Recycled Organic Living Soil (ROLS) and No Till Thread

[boblawblah421]

Willing and Wanting, but... life goes ways, and stuff.

This is my most lurked thread... anywhere really, because this would be my preferred method. It's just that a lot of it is difficult to read, some of it is difficult to understand, and there are lots of conflicting opinions, endless details, and plenty of ego. This thread fries my brains faster than almost anything else i've tried to read. Idk if it's the language or the format or what.

Regardless, i like what you guys are doing here, and intend to follow the path... if i can find it!

Pick through it all, & take the ideas that sound right to you.

You can't go wrong.

 

[x713]

could someone please explain to me what ph is?i seem to forgot what it means after being expose to the natural truth .its funny watching people talking about phing in organics i havent touched a pen or phup/down in 5 years lol

 

[hyroot]

could someone please explain to me what ph is?i seem to forgot what it means after being expose to the natural truth .its funny watching people talking about phing in organics i havent touched a pen or phup/down in 5 years lol

even when I did hydro over 6 years ago. I never did any ph then. I always had good results. I thought my hydro was organic then too. I know.better now. Ph products always seemed like a gimick and pointless to me. Those ph up down will burn your skin and that doesn't sound good at all for plants. Anyone that has grown for quite a while can almost smell any change in the water. I use tap water. I can smell when the chlorine is gone or not when aerating. My local water doesn't use chloromine..

 

[x713]

cats are to busy trying to be scientist concoctions.i did coco to and used maxibloom with no ph and produced some good plants.it also bother me when i see people us bottle *organic*line like general organics lol how do you even fall for that .

@hyroot i see the whole lime in soil a big gimmick to.i never used it before maybe because we go though a lot of eggs so i have tons of egg shells to compost who knows.

alot of people try way to hard,i simplify my grow i use good compost/ewc that i make,aloe,silica,enzymes*barley*.i might splurge out and get some pul power see whats its all about,been a while since ive gone to the hydro store

 

[hyroot]

I only used lime when I did super soil before I learned it takes years for lime to break down. Coco, compost, teas, egg shells, etc... Are enough for a buffer.

 

[reasonevangelist]

I think one of the issues i'm having with understanding some of this stuff, is that i'm a "why?" learner: if i don't understand why i'm being told to do something, it "does not compute," and i can't use the information until it makes sense. But once i understand why, and it makes sense, it's permanently etched into my cortex, and i'll never forget it. There's a lot going on here, lots of pieces and parts and things that can be substituted for one reason or another, lots of details and debate over preference, and the 'whys' get lost amidst the static (at least in the format occurring here).

It's inevitable that if i say "tell me the simplest way to get started," someone will either post a link, or say "google it." And further inevitable that i will get into the instructed process, only to encounter dissenting opinions from others of seemingly equivalent experience, insisting that i'm doing something wrong (lol). So, in order to avoid costly mistakes (not just with money, but time and energy as well), i want to fully understand just what it is i'm supposed to be doing, before i do anything. If i can understand the fundamentals, well enough to form a preference where there is no "right" answer, then i can begin sourcing materials, and eventually acquiring them, and eventually getting started... and then someday, eventually (lol), i will have a "cooked" ROLS ready to actually plant something.

If anyone knows of a more organized format that exists to help me understand what i need to know, prior to being able to make decisions about what to source, and from where... i'd love to see it.

But at this moment, it honestly feels like hydro would be easier to understand (and i'm sure it's significantly faster to get started... i just don't like the idea of having no way to determine the ecological and potential personal health impacts of the materials required... if i went hydro, i'd want it to be as "clean and green" as possible, which i'm guessing is another 'beast' in its own right...)

 

[Mohican]

Hydro is much more time intensive and you can't leave your plants alone or one of the million little things you need to monitor will go wrong and you will kill the plants. Soil is so much more forgiving.

 

[x713]

it bother me when people say google it,its like well this is a forum after all to ask questions lol

since ive been feeding aloe vera and silica i noticed a huge difference in growth its nuts

i always tend to screw things up and over think it when i try to fingure out why stuff happens,i been able to keep my ocd under control and just copy everyone and get same results.some things are bettter unlearned

 

[reasonevangelist]

Hydro is much more time intensive and you can't leave your plants alone or one of the million little things you need to monitor will go wrong and you will kill the plants. Soil is so much more forgiving.

The thing about ROLS seems to be that if you don't get it set up correctly at the beginning, you're stuck with whatever mistake you made, until whatever you use to amend, can *eventually join with the existing web.

