Old Piney
Well-known member
I use it for flowers and shrubs . It's used commercially for ornamentals but not so much in food crops. Just not in to chemical fertilizer on any thing I consume. It's really not hard to avoid them, just my opinion.
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Old Piney
Well-known member
This thread has a lot of good info if you are interested https://www.icmag.com/threads/diy-organic-potting-mixs-for-grass-ace-spicoli.341796/
Old Uncle Ben
Well-known member
Does Fertilizer Kill Soil Bacteria?
Do synthetic fertilizers kill bacteria in soil? Is the soil food web right? Find out what really happens in the soil after adding fertilizer.
www.gardenmyths.com
Here's a good one that I got into a discussion with a organic purist this morning on Fakebook regarding the popular Espoma brand.
Me:
".....like most "organic and natural" fertilizers, it is marketed, targeted if you will, towards a consumer who relies on personal feelings/philosophy over nutritional facts. Take their citrus food, it does not have the correct NPK for citrus (citrus prefers a 3-1-2 or 5-1-2 NPK ratio) and worst of all Espoma contains NO micros which citrus *requires* to perform. Am talking NO Fe, Mn, Zn, or B. When someone complains here that their citrus fave is not looking good, is losing leaves, doesn't hold or produce fruit, the first question I ask is "what food are you using?" Never fails.......
Having said that, I know and support the use of organics, just not a purist. I make my own soil mix and always add some of the meals - blood and bone. I've also planted 14 acres in green manure crops, 2 years in a row. Also innoculate perennials with mychorrizae. Did some afghanis too recently, not that it will do any good. They're annuals and that fungi does not work welll on annuals.
All of this is in my diary.
Meyer lemon tree, loaded with about 200 in the greenhouse. Osmocote, mulched with mainly it's leaves and pine bark. Tree is dropping old leaves, pushing new ones and about to bloom.
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Old Uncle Ben
Well-known member
Wrote my ditty above before posting this! Espoma and the other organic scams are laughable.
Facts before feelings.
See my garden diary, if you want the truth.
Tio
Old Uncle Ben
Well-known member
Nah, nutrient flows and ebbs in a "natural" environment.
Might be willy nilly but not hooked on the industrial machine. And hey, whatever works for you.
I'm hooked on results, not hype.
Taima-da
Well-known member
Herb, Looks like that plant has indeed used up all its resources. Did it suffer from aggressive defoliation? If it never got to grow to full momentum it will tend to give all it's got and then eat itself.
Uncle Ben, I'm in agreement with you, am aware of your work, I'm a fan. You've been at it a long time and your produce consistently looks incredible, not too mention the volume and variety you turn out! It is astounding.
But nutrient flows in the environment, it is not a "same dose" continuously situation, plants use up elements, rain leeches salts etc. is just a statement of fact.
Ganja is cultivated, so "natural" is a moot point. You can bet that traditional farmers the world over will manure their fields if they get the chance, especially if they can't afford (or don't want to support) industrial solutions.
Just cos it's wrapped in a little plastic pril and put together in a lab don't mean it's perfection. Some soils need certain elements and others not so much, soil is not hydro.
And over fertilization makes waterways bleurgh.
I'm not saying you do this btw.
Uncle Ben, I'm in agreement with you, am aware of your work, I'm a fan. You've been at it a long time and your produce consistently looks incredible, not too mention the volume and variety you turn out! It is astounding.
But nutrient flows in the environment, it is not a "same dose" continuously situation, plants use up elements, rain leeches salts etc. is just a statement of fact.
Ganja is cultivated, so "natural" is a moot point. You can bet that traditional farmers the world over will manure their fields if they get the chance, especially if they can't afford (or don't want to support) industrial solutions.
Just cos it's wrapped in a little plastic pril and put together in a lab don't mean it's perfection. Some soils need certain elements and others not so much, soil is not hydro.
And over fertilization makes waterways bleurgh.
I'm not saying you do this btw.
Old Piney
Well-known member
My chickens and worms are busy scamming. Whatever you like osmocote I don't I've have found my “truth “
Herbert Chickybaby
Well-known member
No, Tamai da, it was not defoliated at all apart from dead or nearly dead leaves being picked off.
