[MrBungle]

Are you guys precharging the biochar or just tossing it into the soil?

In my research I found that if the bio-char isn't precharged, it will only absorb nutrients from your soil until it is charged on its own

[h.h.]

I hate to refer to what I use as bio-char. It's just char out of the fireplace. I've soaked it in act, put in in the worm bin, coated it with coconut milk, and used it directly without doing anything.

I kind of like the thought of the nutrient exchange with in the soil itself. A little, not a lot. I don't want to bury a lot of stuff and overwhelm everything. Just a few ions moving back and forth, especially in the initial mixing stage to wake everything up. After a week, it's somewhat stabilized.

Honestly, it all depends on the moment. I am lazy and haphazard, Plant a little chia and take note of it's coloration to check the soil. Then you can always top dress if you want more nitrogen. I want the roots to search for what they need. If they don't like the char, they'll move on. Usually though they clutch on to it. I think especially when charged and coated with the coconut milk. After a little time though, it doesn't make any difference..I guess the key is the amount of room in your pots. After a couple of turn arounds, it balances out.
I think the greatest benefit of the coconut milk was that it made the char sticky and held in moisture. Most cc milk has preservative, potassium sorbate or something like that. There's probably better and cheaper alternatives. Gluten or milk, pectin gelatin? I just abandoned the practice as an unnecessary experiment.

[DocTim420]

I have played with biochar off and on and right now, I am in the 90/10 camp (the 50/50 mix sucked big time!). 10% charged biochar mixed with 90% Malibu Compost is what I am working with now.

To charge virgin biochar, I use a mixture that includes rock dust (land minerals), Sea90 (sea minerals), Mycorrhizae (Promix PUR powder) and Raw Milk (non-homogenized milk is loaded with bacteria, amino acids, protein, etc).

Biochar does many things--include providing bacteria a habitat within the grow medium and increasing air/water porosity (replacing the need for perlite). At the 90/10 ratio there is also a nice increase in available calcium...so say various studies and this one old timer that convinced me to revisit biochar.

[moose eater]

WOW!

I assume by char you're referring to charcoal left in the wood ashes? Haven't used that stuff in years, and rarely for cannabis.

All kinds of stuff I've never used in this application, or some of it, never. Grew and ate a bit of San Pedro cactus 43 years ago, but never used it for anything but ornamental and ingestion, in search of an alternative cactus high.

For a time I'd quit using wood ash altogether, due to reading of its caustic properties, despite knowing that on average, the clean ash possessed about a 7 to 9 rating on K, as well as micro-nutes.

I'd only recently encountered langbeinite, and was intrigued by the K levels, as well as intimidated by the sulfur and mag levels, having seen some sources of K and micro-nutes trip male stress flowers in otherwise relatively stable females.. Time and place thing. Can be used to advantage, but typically totally unwelcome.

I believe a combination of excess langbeinite and supplemental feedings while using the method below, incorporating smaller pots, led to some excessively stressed plants in not too distant times.

The greatest production, (lacking a fair bit of the outrageous amounts of resin/oils I once achieved in the SS California Indica plants when it was pre-well and using predominantly bat shit teas) was achieved via smaller pots (16 smaller pots in a 4'x4' foot-print, taking cuttings/clones of the same varieties, from 3"x3" cubes, into Classic 600's x 16 total per 4'x4' area (Super-Cropping, with, ideally, 6-8 primary colas per plant, using one of the transient, now in the rear-view organic variations), and supplementing the organic mix with (sometimes) Fox Farms and then other times Advanced Nutrients (whose N-P-K array ran counter to what I'd always believed or been taught, and probably why it contributed to some problems; AN's and my view of the universe collided a bit.. ;^>) ).

Using 1/3 dilution from stated doses by the sources listed above, and alternating with plain H2O or Yucca extract for rinses, if I read the plants correctly and avoided stressing them too badly, I was sometimes getting over 20 oz. per 16 sq. ft., and averaging 15-17.5 oz., running digital 400 hps. with no other supplemental lighting. (*Something I'm looking at changing now with 315 cmh's, as their foot-print is a bit less than the 400s were).

By the end of a cycle, one person noted that the plants had achieved near-ripeness about the same time they were out of root space and declining in the otherwise fairly balanced nutes, stating at that juncture, or shortly before, I was essentially doing a soil-based hydroponic gig. It sounded oxy-moronic, but in terms of rates of water and feed absorption, esp. in or after peek flowering, his description made total sense.

