Please help me make a nice water only Supersoil auto mix

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Hey guys!
Okay...I am setting up an oldschool friend with a micro indoor setup for autos(run under UV heavy Galaxyhydro 100X3w leds in 7"X7"X10" deep pots). It has come to a realization that he cannot handle mixing bottled nutes, so we have to find an easier way to grow. I want to source everything locally so here is a list to all of the organic supplies I can get a hold of.

Here is the list of materials I can get
Promix BX
Promix HP
Black Gold [HASHTAG]#4[/HASHTAG]
Bat Guano 0-12-4
Bat guano 8-4-2
Alfalfa meal
Kelp Meal
Fish Bone meal
Blood meal
Bone meal
Glacial rock dust
Rock phosphate
greensand
lime
ground oyster shells
worm castings

So I am hoping you organicons ;) can help me out what to get, ratios ect to make this organic run go smooth as glass.

I would love to tag a bunch of organic guys in, but alas my brain seems to be on pause right now. The only one I can think of is @Eyes on Fire

Thanks so much for help!! I used to grow organically for many, many years, but mostly just running horse manure and lime. Read lots of great things about bat manure, always wanted to try it, but never got around to it.
 
This is subcools recipe which I have seen and taught people how to use(although its simple and crazy easy) this mix since they are all very similar in make up. although I do not like the heavier bloom leaning. its fine but add some plain N to the mix. guanos are a problem too imo. but work fine. but can make a soil HOT HOT HOT.and the lime is waaay too little for a 1/2 recipe imo. the N you could use some alfalfa meal with some blood meal. and add some cootonseed meal to let your N characteristics spread over a longer period of time after the initai 45 day cooking/blending time frames. use kelp meal instead of guano with some frass for bloom along with the bone meal too. just the way I would mix it.

prolly between 5-7 cups for a 40 gallon mix..1/2 recipe. each 1.5CF bag is roughly 10 gallons depending how you pot it up. atleast a cup per 10 gallons imo. upwards of 1.5 or 1.75 cups per 10 gallon cooked in.

1/2 Recipe
4 large bags of a high-quality organic potting soil with coco fiber and mycorrhizae (i.e., your base soil)
12.5 to 25 lbs of organic worm castings
2.5lbs steamed bone meal
2.5lbs bloom bat guano
2.5lbs blood meal
1.5lbs rock phosphate
3/8 cup or 6 tablespoons Epsom Salts
1/4 cup or 4 tablespoon sweet lime (dolomite)
1/4 cup or 4 tablespoons azomite (trace elements)
1 tablespoon powdered humic acid

1/4 Recipe
2 large bags of a high-quality organic potting soil with coco fiber and mycorrhizae (i.e., your base soil)
6.25 to 12.5 lbs of organic worm castings
1.25lbs or 20 ounces steamed bone meal
1.25lbs or 20 ounces bloom bat guano
1.25lbs or 20 ounces blood meal
3/4 lbs rock phosphate
3/16 cup or 3 tablespoons Epsom Salts
1/8 cup or 2 tablespoons sweet lime (dolomite)
1/8 cup or 2 tablespoons azomite (trace elements)
1.5 teaspoons powdered humic acid

1/8 Recipe
1 large bags of a high-quality organic potting soil with coco fiber and mycorrhizae (i.e., your base soil)
3.125 to 6.25 lbs of organic worm castings
.625 lbs or 5/8 lbs or 10 ounces steamed bone meal
.625 lbs or 5/8 lbs or 10 ounces bloom bat guano
.625 lbs or 5/8 lbs or 10 ounces blood meal
3/8 lbs or 6 ounces rock phosphate
3/32 cup or 1.5 tablespoons Epsom Salts
1/16 cup or 1 tablespoon sweet lime (dolomite)
1/16 cup or 1 tablespoon azomite (trace elements)
3/4 teaspoon powdered humic acid


ill do a better mix imo. well if you added more lime and omitted a few things and replaced them with the few things I believe are on your list would be a better not as hot fully balanced soil imho.
 