Yeah, perhaps it was a nutrient deficiency, not quite enough to go all the way to finishing. I had used the soil to grow a Panama female that got nearly al the way through finishing before being completely decimated by botryitis at the end. However just prior to planting the Lao Gold I did re-mix the old Panama's soil with new fully matured cow manure and worm castings as well as supplementing with agricultural grade molasses, bat guano concentrate, sea weed, occasional yogurt 1-2 times per week.
I tried to err on the not quite enough side, I had heard that many SE Asian sativas don't take well to too much nutrients. So I just eyeballed it and everything went OK, no signs of too much nutrients and there seemed to be enough too, though other things made me wonder as well which I describe below.
Also, I seemed to have a problem with drainage, the basic soil mix included maybe 10 percent red-clay from this plot of land, I wanted to see what giving the plant local minerals would do for it, but it was clearly too much clay and not enough sand, watering the plant took longer than normal because I had to wait for the water to soak in longer than normal, water/nutrients were not easily penetrating the lower areas of the 15 gallon pot. Watering also had to be dropped from every other day to every three days. Everyother day and the plants are show signs of over-watering, droopy leaves. Watering less seemed to stop that problem.
That said, I harvested her yesterday. A bit of a cool weather where it also threatened to rain moved in and powdery mildew starting to kick off so I decided to act and take her down before she got ruined by cold rain. Of course the rain never fell and of course the threat disappeared immediately after I took her down. Always like that around here. It won't rain for months but then right before the farmers around here are ready to harvest their rice it rains screwing their harvests. Its like someone is deliberately ruining their harvests most of the time.
Still glad I harvested though, as it is also really dusty today, my neighbors decided to fill their pond in with likely really poisonous used rice paddy soil/banana plant orchard dirt. This enormous totally ridiculous monster dump truck is being used to transport soil, back and forth all day, the truck is like what they use to make sports stadiums or 75 story hotels with and all we are are a few wooden shacks on dirt roads, the house shakes and enormous clouds of dust fly as the driver hauls ass 40 mph down the dirt road and rumbles into the yard of the neighbors, clouds of dust around here outside all day and yesterday, fucking appalling. My other plants are covered in dust today, I really hesitate to spray them off as most of them are in bloom now. Anyway, I saved the Lao Gold from being exposed to most of all of that at least.
I will add also, that the plant started off very poorly, very scraggly for its first month or so, maybe not enough light or maybe something not to the plants liking in the soil but then really started to come around and grew to 6 foot and looked pretty normal until month 4 when it started shedding leaves as already mentioned. 6 foot tall is low end of normal for this strain, it is not a typical monster SE Asian sativa. Angus mentions that some people wrongly say that its mixed with a broad leaf type. I agree with Angus it doesn't seem at all like that, but it does have a lot of small bud leaf with a typical open bud structure which from even a short distance gives it the illusions of being fat colas of bud which it is not particularly, though theres a decent amount of bud on each branch.
Today, I'm happy enough with what I harvested so far, it smells pretty developed, and after a day of drying it looks good. The final test of course will be smoking a bit. But looks and smell wise its very promising, so while it could have been much better had it developed another 6 weeks, I'm not sure how much better that would have made it. Lessons learned but not too high of a price to pay really.
Old Uncle Ben
Well-known member
I know very little to nothing about how the village farmer or "peon" in Pakistan, India, Lao, Michoacan etc. feed their cannabis but I have seen plenty of pictures to know they're not using modern methods or foods beginning with a simple lab analysis to see where they need to go.....if they even have access to one or have a clue about soil chemistry and plant nutrition, which I do. I have to as I've had several large scale ag businesses on farm land. I assume these "simple" and often remote village farmers are using animal manures, it's probably all they have. But, they ARE NOT complete foods. Talking the basic 13 essential elements.
Foods like Dyna-Gro, some Osmocote blends, Peters are usually very complete.
Speaking of perfection and complete, this 8-9 month Osmocote works for me. It's been carefully designed to release a constant feed of elements based on moisture and temperature. You can't tell me manures and other organics can do that. So, do the best of both worlds like I do and combine both.
Having said that I used to grow exclusively with organics, mainly the meals. But, being older and a helluva lot more experienced (and hopefully wiser) have fine tuned my garden to make it less of a chore, especially when it comes to my large tropical fruit trees. Osmocote fits that bill.
FWIW, here's the view from my Mancave chair which sits under/in the canopy of a 15' avocado tree. Cold beer, magazine, the hum of bees and I'm in heaven.
Grow hard,
Uncle Ben
Old Uncle Ben
Well-known member
Nice job. I've been drooling over some psychedelic, cerebral Thai. Let us know how it smokes.
