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Originally Posted by farmerlion

Hops are genetically close to cannabis. If your amending the soil now and it's working well, keep doing so. I have used a post hole digger for some outdoor plants. Then filled in the holes with certain amendments. If your not doing to many holes it works well. Take some soil Ph readings and find out if your acidic or alkaline? Test kits are very inexpensive and will let you know in just minutes what you need to do. Check the Ph of your water source as well. I haul lake water from a nearby lake as my well water is very high alkalinity. I wish you well. Peace

Hops should be good then, but I have never seen it locally. I'm in the middle of the UK. Does it like rain? If it does, we can grow it.

I don't water. I will spray them, but only water them if it's dry when they are first put out. Having started them indoors. It's never sandy ground. Mostly clay. If somewhere is dry, I walk away. I guess I'm lucky. Though some loam for once would be nice.

I dig about 18" square, 6" deep. Putting in about 10L of compost and a little blood fish and bone, with a sprinkle of K. Then feed by spraying, according to needs. I top dressed many times, but it just sits going mouldy, so I don't bother. It would be good to correct the soil enough to just skip all that digging and carrying, and be able to just open up a small hole with a couple of handfuls of compost, just to seat them.

Thank you for the input


Oh.. betterhaff. I did read that 3g of P and 3g of K, per meter, would need putting back after hemp is grown (I worked out the area from the hectare amount, so nobody should blindly copy)

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Originally Posted by Stickybred420

no matter what crop you are planting, you should lay down a 3'-5' thick layer of woodchips or mulch on the bed. it will drastically increase water retention and microbial activity. it really seems to work. theres a guy on you tube and he runs an all organic veg farm and he doesn't ammend the soil at all. just uses woodchips and soil biology. i would definitely say you should ammend your soil though. then do the wood chip mulch. i think it would be bulletproof. i recommend checking out the youtube videos too. incredible info. he calls himself organic gardening.

I have used some beneficial lifeforms, but never really saw results. Watered in with seaweed extracts, the result was that seen from just using the seaweed stuff (maxicrop is my usual choice, as it's cold pressed).

I have a plot that's easily 5 times better than others. Plants in the ground there, do better than breaking my back elsewhere. It could be a lesson that god knows best. A youtube showing it's better to do nothing would certainly get believers. I'm a man of science though. I want control of what is happening. I keep records of what I did, when and with what results. It's this science aspect of growing them that I'm trying to step up. I would say by a notch, by this is a very high jump from reading bottles at the garden center.

I'm really not into the voodoo methods of growing. I do add some ground cover and certainly the micro-herd are at work. I don't know who they are though or their levels of population. I have to sample the ground to just see how good a job they're doing, with what they have. To assist them. With large helpings of stuff that likely decimate their populations

[djonkoman]

hops isn't really a usefull comparison I think. sure, it's genetically close, but in this case the only thing that matters is nutrient requirements.

cannabis is a fastgrowing annual(hops is a perennial) that can get quite big, so you can assume they use quite a lot of N. maize seems like an obvious comparison, also an annual that makes quirte a lot of mass within that one year.

another obvious comparison would be hemp.
you would find numbers for fiber and for seeds/oil probably. hempseeds contain a lot of protein, which contain N, so growing a plant the same size etc an unfertilized plant will have lower N needs.
so likely the number for fiber is more accurate as for seed/oil.

I found a link(https://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/cr...roduction.html) which says springwheat is used as comparison(for hemp). it also list some numbers("89 to 135 kg/ha nitrogen, 45 kg/ha phosphorus, 67 kg/ha potassium and 17 kg/ha sulfur.", I think those numbers are only for the start of the season, since it then goes on to describe what's removed, and the N removed is higher as 135 kg/ha)

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Thank you. That is very useful. I will go and look up spring wheat right away, to see when it's planted out, and that we do it here. I have a few analogues now, which was my purpose for posting, and this idea of good ground condition. I can hopefully stick with future crop details so they can offer ideas of what sources the I should use with ph outcome in mind. It will be great to cross reference what everyone says though to find some common ground and record another seasons results. Hopefully much better results!

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Well after all that, only Spring Wheat and Forage Maize were listed as choices. I got my results back some time ago though, and in a few cases they said to do nothing. On land I know is going downhill each year, so could do with something. I have little idea what though, as hundreds of pages on, I'm still yet to find some targets. It seems quite American here, with a strong emphasis towards the ratio of stuff. Which here in the UK is viewed as outdated. It wasn't even reported. I have available levels of P K and Mg as my main result. Plus Sodium, Calcium and estimated CEC as extra's I asked for. Along with PH and lime recommendations. I can ignore that though I think, as they want to raise anything below 6.5 and only my worst sites are over 6.5 with under 5 recorded at one of my better locations.

I actually have 3 samples from one site. A site that gets worse as we move across it. The results show the ph goes up from around 6 to around 7.5 in hand with sodium levels dropping. Sodium being a ph lowering substance that seems to have little effect with most crops. Leaving just the PH increase as the likely cause of poor plants there.


Still... on this huge site of industry experts, where are the targets hiding? Either as actual values or just index's