Stumbleweed
Active member
Real deal Matanuska Thunderfuck cut:
(my first time going all true organic [recycled soil, fed only compost tea & water], AND my first time trying to photograph buds - please forgive how damn amateur this is!)
Man... I'm already working on figuring out how I'm gonna bring my dirt bins & compost with me when I move out of this house - I'm looking forward to a LONG relationship with this soil!Awesome, a couple of friends and I that run my system have used the same dirt for nearly a decade.
Funny you should mention Age Old - I actually ran it my first 2 cycles (then ran 1 with House & Garden cause I got hooked up with a free line-up). I liked it, but just got sick of measuring stuff and tweaking my feeds (H&G was a whole other level of grow-room chemistry class that was wayyyyy too complicated for the results). I def needed Earth Juice & a K booster when I ran Age Old tho...Compost teas are great, but too much work for a small indoor setup IMO, check out the Age Old line... I use Grow at 1 tsp/gal for veg and bloom at the same rate combined with Earth Juice High Brix Molasses or Meta K to get the K levels up a bit. It's super cheap and easy...
If you don't have a soil test kit for NPK and Ph, pick one up, they are only about $20 and while they aren't super accurate it'll tell you if you're deficient or overloaded on nutes and will test the pH of your actual soil, which is key (measuring runoff isn't a great way to monitor your pH). Anyway, your pH will always be perfect if you use a peat moss based mix and add some dolomite lime every run. Don't try to monitor or correct the pH of your nute mix/compost teas unless your soil pH is actually drifting off, which never happens in a good soil mix. And never, ever flush your soil unless you've made a horrible mistake feeding them. Keeping your soil happy and balanced is the key to successfully recycling it.
Also, the larger the volume of soil you use, the larger your margin for error in getting the soil conditions right. I use 20 gal smart pots for plants that yield about 3/4 of a lb. I usually use beds that contain more like 40 gal of soil per plant and set up that way the system pretty much runs itsself and is the closest to outdoor/greenhouse that you can get indoors. The smart pots require more soil amendments per volume of soil, more lime to keep the pH balanced and a higher concentration of liquid nutes when I water them. Soil conditions in smart pots can change much more rapidly than in beds.
And yeah... photographing buds is far more challenging than I would have thought. Stumbleweed makes it look easy, he's the best pot photog I've ever seen. At least we're not back in the days of paying for film and processing!