Whereas w/ hydro, as long as you pay attention, you should be able to make micro-adjustments to keep things where they should be. So, more work during the grow, but less understanding of soil food web and sourcing various materials, and less time, to get it up and running. Trade-offs and such. I'm pretty meticulous about most things, so i don't see myself making any significant measurement mistakes (measure twice, cut once!).

Certainly not trying to start a ROLS vs Hydro discussion... i already know which i would prefer (ROLS), but i can see some potential situational advantages for me, if i were to go hydro, due to my current situation (e.g. mixing soil is strenuous and visible...). However, i also see, and prefer, the idea of doing most of the work up front, and just letting it do what it does. Which is why i'm even posting in this thread in the first place. lol. I want to figure out exactly what i need to do, so i can get that initial setup done, and move on to the next thing, while my yet-unmade first ROLS batch "cooks."

I would like to start at least 3 months ago, if at all possible.

 

[hyroot]

The thing about ROLS seems to be that if you don't get it set up correctly at the beginning, you're stuck with whatever mistake you made, until whatever you use to amend, can *eventually join with the existing web.

Whereas w/ hydro, as long as you pay attention, you should be able to make micro-adjustments to keep things where they should be. So, more work during the grow, but less understanding of soil food web and sourcing various materials, and less time, to get it up and running. Trade-offs and such. I'm pretty meticulous about most things, so i don't see myself making any significant measurement mistakes (measure twice, cut once!).

Certainly not trying to start a ROLS vs Hydro discussion... i already know which i would prefer (ROLS), but i can see some potential situational advantages for me, if i were to go hydro, due to my current situation (e.g. mixing soil is strenuous and visible...). However, i also see, and prefer, the idea of doing most of the work up front, and just letting it do what it does. Which is why i'm even posting in this thread in the first place. lol. I want to figure out exactly what i need to do, so i can get that initial setup done, and move on to the next thing, while my yet-unmade first ROLS batch "cooks."

I would like to start at least 3 months ago, if at all possible.

First you make your soil mix. Then grow your plants. Then chop. Pull the stalk. Now ROLS begins ( recycling soil). Recook the soil while its still in the pot for 30 days, topdressing with compost and castings. Watering the pot with teas. This breaks down the roots and builds the microbial populations. Sort of an ecosystem beneath the surface. Then you plant your next small plant. top dress with compost and casting and grow. after a week or 2 one the plant has acclamated itself. Its ready for nutes. So top dress nutes and then more casting and compost. thats it. With Rols microbes are everything. Homemade vermicompost is the cornerstone of living organics...

I use compost teas once every few weeks. Seed sprout teas (enzymes and minerals) once a week. Spray with kelp and aloe twice a week.

You can use what ever soil recipe you like. Rols is about longevity and sustainability. Re-using the same soil for years. The bacteria, fungi, and enzymes make it possible and more beneficial and more efficient. Rols is true organics. So no bottled nutes because they all have chems no matter what they claim. Hydro in not organic. with organics. you feed the soil. microbes do all the work. The plant eats what it wants and when it wants. Be able to grow to its full potential. with hydro yyou are force feeding the plant. so the plant adapts and eats when its supplied. In turn diminishing its potential of its genetics.

All this is clearly explained at the beginning of the thread..

 

[reasonevangelist]

First you make your soil mix. Then grow your plants. Then chop. Pull the stalk. Now ROLS begins ( recycling soil). Recook the soil while its still in the pot for 30 days, topdressing with compost and castings. Watering the pot with teas. This breaks down the roots and builds the microbial populations. Sort of an ecosystem beneath the surface. Then you plant your next small plant. top dress with compost and casting and grow. after a week or 2 one the plant has acclamated itself. Its ready for nutes. So top dress nutes and then more casting and compost. thats it. With Rols microbes are everything. Homemade vermicompost is the cornerstone of living organics...

I use compost teas once every few weeks. Seed sprout teas (enzymes and minerals) once a week. Spray with kelp and aloe twice a week.

You can use what ever soil recipe you like. Rols is about longevity and sustainability. Re-using the same soil for years. The bacteria, fungi, and enzymes make it possible and more beneficial and more efficient. Rols is true organics. So no bottled nutes because they all have chems no matter what they claim. Hydro in not organic. with organics. you feed the soil. microbes do all the work. The plant eats what it wants and when it wants. Be able to grow to its full potential. with hydro yyou are force feeding the plant. so the plant adapts and eats when its supplied. In turn diminishing its potential of its genetics.

All this is clearly explained at the beginning of the thread..

Ah, good, that helped me refine my line of questioning. I want to understand how to start from the right place, so that, from the beginning, i'm building a soil that i can reuse for many years, preferably "no till." I saw someone around here leaving their root balls in the soil. How many people think that's a viable strat?