But there's no real pride of totally home-spun organics in that, other than benchmark production, and while the weed was regarded as exceptional by many, it didn't possess the amounts of oils that the long-ago-and-far away Cal. indica's 16" and 18" colas did, where, after laying drying in a pizza box for a few days, picking one up sounded like peeling off scotch tape.

Thus this quest. Overcome the obstacles that led to the loss of that severely resinous quality and health, maintain stellar production, and go back to the days preceding bottled supplements, with the possible exception of the Sledgehammer, or a rare micro-nute boost when called for..

I'll have to continue contemplating your technique, and will ask questions when needed, if that's OK. Meanwhile, keep the feed-back rolling, please.. And thank you, again.

Originally Posted by h.h.

Good. Now that I've disqualified myself from achieving guru status, I can speak freely. My lack of knowledge has never stopped me from giving expert advice.

Looks like you have a pretty diverse soil mix. Something you've tweaked over the years and are pretty content with. For me to actually critique it, I think that I'd have to break it down to your base, figure out your percentages in it, breaking each one down to percentages, release rates, longevity, and I leave it to the experts.

There's only a couple of folks really qualified to reply to your thread with accuracy.

I'm kind of lazy. I don't put that much thought into my soil. Kind of cheap as well.
I was using yucca schidigera trunks for part of my base material. It made good bedding for the worms and that was about the only way to compost it. A little horse manure, SPMoss, DE, a few other selected items, pea gravel, San Pedro cactus. Dirt for some mineralization and some clay. Stuff I was lucky to have at the time.It all went through the worm bin. I would harvest it early with a piece of carpenter cloth.

I'd mix in some finished vermacompost to my desired texture, a little gypsum to color, oatmeal or something for aggregation, cheat with a little Epsoma for redundancy. A slight bit of ground acacia seed for fertilizer. A few ashes along with the char.
I'd fix up my pots, leaving a hole where my transplants would go. Then I sprouted chia seeds in it to get what in my mind was a start to the nutrient flow. Priming the pump. I would then smother the sprouts for a day or two and plant shortly after with a little mycorrizae.

Top dress with something for nitrogen. Manure, ground seed, meals. Mulch in layers lasagna style. Through in a little blood meal if you want. A little ash water. Plant teas from dried leaves. Every time I watered, I fed the soil through filtration. That gave me the flexibility to be somewhat sloppy in my soil mix.

I'm starting over now. In a new area with somewhat different resources. One advantage, I have a fertilizer factory in the back. My yucca is a different varity. Not the same saponin content.

The best advice I think I could give you if you haven't already would be to look over Lowenfels trilogy and to check out Tim's (Microbeman) website. KIS posted some pretty good podcasts recently that are worth a listen as well.

[moose eater]

h.h. wrote:

>>""" Every time I watered, I fed the soil through filtration. That gave me the flexibility to be somewhat sloppy in my soil mix."""<<

This confused me a bit. I'm still scratching my chin and cog-i-tating on some of the other topics you raised, but please help me to better understand the line above.

Thanks!

Edit: Are you referring to watering with RO, so as to avoid any negative mineral or other interactions between your soil contents and untreated H2O contents of similar type?

Also, re. pod casts, complex images, videos, etc., I've got a 56k dial-up in a rural location with an aerial span of 2-strand long enough that both utilities claim such a span doesn't exist, and snails on Quaaludes knit sweaters while playing gin rummy while simpler stuff loads on this dinosaur of a computer. The utility says they won't be bringing newer style phone lines into my world during my life-time (seriously), so for now, the sluggish snails rule what I can and can't download.

[moose eater]

I went to the link you'd posted, and will go back again in a bit.

As I wrote to h.h., I mainly use clean ash that's been screened/sieved through 1/4" hardware cloth, thus incorporating mostly clean ash, though some smaller chunks of charcoal get in there.

I haven't really used much charcoal in the soil for years, and very rarely if at all back then for cannabis. But in that this is about changing things up a bit, in pursuit of 'the better parts of what was,' as stated earlier, given some thought, I'll attempt any number of plausible efforts.

Thanks!!

Originally Posted by MrBungle

Are you guys precharging the biochar or just tossing it into the soil?

