But, if the soil pH is way off, the plants will get sick before they can change anything. This is what I experienced on my last run. If I had waited for the plants or the soil to do what I thought they were supposed to do, I would have lost the entire grow.
Do you use bottled nutes?
Fungus should be beneficial at all stages. Cannabis prefers fungally dominant soil.
Two Prong probe tester. I stick it up high, then down low and a couple spots and see what's average. It was soil I made with cow manure, compost, peat, perlite and some topsoil. Maybe too much manure not sure. Is what I was thinking.
THat's what I do yes. lol Not on the cheap.
Yes bottled nutes. Can't recall the name brand at the moment, from a farm supply store in town. They sell FF and a few others.
Then you need to pH your nutrient solution.
I used Jack's 3-2-1 fertilizer salts and I followed their instructions. Over the years, I have used just about every way of growing that was trending at the time. I have never used bottled nutrients because it's essentially paying extra for them to dissolve the nutrients in water and I can do that myself.
What brand and model is it? One of the 3 in 1 meters for ph, light and moisture?
Making my own soil is half the fun. I buy one big bag of Ocean Forest for each grow, for the sterility, to start my seedlings. The rest gets mixed 50-50 with my compost and that fills a 10 gallon grow bag. Then the used Ocean Forest becomes part of my soil. One bag will do 2 grow bags.
High, or low pH inhibits nutrient uptake. Here's a chart I use:
Yea, I always had trouble using salts with soil. Imo, salts work best with hydro. Now I'm not saying it can't be done, people do it all the time, it's just the simple fact that they're water soluble, makes them perfect for inert mediums
Salts kill soil microbes. Not good for my compost.
I'm gonna call BS (bro-science) here, or at least it's debatable... If you dump pure undiluted salts into the soil, sure, but at the rates people use for fertilizing their gardens? Highly unlikely. The biggest risk of adding synthetic nutes to organic soil is probably overfeeding the plants, but that's a risk in sterile mediums too...
I've been trying to understand how long it takes salts to break down in the compost pile.
i use masterblend (salt based nute same as jacks) and i added some bacteria to my hydro.one day i had to remove the water because i had too much of them they would force ph to 8 every day....
Depends on what you mean by "break down"... Synthetic ferts are usually water-soluble by design, so they should dissolve as soon as they get wet. If you put a handful of megacrop in your compost pile, it would disappear the next time it rained, vs something like a banana peel which would take significantly longer to "break down" in that sense.