The growing large plants, outdoors, thread...

[Bulldog420]

Thought I would throw up my results, since I just made an order today. Talked with the lady and they don't have Neem meal anymore!!!!!! I am calling around right now looking for it elsewhere, but they don't ship to Cali anymore!!!! Cali pisses me off sometimes. Anybody have some extra or know where some might be? Any store around would be fantastic.

30% Peat
30% lava
20% Bu's compost
10% EWC
10% top soil ( was going to skip this but the lady told me it was heavy in minerals and recommended it)

1/2 cup neem meal (yet to find but it will make it into the mix)
1/2 cup Kelp Meal
1/2 cup gypsum
1/2 cup oyster shell flour
4 cups rock dust - I did 2 cups glacial rock, 1 cup azomite, and one cup another mix, can't recall atm)

that's the amounts per cubic foot, there are 27 cubic feet in a yard.

4 cups fish bone meal per cubic yard


Hope this works out well this season, Boob's your the shit for helping out. Will update when things get more interesting.

Thought I would post the price for this soil mix......163.75 a yard. I might swap out the bu blend compost for all EWC and save 400 over 20 yards. However the Bu Blend is some great compost, maybe I will just stick to this.......can't decide.

 

[Shcrews]

Thought I would post the price for this soil mix......163.75 a yard. I might swap out the bu blend compost for all EWC and save 400 over 20 yards. However the Bu Blend is some great compost, maybe I will just stick to this.......can't decide.

we just got our dirt from rare earth too. 40 yards for $5k including trucking. hoping it performs well, i went with a modified "boobs mix" haha

 

[Backyard Farmer]

Another trip around the Sun...

Another trip around the Sun...

Been plugged for a while now and the plants are loving life.

Here are some soon to be large plants, outdoors...

DOG in the Big Yard





Cherry Pie in a 200 gallon dumb pot. It's funny that my garden with 9 dumb pots is one of my favorite gardens , but it more has to do with it's location at the end of my zip line course...It's pretty fun to go from the Big Yard to here..

 

[milkyjoe]

So here is a picture of my soil that has been sitting and will get plants June 1 along with my take on the "cooking" thing.



You can see that in spite of having been sitting there with all the amendments in it the soil basically has no EC...it is electrically dead (or dormant may be a better word).

What will happen is I will put a plant in it and that plant will then start feeding sugar to the soil. The soil will then become electrically alive and free up ions that will be measurable on the meter.

There is zero chance this soil can burn roots. But, because I took a soil test, I know there are plenty of nutes in the right balance (Albrecht ratios) to carry me through the season...well combined with the amount of soil. Big soil holds more nutes without pushing anything.

A hot soil is one with a high EC. The thing is you do not know what is driving that EC....is it a balanced mix, or, for example is it primarily K because you overdid bad compost? Who the fuck knows without a test. A hot soil can certainly burn roots, or it could flood the plant with too much of one mineral and not enough of another.

Now...in fact what I will do when I plant is use a transplant drench which I know from experience will bring the EC up to 0.3 or 0.4. That feeds the plant while it starts feeding the soil root exudates...sugar, aminos, fat if I did it right. Once that happens I have established a symbiotic relationship where the amount of photosynthesis determines how much the plant ends up getting fed.

If I get it right it is almost impossible to fail. If I overload the soil it is nothing but a crap shoot.

So...imo there is no such thing as "cooking" a properly amended soil

 

[grow nerd]

What if that soil pile was moist for that testing, as if the plants were in it?

 

[COconnect]

Exactly. ^^^^^

Idk anyways. In my world letting the soil cook gives time for the microherd to get poppin. Let it sit damp for a litle bit with the micoroixxahe haha spelling and I'll even give an empty pot a tea before transplant.... we're growing more than weeds.....

 

[Luther Burbank]

You can't grow mycorrhizae without plants. They lay dormant until root exudes reawaken them. Myccorhizal hyphae traverse the same pathways as the roots they live with.

 

[COconnect]

So you're saying that all of the beneficial microorganisms/fungi don't exist until there are plant roots in the ground? So that bag of ffof with the white growth just came that way? Or are there microscopic organisms that feed off the nutrients in the bag?

 

[FatherEarth]

Milky,

I have the same meter... I cant tell but it sorta looks like the alarm indicator is illuminated..?
Is that low number because the soil is dry?

Just curious since you mentioned a transplant drench will jump the number to .3-.4...?

 

[milkyjoe]

Water may make a few minerals soluble but not a lot. It is when you overfill the cec/humus that soil becomes hot. I will stick some in a pot and water it and we will see. Still I do not go into really wet soil.

 

[bobblehead]

So you're saying that all of the beneficial microorganisms/fungi don't exist until there are plant roots in the ground? So that bag of ffof with the white growth just came that way? Or are there microscopic organisms that feed off the nutrients in the bag?