but the one I like is the revs mix. I buy a 2.1 recipe already made and just dump that in the soil,perlite,and casting with some coco too,and voila. simple LOL! maybe a cup of steer manure and some bokashi as a helpful hand in an inoculate and there it is. LOL

Base Mix:

2 gallons quality organic soil mix (or healthy organic recycled soil mix)

2 gallons throughly rinsed coir(coconut fiber)

2 gallons Pearlite(small nugget size)

2 gallons earth worm castings (fresh EWC and/or fresh compost works too)


Amendments:

1 1/2 cup grow or bloom "Pure" by Organicare (or 1 cup 5-5-5)

1/2 cup green sand

3/4 cup ground oyster shells ( 1 cup if no crushed oyster shell)

1 cup oyster shells (optional)

1/2 cup Dolomite Lime (powdered)

1 3/4 cup prilled(pelletized) fast-acting dolomite lime

1/4 cup blood meal

1/4 cup high N birb/bat guano 12-8-2 N-P-K

1/2 Heaping cup of Feather Meal

1 cup un-steamed granular bone meal (like whiney farms brand)

1/2 cup bulb food

1/4 cup powdered soft rock phosphate

1/2 heaping cup of powdered gypsum

1/2 cup kelp meal

4 heaping cups of composted steer manure (this inoculates your mix with specialized microbeasties and primo organic matter)

1/2 cup Azomite granular (add an additional 1/4 cup green sand if no Azomite)

1 cup granular humic acid ore (such as down to earth brand)

1 cup alfalfa meal (or 2 cups pellets-make sure pellets are all organic and no additives)

1/2 cup rock phosphate granular (optional)

1 heaping cup organic rice (important for the good Fungi in this soil mix)



now understand you do NOT have to use all these things. read this and you'll get a lot from this with better amounts and he too will understand how his mix is comprised as well.

h=2]Dissecting the Rev Soil Mix Step by Step:[/h]After discussing organic growing indoors for so long, you start to come across a few things over and over again. I have a book on the shelf called TLO by the Rev. If you are reading this, then I’m guessing you have either read the book or have read his laundry list of a soil mix and were looking for more information on it. In my opinion, that book perpetuates many cultivation myths and then goes a step further and actually creates some myths of it’s own. Many of the amendments being used in the soil mix are ridiculous when you learn more. That’s why I wanted to list the entire list of ingredients and break it down line by line.
Please argue with me, I’m not writing this for my own good, but to create a conversation about where our amendments are coming from, and how we are growing our plants. My goal is to keep things as simple as possible, and to duplicate Mother Nature as much as I can while bringing organics indoors.
Base Mix:
2 gallons of quality organic soil mix
2 gallons thoroughly rinsed coir (coconut fiber)
2 gallons perlite(small nugget size)
2 gallons earthworm castings, and/or fresh compost works too)
While I don’t have a problem with the Base mix, I would be more specific here and do things differently.
1. What is the 2 gallons of soil look like?
2. Why Coco Coir? Check out this article from Utah State University on Peat Moss Vs. Coco coirhttp://cpl.usu.edu/files/publications/factsheet/pub__9468201.pdf[1]
(Although Leaf Mold would be Best, it takes 1 year to make at home and would be the way to eliminate all of this outsourcing)
3. Perlite Sucks – Seriously there are way better aeration amendments that don’t float around in the soil mix. Try lava rock, buckwheat hulls, rice hulls… the list goes on.
4. Hell Yes! I love Worm Castings and Compost.
This is what I recommend for a base mix, but think of it this way…. The base mix just has to have good humus and good aeration. Ideally you want the highest Cation Exchange Capacity possibly that way the soil will hold on to all the nutrients instead of letting them leach out with water. You can change the percentages and get almost the same results, but if you start to tweak things too much you will have a mix that is too heavy. You can grow in 100% worm castings, but the growth is slow with no aeration and too much compaction over time.
This base mix will perform very well and is also cheap to make.
30% Sphagnum Peat Moss or Home Made Leaf mold.
30% Homemade or Premium Worm Castings (Compost will suffice, but better be good compost)
25% Buckwheat hulls or Small Lava rock. Some form of aeration amendment. Perlite if you have to.
15% Topsoil – This will make it a real soil, and add clays that will increase Cation Exchange and also add a diverse amount of materials to the mix. I take a shovel and get some soil from a nice spot on my property, worst case you could find some good soil around town.
Or just straight 33/33/33 Peat/Compost/Aeration without the topsoil.
A note about Sphagnum Peat Moss: The Bales you buy at Home Depot in 2.0 Cubic Feet or 3.8 CF size are of a much higher quality than the sphagnum peat moss inside most of the bagged soil mixes you can buy. When you get bagged soil, they run the peat moss through a shredder, blender type deal and it gets really degraded. When you get a 3.8 CF bale from the store, you are getting something that hasn’t really been processed at all, just baled and shipped. It even has some micro life in it when you look at it under a microscope! Good Stuff!