Never use native soil for potting soil. Don't care how much you amend it. If you can find it 4 parts of pine bark to 1 part of sand or vermiculite works great and what many nurseries use. And, if they do it, it's got to be good. These businesses don't take lightly to inferior grown plants that customers won't buy, eh.
Native clay is hard to work with, been fighting it all my life but mastered it via trial and error. The way I do it for cannabis is to upcan your faves into a 3-5 gal. pot, dig a 3" (7 cm.) deep hole, drop your pot in with any drain hole plugs (coarse pine bark is what I use) so it gets the benefit of improve potting soil/food and roots into native soil. Here where I'm at I use a 2' deep tractor mounted subsoiler to open up the clay and fracture it. The roots will find those fractures and root into native soil. NEVER amend the backfill of clay soil. You'll create a non draining pot and rot the roots. Fractures can be made by hand with a small pickax, big screw driver, etc. If you use a shovel or post digger you'll have glazed the sides of your hole. That must be corrected.
Speaking of clay soils, here's a sativa cross with such heavy colas that they still drooped after being staked. This was a potted plant that was dropped into the hole I was referring to with a 1/4" 1 gph emiiter coming off a 1/2" irrigation line out in the field, run about an hour everyday.
Topped this to get 4 main colas above the first true node. This was my cross, an old Positronics Haze X Sensi Skunk.
One of the 4 colas.
It's all about the roots, period. Super dense, fibrous rootball. Tape is a tie up after the colas split due to a very nasty thunderstorm. Good ol duct tape to the rescue!
Enjoy......
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Herbert Chickybaby
Well-known member
Amazing post Uncle Ben! Definitely will copy and paste it into my files for later reference, particularly about opening fractures in the clay, its like asphalt around here. No chance of pine around here, tons of coconut coir though!
The farmers around here, including my wife and her sister who lives next door seem to make do on cow manure only for vegetable gardens. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement. Agrichemicals in Thailand are not to be trusted plus I can't read the labels, even literate Thais cannot, everything is printed on the labels micro-film tiny. Thais resent instructions of any kind, so perhaps its polite to print illegible labels for agri-chemicals, up to you! Just toss it all around like wedding confetti!
I was urged by Angus to plant in the ground. I like being able to move stuff around. We have a problem with a lot of shade trees blocking sunlight. There are areas of good sun but they change week to week depending on where the sun is and how the trees are growing. we cut them back but they grow back pretty quick. Also I am just too old and lazy I suppose, the clay is really hard and just digging a 1 foot hole is very hard work. I guess I don't trust too what would tunnel through the clay and say kill the roots, being that this is the tropics there are so many critters that even if you live here all your life you will have a number of wtf moments at what turns up in your garden. We are in a semi-forested area as well, so the only things that are missing I suppose are tigers and macaques. Thats fine by me, Its enough having ornery cobras and giant pythons as big around as your leg taking up residence in the kitchen, colonies of giant barking geckoes as big as a house cat taking over your attic along with the bats and giant rats, all of them fighting and sometimes eating one another.
I think that gives you a picture though, what works in your area probably will not work here either because its unavailable, like Osmocote, or because the climate natural environment is so different that it won't work. Thai Petroleum I think has a monopoly on all fertilizers and pesticides, you are hard pressed to even order by mail your own stuff, it will get seized by customs, no chemicals are allowed to imported by anyone withour the proper licenses.
All that said, I'm seriously considering putting up more permanent solid clear plastic over a larger area to grow more vegetables and grow larger cannabis plants. they are all jammed into a tight area under a disposable plastic canopy put up to keep the toxic rain that falls on us from China and from Thai and international corporate factories and slash and burn agriculture. We're heading into burn down the mountains high season, also a political strategy to oust incumbents, by wreaking havoc with massive annual forest fires and pit everyone against the current local governing factions. But, that would give me a larger area to work with and make planting in the ground seem like some thing that would be worth risking.
Herbert Chickybaby
Well-known member
RSC Lao Highland #4 at about 3 months. 4 different photos, same plant, same day today. Seems it will be my biggest yeilder of the 5 Lao sativas I'm running (Lao Gold, Lao Highland #4, Lao Sa, and Bokeo see RSC Bokeo thread: https://www.icmag.com/threads/rscs-bokeo.17902198/page-6#post-18543526)
Old Uncle Ben
Well-known member
Wow, what an eye opener, thanks for the history, politics and WTF lessons! You don't have a lot of freedoms it seems.