In my research I found that if the bio-char isn't precharged, it will only absorb nutrients from your soil until it is charged on its own

[moose eater]

For maintaining (or trying to maintain) an environment suitable for microbes, I've already been using fulvic and humic acids (in advance of the organics breaking down), limited amounts of hygrozyme, Liquid karma, and molasses, as well as micorhizae. Haven't expanded much in the direction of other microbial additions.

I'd some time back used Worm Gold with rock dust, kelp, etc., added in, but found that having others playing with ingredients I was already either adding, or using other sources for, could cause more trouble than good at times. Some of that is obviously affected by the supplemental feeding, and insufficient deductive reasoning where specific amendments are concerned.

Haven't had unpasteurized or non-homogenized milk since I lived on a small farm during grad school, though I know it's around.

Some of this incorporates a layer or form of gardening I've never considered.

|I only recently became aware of or interested in Azomite, which sounds like something you may or may not be using in your char inoculation/fermentation..

Thanks

Originally Posted by DocTim420

I have played with biochar off and on and right now, I am in the 90/10 camp (the 50/50 mix sucked big time!). 10% charged biochar mixed with 90% Malibu Compost is what I am working with now.

To charge virgin biochar, I use a mixture that includes rock dust (land minerals), Sea90 (sea minerals), Mycorrhizae (Promix PUR powder) and Raw Milk (non-homogenized milk is loaded with bacteria, amino acids, protein, etc).

Biochar does many things--include providing bacteria a habitat within the grow medium and increasing air/water porosity (replacing the need for perlite). At the 90/10 ratio there is also a nice increase in available calcium...so say various studies and this one old timer that convinced me to revisit biochar.

[moose eater]

I'll try and print a smattering of the various soil recipes that formed the proverbial trail in between those already posted, 'pot holes' and all, to include some that were used in the Classic 600s described above this A.M.

[h.h.]

A structured lasagna style mulch held together by starches from various seeds and grains. A little dirt mixed in for minerals. This provides a simple compost tea as my water filters through. To this I can add hotter ingredients if needed. Cap it off with carbonous/brown material to slow the release of nitrogen.

I like to use finely ground high protein seed to feed the herd. Black beans area good source. I used seeds off of my acacia tree. Sprinkled on top of the mulch and watered in.

The San Pedro was because I had it. It is said to have many qualities which brought me to wonder if perhaps it had some usefulness in the soil. Similar cacti harbor endobacteria that help to break down the minerals in the rock that they grow in. Not sure what actually transfers to the soil... Anything that grows in harsh conditions poises benefits IMO. I was growing in the desert. I wanted desert compost.

[DocTim420]

Originally Posted by moose eater

...|I only recently became aware of or interested in Azomite, which sounds like something you may or may not be using in your char inoculation/fermentation..

Thanks

Let me direct you to an interesting concept: naturally occurring elements. Of the 118 identified elements, 92 elements (#'s 1-94, except 43 & 61) are believed to occur naturally on Earth; the remaining 24 are classified as being "synthesized".

Sea90 (sea minerals, sourced from the Sea of Cortez but distributed out of Georgia) contains all 92 naturally occurring elements and over 50,000 organic compounds (plus a few exotic things from outer space--after all 3/4's of Earth's surface is "ocean").

Agrowinn rock dust (sourced locally from Encinitas) contains 57 naturally occurring elements. While Azomite (sourced from Utah) contains 70 naturally occurring elements (13 more than Agrowinn, but 22 less than Sea90).

Comparing Agrowinn and Azomite can be funny, Agrowinn has neartly twice the amount of Ca & Mg, but has less Si; both contain about same levels Al, but for me, Azomite is twice the price than Agrowinn.

One secret this old fucker discovered is the magic of "diversity". Not all sources of a given element are equal, but sourcing a single element (like Ca) from multiple sources (gypsum, bone meal, DE, rock dust, etc) provides me with better results in both plant health, as well as the two Q's (quality and quantity...in that order).

Others will champion simplicity and suggest no more than 16 minerals are adequate to grow killer ganja; that's fine for them. I am obviously in the 92 mineral camp (and staunch member of the "more the merrier gang"). I am actually quite happy with my perpetual garden's results--each plant yields not less than 1/4 lb of manicured buds every 7-8 days (45 or so harvests per year).