Now for the fun part, all these crazy amendments, I’ll keep the list here and just go through it one by one.
Amendments according to the Rev 2.1 True Living Organics Soil mix.
1 and 1/2 cup Grow or Bloom "Pure" by Organicare (or 1 cup 5-5-5) Here are the ingredients for the Organicare: Fish meal, crab meal, sulfate of potash, alfalfa meal, composted poultry litter and seaweed (Ascophyllum nodosum). Why not just add these separate ingredients yourself at a known ratio and with your own personal quality control? Why are we using expensive bagged products along side with similar stand alone amendements? This makes no sense.
1/2 cup greensand Greensand takes Years to become available, if this is part of your really long term plan, that’s fine. This could be an initial amendment for starting a No-Till. There are other mineral amendments that will make themselves available to the plants faster. My goal when building a soil is not to waste money, and I would cut this out for sure.... but really see no harm in using it.
3/4 cup ground oyster shells (1 cup if no crushed oyster shells) Oyster Shells are about 95% CaCO3 or Calcium Carbonate. Once you realize that calcium carbonate is good, you can add it without having to be redundant. Gypsum, Crab, Oyster, they all have CaCO3 1cup crushed oyster shells (optional) Read the above.
1/2 cup dolomite lime (powdered) NO DOLOMITE LIME: As a rule, don’t use Dolomite lime, regardless of what you may have read in various gardening books, unless you are sure that you need Magnesium. (We don’t need any more magnesium in our mix, I promise) Dolomite is a high Magnesium limestone. Using dolomite will tighten the soil, reducing air in the soil and inducing anaerobic alcohol fermentation or even formaldehyde preservation of organic matter rather than aerobic decomposition. 1 and 3/4 cup prilled (pelletized) fast-acting dolomite lime Again, No Dolomite, it’s awful for your soil, especially with the alternatives available like gypsum.
1/4 cup blood meal Blood Meal: There are way better sources of Nitrogen than this. Blood meal is the blood waste from the cattle industry, Are you 100% confident that all the blood being used is free of any drugs, hormones, toxins etc? I'm not, and it turns out there is good reason to question the industry practice. Blood meal is made from dried blood that is literally scraped from the slaughterhouse floor. Even those farmers that use it admit that it is dangerous to breathe and can carry a number of harmful pathogens. Warning for animal lovers: Blood meal may attract your pets or other animals and if ingested can cause vomiting and diarrhea. Ingesting blood meal can also result in severe pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas) which is bad news for your pup.
1/4 cup high N bird/bat guano 12-8-2 N-P-K Bat guano is bad to breathe, and isn’t sustainable to harvest. It’s also not magic like the hippies of yesterday seem to think it was. There are many alternatives to Bat Guano, but I understand many people still use it and love won’t grow without it. That is a personal decision you have to make. Personally, I’ve found that Comfrey, SRP, and many others are better and less dangerous to use.
1/2 heaping cup feather meal
Antibiotics and other drugs found in feather meal samples. That should be enough to show you how convoluted the feather meal industry is. This is another waster product from slaughtering animals. Here is a quote from an article sited below: "To do this, they examined 12 feather meal samples from the U.S. (n=10) and China (n=2). All 12 samples contained at least one antibiotic residue, and some contained residues of 10 different drugs (both of those were from China). While many of the antibiotics were ones used in poultry farming (or their metabolites), they also found drugs they did not expect. Most significantly, this included residues of fluoroquinolones, which they found in 6 of 10 U.S. feather meal samples. Why is this important? Fluoroquinolone use was banned in U.S. poultry production as of 2005 because of the risk to human health–so where are these residues coming from?" Source:http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2012/04/05/waste-not-want-not-poultry-fea/
1 cup un-steamed granular bone meal (like Whitney Farms brand)