I'll repeat, based on your challenges I still don't see why you don't choose to grow in pots that are dropped into the ground. Case in point, not only did I successfully grow pot outdoors that way but I have a large greenhouse and graft and grow large tropical trees like mango, citrus, avocado, annona, pineapple, tomatoes, etc. I use bottomless RootBuilder panels which would be excellent for you. They root prune which creates a super dense root system (part of your problem) and the trees root into native soil.
Example, here's a Moro blood orange rootball. Notice no root spin out? You can barely see the white thick roots at the bottom rooting into my native soil, the greenhouse floor. This was June 2014. . What I'm getting ready to do is add more 13" panels to expand the bottomless "pot" or raised bed if you will. Drill is to cut the previous cable ties that tied the ends together, add as many panels as you want then tie them together. Stuff comes in a 115' roll, is 16" high. I advocate this system for anybody that has challenging soils, like the avocado growers in Cali who have a granite base.
Just for grins, Mallika mango. Ya'll probably grow this one.
Old Uncle Ben
Well-known member
Very nice, can't wait to hear the smoke report. I've grown sativas most of my life, Have these from Mandala to play with. Been playing with indicas lately. Have some going and some C99 backcrosses growing too.
Herbert Chickybaby
Well-known member
Ive got about 4 seeds left of their Panama regular. I hope that will still be viable by next August when it comes time to plant. That Golden Tiger has always piqued my interest, but i have never even seen any of it let alone grown it.
Old Piney
Well-known member
I have to agree unless it's just rocks ,you appear to do just fine with your soil and cow manure. Container nurseries growing in the soilless mix with chemical fertilizers and constant irrigation are basically growing hydroponic.They grow a beautiful product that the customer takes home and plants in the ground and ends up struggling keep watered or drown in a puddle of water, depending on the native soil and conditions they have to adapt to. I liken it to that fruit people buy a the market that looks great but tastes like shit, but it looks really good and sells. I'm not a crazy total organic person but if I'm gonna grow my own crops to consume ,why not especially when it's easier and cheaper
Herbert Chickybaby
Well-known member
My main issue with growing direct in the ground is that I cannot move my plants. For example, today I have the situation where a plant is just getting into proper flowering phase but it is not getting optimal light. My Lao Gold was in a relatively good spot for sunlight and now that I have taken it down, just 4 days ago, I can now move that plant into that spot. As I mentioned in another post, I have to move my plants around a few times to jockey for sunlight with the surrounding trees to the south that obscure the sun for an hour here an hour there and it changes as the sun gets lower in the sky as we approach winter solstice and higher in the sky as we approach summer solstice.
Its sounds like you think I am all about using chemical fertilizers and growing in a soilless mix. I'm just growing the way I would if i planted straight into the ground. perhaps i am being stubborn or neurotic about using pots, but things are just not the same here as they are there, it just intuitively seems like a bad move to plant directly in the ground. I am perfectly satisfied so far with what I am getting. I get why planting direct in the ground is ordinarily the best thing, it isn't in my situation for countless reasons some of which would be impossible to understand if you don't live over here, I could tell you about it till I am blue in the face but you wouldn't believe it or accept it, I go through this a lot with explaining why I do what i do to people in the United States where i am from originally. people in the United states don't undestand why I won't go to doctors and insist on healing curing myself. You can't tell people, well the opthamologist blinded me in one eye, and a dentist sat there and broke four of my perfectly good teeth, while another doctor tried to get me to believe all the bones in my feet had disintegrated and that I needed to hav ethe feet amputated, a total lie, there was nothing wrong with my feet according to two other doctors i saw subsequently. People don't get what it means that there is no malpractice laws here and that the education system is a corrupt joke. They will drone on at you regardless of what you tell them, "You better go see a doctor about that!"
Ain't it the truth!
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Old Piney
Well-known member
I'm sorry I misunderstood I thought you were planting in the ground .Whatever you are doing looks great ! You obviously are the master of your own environment and situation. Best of luck in dealing. With your health care over there
Herbert Chickybaby
Well-known member
No I am not a master, this is the first year I have tried to grow SE Asian sativas. I got some confidence last year growing some auto-flowers outdoors and this year i wanted to try regular pot. I may decide next year to plant directly in the ground, I am curious to see how that turns out.
