A way to test organic soil?

Hello RIU,

New member here, long time lurker.

Anyway,

I recently made my first batch of organic soil. I let it cook for 5 weeks, just potted it up this afternoon. Soil looked rich and healthy and had a great smell to it.

Is there a way to test the soil to see if it is too hot? Maybe drop a tomato plant in a pot and see how it does? Just paranoid and I guess and want to make sure everything is correct before I pop 16 beans.

Thanks in advance!

If you have a ppm meter ($15 on amazon) you can do a basic soil fertility test. Of course it gives you no clue what is contributing to the ppm or the balance but at least you get SOMETHING to key on.

I mix 100ml of water with 25ml of soil. The ppm will rise quite a bit in the first few hours and then rise slowly for the first 48 hours or so. I key on the 24 hour number. 875ppm was too hot so I have been aiming for 750-800 and that has been working great.

I don't bother to layer the stuff like super soil. Once a clone is vegged up a bit, just pot up straight into the hot stuff and its water only all throughout veg and flowering. With 600 HPS I have seen it yield up to .75gr/watt when everything goes perfectly. I'm sure with high yield clones it can reach 1gr/watt. Good luck!

I was thinking about testing the run off but your way makes more sense so I will give that a shot. I just didnt think that with organics that it would be messurable compaired to bottled nutes.

I have been growing hydroponically in dwc for the last three or so years and it took me about two years to figure it out and cost me quite a bit between seeds/nutes figuring out how not to kill my plants.

This first round will be from seed(bf blue cheese) till I can pull a good pheno out for a mother plant. Think 16 plants in a 4x4 tent is over kill? ( 3 gal smart pots)?