I was given a couple kush seeds last season(not sure on the breeder) one I grew out.it got really tall,lst would probably be a good idea just for general maintenance. I had to have a 6' ladder in the garden to check the top.I only fed with a tea I brewed every week (powdered bat guano during flower)but it seemed to respond really well to nutes.I'm in the northeast and had to chop early due to weather/rot.I personally would not try growing it out again due to my location,which is too bad.it was a really nice looking plant,big branches and nice buds.GL
Personally though, I like to top and train my girls a bit. I prefer to have wide bushes instead of tall trees, but that's more for privacy purposes than anything else. I know nothing about Critical Kush, but from what little I know it's designed to be a pretty heavy yielder if I'm not mistaken? So it shouldn't be too finicky and it shouldn't be too tough to get good results outdoors.
Unless you're growing some kind of high class OG or some other finicky strain, growing isn't all too difficult and your friend should be able to get himself a great harvest! Got a couple of questions that I need to ask before I can give you guys some solid advice though.
What medium are you using? Coco? Homemade soil? Bagged soil?
What nutes? Bottled nutes or soil amendments?
The only plants that I recommend NOT topping/LST would be your dense, low yielding indicas. However, something to consider about training plants. Most people train their plants in order to get the full use of their lights indoors. Take a 1000 watt for example, can light up a 4x4 sqft area easy, so growers will train their plants to fill the entire 4x4 sqft area by making an even canopy. This maximizes yields indoors because it maximizes the use of their light indoors.
But when you're outdoors you don't really need to worry about maximizing your light use because you've got the sun to take advantage of! The sun doesn't care if your plants are trained or not, you'll still get good growth either way with the help of our friend the sun
Growing outdoors, there are only a handful of things that you really need to stay on top of to have a successful harvest. How you grow them doesn't matter all too much so long as the following are taken care of.
- Watering
Stay on top of your watering, seriously. Not sure where you live and I don't really need to know, but when I grew outdoors it would get to 100-110 outside during the summer sometimes. During the summer months I would have to water my girls 3 to even 4 times a day! When it's that hot outside, you need to be going outside constantly to make sure your pots have enough water in them. Throughout the day, stick your finger into your pot and check the moisture. If it's not moist inside the soil where your finger is then you need to water again. This is pretty much the only way you are going to destroy a plant outdoors. I can't tell you how many times I'd come outside at 9am to be greeted with droopy girls when I first started. I really underestimated how much water they needed when I first started. When you're growing in big containers (15+ gallons) outdoors you'll need to water quite a bit, especially when it's hot! Stay on top of this and you've seriously already won more than half the battle!
- Hot temps
I recommend your friend grabs himself a bottle of Pro-Tekt asap. It's an organic silica supplement and is pretty much mandatory when you're growing in hot temps. Silica won't make your plants immune to hot temps by any means, but it will help them deal with the hot temps much better. The smallest bottle is $15-20 on Amazon and should be more than enough to last you for an entire grow.
- Pest management
Your other biggest problem aside from watering. Your friend will grow to have a burning hatred for caterpillars. Those little fuckers always find your biggest and best buds and start munching away, leaving a train of shit as they go. To add insult to injury, when they're done eating, the buds they destroyed will soon succumb to bud rot. I have a recipe for you to help with pest management though, tried and true for me. 100% organic and can even be used on the plants when they're flowering.
Buy yourself some habanero peppers, or the hottest peppers you can find. Habanero at a minimum though. Boil the habaneros in a pot of water with some garlic and onion, boil it down for however long it takes to get it extremely concentrated. Then strain it and put the concentrated habanero water in your sprayer and dilute it with a little water, then spray it all over every surface of your plant. This spray can be used until the last week of flower, I've gone up to the last 3-4 days of flower with no consequences. This will NOT add a spicy flavor to your plants at all and will in no way affect the flavor of the buds. Mold/mildew won't be an issue either since you should have plenty of airflow outdoors to avoid that. This works because any pests that attempt to eat your buds will die instantly, some of the pests will die just from making contact with the spray. A lot of the pests that attack our plants don't have exoskeletons, if a spider mite gets this spray on them they'll fry. Have you ever got jalapeno juice in an open wound before? Imagine that being your entire body, but with habanero instead. Mites and other small critters like that will die upon contact. Caterpillars won't die from contact, but once they take a bit of something that's been sprayed with the pepper juice they'll quickly die too. This is cheap to make too!