Why not use Fish bone meal, comfrey, soft rock phosphate or something better than bone meal? Bones are stripped, dried, and ground. It is used for its high phosphorus and calcium content despite the fact that bone meal is dangerous to breathe and has been suggested as an agent for spreading Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) (the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy “mad cow disease”) to humans. “Do you feed your roses with bone meal? Not a good idea, says the world’s foremost expert on a group of rare diseases, found in animals, that sometimes make their way into humans. Breathing in the dust from contaminated bone meal could be deadly, says Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek (GUY-doo-sheck), a brilliant Harvard Medical School graduate and Nobel laureate. In his latest book, Deadly Feasts (Simon & Schuster), author Richard Rhodes traces the history of these diseases, called spongi-form encephalopathies, that reduce the brain to a spongy mass, causing their victims to stagger, fall, develop dementia and paralysis, and soon die a terrible death.” - “Mad cow disease” from feeding your roses? – Medical Update September 1, 1997. Brown, Edwin W. Bone Meal can also be a danger to your pets. If an animal consumes a large quantity of bone meal (for their size) it will form a cement-like ball in their stomach, which may block the digestive track and need to be removed by surgery. http://gentleworld.org/whats-hiding-in-your-organic-fertilizer/
1/2 cup bulb food
WTF? Why are we adding chemical fertilizers now? Okay, so someone said he uses an organic bulb food. (I looked it up, it's just more of all the above)
1/4 cup powdered soft rock phosphate Good good, but ¼ cup for more than 1 cubic foot of soil? I don’t think that’s enough!
(Also, SRP does contain heavy metals, please use to start your mix but don't start going crazy with it)
1/2 heaping cup powdered gypsum Finally, this makes some good sense… but again, not enough, it should be about 4 cups!
1/2 cup kelp meal Awesome! Kelp Meal is incredible.
4 heaping cups composted steer manure (this inoculates your mix with specialized microbeasties and primo organic matter) Manure? Really? We can get said “microbeasties” without that crap. If this manure hasn’t been composted properly it still has residual amounts of antibiotics etc in it.
1/2 cup azomite granular (add an additional 1/4 cup of greensand if no azomite) Azomite I’m fine with. Good source of minerals, but don’t stress if you can’t get it easy, no need.
1 cup granular humic acid ore (such as Down to Earth brand) Humic Acids are NOT all created equal. I prefer Liquid Ful-Power. It is 10 times better. Read this interesting write up on the Humic industry. There is SOOO much bullshit being sold as “humic acid” it’s ridiculous. Please read this entire article before buying any!http://www.bioag.com/educationandresources.html
1 cup alfalfa meal (or 2 cups pellets- make sure pellets are all organic no additives) I love Alfalfa Meal! With all the other stuff going on in this mix I would cut it to ½ cup. Or leave it out of the mix and use it for making botanical teas with.
1/2 cup rock phosphate granular (optional) Soft Rock Phosphate is better. This won’t be as available and also may have slightly more heavy metals etc.
1 heaping cup organic rice (important for the good fungi in this soil mix) First the rice will absorb water, then rot and while rotting it’s going to take up N to compensate for the use of carbon. Eventually it will turn into something useful but it would be better to use the rice for making BIM cultures and then adding that to the mix. It just doesn’t make sense to add it to the mix directly. (Thanks to JayKush for this comment in my notes)
For what it’s worth, if anyone wants to discuss the ridiculous use of spikes and layers along with god awful “Nutrient Teas” that make absolutely no sense…. Than we can talk about that stuff too. But be prepared, because there is nor reason to shove spikes into the soil or to use even more nutrients in these crazy tea concoctions with doses of calmag etc.
Here is what I would use for amendments to keep it simple:
Neem Cake ½ cup per cubic foot.
Sea Kelp Meal ½ cup per cubic foot.
Crustacean Meal ½ cup per cubic foot.
Mineral Mix 4-5 cups per cubic foot.
Comfrey Leaf – Handful top dressed and then covered with worm castings.
Once in the container, mulch with straw or with a living mulch like clover.
Ideally, you can process your homemade worm castings with these ingredients and when the castings are ready for use, that will be all you have to add…. Not anything else! That would be really cool.
TL;DR
The Rev Mix isn't good and is too complicated. Understanding how to build a soil can be simple.
You only need good compost or worm castings and a few good soil amendments covering the NPK range. Add to that a complete lineup of minerals and you are done. You can source whatever is best locally and you don't have to use ANY set recipe. Just make sure you have Compost, Nutrients and Minerals. The part where people fail, is keeping the soil alive and full of microbes that can actually proccess the added minerals and nutrients fast enough to keep up with the plant. That is where the compost and/or compost tea comes in.

