Organic Gold III - Soil Heresy by 3LB soil heresy by the 3LB ~ CW We are about to commit heresy and

tell people that we ALWAYS re-use our soil. No soil has left the garden's of the three_little_birds since before the turn of t he millennium! Some growers will tell folks to throw out their soil after every grow, and we've known plenty of commercial growers that happily do that to make sure they do not have pest or nutrient problems. Maybe that even is the best sol ution for your grow, we can't say for sure, as always your mileage may vary. We are poor simple medical users (and aging hippies, etc.), and spending something like $20 for a bag of FoxFarm soil rubbed us wrong! With our container system it might take 2 full bags of that soil for 3 plants! Now again . . . someone who is involved in commercial (rather than personal medi cal) production might not be so inclined to bother with making sure their soils stay healthy and all the work we go through to ensure our soil's health, but for us it is a labor of love and we feel our results speak for themselves. Anyway, like we said, our soil never leaves our grow, it has all been recycled t o the point that we could not even begin to tell you how many times it's been th rough our system! A good commercial potting mix has always been the base for our soil. We look for a product which is 100% organic, and recommend that you avoid ALL chemical salt ferts like the plague if you value your soil health. This esp ecially includes timed-released chem ferts like osmocote! Depending on what we h ave found for soil, we go from there. Some cheap organic soil mixes contain litt le more than peat, pearlite, and dolomite lime. These absolutely need amending t o start off. Some organic soil mixes are much more complete and need little or n o amending for starters. Organic mushroom compost is certainly one of the hot soil mediums these days, an d we've certainly had great success mixing it in with our soil remixes to add fr esh organic matter. We can't however comment on it's longer terms effects in soi l remixes. Since we found a cheap source of mushroom compost, we have also been top-dressing our plants with it almost exclusively, so we imagine that we will s oon discover if remixing the shroom compost will have any detrimental effects. Once through it's first grow (the plants fed 100% organic with earth juice, teas , fish ferts, and liquid kelp) our container of soil has it's root balls pulled and it is dumped into a very large rubbermaid container w/ a lid (50 gallon cont ainer) These container's are longer than our 2x3 growing containers, so with 2 p eople lifting and dumping, it's not too hard to keep this step neat. Each bin ca n actually hold more than the contents from a single grow-container (2 grow-cont ainers of soil will actually fit, but this makes mixing in amendments very diffi cult and messy.) Now we proceed to give back to our soil mix what our plants hav e taken (and then some.) We get out our kelp meal, bone meal, blood meal, greens and, rock phosphate, diatomaceous earth, and dolomite lime and get mixing. Depen ding on the soil's condition this is also where we might add a little more perli te if soil compaction looks to be a potential problem. Folks are going to ask us how much of these different supplements we add, and th e only honest answer we can give is - it depends! If the plants we'd raised prev iously in that particular container had shown any signs of being short on a majo r nutrient N P-K - it's not too hard to throw in an extra cup or two of the appropri ate organic supplement (Blood meal / Alfalfa meal for N - Bone meal / rock phosp hate for P - kelp meal / greensand for K and other micro nutrients.) A nice full 16 oz plastic cup of each of the prior mentioned ingredients would be our basel ine for supplementing this round of soil re-mix. We will generally double this a mount if any nutrient shortage has shown. . . The greensand and rock phosphate are very slow to dissolve and be absorbed by pl

ants, and are not normally used by many indoor container gardeners. Their slow r elease is what helps to make our system work! They will still be in our soil for the next couple of grows, doing their part for our soil health. This is the poi nt where we would also add some of our own compost (assuming there is some finis hed and ready - if not some mushroom compost has proven to work.) Our compost is made from the usual standards, household veggie food scraps and such, with the addition of all our used grow scraps. Fan leaf, chopped stems, and the "leftover 's" from processing by bubble bag or tumbling are all composted and returned to our soil. Now we will wet this whole mix down lightly and let it "cook" for a spell. We ha ve three large bins like this for soil remixing and composting. Folks always wan t us to be specific on amounts and times, and we do a lot of this by feel, so wh en we say we let the soil cook for a "spell" - how long depends on feel and need ! The minimum time our soil sits is two weeks, and it's sat waiting for use for a couple months like this during slower times in our grow. This time gives soil bacteria a chance to work and make the various organic amendments more quickly a nd easily available for our plants. We use this soil again for another grow, wat ering with our usual array of teas, Earth Juice, etc. If needed, containers are top-dressed with compost (our own or mushroom compost depending on availability) as any soil settling occurs. Upon yet another successful harvest, the soil is reconditioned again. Once we re ached our third mix of soil, we cut back on the soil amendments. The greensand a nd rock phosphate are still working from the last re-mix so we don't need to add any more of them for sure. What remains in your soil at this point in terms of nitrogen and such may depend on your strain, some strains are much more greedy f or some nutrients. So if our plants haven't shown any signs of yellowing as they mature, we figure there is nitrogen enough in the soil for the next round (at l east to get started - we can add more N on the fly with fish ferts and teas if n eeded) and no blood meal is added. If yellowing has occurred then blood meal is added again. Kelp meal is usually added again since many of the major liquid org anic ferts seem a little short on potassium, and also because we like the micro nutrients kelp meal provides to our plants. Dolomite lime will probably be neces sary again too, and it's possible your soil will need even more this time than l ast. Any peat in the soil adds acidity as it decomposes, and the lime balances t his as well as providing magnesium. After the standard 15 - 30 days of standing moistened waiting for use this soil is used still another time. Now our soil has grown 4 crops of herbs and is still going and growing strong. At this point, we have started plants in our soil remixes directly alongside plants in fresh pott ing soil, just to make sure our mix wasn't subtly stunting our plants. The plants grown in our 4th and 5th generation soil remix did far better than th ose directly alongside grown in fresh from the bag FoxFarm OceanForest potting s oil! Because our garden is a continuous harvest setup, once we are to our 4th or 5th remix, it's starting to get hard to keep track of exactly what soil has bee n remixed where, since half used bins of remixes are often dumped together to ma ke room for another round of used soil coming from the garden. So we simply cont inue adding amendments by feel as needed. This is how the three little birds use soil. We know we break the rule we have a ll been told to follow - to never reuse soil. Even those "radicals" we have seen reusing soil, have always described letting their soil go out to their veggie g ardens or flower beds after 3 or 4 grows. We decided to push the envelope and se e how far we could take it . . . We still haven't found a limit for the number of times we remix our soil, and ou r harvests and plant vigor keep improving. Oh, just to add another bit of heresy, you may have noticed our container grows suspended above the floor on wheeled furniture movers. It's a very convenient wa y to keep the plants in larger containers mobile. . . but you also must realize

then (if you think about it) that out grow containers have NO drainage. Our soil mix, which is now has been remixed double digit times, has NEVER been flushed! We warned you all at the start of this post that some might consider it heresy . . . And we can t even begin to tell you how we can break these rules and get better results than average - but it works for us and we wanted to let folks judge for themselves. one thing we might add - we certainly would not remix soil from any containers w here we'd had a bug or disease problem - even getting bud mold would be enough f or us to say - no thanks to a soil remix we were discussing this among "the birds" the other nite - and one line that a l ittle bird said comes to mind . . . "Farmer's don't strip their topsoil after a harvest - or even a few - in fact their soil is their most precious commodity why should it be different for indoor gardening as long as proper care is taken to build healthy soil?"