So i suppose the recycling part is an advanced concept, and isn't something i need to worry about until after i've built and used a soil.

i don't want to spend a fortune on soil, or take months to get the soil ready to go, or build anything into the soil that will cause problems for either me or the plants or the earth.

I want the cleanest, safest, most natural and organic, but still sufficient quality to be worth the extra effort... and not take forever getting it to a useful starting point. I don't care if the first crop doesn't win a cup. Or even the second for that matter.

I know virtually nothing about compost or teas or worms (aside from the fact that they're apparently prioritized).

I do understand the concept of having a micro-ecosystem, and while i do not understand the details of the microbes, that "microbes do all the work" concept does make sense to me.


So i suppose my biggest question is this: is there a way i can "throw something together and go," and evolve that into a sustainable recyclable soil for myself, over time? (and i realize "throw together and go" will probably require some "cook" time anyway).

Some of my already established preferences are:

coco not peat, because i don't like the idea of harvesting those peat bogs (although i feel like a hypocrite because i use the opposite argument against vegetarians: "the animal was already killed; it would be a shame to waste it!" likewise, the peat bog is going to be harvested regardless, so if peat is better... but i still end up feeling better about coco, because it's "sustainable," even if we haven't quite established the potential long term impacts of all the salt runoff...)

Don't want to use guano because habitat destructive harvesting...

don't like the idea of anything unnatural really... which is the biggest reason why i want to avoid hydro.

Then again, i often make the "everything that exists is nature" argument. Superconductors are a natural byproduct of the human's natural quest for knowledge and technology (but i would say that type of "natural" has quite a different context).

So yeah. Clean/green/safe is what i'm after, whether you call that "organic" or "all natural" or whatever. I don't want anything in me that shouldn't be in me, same goes for my plants, or anything else in my environment.

In accordance w/ that statement, i need to build a worm bin and start composting.

Meanwhile... i need soil now, and do not want to wait however many months it takes to make my own worm bin and compost, and i will need to source acceptable products in that regard, and i have no idea how to determine what is or isn't an acceptable product. You guys seem like you'd know that kind of stuff, or at least, how to guide me to where i can learn it.

 

[hyroot]

^^^^ I do cootz mix sort of. Peat moss, coco(aeration) , compost, castings, crab meal, rock dust, kelp meal, neem meal.

compost is the broken down organic material. Straw, leaves, veggies, coco, peat some have manure. vermicompost is a mix of compost and castings. That's where the microbes come from.. In my worm bin I made a bedding with layers of coco, peat, dried canna leaves. Bury pockets of veggies. After a week I add worms. A week later then every few days after I bury veggie scraps , nutrients, pulverized egg shells, etc... Not all atthe same time either. Egg shells once a month. Nutes once a month. Veggie scraps, coffee grinds every few days. With all that my vermicompost has far more nutrient value than store bought. I use a sifting screen (1/4 inch) to separate worms from compost. With veggie scraps, I keep them.in the freezer til I use them. Thaw them out, puree. Then bury the slurry in the bin.

 

[reasonevangelist]

^^^^ I do cootz mix sort of. Peat moss, coco(aeration) , compost, castings, crab meal, rock dust, kelp meal, neem meal.

compost is the broken down organic material. Straw, leaves, veggies, coco, peat some have manure. vermicompost is a mix of compost and castings. That's where the microbes come from.. In my worm bin I made a bedding with layers of coco, peat, dried canna leaves. Bury pockets of veggies. After a week I add worms. A week later then every few days after I bury veggie scraps , nutrients, pulverized egg shells, etc... Not all atthe same time either. Egg shells once a month. Nutes once a month. Veggie scraps, coffee grinds every few days. With all that my vermicompost has far more nutrient value than store bought. I use a sifting screen (1/4 inch) to separate worms from compost. With veggie scraps, I keep them.in the freezer til I use them. Thaw them out, puree. Then bury the slurry in the bin.

Cootz mix? Is that "Coot's" or "cootz" ?

I've seen that mentioned before, but idk who or what that is.

I've seen people start worm bins with newspaper, and i thought "that doesn't seem very 'natural'..."

I've seen talk of "green manure," aka "cover crops" (i think? ...meaning "beneficial to what grows beside them," and not as-in stealth; i obviously wouldn't need stealth inside a grow space...), seems like a good idea.

When you say you bury "nutrients," "nutes once a month" (between veggie scraps and egg shells), what is that?

I assume you mean used/depleted coffee grinds; i'm sure i can produce plenty of those in-house. lol.