Bonus points if you buy yourself some Neem Seed Meal and top dress the plants with them. Neem Meal has good NPK ratios and is great for pest management as well. Top dressing with crab meal will also be beneficial to you, crab meal produces microbes called "chitin" that will go to town and pretty much any pest that attempts to live in your soil. These little microbes are a Godsend and will eat aphids, fungus gnats, etc, assuming they haven't eaten their eggs already of course!
So pretty much, just take care of those three things and you should have yourself a successful harvest. Nutrients/grow medium are all a matter of personal preference, what works for one person may not work for another. I'm an organic guy personally, but I've had some hydro put in my face that was nothing short of art. If you reply with your choice in nutes/grow medium I'd be more than happy to help out with that in any way I can.
Best of luck to you and your friend in your venture.
Is it a good bagged soil? Or Miracle Grow? Good soil is absolutely crucial. And make sure the horse manure has properly decomposed enough, don't want things getting too hot!
I plan on doing CK also. I'm using a super soil mix with compost and worm castings from our local farm. It will be my first time. I was wondering if I should expect to use nutrients with the super soil also. Or will the soil be enough. I also will be using Recharge if you've heard of it. It contains billions of beneficial living soil microbes that load up depleted soils with organic nutrition. Any info will be greatly appreciated thank you.Is it a good bagged soil? Or Miracle Grow? Good soil is absolutely crucial. And make sure the horse manure has properly decomposed enough, don't want things getting too hot!
As for the holes, well, that's entirely up to you. Digging a hole is similar to putting it into a pot, the bigger the hole/pot the bigger the plant. Just be careful about planting in a hole because it leaves you vulnerable to more pests than if you used a pot instead. Gotta start worrying about gophers and all that other fun stuff.
I sprayed the pepper on the entire plant though, even the buds. Just stop spraying in the last 4-5 days of harvest and you'll be fine. It's potent stuff, but not potent enough to make your harvest taste like habaneros
Well, the tl;dr way to summarize what I'm about to type up would be to say that the soil will be enough assuming you've followed sub's recipe to an exact T, including letting it sit for 45-60 days. As long as you follow his instructions, you'll only need to water the soil. No catch!
Yea I haven't gotten the mix yet. CC's sounds better for my time frame only got a month or so to let sit. I cannot find CC's mix online tho or any info. Just people talking about it. Does CC stand for something. Thanks for the info you've been a big help really appreciate it. A lot of people don't take the time on other fourms.Well, the tl;dr way to summarize what I'm about to type up would be to say that the soil will be enough assuming you've followed sub's recipe to an exact T, including letting it sit for 45-60 days. As long as you follow his instructions, you'll only need to water the soil. No catch!
Gonna be a bit of a lengthy reply so forgive me in advance
Please allow me to explain a little as to how organic soil works exactly in hopes that it will give you a better idea of what's going on with your soil and it's relationship with your plants. Keep in mind that this is based on my limited knowledge and I'm sure someone with more expertise would be able to provide better information.
A typical blend of soil will consist of a base (typically peat or coco), aeration (perlite, pumice, lava rocks, rice hulls, etc), compost (EWC and/or compost), and organic amendments (meals, guanos, minerals, etc). Your soil will have no life without any compost and amendments, without those two components you pretty much just have dirt. Your base (coco or peat) is mostly carbon based where as most of your amendments are nitrogen based. Individually, your peat and your amendments won't be able to do much on their own, however when they're combined they can begin the composting process. This allows the amendments to release their nutrients into the base via decomposition, creating a living soil. The compost that you add to your soil mix provides nutrients and microbes, EWC does this as well.
