Top dress and tea ?

[Uglyrichie]

Figured I would give organic a go. I bought some craft blend from BAS for top dress and ordered some boogie heavy harvest for tea. Along with soil I purchased from a gentleman who makes an organic super soil blend. I guess my question is, is this to much. I know there's always a learning curve but if I can top dress and tea every so often I would rather do that than mix chemicals. Thanks

 

[HempKat]

It's kind of hard to say if it's too much or not if we don't know what specifically is in these blends and teas and in what ratios. Done properly with the right combination of ingredients in the right ratios growing organically can yield amazing results and never require much more care then watering and maybe some selective pruning to improve light penetration. If however the blends and teas don't have the right ingredients or have them in the right ratios one can experience a lot of problems.

 

[TychoMonolyth]

It's pretty hard to miss with a good blend.

 

[Creeperpark]

New potting mixes don't have to be fed anything because they have plenty of nutrition available. You don't need to worry about teas yet, get your seeds started, just plant the seeds in a quality soil mix and keep the temps in the upper 70s and get growing.

 

[Uglyrichie]

Thank you I'll try to get the ingredients lists, I believe all 3 are using the same ingredients in their products with slight variations. But I am going off memory so I could be very wrong. I guess when I get home I should deep dive organics a little.

 

[flylowgethigh]

A good reference:

https://www.icmag.com/forum/marijua...ic-soil-from-start-through-recycling?t=241964

I just ordered a bag of BAS top dress last night. I use it for the "make-up" soil when the level of soil in my bags drops from compaction and whatever. IMO another good product of theirs is "big 6", which I add when I do my weekly top water feeding.

Get bags of alfalfa, kelp, barley, neem, oyster, crab, Langbenite, Leonardite, glacier dust. I make tea with alfalfa, worm castings, maybe a little chunk of chicken chit. The tea seems to help veg growth. Another good vendor is Redbud Soil Co in OK.

I also ordered some of this last night from BAS. We'll see what it does, but I am looking to build trics.

https://buildasoil.com/products/eden...old-super-carb

 

[St. Phatty]

Some of the best soil I ever bought was $17 a cubic yard.

Amazing how much people pay for bagged mixes.

 

[flylowgethigh]

Using soil once, then tossing it, is what I can't understand. Like tearing down and rebuilding Walmarts every time the shelves get emptied. I dump the soil from the bags into a tub, amend, and re-use the run after the next. It composts in the greens in the interim.

 

[flylowgethigh]

Are you going to add microbes? Good soil may already have them, but I figure the more the merrier. I add microbes with each weekly feeding.

 

[HempKat]

Thank you I'll try to get the ingredients lists, I believe all 3 are using the same ingredients in their products with slight variations. But I am going off memory so I could be very wrong. I guess when I get home I should deep dive organics a little.

I should add that my response about not knowing what's in the mixes and teas you described were because I've never grown organically and so when you say "BAS for top dress" and "some boogie heavy harvest for tea" or "soil I purchased from a gentleman who makes an organic super soil blend" I have no way of knowing if those things are made with Cannabis in mind or are they for something else? If they are made with Cannabis in mind then they probably contain everything you need and you can just get started. I also answered the way I did because not knowing what's in these three things I have no way to tell if you're duplicating things because the may contain some of the same ingredients as each other. Although from my limited understanding of organics it's hard to have to much of an ingredient because the organic components still have to break down over time before the plant can access them. When you add nutrients from a bottle you have to be much more careful because those nutrients are available immediately and so if you give too much you can end up with toxicity issues. In working with bottled nutrients generally speaking in the beginning, during the veg phase you mainly want to be giving something that is mostly Nitrogen with very little Potassium and Phosphorous as far as the macro nutrients and then you want it to have things like Calcium, Magnesium, Manganese, Boron, Iron, Copper, Zinc, Sulphur and Molybdenum for your micro nutrients. So this is what you would want to see in your soil mix and top dressing. When you get to flower though, Nitrogen becomes less critical but the demand for Potassium and Phosphorous goes up and this I would guess is what you want your tea to contain so that you can increase the availability of those macro nutrients as demand for them goes up. They probably also contain some micronutrients that might have become depleted in the soil during veg with the two most likely being Calcium and Magnesium because there is a strong demand for those throughout the life of a Cannabis plant and most things you can buy for a Cannabis plant don't contain enough.

So being that I'm the only one who asked for the ingredients and how much yet I don't really know much about growing organically, you probably don't need to bother getting and posting that information unless others start asking for it. All I could do is confirm if the ingredients will convert to the right nutrients and even there I'd have to look some of them up and do some research before I could tell you that and I would be unable to tell you if you have too much or not enough of a particular ingredient. Of the people that have responded to you so far I would suggest you pay the most attention to Creeperpark. Not because the others couldn't also be helpful, it's just I don't know them well enough. Creeperpark on the other hand I have seen answer questions for lots of people to where I have a good sense he knows what he's talking about and gives solid, reliable advice.