If i wanted to start with a commercially available base/vermicomp (because vermicompost takes a long time to start), what are some acceptable options? How can i search this for myself? How can i know whether any of them are "good" or "bad" for a purchasable product? (obviously, making my own would be "best," but that will have to come later). What are the right and most/least important factors for determining whether a product is of acceptable quality? (from what i've seen in just this thread, i'm lacking about 2 decades of farming experience...)

...

I got distracted and did other stuff during that ellipsis right there. Lost my train of thought, so i'll just post what i had.

 

[x713]

a rule of thumb i always follow if you haven rols then your lagging behind.i always went with the less is more why complicate something thats been happening on the earth way before we even lived on it

i remember when i firs got into this i hated how dirty it was ect,but now i feel dirty duping hydro butes into my plants

.i freaked out the day one of m yolder friend told me he grows in just using ewc.ricehullls and some perlite.this was when i was into hydro and had to bull all the bottles of kushie kush and skunkie skunk

 

[Mohican]

My compost grow was the best plant ever and it was a finicky sativa!

 

[Tranquileyes]

Hey all, I've been meaning to post here for about 4 months now, not sure how its slipped my mind for so long......

I made the switch from synthetics to a fully organic amended soil mix about 6 months ago, supplementing with teas and foliar feedings. I had no intentions of recycling soil until I stumbled upon this thread, but still like all things online I was skeptical.

The time came for me to harvest my first organic lady. Thinking back on what I had read in this thread, I decided to experiment for shits and gigs. I cut her out of the soil only removing the stem, leaving all roots behind, and watered it down with a tea. A few days later I cut a hole just big enough for a vegged clone (same as previous strain), fastened her in there, and transferred to flower.

This girl amazingly outgrew its predecessor in every way! (fyi both were identical clones, the first was not a mother from seed)

The misinformation people spew on these forums should be punishable by death! ..Perhaps I've been watching Game of thrones a little too much lately... But seriously, fuck those spreading bullshit.. except those spreading actual bull shit, because that's encouraged

 

[x713]

crazy how good compost or ewc does everything for you.i get told all the time get with times,i say go back in time! earth been doing this process for a while

 

[Pattahabi]

Interesting article I came across on Epsom Salts.Worth reading the full article imo.

Excessive levels of potassium contribute to a mineral imbalance that causes magnesium deficiency in a variety of species, even when soil levels of Mg are adequate. High levels of soil potassium apparently interfere with root uptake of magnesium. Addition of nitrogen and/or reduction of available potassium are both recommended to overcome this indirect magnesium deficiency; trees high in nitrogen were found to be less susceptible to magnesium deficiency than those with reduced nitrogen levels.

The science behind the use of Epsom salts is only applicable to intensive crop production in situations where magnesium is known to be deficient in the soil or in the plants. It is irresponsible to advise gardeners and other plant enthusiasts to apply Epsom salts, or any chemical, without regard to soil conditions, plant needs, and environmental health.

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[Pattahabi]

I just came across this, but sounded like something I'd like to look into a little more.

In order to study the action of SA, under laboratory conditions, the seeds were soaked in 0.05 mM SA solution for 3 h and then were germinated for 5 d on moist filter paper in cuvetters (24-h light/dark photoperiod with the light phase duration of 16 h; light intensity, 15 klx; temperature; 22-240C). Estimation of the influence of presowing seed treatment with 0.05 mM SA on hormonal status of leaves and milky grains and various characteristics in wheat were carried out in microplots (2 m2) in the field of Chishminsky Crop Production, Bashkortostan, Russia.
Presowing seed treatment with SA leads to an activation of germination and seedling growth (Shakirova et al., 2003), while the enhancement of the division of root apical cells is an important contribution to the growth stimulating effect of SA (Table 1). This effect was also revealed in field experiments when elements of yield structure were analysed. As evident from table 2, plants pretreated with SA were characterized with increased size of ears, mass of 1000 seeds and grain yield, indicating prolonged effect of presowing treatment of seeds, which produced stimulative effect on the productivity of wheat, at harvest.

Taken from Salicylic Acid: A Plant Hormone - Hayat & Ahmad

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[Pattahabi]

On a livelier note...

Jethro Tull (1674 – 21 February 1740 or 1741 New Style) was an English agricultural pioneer from Berkshire who helped bring about the British Agricultural Revolution. He perfected a horse-drawn seed drill in 1701 that economically sowed the seeds in neat rows, and later a horse-drawn hoe. Tull's methods were adopted by many large landowners, and they helped form the basis of modern agriculture.

The progressive rock band Jethro Tull was named after him.

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