lack of good discussion about (guerilla) soil

[bombadil.360]

Hortic, yes, you can re-use that soil. you can mix with new soil or ammend it or use it as is. however, as you said, remember that if you use it as is, it will lack nutrients.

best way to give nutrients and mass to soil to be re-used is with earth worm castings and vermiculite.

btw, I forgot to mention, that using only ewc and vermiculite makes for a light soil, light in the sense of weight, so it's best to mix it with good local soil or good clean river bed sand to give it a bit weight to hold the plant down better.

peace

 

[Hortic]

Hortic, yes, you can re-use that soil. you can mix with new soil or ammend it or use it as is. however, as you said, remember that if you use it as is, it will lack nutrients.

best way to give nutrients and mass to soil to be re-used is with earth worm castings and vermiculite.

Thank you for your answer. It seems kind of common-sense but I just needed some outside input.

 

[Tiami]

some very nice tips guys.

@Guyote
unfortunatly there's no natural source of water. everything is done by foot mice chew at the base of the plant. yep that's something I need to deal with otherwise no crop. I have a few ideas.

@bombadil
I'll use some WC, I allways thought of it more as soil conditioner not food source. also I'll be using plenty of manure and maybe some other stuff.

 

[Noggone]

mice chew at the base of the plant. yep that's something I need to deal with otherwise no crop. I have a few ideas

Had that, but only with a winter/spring grow.
What you do is get some pvc piping, maybe 15mm diameter, slit it down one side and put it around the stem. Works well.

As for carting soil amendments, well I used to do that, a lot of work, and given the nature of guerrilla growing, no site is guaranteed permanent, it might get ripped the first year and then you can't use it again. All that work for nothing.
Plus we're not talking backyard growing here, or outdoor growing, ie. growing on your own land, we are talking growing maybe two mile into the forest from the nearest road.
A lot of work carting soil amendments all that way.
I have given up on spending too much time setting up a site, nothing is guaranteed or permanent in guerrilla growing, better just dig a hole, water crystals if needed, and then fertilize with inorganic fertilizer out of a packet.
If you spend little time setting up the grow then if it gets ripped then you haven't lost much in the way of time spent on the grow.

 

[idiit]

^ noggone i agree. the problem with my area is that strain hardiness is critical to being able to harvest any decent od product. hopefully the proactive micro herd foliar spray will reduce the dependence on pure hardy strains. i went to organics for purely practical reasons. the best defense against disease is proper nutrition. when you research this topic you get into soil remineralization. if you are using chemicals you kill off the micro-herd needed to chelate the hard to chelate calcium, mg., and especially trace minerals.

one of the ugliest secrets in the organic movement is that they don't routinely publish trace mineral content of their organic product. i assert this is because their product's trace mineral content sucks. as a community we do need to look at the efficacy of what specific micro orgs. do chelate trace minerals the best. this is a big deal imo.

an obvious alternative is to add already chelated trace minerals in the form of sea solids. sea-90 and sea-crop are well advised topics to research.

so yeah, if you are going to probably lose the patch sooner than later then chem ferts. supplemented by already chelated sea solids in a soil medium that supports canna growing already (doesn't need to be totally replaced) looks good to me. it's a lot less work, more bang for the buck. i am sticking to the pure organic method for my grow area but chem.'s supplemented with sea solids looks valid to me as a supplement technique.