When you make a soil mix, you're combining a base, aeration, compost, and amendments together into one single medium. By keeping it moist and turning it consistently, you're provided the microbes with the air and water they need to survive. Your amendments (blood meal or guano for example) have their own set of NPK ratios, however the nutrients aren't readily available for the plants to absorb until they've decomposed. This is why people use synthetic nutes, because synthetic nutes are designed to be made available to the plant instantly. So pretty much, the things that will help your amendments decompose come in many shapes and sizes. You have the microbes (fungi and bacteria) which are responsible for munching on the amendments in your soil, they then proceed to excrete the amendments back into the soil. The excrement from these microbes is where your nutrients come from, once your meals/guanos/etc have been devoured by these microbes, the nutrients are excreted out of the microbes and are now available to the plant whenever it feels like eating. There will also be a variety of bugs doing this same process as well, you'll come to see little mites/flies in your soil that are actually good guys. They munch on your decomposing amendments and their excrement is also packed full of nutrients similar to the microbes. Other bugs responsible for this include millipedes, roly polys, soldier flys, and earthworms. All of these microbes and bugs are responsible for providing your plants with the nutrients it needs to survive from start to finish.
That's where your recharge comes in, I happen to use that stuff by the way, it's great! However, recharge doesn't actually load up anything with nutrients. All recharge is is microbes (bacteria and fungi) and a little bit of kelp to keep them alive. Recharge is responsible for recharging the life in your soil, however if you don't have any food for them to munch on they will eventually grow dormant and die off, producing no results. Recharge should be used in conjunction with top dressings. Recharge will essentially jump start the organic process, because it fills your soil with the microbes needed to help decompose the amendments you top dress with.
Another thing to keep in mind is that some things decompose faster than others. Alfalfa meal will begin decomposing pretty much instantly, where as something like blood meal or bone meal can take well over 30 days to fully decompose. Guano will also take near 30 days to fully decompose. This is what people mean when they say your soil is "hot". When people say your soil is "hot", that really means that the soil is decomposing at a rapid rate. When this happens, things literally get hot. Decomposing matter can actually reach temperatures of up to 180 degrees in fact! This is one of the reasons you need to "cook" your soil for a bit, because you don't your roots to be in decomposing soil that's over 100 degrees or they'll get fried! Once the soil is cooked, it's been decomposed. When the soil is cooking, it's decomposing. You want things to be decomposed before you start growing, not decomposing! You'll need to be careful of the compost you use for this exact reason.
The reason I explain all of this is so that you'll know what the reasoning behind the supersoil being enough on it's own without any additional nutes. It's been a while since I've run sub's soil, but from what I can recall, it has two different types of guano, blood meal, bone meals, alfalfa meal, kelp meal, azomite, dolomite lime, and some other stuff that I'm sure I'm forgetting. Not to mention all of the stuff in the bagged soil you purchase for it, I believe he uses 6-8 bags of Roots Organic as his base? Point is, his soil has a TON of stuff in it. Once this soil has finished decomposing, it's some potent stuff for sure. That's why you only want to fill half of your final container with sub's soil, because of how incredibly potent it is! If you were only using bagged soil then you would definitely need to supplement with nutrients somehow. I've yet to come across a bagged soil that will get you through an entire indoor cycle let alone outdoor. They do this on purpose so that you'll need to buy their bottled nute line ups. The supersoil has so much in it though that you don't need to supplement with anything, even for an entire outdoor cycle. All that you need to do is keep the soil alive by providing it with water, if your microbes die then you have nothing to deliver nutrients to your plants. Your soil is literally a living entity. The roots of your plant actually communicate with the microbes living in your soil, when your plant needs a specific nutrient, it signals it's needs to the microbes. The microbes then go to your buffet in the soil, eat their fill, then go back to the roots and defecate readily available nutrients for the roots to immediately absorb. This is why you don't have to do anything, your plant will tell the microbes exactly what it wants and assuming what it wants is in your soil, the microbes will gladly oblige!
I have nothing against Sub or his soil, it's just that there is much better out there in my opinion. Sub's soil served me well when I was using it though, and worked exactly as he claims. It's just that the blood/bone meals and guanos take a long time to decompose and you can get the same nutrients from other sources. I'm running CC's mix now, and if you haven't already made your supersoil I'd recommend looking into CC's mix as it's much better for a variety of reasons. If your supersoil is already made then don't fret, it will still provide you with a quality organic harvest!
