My first notill, trying to decide on an initial mulch

[Organic785]

I have over half of decade of doing 100% organic no-till living soil experience. I have tried just about everything. Figured I'd throw in my two cents. So after I chop, I push my mulch to the side of the table, get the new girls in, then top dress with about an inch of a 2:1 mix of veganic fed earth worm casting harvested that day, diluted with a little bit on my base mix (basically my soil mix, minus the biology) to keep the Nitrogen from burning the babies. After that, by far the best mulch combination I've come by is to use a good barely straw as a base, with a good amount of horsetail, nettles, and comphrey. Any of those dynamic accumulators plants that pull leach the nutrients out of the ground will do wonders. I have the luxury of being able to pick fresh horsetail, nettles, and cumphrey, and its definitely the way to go. If you can't locate these accumulative plants, barely straw is pretty damn good stuff. Hoping this goes without saying, but if you're going to be feeding with any synthetics whatsoever, don't bother with the casting. You'll just kill them..
Hope this helped! I usually mulch a good 1 to 1.5" . Keep recycling that barely straw too.. just gets better!

 

[Organic785]

BTW, love hearing someone say they're doing smart pots in milk crates^^^^^. I can't remember the brand, but one of them had the 5 gals that fit PERFECT! Happy to see someone else taking advantage of this! Thats what I started with when I switched to living soil. Just make the switch over to no-till tables about a year back..

 

[Aphotic]

I have over half of decade of doing 100% organic no-till living soil experience. I have tried just about everything. Figured I'd throw in my two cents. So after I chop, I push my mulch to the side of the table, get the new girls in, then top dress with about an inch of a 2:1 mix of veganic fed earth worm casting harvested that day, diluted with a little bit on my base mix (basically my soil mix, minus the biology) to keep the Nitrogen from burning the babies. After that, by far the best mulch combination I've come by is to use a good barely straw as a base, with a good amount of horsetail, nettles, and comphrey. Any of those dynamic accumulators plants that pull leach the nutrients out of the ground will do wonders. I have the luxury of being able to pick fresh horsetail, nettles, and cumphrey, and its definitely the way to go. If you can't locate these accumulative plants, barely straw is pretty damn good stuff. Hoping this goes without saying, but if you're going to be feeding with any synthetics whatsoever, don't bother with the casting. You'll just kill them..
Hope this helped! I usually mulch a good 1 to 1.5" . Keep recycling that barely straw too.. just gets better!

Damn, well I had written a long response but it got erased when my phone glitched...

Ok, so a few questions. Where are you sourcing organic straw? In my response to corky I lay out my problems with nonorganic straw like the use of roundup on wheat, it's a common practice for farmers to spray wheat crops with roundup as it makes the wheat all finish at the same time, it's also caused "wheat allergies" in people who've never had problems with wheat before. I haven't looked into if using roundup on other grains is as common, so for now I buy rye straw for bedding for my goats and chickens. I'm in Oregon at the moment, and the only place I've found for organic straw is a friend in southern Oregon but that would be a 4 hour drive, and not practical considering how much I go through. I plan on growing barley, but it would only be enough for my Notill beds. I've read of some people growing it in with thier plants, do you do this, or have experience with this method?

I understand what to reamnend with after the chop, but I'm not clear on adding green material during flower or veg, is it somthing I should do on a regular basis? I have stinging nettle, horsetail, etc growing on my property. I also have made seperate beds in my rooms containing comfrey, borage, dandelions, and soon more. So I guess what I'm asking is can I continually add greens that are not as high in npk as say stinging nettle?

When you say add a little bit of your soil mix minus the biology, what do you mean? If I may ask what is your soul recipie? I'll post mine in a post below this one. And no, I'm not using bottled anything, only plants, Poop, wc, act, etc.

I forgot to add that I've made myself a nice 60gal ACT brewer, and a decent sized worm farm, I'm still awaiting my first batch of WC. The worm farm uses 3 30gal containers stacked as needed, it's inside for around the year production. However I also plan on making a 200-250gal fabric bed outside for wc production using peat and goat manure/soiled bedding.

Thank you for your input, it's appreciated

 

[VortexPower420]

I have run 20 gals and constantly added greens throughout the run. It grew great herb but they never yellowed out.

I have since started to only top dress at transplant and flip.

My current practice is. Clone to small pot seedws with clover. To a 5.5 with more clover and a forest duff mulch.

Final pots get kelp, horsetail, avaluable top-dress (dandi, yarrow, comfrey, clover, etc)9 way covecrop mix and forst duff or straw mulch. Depending on plants size and veg time they may get a top-dress at full. Mostly no.

I was never specific with anything. Handful here and there.