They don't exist in numbers like they would after fully colonizing the root system of a plant. They need those root exudates. Microbes lay dormant until the ideal conditions have been met for reproduction. Mix some soil, send it off to the lab. Let it cook for a month, and send off another sample. Very little will change without putting a plant in the soil.

 

[Bo Hasset]

Hi Jenn,
25 bags black gold potting soil (1.5cf ea)

4 bags stutzman farms chicken manure (1 cf ea)

1 bag perlite (4 cf ea)

1 bag (50 lbs) bonemeal (steamed, not precipitated)

1/2 bag gypsum (aprox 1/2 cf) - Edit -> 1/2 of a 40 lb bag (20lbs).

Mix well, water thoroughly, let rest for 2-3 weeks minimum, transplant, and stand back

If you'll read back a few pages in this thread you'll find some posts from me detailing a garden I tend that had it's 24 300 gallon smarties grow legs and walk off the property, even clearing a 6 foot locked gate on their way out. Craziest thing I've ever seen...

Anyway, as much as it sucks I tried to look at it as an oppurtunity to try my hand at Tom's mix as posted above, with slight modification. The first modification being that I would halve all of his amendments (except the perlite) b/c I didn't/still don't have time to let the mix marinate as prescribed for "at least 2-3 weeks"... through my re-reading through large chunks of this thread I came across a post from Tom himself stating he had done this exact same thing and just sub'd in several light feeding throughout the veg cycle. The second modification was also made after seeing yet another post from that old devil TomHill in which he stated that Black Gold was not the panacea and that he had subbed out a variety of bagged and bulk mixes when the need arose. Well, under the constraints of time, wanting to use as many resources that I had previously purchased and not wanting to buy 12 or so pallets for around $5500, even with a discount, I pulled enough soil from other sites and in the end only had to pick up 6 yards of the Worm Soil Factory's Premium Blend and a pallet of FF's Coco Loco for a whopping $300... a deal I couldn't pass up since I've never had any qualms with FF and Coco Loco seems to be the same as Happy Frog except they swapped peat for coco coir. The Worm Soil Factory stuff was added to about 9 more yards of the same stuff I had picked up earlier this year and mixed a yard of Lava Rock, 25 pound bag of 10-3-1 Bat Guano, 50-100 lbs of Greensand (can't be sure as I wasn't there the day it was mixed up) and a 50 1b bag of Dr. Earth 4-4-4 into.

So, instead of the 25 1.5 cu. ft. bags of Black Gold per 300 gallon hole, my "dirt" portion looks something like:

- 3 rounded 8 cu. ft wheelbarrow loads of the Worm Soil Mix, 1 load in that same wheelbarrow of Pro-Moss, 2 bags Coco Loco, 2 bags Dr. Earth Planting Mix, 1.5 bags Roots 707 and 1.5 3 cu. ft. bales of E.B. Stones Big Harvest mix

The rest of the mix per 300 gallon geoPot is as follows:

- 2 bags of Stutzman Cicken Manure 3-2-2

- 4 cu. ft. perlite

- 25 lbs. of a 50/50 mix of 4-20-0 Fish Bone Meal and steamed 2-11-0 Bone Meal (this was one of those "use what I've got" ideas that might already be coming back to bite me in the ass if you'll read on...)

- 10 lbs of a 50/50 mix of Gypsum and Oyster Shell Powder (yet another sort of use what's on hand deal)

So, anyway... that's the mix I mixed by hand and filled up 12 300 gallon pots on Sunday and Monday of this week before giving it a final whirl w/ the 2-man auger and watering it in with approx. 30 gallons per pot. Got back out here tonight to spruce up the trailer on-site that a friend who will be the "eyes" for the garden and to check on some plants in hoop houses that got transplanted beginning of the week as well and will start being tarped on June 1st...

Well, as I was out in the garden whistling dixie and playing in the dirt I decided to turn some of the modified Tom's mix over and see how well it was retaining the water i soaked it in with on Monday... WHOA!!!

The fucking soil let out a burst of steam like no other after I got about 6 inches down and another 6 inches down and it was damn near too hot to touch... it was hotter than the hottest compost pile I've ever seen.

WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I DONE?!?!?!?

None of the individual components of the mix felt hot on Sunday and Monday when we were here mixing the first 12 pots... and in all my years of looking through this thread I don't know that I've ever seen someone with this happening even when going full strength on his amendments. Was it the substitution of the the fish bone meal or oyster shell powder? I have a couple ideas about what might be happening, but I would sound like a retard trying to explain it with my half-assed recollections of past Chemistry and Botany courses from college.

I had plans on finishing up these pots, but that's obviously been put on hold. Barring a concise and absolute answer popping up on here before morning I've decided on the following... mix one pot, still at 1/2 strength, but no fish meal or OSP subs... mix another pot the same way I have been, but at 1/4 strength... and finally, mix up one pot sans any of Tom's amendments to determine if it's the combination of soils that have created my "fertilizer bombs".

