I’ve grown chilis and cannabis without really knowing what I am doing, now I wanted to learn to grow any veggies, but finally learn about soil and prepare it well myself.
I naively tried to use coco substrate with tap water and killed off my tomato seedlings pretty fast. Then I’ve did some research into soil and learned about more organic approaches, and also that pure coco is a bit like dry hydroponics and needs a lot of understanding, and that I probably both over-fertilized and starved them at the same time.
I’m going to start from seeds in Mel’s mix with 1/3 coco 1/3 perlite/vernaculite 1/3 compost. Is this kind of substrate to be treated as organic or as mineral approach? The compost probably adds the typical soil properties including the buffering of pH and EC and taking care of fertilization.
But I do not want to re-pot all the time, it is messy and inconvenient. I don’t really like working with soil. Instead I want to use mineral fertilizers. Once the compost is depleted, can I consider it to be like a non-soil grow? I got a pH/EC sensor to check my water and the drain coming out, diluted a pH- down based on diluted citric acid to normalize my water to 6,5pH, which seems like a good starting point for any situation.
Does it make sense to follow some generic approach (like keeping pH/EC in certain ranges in certain growth stages)? I do not want to use commercial fertilization formula schemes. I want to work with standard off the shelf mineral fertilizers. Is it possible to get decent results with that?
And where can I find that kind of information for general vegetables, like tomatoes or cucumbers etc.?
The whole soil business is pretty overwhelming, but I want to learn enough (without getting a degree in agriculture) so that I can do this not blindly but improvise with available substrates and fertilizer. How to get this knowledge?
I thought compost is supposed to be microbiologically active and fertilization is produced and released by microbial activity, while mineral fertilizers are more typical for hydroponic setups and do not rely on any biological activity, why not buffer nutes directly in the coco? I thought they built up salts over time? Now I’m confused.
What kind of approach are your recommendations based on? It sounds like neither the typical information for soil growing nor like hydroponics, but you do include some organic material in your mix and still fertilize with mineral fertilizers?
Concerning the additives, I thought the point of vernaculite was that it’s porous and was intended to actually keep the water longer, and for pure drainage you would use something else. I already noticed that coco coir also dries pretty quickly and wondered if with these additions it would behave more like soil in how long and how much water it can hold. You do not seem to be fond of them.
What do you recommend to read that explains your perspective? It seems not to fit in any “growing concept” I can recognize, so I’m curious.
“Growing concepts” are simplified methodologies that offer a recipe for those who don’t understand the complexities.
Professionally I advise commercial growers on their farms, greenhouses, etc… so not a beginner. I understand all the little bits and pieces so I can cut through all the bullshit and combine all the fundamental concepts.
I can give you some basics to help you understand my recommendations.
Water holding capacity = particle surface area. In soil, clay has the highest water holding capacity. Coir is a ton of little fibers that hold water in your mix. It needs to be somewhat compacted to work well however.
Plant nutrition - at the molecular level plants can only take up certain forms of nutrients. To the plant fertilizer from compost or a hydroponic blend is the same thing. They are molecularly identical.
Organic matter - this refers to mostly broken down organic material. Microbial activity reduces to a slow steady rate. Compost is organic matter.
Cation Exchange Capacity - this refers to mineral clay or organic matters ability to loosely bind to positively charged nutrients. This keeps them available for plants to use.
Porosity/drainage - these are channels for air/water to move in the soil matrix. Larger particles like sand/perlite/vermiculite are a source of these. Aggregate formation by microbial activity also create these.
“understand all the bits and pieces so I can cut through all the bullshit” -> that’s exactly what I was hoping to do.
Do you have some reading recommendation? You know, like in every area there’s this one book or two you’d give a beginner to learn the most important things right from the start, and the rest is details you can fill in and refine later ? In another comment I got some book recommendations, don’t know what you think about them.
Contrary to a different commenter, who advised not to mix soil and non-soil, you seem not to have any issues with fertilizing with mineral NPK fertilizer on soil?
I also did that before without second thought, but I got warned that it kind of leaves the microbes in the soil/compost starving or something. I guess that would matter only if you try to do “living soil” or something, and otherwise the worst thing that happens is the microbial life in the soil dies off and I just have depleted substrate (with possibly molecules holding NPK in locked form that cannot be released without the microbes) that I can fertilize with mineral fertilizer without any issue, is this correct ?
And thanks for replying :)