CC's mix is just better because it uses a mere 7 amendments, these 7 amendments don't take as long to decompose and they provide you with more conservative doses of the nutrients you need for your plants. Apparently, having too high of a phosphorus content in your soil will provide undesirable conditions for certain microbes. CC also uses Oyster Shell Flour instead of Dolomite Lime. OSF provides calcium just like lime does, and buffers your ph like lime does. The difference between it and lime is that it's more readily available because it doesn't take as long to break down as lime. On top of that, OSF provides your soil with trace elements that lime doesn't. The only amendments CC uses are kelp meal, crab meal, and neem meal. Those three meals have all the NPK your plants could ever need while providing you with extra goodies that blood meal and guanos don't. Crab meal provides a 4-3-0 NPK, but is also responsible for producing a unique microbe called "chitin". Chitin is a predator microbe that will eliminate pretty much any kind of pest you can think of. Chitin devour spider mites and gnats, even their eggs and larvae! Neem meal is similar, provides a 6-4-2 NPK while adding the benefits of neem to your soil for more pest control. Kelp meal has a very modest NPK content, where kelp meal really shines is in the plethora of trace elements it provides your soil. The only catch is that CC's soil requires that you top dress occasionally to keep things going.
Good advice, but chitin is actually a polysaccharide, a clear hard substance similar to cellulose which makes up the crab shells. The sharp surfaces of the chitin makes life very hard for insects and nematodes. It also contains nitrogen. I top dress with it. My only concern is with my earthworm population. I don't think they like it very much.I know nothing about Critical Kush, but from what little I know it's designed to be a pretty heavy yielder if I'm not mistaken? So it shouldn't be too finicky and it shouldn't be too tough to get good results outdoors.
Unless you're growing some kind of high class OG or some other finicky strain, growing isn't all too difficult and your friend should be able to get himself a great harvest! Got a couple of questions that I need to ask before I can give you guys some solid advice though.
What medium are you using? Coco? Homemade soil? Bagged soil?
What nutes? Bottled nutes or soil amendments?
The only plants that I recommend NOT topping/LST would be your dense, low yielding indicas. However, something to consider about training plants. Most people train their plants in order to get the full use of their lights indoors. Take a 1000 watt for example, can light up a 4x4 sqft area easy, so growers will train their plants to fill the entire 4x4 sqft area by making an even canopy. This maximizes yields indoors because it maximizes the use of their light indoors.
But when you're outdoors you don't really need to worry about maximizing your light use because you've got the sun to take advantage of! The sun doesn't care if your plants are trained or not, you'll still get good growth either way with the help of our friend the sun
Growing outdoors, there are only a handful of things that you really need to stay on top of to have a successful harvest. How you grow them doesn't matter all too much so long as the following are taken care of.
- Watering
Stay on top of your watering, seriously. Not sure where you live and I don't really need to know, but when I grew outdoors it would get to 100-110 outside during the summer sometimes. During the summer months I would have to water my girls 3 to even 4 times a day! When it's that hot outside, you need to be going outside constantly to make sure your pots have enough water in them. Throughout the day, stick your finger into your pot and check the moisture. If it's not moist inside the soil where your finger is then you need to water again. This is pretty much the only way you are going to destroy a plant outdoors. I can't tell you how many times I'd come outside at 9am to be greeted with droopy girls when I first started. I really underestimated how much water they needed when I first started. When you're growing in big containers (15+ gallons) outdoors you'll need to water quite a bit, especially when it's hot! Stay on top of this and you've seriously already won more than half the battle!
- Hot temps
I recommend your friend grabs himself a bottle of Pro-Tekt asap. It's an organic silica supplement and is pretty much mandatory when you're growing in hot temps. Silica won't make your plants immune to hot temps by any means, but it will help them deal with the hot temps much better. The smallest bottle is $15-20 on Amazon and should be more than enough to last you for an entire grow.
- Pest management
Your other biggest problem aside from watering. Your friend will grow to have a burning hatred for caterpillars. Those little fuckers always find your biggest and best buds and start munching away, leaving a train of shit as they go. To add insult to injury, when they're done eating, the buds they destroyed will soon succumb to bud rot. I have a recipe for you to help with pest management though, tried and true for me. 100% organic and can even be used on the plants when they're flowering.
