anyone topdress organic dry nutes indoors and nothing else?

[Scrappy4]

Going back to the OP it's about using top dressings...and I've always had good results using this method and not just the time I mentioned. I've never used compost as a top dressing but cooking up a bunch now so we'll see how that works out during the winter. A decent part of the compost I make will be fed to worms for casting so will have compost and castings to play with. A bunch more of the compost will simply go into a custom mix and some of it will be used for teas.

I'm using thermo compost as a top dressing right now. It was just cooled and I was leary of just mixing it in, so I top dressed it and so far it seems like it did help. I gave some to my worms too, but they aren't exactly tearing into it, maybe it's the oak leaf base.....scrappy

 

[Scrappy4]

oh and I meant to say - dried and powdered cannabis trim is very quick

I'm using old leaves on top the soil too, then I spray them with a weak em1 spray. The em1 seems to work real fast, a couple of weeks and the leaves are gone. They kind of melt into the soil. A time lapse camera would be neat on them decomposing.....scrappy

 

[xmobotx]

once i water through a top-dressed amendment, I consider it to be there and available in the rhizosphere - not sure how much or how immediately but within a couple of days. hell, within a couple weeks you can't tell the top-dress was there anymore

 

[cyat]

I wanna thank u guys for your opinions and experiences.

 

[cyat]

pinecone, fish emulsion is bottled and available to the plant right away.
nice plants and training.

 

[cyat]

Take a look at the many threads we have here on plants grown with organic and living organic soils for pics.

I think many people don't get, what most people claim on the net either. No one wants to be seen as lagging, so the bar keeps getting higher, but maybe not realistic. And most all good growers, me included, think their shit is the best. Human nature at work.

Yields come from many factors, and some folks regularly pull big yields, but that might not be the end all in every grow. I think the biggest factors for higher yields would be the light available, and genetics.

But i think taste and effect are more important to me, with yields important, but not the most important. I flower 4 plants at a time, and have plenty enough of aged, cured, primo smoke, to last me, even though I shut down my grow for a month or more every year.....scrappy

I look thru all the organic threads and see very little amazing pics to go with the stuff people talk about. not doubting anyone just wanna see these amazing plants.
I agree about genetics being the biggest factor, but ive grown the same cut many ways and it does make a huge difference what and how u feed it. light is not the issue w/ me.

yield taste the whole package is important to me and trying to always improve and keep an open mind

 

[cyat]

As much as the nutes matter, I think growing technique matters just as much when trying to get good yield..
Trim your plants up EXACTLY how pinecone did! and make sure to use a good size pot/ whatever your root system can utilize.. Do this and you will be on your way to g/w

 

[cyat]

classic bogus criticism of nature farming: "things don't fall from the sky".

it's really just a diversion. Nature farming is not abandonment. In nature farming the human is both playing a role and manipulating the process a bit. Sure, this thing or that thing does fall from the sky, but you may need to use a bit of brawn collecting it and you might need a bit if brain to use it.


Here is some easy math - if I take only flowers, and return all my trim, stems, and roots to the soil, how much do I need to add back to keep things going? Are we taking more, or less than when we grow tomatoes?

Or howabout I remove all trim like you say, but I have other plants in the ground with the cannabis that are soil builders. And let's say I started things off with a biochar application, and I do some selective trimming of my companion plants to maximize their effectiveness - yeah, I think I could come up with a system that needs nothing but some timely and selective and minimal mowing.

Some options even include sowing seeds of things "too late" to mature before the killing frost, etc... seeds can fall from the sky, sprout, fix N from the air, and die back into mulch.

I see you are passionate about your beliefs but this is all goin off topic, no prob really started this to get some ideas about just topdressing as a total feed

 

[cyat]

I've been top dressing with a fat handful of good ewc, and the root growth up at surface level is really amazing, especially when some sort of additional leaf mulch or clover canopy is added to retain moisture. guano is easily watered in. I'll be switching to dried powdered comfrey soon though.
I use fpe's, act, and very occasionally some liquid fish fert, but i rely on the top dress as the big feed.

thanks for sharing your experience

 

[pinecone]

pinecone, fish emulsion is bottled and available to the plant right away.

A couple of things to note
- I use fish hydrolysate not fish emulsions
- fish hydrolysate is used is a microbial food source my ACTs at the rate of 2.5ml per gallon (not very much).
- I apply ACTs perhaps 3 times per cycle.

Thus, I'm not really relying on fish as a fertilizer.

Pine

 

[cyat]

potato potaato

emulsion hydroslate, used both no tmuch difference to me, and its still a bottled form of available nitrogen. great stuff bubbled or not

 

[pinecone]

emulsion hydroslate, used both no tmuch difference to me

There are significant differences in the manufacturing process and in the finished product. Basically fish hydrolysate is cold processed and as a result retains some oils and enzymes that fish emulsions lack.