I'm also going to turn all of the pots again as best I can with the auger and hose them back down to see if I can help speed u whatever "composting" is going on...

I suspect I'll be transplanting into some 20 gallon smart pots as the 1.5 foot starts I put into 3 and 5 gallon smart pots intended for these 300 gallon pots are a few days away from being more root bound than I'd like to deal with, waiting a month for the soil to cool and transplanting again.... it's not ideal and way more handling of the plant than I care for, but I don't see another option except to either take out half the dirt from each pot and put down a top layer of of the straight dirt mix, should it prove not to be the culprit, and hope that things have cooled down by the time the roots make their way south??? Oy!

I know that was a lot to read, but if anyone made it this far and has an idea or two, then I'm all ears.

 

[Cep]

@Bo
Chicken shit, bone meal, any other N amendment is going to feed microbes; microbial respiration will generate heat.

You can't grow mycorrhizae without plants. They lay dormant until root exudes reawaken them. Myccorhizal hyphae traverse the same pathways as the roots they live with.

Yes! With endomycorrhizal fungi its actually difficult to see the hyphae on the roots in many cases. You have to stain them with trypan blue and look under a scope. The best indicator is the root morphology. I.e. if you pull up a root wad and it's thick and branching more than an uncolonized wad. Not only do they increase the actual surface area of the root, they produce proteins to improve soil structure. The roots will take on a pale yellow color as well.

All of the fungal growth people see in bags of ffof or in the straw on their gardens is NOT mycorrhizal. They are saprobes decomposing your waste for you.

Very little will change without putting a plant in the soil.

They are dormant until you feed them. Some just prefer plant exudates. Your soil composition over that month also depends on how much rain you get. In Tom's mix, for example, your initial test right after mixing is going to show high S and moderately high N levels. Put 6 inches of rain through that and both those numbers are going to decrease.

@Milky
When did you amend your soil? I "cook" my soil not only because of the initial increase in EC but also because the temperature will rise as it composts. I could be adding too much blood meal, fish bone meal or other N amendments. Would you say that if you're adding enough N to bring the total ppm to 100 that the soil wouldn't get too hot to plant?

 

[Bo Hasset]

@Bo
Chicken shit, bone meal, any other N amendment is going to feed microbes; microbial respiration will generate heat.

I get that much. I guess I wasn't expecting THAT much heat. Any kind of guesstimate from the "mix" I posted on how long these suckers are going to keep generating heat?

 

[nomaad]

Turn that shit every day...twice a day. the process can be sped up a LOT by aabout a metric fuckton of movement.

 

[nomaad]

example... those backyard spinning plastic composting units cut compostung time by up to 60%. same composting process taking place. mucho mas aeration.

 

[bobblehead]

Organic matter has a lot of composting to do before it becomes plant available. The major decomposers are your arthropods and fungi. Fungi feed the bacteria. Bacteria and some fungi feed the plant. Mycos, a type of fungi, need to come into contact with roots to activate.

Thanks CEP... Yes the water solubles will flush out.

If the soil is hot, why not cut it?

 

[milkyjoe]

View attachment 268090

I soaked it so there is no dispute. 0.2. There is no worry this soil will burn roots on a transplant. And i guarantee there is plenty of stuff in it that will respond when the plant starts sending exudates out the roots .If I plan the transplant solution properly I will raise the EC to match that of the pot I have the plant in...no slow down from lack of nutes and no burn from too much

I do not add extra N to the soil at all, so that may be different than most.



On the other hand this is a soil I ran in a bed. I took the HST approach to finding out where the edge was and I went the fuck over it....split my differential and tipped the fuck over (I love Wolf of Wall Street). This soil will burn roots and does not allow the plant to establish a symbiotic relationship with the soil. This is bad soil.

When you try to leach soil some things leach and some things don't. Yes you may lower the EC but it wont be in a balanced way. You can add pure humus to try to tie more things up but that gets expensive...north dakota leonardite works for that.

This is why a simple $25 soil test is so valuable. You don't gotta guess.

 

[milkyjoe]

fuck me...here is that first pic

 

[Luther Burbank]

I'm vexed. This unnamed cross has shown mostly uniform hybrid leaf structure, but plant number six showed extremely squat size and much broader and fan shapped leaves. I plugged it into one of my holes and there she has sat being a runt while the rest of the girls take off. Keep telling myself to have patience.

So you're saying that all of the beneficial microorganisms/fungi don't exist until there are plant roots in the ground? So that bag of ffof with the white growth just came that way? Or are there microscopic organisms that feed off the nutrients in the bag?

Not all fungi are mycorrhizae. There's a lot of fungal and bacterial activity going on but mycorrhizae specifically refers to fungi which have a symbiotic relationship with roots.