Buy yourself some habanero peppers, or the hottest peppers you can find. Habanero at a minimum though. Boil the habaneros in a pot of water with some garlic and onion, boil it down for however long it takes to get it extremely concentrated. Then strain it and put the concentrated habanero water in your sprayer and dilute it with a little water, then spray it all over every surface of your plant. This spray can be used until the last week of flower, I've gone up to the last 3-4 days of flower with no consequences. This will NOT add a spicy flavor to your plants at all and will in no way affect the flavor of the buds. Mold/mildew won't be an issue either since you should have plenty of airflow outdoors to avoid that. This works because any pests that attempt to eat your buds will die instantly, some of the pests will die just from making contact with the spray. A lot of the pests that attack our plants don't have exoskeletons, if a spider mite gets this spray on them they'll fry. Have you ever got jalapeno juice in an open wound before? Imagine that being your entire body, but with habanero instead. Mites and other small critters like that will die upon contact. Caterpillars won't die from contact, but once they take a bit of something that's been sprayed with the pepper juice they'll quickly die too. This is cheap to make too!
Bonus points if you buy yourself some Neem Seed Meal and top dress the plants with them. Neem Meal has good NPK ratios and is great for pest management as well. Top dressing with crab meal will also be beneficial to you, crab meal produces microbes called "chitin" that will go to town and pretty much any pest that attempts to live in your soil. These little microbes are a Godsend and will eat aphids, fungus gnats, etc, assuming they haven't eaten their eggs already of course!
So pretty much, just take care of those three things and you should have yourself a successful harvest. Nutrients/grow medium are all a matter of personal preference, what works for one person may not work for another. I'm an organic guy personally, but I've had some hydro put in my face that was nothing short of art. If you reply with your choice in nutes/grow medium I'd be more than happy to help out with that in any way I can.
Best of luck to you and your friend in your venture.
Ohh ok, I thought they were microbes that killed bugs but seems I was wrong so good to know!
Clackamas Coots is what CC stands for.
I grew CK for the past 2 years. I just stopped growing this strain recently. Got my seed from Herbies and it's a Barneys Farm strain.
Anyway, indoors ain't outdoors.
Last year I amended Pro-mix with Peruvian seabird guano NPK averages around 12-10-3... I added Neptunes harvest kelp meal to boost up the K. I prefer heavier K (1-0-2).
Last years bloom boosters was a mix between synthetic and organic Grow More Hula Blend and Jamaican Bat guano.
I yielded over a LB per plant. I used those big black contractor garbage bags and doubled them up. Poked holes on the bottom.
Filled 80-90% of the bag with Pro-Mix
I started in the last week of May and it was an unusually hot and dry summer. Harvested at the beginning of October.
These are the 2 CK I grew. I had like 5 different strains
OK I found cc mix I didn't realize it was a kit sorry. Two weeks for this mix is perfect for me I'm going to go with it. Just 1 last question you said requires top dressing once and a while. What do I use so I can have it ready. I understand top dressing. I'm really good in veg but get lost sometimes in flower. I'm growing white widow,blue cheese,critical kush,liberty haze, and a six shooter all out door with that cc's mix,recharge and whatever top dressings I need.Well, the tl;dr way to summarize what I'm about to type up would be to say that the soil will be enough assuming you've followed sub's recipe to an exact T, including letting it sit for 45-60 days. As long as you follow his instructions, you'll only need to water the soil. No catch!
Gonna be a bit of a lengthy reply so forgive me in advance
Please allow me to explain a little as to how organic soil works exactly in hopes that it will give you a better idea of what's going on with your soil and it's relationship with your plants. Keep in mind that this is based on my limited knowledge and I'm sure someone with more expertise would be able to provide better information.
A typical blend of soil will consist of a base (typically peat or coco), aeration (perlite, pumice, lava rocks, rice hulls, etc), compost (EWC and/or compost), and organic amendments (meals, guanos, minerals, etc). Your soil will have no life without any compost and amendments, without those two components you pretty much just have dirt. Your base (coco or peat) is mostly carbon based where as most of your amendments are nitrogen based. Individually, your peat and your amendments won't be able to do much on their own, however when they're combined they can begin the composting process. This allows the amendments to release their nutrients into the base via decomposition, creating a living soil. The compost that you add to your soil mix provides nutrients and microbes, EWC does this as well.