 

[Aphotic]

Here is my mix, it's based off of CC's mix and some other stuff I had around.

So each batch makes about 8.5 gal of soil if I remember correctly, which is about what I can mix by hand at a time without killing myself, and I literally mix it with my hands, to ensure a thorough mix. (I can't wait to get a cement mixer).

40c peat
20c compost
20c WC
20c perlite
20c pumice
4c silica sand
4c granite grit w/fines
3c bio char (would be more but it's all I had at the time)
1c red lake DE w/calcium bentonite
1/2c sodium bentonite
1/2c azomite
1/2c oyster shell flower
1/2c kelp meal
1/2c alfalfa meal
1/2c neem meal
1/2c crab meal
I also add in some powdered beneficial bacteria I had, and myco fungi.
I wet it all with fresh act and let it sit in bins for a few weeks bofore use.

Everything is organic
I

 

[Aphotic]

I have run 20 gals and constantly added greens throughout the run. It grew great herb but they never yellowed out.

I have since started to only top dress at transplant and flip.

My current practice is. Clone to small pot seedws with clover. To a 5.5 with more clover and a forest duff mulch.

Final pots get kelp, horsetail, avaluable top-dress (dandi, yarrow, comfrey, clover, etc)9 way covecrop mix and forst duff or straw mulch. Depending on plants size and veg time they may get a top-dress at full. Mostly no.

I was never specific with anything. Handful here and there.

How long do you usually veg?

 

[Aphotic]

BTW, love hearing someone say they're doing smart pots in milk crates^^^^^. I can't remember the brand, but one of them had the 5 gals that fit PERFECT! Happy to see someone else taking advantage of this! Thats what I started with when I switched to living soil. Just make the switch over to no-till tables about a year back..

Yeah making pots to fit milk crates is brilliant, and I'm glad I stumbled across that idea. I hope you're not using a single bed to hold different strains long term, as in for your mother plants, if you keep mothers.

I can't remember if I mentioned this or not, but keeping different strains in a pot or bed where their roots, stems, branches come in contact long term can lead to genetic exchange between strains. In sine cases this will lead to a chimera being created, or at the very least genetic mixing will occur at the fusion site, sometimes this spreads and sometimes no. These sites can also be a route for viruses or diseases to be spread. As for flowering its fine, things don't really have enough time to mix things up in a meaningful way.

How big are your beds, how deep?

 

[Aphotic]

I have run 20 gals and constantly added greens throughout the run. It grew great herb but they never yellowed out.

I have since started to only top dress at transplant and flip.

My current practice is. Clone to small pot seedws with clover. To a 5.5 with more clover and a forest duff mulch.

Final pots get kelp, horsetail, avaluable top-dress (dandi, yarrow, comfrey, clover, etc)9 way covecrop mix and forst duff or straw mulch. Depending on plants size and veg time they may get a top-dress at full. Mostly no.

I was never specific with anything. Handful here and there.

What's the 9 way covercrop? I just picked up a field fixing mix that has triticale, Austrian winter peas, walkin oats, crimson clover, common vetch, and rye grass. I also picked up some barley. I'd like to have a more diverse living mulch, but I'm not sure what to plant .

 

[VortexPower420]

Veg time is something I have been working on. I have run 5 to 7 gals so long that I haven't been give the big pots enough veg time. My yeild has suffered. I do put in multiple plants in one pot to compensate for short veg time.

Now prob like 3 plus weeks in a 20 gal.

As far as cover crop, I don't think there is a bad idea. No matter what everything diea off by the end.

I have used and found everything you stated growing in my pots as well as..
Nettles, dandilion, morning glories, lamkspur, Diakon radish, wheat, rye....

Diversity is key in my book.

 

[Aphotic]

Veg time is something I have been working on. I have run 5 to 7 gals so long that I haven't been give the big pots enough veg time. My yeild has suffered. I do put in multiple plants in one pot to compensate for short veg time.

Now prob like 3 plus weeks in a 20 gal.

As far as cover crop, I don't think there is a bad idea. No matter what everything diea off by the end.

I have used and found everything you stated growing in my pots as well as..
Nettles, dandilion, morning glories, lamkspur, Diakon radish, wheat, rye....

Diversity is key in my book.

Veg time is something I have been working on. I have run 5 to 7 gals so long that I haven't been give the big pots enough veg time. My yeild has suffered. I do put in multiple plants in one pot to compensate for short veg time.

Now prob like 3 plus weeks in a 20 gal.

As far as cover crop, I don't think there is a bad idea. No matter what everything diea off by the end.

I have used and found everything you stated growing in my pots as well as..
Nettles, dandilion, morning glories, lamkspur, Diakon radish, wheat, rye....

