Experimental organic grow in coco

[jeezooz]

Tired of pouring bottled chemicals into pots and researching an organic nutrient concept for coco. Among all other benefits this would allow me to partially harvest without double flushing. Mr Canuk's dry amendments on Youtube look messy and his plants are underfed in late bloom so want to try something else.

I extensively use banana peel tea but want to take it a step further and make a thin smoothie from the actual bananas. This will take care of potassium and also provide a carbs emulsion for the plants. Nitrogen will come from the seaweed extract rated at 3-0-0. One problem is that I start in final pots and do not water to runoff until late week 4. If I fed the banana smoothie to seedlings it would not get fully absorbed and end up decomposing in coco. Therefore the current plan is to start with bottled and switch to organic when I start watering to runoff.

I routinely add potato water to the feed for mature plants with no problems so banana smoothie should just be a more nutritionally dense version? Not too thick, maybe half a banana for 5L of water. This is meant to be a trial for a boutique home grow - what do you think?

 

[jeezooz]

When the tent clears I will do a comparative side-by-side grow of two Zamaldica autos - one on bottled nutes and one organic with banana smoothie.

 

[jeezooz]

So the 3-0-0 seaweed extract turned out to be laced with "added nutrients" - bugger. Having done more research I am now leaning towards sourcing N from a lucern (alphalpha) tea/brew. Dry lucern contains 2-3% N and even with 50% extraction rate I should be sweet. So the current plan is to soak a mix of lucern hay and dried banana peel in hot water for a few days, use the liquid and compost the sludge. More lucern in veg, more banana in bloom. This is work in progress but beginning to take a final shape...

 

[jeezooz]

Just started a trial run of the organic liquid fertaliser for my experimental coco grow.

Used around 150g of lucern hay and three banana peels. The hay is bone dry so maybe 4% N, at 50% extraction rate I should end up with 3g of soluble, organic N in the brew. To get the ball rolling will start using it in my current grow to substitute for maybe a quarter of bottled nutes.

 

[jeezooz]

Here is the 3g of organic nitrogen ready to be deployed in my current grow!

 

[Guest]

this is cool, nice to see. will be good to see your tests. also, nice glass jar, how many gallons is that?

 

[jeezooz]

The jar holds about one gallon. So I worked out that the 3 grams of N in the solution should be ok for about thirty feeds, to provide the same N as bottled A + B. Last night I fed Bangi Haze 25% organic for the first time

 

[jeezooz]

So the results of the trial are very positive so far. My Bangi Haze plant has been getting 30-50% of its nutrs from my organic brew. It looks absolutely fine - so the pics on my other thread.

Encouraged, I decided to keep feeding BH more organic and actually bump up the dose. She is one month into flowering so I am preparing the new, potassium rich brew. Alfalfa is reported around 3-1-2 and banana peel maybe 1-1-4 so as you can see in the pics the mix is banana heavy.

I made two improvements to the tek. Instead of packing the dry meal into a laundry bag I tied some chicken wire towire pot stsnd and replaced stone with a jar as weight. When drained, the liquid goes its small drink bottles and then the freezer. Bottles 3/4 filled because of expansion. This way only one tiny bottle lives in the fridge and there is no smell.