Pine

 

[Hovz]

Nice Hovs!
thanks for the pics
how did that compare to your current technique?

I find both the methods to make similar plants in the end result but the K.I.S.S. method works well for me because its really easy and foolproof where organics can be tricky

 

[CascadeFarmer]

oh right, someone comes on and calls everyone "a bunch of jokers", but it's pointing it out that starts shit.

I'm not a joker (well, depending on who is saying it maybe), and I'm not kidding - it's not that hard to come up with a guild to support a cannabis planting, even if you don't return trim.

So please don't encourage people coming on, being dead wrong, and insulting everyone.

You wanna bring that back up again so be it. My original statement that 'Nutes don't fall from the sky' has obviously been proven false and I'm wrong. The point I was trying to make was that nutes don't rain from the sky in a way that is anywhere similar to what people do when they bottle feed plants.

So if nutes do fall from the sky...in such a way that a plant can be sustained I say try this...take a canna seed or seeds, plant in new, fresh, unused coco fiber (in any container size you want) that's been rinsed to remove any residual salts from processing, put outside and let the plant be fed from anything that falls from the sky and we'll see what happens. I'll even let the guidelines be that you can capture rainwater instead of just relying on natural rainfall. Show me that plant at the end of the summer.

The term 'joker' being interpreting things I was saying in such a way that was way off track from my original intention and nothing personal.

 

[mad librettist]

You wanna bring that back up again so be it. My original statement that 'Nutes don't fall from the sky' has obviously been proven false and I'm wrong. The point I was trying to make was that nutes don't rain from the sky in a way that is anywhere similar to what people do when they bottle feed plants.

So if nutes do fall from the sky...in such a way that a plant can be sustained I say try this...take a canna seed or seeds, plant in new, fresh, unused coco fiber (in any container size you want) that's been rinsed to remove any residual salts from processing, put outside and let the plant be fed from anything that falls from the sky and we'll see what happens. I'll even let the guidelines be that you can capture rainwater instead of just relying on natural rainfall. Show me that plant at the end of the summer.

The term 'joker' being interpreting things I was saying in such a way that was way off track from my original intention and nothing personal.

so basically, what you said is so narrow in scope as to be completely meaningless, and anyone trying to relate what you said to real life is a joker trying to throw you off track.


I much prefer your informative posts.


Using guilds to support food/medicine/textile production without any compost piles and hardly any work is exactly what permaculture design is all about. In the real world, you can, and some do work with Nature to do very little work for very good production. Supporting cannabis would be pretty low on the difficulty scale.

And there are wild stands of good soil where one could grow year after year without fertilizing.

Sometimes I feel like cannabis growers make it sound like a difficult plant to grow. It's an easy plant with minimal requirements for everything but light.

 

[Microbeman]

You make a good point, not too many soils would excel year after year without grower inputs, but I think we want better than what mother nature would have provided, on her own, in that particular spot, don't we? Scrappy

We actually grew our hay, year after year exactly like that, just counting on thunderstorms (nitrogen), spring floods (silt/clay), wintering Elk & deer (poop).

 

[Microbeman]

potato potaato

emulsion hydroslate, used both no tmuch difference to me, and its still a bottled form of available nitrogen. great stuff bubbled or not

Total difference. Look at the other thread about that. Not just nitrogen either.

 

[Microbeman]

You wanna bring that back up again so be it. My original statement that 'Nutes don't fall from the sky' has obviously been proven false and I'm wrong. The point I was trying to make was that nutes don't rain from the sky in a way that is anywhere similar to what people do when they bottle feed plants.

So if nutes do fall from the sky...in such a way that a plant can be sustained I say try this...take a canna seed or seeds, plant in new, fresh, unused coco fiber (in any container size you want) that's been rinsed to remove any residual salts from processing, put outside and let the plant be fed from anything that falls from the sky and we'll see what happens. I'll even let the guidelines be that you can capture rainwater instead of just relying on natural rainfall. Show me that plant at the end of the summer.

The term 'joker' being interpreting things I was saying in such a way that was way off track from my original intention and nothing personal.

I don't wish to be insulting but putting any plant in coco 'rinsed of all salts' to catch whatever nutrients fall from the sky does not remotely resemble natural/organic growing in any way and this statement illustrates your lack of comprehension of how plants grow naturally.

 

[cyat]

Total difference. Look at the other thread about that. Not just nitrogen either.

I understand the difference intellectually but both have given me similar results , and I cant notice much difference between plants grown with hydroslate or emulsion

How about topdressing ? we can talk about fish liquids instead but thats not why I really started this thread.

how bout some pics?

 

[cyat]

Why do most organic threads end in bickering and drama?

I get tired of hearing big talk, back up up your words with pics guys

what about the subject of this thread?

a lot of stuff I hear is starting to sound like dogma

the church of organic growing