Diversity is key in my book.

Putting multiple strains in one bed or pot is fine short term, for veg or flower, the possible issues are only if you are keeping mothers of different strains together in one pot. Just to clarify.

The thing I'm concerned with in my notill beds as far as companion\covercrop plants is plants like comfery or mint let's say, that have aggressive root systems, or large taproots. If youre using the hybrid comfery its not as aggressive and can only be propagated by root cuttings, but I have true comfery, and it is almost impossible to kill. How do you stop things from taking over your beds? There are dandylions and comfery I've been trying to get out of a spot in my outdoor beds for a few seasons, their taproots go down 3 feet, and keep coming back even when I think I've gotten all the root pieces out. So my concern is that I'll have to battle back these things in my notill beds, and I'd like to disturb the soil as little as possible.

Is it the richness and loose structure of the soil perhaps that makes these things less aggressive? And I agree id like it to be as diverse as possible.

Are you running your pots nonstop or are you giving your pots from each flower cycle a cool down period?

Sorry if my train of thought is a bit choppy, I'm working on 4 hrs sleep

 

[Aphotic]

I've decided to make the flip to 12\12. When I decided to make the switch to notill, I had already taken clones for the next cycle that where ready to go into the flower room. It took me a few weeks to build the beds and everything else, and unfortunately the clones sat in the cloner, growing and crowding each other out. The result of this being the clones ended up three distinct sizes, 1\3 stayed about the same size as when they were taken, 1\3 doubled in size, and 1\3 tripled in size. So in the end, with my three beds, it looks like I took 3 sets of clones in 1-2 week intervals, like I planned on doing a perpetual harvest.

Anyways, I installed the trellises on the beds last night and made the flip. I'm really impressed with how healthy everything looks and how rapid growth has been.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/picture.php?
albumid=67185&pictureid=1602517

 

[Aphotic]

Oops, the first pics link was broken, and I can't edit yet

 

[Aphotic]

I did the first round of cleanup under the canopy, the third beds plants are still pretty small so not much cleanup and didn't warrant a pic.

 

[Aphotic]

I just realized I haven't listed the strains this run.

Jack Herer
Trainwreck
9lb hammer

And 3 unknown strains from a friend, one of which was a new project and was wipped out in a fire last year, so we renamed it
Phoenix, one is a purple strain that explodes with color about 4 weeks into flower, we call that one love, and our favorite of the unknown strains we call Monsanto because it apparently came from a corporate lab grow, its a very very picky plant and the tiniest mistake sends it into a death spiral, last run going into flower it had lost 2\3 of its leaves and what remained showed major nutrient deficiencies, and were half dead. Surprisingly it was still the second biggest producer, and by far the most potent, with super tight buds, and so resinous it was very difficult to trim. I can't wait to see how she does in a healthy run.

The next two runs after this will be popping beans and building seed stock. The first is an afghan landrace, and the second is white widow, I'm super excited about both!

 

[Aphotic]

I thought I'd share my test beds where I'm currently growing various plants for top dressing, and teas. Which include
Borage
Comfery
triticale, Austrian winter peas, walkin oats, crimson clover, common vetch, and rye grass
Barley
Alfalfa
Chamomile
Rosemary
Lavender
And a few more I can't think of right now

 

[growingcrazy]

Your setup is looking killer! Very nice work.

Consider filling one of your catch trays with perlite and do a side by side? I noticed a large difference after doing so.

 

[stoned-trout]

those fabric beds are sweet.....yeehaw

 

[Aphotic]

Your setup is looking killer! Very nice work.

Consider filling one of your catch trays with perlite and do a side by side? I noticed a large difference after doing so.

Thanks man, I put a crap ton of time, research, and work into it. Next step is to knock off the rough edges (make it pretty, bundle cables, etc)

After this run I'm going to be popping some seeds. You can't see it in my pics but my mom room is pretty empty, I'll be selecting males from my afghan landrace and white widow beans, along with some choice ladies for breeding, something I've always wanted to play with. Going notill set me back a couple of months, but its more than worth it.

So perlite in the catch trays?in my big beds or the little ones? In my large beds I don't really get much if any runoff. What's the benefit of putting the perlite in there, retaining water longer, less evaporation?

 

[Aphotic]

those fabric beds are sweet.....yeehaw

Thank you, I appreciate it. They were fun to make, and its pretty sweet having beds tailored to your needs. I meant to make a tutorial while I made them, but I spaced it.

 

[Aphotic]

Your setup is looking killer! Very nice work.

Consider filling one of your catch trays with perlite and do a side by side? I noticed a large difference after doing so.

Also how much perlite, and do you put a layer under the pots as well?