. Perhaps it took a few days for the good bacteria to take up residence in the scoria.
I'm in the process of trying to root some clones, as soon as they are rooted the seedlings will get tossed & be replaced by the clones.

if by worm wee you mean the leachate from your worm farm then realize that's not the same thing as worm castings or worm castings tea. the leachate is not fully decomposed and can have an extremely varied composition and pH depending on where it's coming from. castings on the other hand, the actual deep brown worm shit, is completely stable, full of the humic and fulvic acids that ezra mentioned, and also densely inhabited by symbiotic microfauna that will help your organic grow.

the nitrifying bacteria on your lava rocks will act as somewhat of a pH down but only so long as the pH of the solution stays within their range. 7 something is fine i think, above 8 and you might be in trouble. i haven't studied this enough though, but the basic process of nitrification involves ditching an H- from the original NH4 or NH3 thus acidifying the solution slightly.

still, why don't you take your chicken poop and put it in the worm bin first? i've practically bathed in worm castings tea, spilled it all over, got it on my hands and forgot to wash them, etc, and i've never gotten sick. dumb luck perhaps. but if you fuck up just once with your chicken poop you may be dealing with salmonella or worse. that alone should make you do a double take. also, i have never tried an aerated manure tea, but i can almost guaruntee that simply leaching the manure in water, without a long aeration period, would give almost the same effect. this would still be a little risky, don't forget to wash your hands plenty, but at least there wouldn't be the little droplets of water spraying out over the canister that are a result of the aeration, and could contain serious pathogens.

just lookin out for ya

Thanks for chiming in here muddy waters. I'm going to take your advice & collect all the earth worm castings i can then load up the worm farm with chook poop. I got planty of straw that i use in their nesting boxes so i'll use that to layer between the chook poop in the worm farm.

A question on EWC tea, can i use it for the entire grow or is there too much N for the flowering period? I've also got some liquid bat guano that i use during flower. I'm thinking that probably a mix of the 2 would do the job.
I've also been able to track down some comfrey that i'm hoping will make it thru our cold winter.

I'm really determined to get the organic hydro up & running. I've done a fair few crops in soil now & their growth rate is just too slow for me, i'd like to be able to get the sort of growth rates & yeilds that i see hydro growers getting but without the chem nutes.

Your bacteria in your lava rocks will be fine between 6.2-8 pH. They will die below 6. They will help provide buffering capacity to your system but as Muddy stated, they will make it drift down if anything.

I didn't know that good bacteria dies at a Ph under 6.
With normal hydro i've been told that a ph of around 5.5 - 5.8 is optimum,
What would be the optimum PH for an organic hydro then?

the optimum ph for organic hydro is slightly above 6 like 6.2 or 6.3

I dont think that worm castings normally contain a lot of N. It does depend on what you are feeding the worms of course. If they get mostly just vegetable scraps, the N level would be probably low. If you are feeding them a lot of green stuff like grass clippings the N would be much higher. I think chook poo is high N?

Coco coir is definately worth considering as a ph buffering medium I think. It has a natural ph of about 6.2. also it has excellent ion exchange capacity as well as almost perfect water/air ratio. Downside is it can lock up Calcium making it less available.

Nice one Ezra.

I have had rock solid pH at 6.2 for 3-4 months. I have had the same reservoir water and bacteria for 2 1/2 + years previous to this but never tested anything. It has 'righted itself' for about 18 months judging from plant growth.

Had to join the present century to appease my thread with what my pH was. And for me eventually. I still can't be bothered testing most weeks I'm bad.

Bacteria kick ass at buffering. But how patient are folk to really get their organic hydro going.

Bio buckets are rinse and repeat with the same rocks, I just got a step further not changing the water either. Bacteria kick ass at water conservation too if plants are present.

My system I liken to a 3 year old organic plot. I want to upgrade and tweak things but then I think - Can't wait till it's seven.

Worm castings will add a great deal of beneficial bacteria, as would brewing your tea in changeout water from a chem free aquarium or pond.