these are the only two i like.


in a bagged I would try the KIS soil system like mediscrogs has used twice now. the results look very similar to a balanced flowering recipe too.
 
and the 2 gallon is the full strength recipe man. if it were me,the one i always recommend(unless your top coating,use the full on mix) is the medium mix. with a few teas..or two usually.you'll have a beautiful grow. worries about water,use an extra 1/4 cup or maybe 1/2 cup prilled/pellet lime. problem solved. and toss guano in there too to help keep it lower after your higher water PH hit the soil. unless your using Ro water.drop er two or cal mag or sprinkle of elemite or azomite might work too,or soluble kelp meal potentially.
 
and the 2 gallon is the full strength recipe man. if it were me,the one i always recommend(unless your top coating,use the full on mix) is the medium mix. with a few teas..or two usually.you'll have a beautiful grow. worries about water,use an extra 1/4 cup or maybe 1/2 cup prilled/pellet lime. problem solved. and toss guano in there too to help keep it lower after your higher water PH hit the soil. unless your using Ro water.drop er two or cal mag or sprinkle of elemite or azomite might work too,or soluble kelp meal potentially.

That's a crapload of ammendments! Hmm okay so I read that twice. So based on the above stuff I can get locally, what would you suggest for a good mix? Shit man...I am ready to go dig some well rotted horse manure from the frozen manure pile, add some lime and be done with it...lol (I thought for some reason this was going to be easy...hahaha)
 
Are you opposed to mail order internet stuff? If you want to shortcut a little, the 2.1 master soil mix from tlosoils.com is a quick and easy way to mix up a water only soil. Haven't completed a grow yet to be able to 100% endorse it personally, and I'm supplementing with their teas so not exactly hitting the water only parameter in my test of it. But so far it's been easy to use and the results are looking good at three weeks into a grow with it.

Good luck getting it going. I'd be interested to see what you decide on and how it works for ya'. :greenthumb:
 
Are you opposed to mail order internet stuff? If you want to shortcut a little, the 2.1 master soil mix from tlosoils.com is a quick and easy way to mix up a water only soil. Haven't completed a grow yet to be able to 100% endorse it personally, and I'm supplementing with their teas so not exactly hitting the water only parameter in my test of it. But so far it's been easy to use and the results are looking good at three weeks into a grow with it.