When you make a soil mix, you're combining a base, aeration, compost, and amendments together into one single medium. By keeping it moist and turning it consistently, you're provided the microbes with the air and water they need to survive. Your amendments (blood meal or guano for example) have their own set of NPK ratios, however the nutrients aren't readily available for the plants to absorb until they've decomposed. This is why people use synthetic nutes, because synthetic nutes are designed to be made available to the plant instantly. So pretty much, the things that will help your amendments decompose come in many shapes and sizes. You have the microbes (fungi and bacteria) which are responsible for munching on the amendments in your soil, they then proceed to excrete the amendments back into the soil. The excrement from these microbes is where your nutrients come from, once your meals/guanos/etc have been devoured by these microbes, the nutrients are excreted out of the microbes and are now available to the plant whenever it feels like eating. There will also be a variety of bugs doing this same process as well, you'll come to see little mites/flies in your soil that are actually good guys. They munch on your decomposing amendments and their excrement is also packed full of nutrients similar to the microbes. Other bugs responsible for this include millipedes, roly polys, soldier flys, and earthworms. All of these microbes and bugs are responsible for providing your plants with the nutrients it needs to survive from start to finish.
That's where your recharge comes in, I happen to use that stuff by the way, it's great! However, recharge doesn't actually load up anything with nutrients. All recharge is is microbes (bacteria and fungi) and a little bit of kelp to keep them alive. Recharge is responsible for recharging the life in your soil, however if you don't have any food for them to munch on they will eventually grow dormant and die off, producing no results. Recharge should be used in conjunction with top dressings. Recharge will essentially jump start the organic process, because it fills your soil with the microbes needed to help decompose the amendments you top dress with.
Another thing to keep in mind is that some things decompose faster than others. Alfalfa meal will begin decomposing pretty much instantly, where as something like blood meal or bone meal can take well over 30 days to fully decompose. Guano will also take near 30 days to fully decompose. This is what people mean when they say your soil is "hot". When people say your soil is "hot", that really means that the soil is decomposing at a rapid rate. When this happens, things literally get hot. Decomposing matter can actually reach temperatures of up to 180 degrees in fact! This is one of the reasons you need to "cook" your soil for a bit, because you don't your roots to be in decomposing soil that's over 100 degrees or they'll get fried! Once the soil is cooked, it's been decomposed. When the soil is cooking, it's decomposing. You want things to be decomposed before you start growing, not decomposing! You'll need to be careful of the compost you use for this exact reason.
The reason I explain all of this is so that you'll know what the reasoning behind the supersoil being enough on it's own without any additional nutes. It's been a while since I've run sub's soil, but from what I can recall, it has two different types of guano, blood meal, bone meals, alfalfa meal, kelp meal, azomite, dolomite lime, and some other stuff that I'm sure I'm forgetting. Not to mention all of the stuff in the bagged soil you purchase for it, I believe he uses 6-8 bags of Roots Organic as his base? Point is, his soil has a TON of stuff in it. Once this soil has finished decomposing, it's some potent stuff for sure. That's why you only want to fill half of your final container with sub's soil, because of how incredibly potent it is! If you were only using bagged soil then you would definitely need to supplement with nutrients somehow. I've yet to come across a bagged soil that will get you through an entire indoor cycle let alone outdoor. They do this on purpose so that you'll need to buy their bottled nute line ups. The supersoil has so much in it though that you don't need to supplement with anything, even for an entire outdoor cycle. All that you need to do is keep the soil alive by providing it with water, if your microbes die then you have nothing to deliver nutrients to your plants. Your soil is literally a living entity. The roots of your plant actually communicate with the microbes living in your soil, when your plant needs a specific nutrient, it signals it's needs to the microbes. The microbes then go to your buffet in the soil, eat their fill, then go back to the roots and defecate readily available nutrients for the roots to immediately absorb. This is why you don't have to do anything, your plant will tell the microbes exactly what it wants and assuming what it wants is in your soil, the microbes will gladly oblige!
