Micronutrient input: Sea-90

As an Organic gardener I'm of course worried about salts in my LIVE SOIL and have some concerns about it.

Got a 10 lb bag of Sea-90 from Seaagri for the new growing season and had been planning on using this as one of my remineralization inputs. Indoor grow btw .

From one source it states that 77% of the sea-90 crystal is sodium and chloride. Which I think even newer organic gardeners (like myself) know salt (in certain amounts; and this seems like THAT amount) your gonna lockup nutrients and kill off much of your beneficial microorganisms/fungi by messing with their osmotic pressure (hypertonic solution).

Directions even tell you to add it to your compost teas - near the end of the almost finished tea cycle.

So, in people's experience is anyone seeing bad effects with this product? I'd rather throw away my 10 lb bag than put in something that will destroy my hard work (and $$) of building up the soil to have it become either useless or lower yields, flavor, etc.

Thanks!

Dann0

Dann0 said:

As an Organic gardener I'm of course worried about salts in my LIVE SOIL and have some concerns about it.

Got a 10 lb bag of Sea-90 from Seaagri for the new growing season and had been planning on using this as one of my remineralization inputs. Indoor grow btw .

From one source it states that 77% of the sea-90 crystal is sodium and chloride. Which I think even newer organic gardeners (like myself) know salt (in certain amounts; and this seems like THAT amount) your gonna lockup nutrients and kill off much of your beneficial microorganisms/fungi by messing with their osmotic pressure (hypertonic solution).

Directions even tell you to add it to your compost teas - near the end of the almost finished tea cycle.

So, in people's experience is anyone seeing bad effects with this product? I'd rather throw away my 10 lb bag than put in something that will destroy my hard work (and $$) of building up the soil to have it become either useless or lower yields, flavor, etc.

Thanks!

Dann0

Click to expand...

i add it to my compost teas... i forget what i figured out the dosage to be... i think its just under a tsp per gal of water. i got it for free. to kill micro life, you'd have to be using it at a high concentration rate. remember, ions are by definition salts. you have salts in your soil naturally from amendments when things become broken down and ionized. all things in moderation. I might make about 1 compost tea per round of plants... might. haha sometimes I don't even bother. again it would take quite a bit of salt to kill off "much" of your bene's. if you look several pages back from the newest page of my grow thread, you can see pics of the compost tea i brewed and scoped (i'll be doing a bunch more over the summer when i attend summer classes and have more free time). I used sea-90 at the beginning of that brew. I think it started to turn because i used too much BSM, brewed for too long (44ish hours) in a 72-74 deg. room. but as you can see... there is plenty of life. in fact there was so much aerobic life at one point... my air stones bubbling the hell out of that bucket couldn't keep up with supplying enough O2! I think the temp was too warm, as cold water holds O2 better... this brew was too warm IMO. Cheers.

For sure ShLUbY; definitely agree, all things in moderation. I don't know where I read it but an article or video said the sea90 worked best (at least for this person; temp, humidity, other ingredients, etc) towards the end of the cycle, though not sure if just an hour or 2, or more like 8, I forget.

But yeah, I think you're right - too hot for too long, though i've seen instructions out there saying 70-75 deg 1-2 days. After a test run on mums tomatoes & veg garden at around 65 deg seemed to have gotten a decent tea in about 36-40 hours. But of course you gotta use it or lose it, pretty quick.

Nice grow journal and room, you got everything all hooked up. Sweet.

And a Dr. Who strain? Nice, love that show since forever - glad someone gave a cannabis strain that name!

Thanks for the info on that input. Will be sure to make good use of it on my ladies. Thanks!

i use this frequently in my teas never seen anything but great results. a little bit goes a long way

I used this on various crops in the past and didn't see much of a difference if any. The risk of loading my soil down with sodium scared me away. I think much of the same micro nutrients are very easy to supply with kelp (minus the sodium.)
If I wasn't passing my soil to my kids someday, I may not care but Na builds up over time and if you are growing in bags that you are only going to use for a few grows, sodium buildup may not be an issue.