Good luck getting it going. I'd be interested to see what you decide on and how it works for ya'. :greenthumb:

My problem with internet stuff is shipping costs are killer to cannada
 
well depends on what you want,I can give you the mix simplified certainly,but I thought you wanted to read on how to mix it and then mix it. but ill get to it later today. i dont think other than some granules you have everything already.

it is easy actually,its just a different way of unserstanding how plants pull from the soil and not the water and foods you give it that way usually. your building a living soil. but later ill put the mix together for you if ya want.
 
2 gallons quality organic soil mix (or healthy organic recycled soil mix)

2 gallons throughly rinsed coir(coconut fiber)

2 gallons Pearlite(small nugget size)

2 gallons earth worm castings (fresh EWC and/or fresh compost works too)

ok so take a look at the full strength mix.. you start by using 2 gallons. the medium is five gallons of listed materials and then the lighter mix is I thin k 7-10 gallons of materials. medium to in between the medium and light mix works well. no more than 7 gallons per of the materials.

so what Im about to give you is the 5 gallon method. 5 of soil 5 of coco coir,5 of EWC(30LB bag),and 5 or perlite/pumice rock.

with me so far? imma go smoke cuz my back hurts a lot and justr got back from the docs. sooo to be continued in a few minutes LOL

and for best results since he mentions compost(inoculate) you could use a compost(not EWC unless its freshy fresh out of the worm farm bin fully composted) you should use a cup of steer manure.its a stronger inoculate and pretty cheap too. may be able to source it local too. fully compost.hot composted is best when dealing with manures and such. just ask.but id its fully composted ,thats fine man. ok?! lol ok...
 
Promix BX 5 gallons of this. I use sunshine mix [HASHTAG]#4[/HASHTAG] but both will be fine. maybe 5.5 gallons. dont have to be exactly exact.

Black Gold [HASHTAG]#4[/HASHTAG] not sure what this is,but should not need any more soil. seedling mix maybe,so use BG seedling mix. good stuff.used it many times and have some in my seedling mix now.

Alfalfa meal 1.25 cups to 1.5 cups

Kelp Meal 1 - 1.25 cups

Glacial rock dust 1/2 cup to 2/3 cup of azomite or any similar GRD

Bone meal 1 cup to 1.25 cup

Blood meal 1/4 cup to 1/3 cup

Rock phosphate 1/2 cup to 2/3 cup (optional)

greensand 1/2 cup green sand.. I consider it optional,but I do use it.

lime 2/3 to 3/4 cup of sweet or pellet lime. i like using both to make the total of 2/3 to 3/4 cup of lime total. but either or works fine.

ground oyster shells 3/4 cup ground oyster shells/oyster shell powder

crushed oyster shells 1/2 cup to 1 full cup (optional)

worm castings 5 gallons or 1 thirty pound bag is 5 gallons.

Bat guano 8-4-2 1/4 cup

Bat Guano 0-12-4 1/4 cup

1/2 cup heaping of feather meal. i recommend cottonseed meal but either is fine.

if you can get any humic shale ore or humic acid granules like 40 or more % humic acid,thats what you need. 1/2 cup

1 to 1.25 cups of a good rice.white rice organic basmati rice is great but a regular white rice is fine too. worked for me.I used both so far.

1 cup steer manure

and if you can afford it get a bloom and grow granule. but totally optional. the reason it,is that it releases slow and give it great bllom or veg capabilities ,especially for bloom. so like a 2 or 3 for N and a 7 or more for the P aspect and the K you'll want a number like 5 or more. thats bloom. but optional. but makes the mix a little weaker if not used. but not by a lot,just lacks some aggression which in a small micro grow you may not want anyways.so those few ingredients should do fine omitting the optional stuffs. unless you want to add them. its all good and easily re amendable too.well,worked for me thus far anyways :D happy growing man..

this work for you?
 
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