I have nothing against Sub or his soil, it's just that there is much better out there in my opinion. Sub's soil served me well when I was using it though, and worked exactly as he claims. It's just that the blood/bone meals and guanos take a long time to decompose and you can get the same nutrients from other sources. I'm running CC's mix now, and if you haven't already made your supersoil I'd recommend looking into CC's mix as it's much better for a variety of reasons. If your supersoil is already made then don't fret, it will still provide you with a quality organic harvest!
CC's mix is just better because it uses a mere 7 amendments, these 7 amendments don't take as long to decompose and they provide you with more conservative doses of the nutrients you need for your plants. Apparently, having too high of a phosphorus content in your soil will provide undesirable conditions for certain microbes. CC also uses Oyster Shell Flour instead of Dolomite Lime. OSF provides calcium just like lime does, and buffers your ph like lime does. The difference between it and lime is that it's more readily available because it doesn't take as long to break down as lime. On top of that, OSF provides your soil with trace elements that lime doesn't. The only amendments CC uses are kelp meal, crab meal, and neem meal. Those three meals have all the NPK your plants could ever need while providing you with extra goodies that blood meal and guanos don't. Crab meal provides a 4-3-0 NPK, but is also responsible for producing a unique microbe called "chitin". Chitin is a predator microbe that will eliminate pretty much any kind of pest you can think of. Chitin devour spider mites and gnats, even their eggs and larvae! Neem meal is similar, provides a 6-4-2 NPK while adding the benefits of neem to your soil for more pest control. Kelp meal has a very modest NPK content, where kelp meal really shines is in the plethora of trace elements it provides your soil. The only catch is that CC's soil requires that you top dress occasionally to keep things going.
It's good quality soil and along with the horse manure we are adding homemade fertilizer (banana skins which have been sitting in water for months) and Canna Terra Vega. Also how long do you think I should leave the horse manure to decompose with the soil?Is it a good bagged soil? Or Miracle Grow? Good soil is absolutely crucial. And make sure the horse manure has properly decomposed enough, don't want things getting too hot!
As for the holes, well, that's entirely up to you. Digging a hole is similar to putting it into a pot, the bigger the hole/pot the bigger the plant. Just be careful about planting in a hole because it leaves you vulnerable to more pests than if you used a pot instead. Gotta start worrying about gophers and all that other fun stuff.
I sprayed the pepper on the entire plant though, even the buds. Just stop spraying in the last 4-5 days of harvest and you'll be fine. It's potent stuff, but not potent enough to make your harvest taste like habaneros
They were from clones, and I just top as I think about it kinda thing. That's probably 3 toppings at most
The minerals are a great source of various trace elements and while you definitely don't need them, I feel it's a bit of a stretch to say they're worthless. They're affordable enough on Amazon too
Basalt provides your soil with silica as well as iron, magnesium, and other trace elements. Glacial Rock Dust helps improve the structure of your soil and helps with retaining water. GRD also contains readily available iron, calcium, magnesium and potassium plus micro-nutrients and trace elements. It also increases phosphorous availability to plants. Gypsum gives your girls plenty of sulfer, which has been known to help with terpine production. It isn't necessarily a kit, the site "buildasoil" sells all the stuff you need to mix the soil as a kit but not only is most of the stuff on that site way overpriced, the shipping costs are outrageous. I was able to find every single ingredient in his soil mix on Amazon, all of them came with free prime two day shipping to boot! Check Amazon for all the stuff you need though, you'll be surprised at how affordable most everything is. Each box of amendments will run you $13-15 per 5lb box and the minerals are around the same price range, some a little more expensive but not anything absurdly priced. You should be fine letting the soil sit for a week, two is definitely better, especially if you have some worms to toss in there to give you a hand with everything. For this particular soil, I can't recommend worms enough. Especially if you're growing in 25+ gallon containers. If you plan on making them no-till pots, worms are practically mandatory.
I don't really have much experience with manure to be completely honest with you. All I know about manure is that you usually have to let it sit for a few weeks, even months, depending on how hot the stuff is. Horse manure is supposed to be some really good stuff, just mix it up with some peat and let it decompose for a bit and you should be just fine. I'm sure there are more experienced members on here that could help more with manure. All I know about manure is that horse manure is supposed to be the best you can use, but it should sit and decompose for a bit or you run the risk of making things too hot.
