Back in the 90’s I had a bud that owned a rabbit and chinchilla farm. He grew some of the best shit I’ve ever had composing those critter droppings. I’m pretty sure he was operating completely sustainable. He had one large raised bed in the barn that held 10 plants. He started them in these little pressed bricks of compost and just set them on top of the bed when they had roots shooting out after a couple weeks. I helped him once put a layer down to cook while the seedlings grew in the bricks. He would put a bunch of that scat in a concrete mixer with rock dust, leaf compost, and a bucket of bluegill scraps after fileting them, and a few shovels of soil from the old growth forest near by and let it mix for a week. We spread that out no till style and covered it. Dude was ahead of his time!
@Cannacryptic these are the things I am hear to learn about! I love that people are doing this!!
Low key the best choice there I think was the soil from the forest. Talk about a microbial inoculant full of decomposers!! This is a conversation I’ve had many times with one of my committee members, does it make more sense to source from an ag field or a forest? I agree with your friend that if you are after fertility alone the extra decomposers in forest soil would be ideal for cycling nutrients.
I’ve got a lot of interest in running some outdoors this summer in a prairie. Highest productivity of any ecosystem, prairie species are natural cover crops and companion species as well.
Edit to add: the no till is so important! I also think we are getting off topic because of me. I might open a thread later focused on soil growing with tillage and no till and some of the cool stuff we’ve mentioned here already
Bruce bugbee mentions somewhere, I think his talk on drying and curing, the broscience of 48hours of darkness before harvest and pretty much debunks it. If I remember correctly he said the goal of that theory is to degrade the chlorophyll, but that happens at a much faster rate when you just cut the plant and start the drying process. He also explains I think in the same talk what added nutrients near the end effect your end product, how harsh it is etc.
Most everything (in a free available form) except potassium becoming a constituent of organic matter in the last couple weeks
Thank You. Will do.
I agree wholeheartedly.
This is one of the many reasons why OG is an awesome place to be ! ! ! imho.
Great information! I am sure some people here are already aware of this, but if you use Google scholar to search for cannabis related articles there will often times be a pdf link off to the side that gets around paywalls.
There are some good articles about nutrient requirements for veg and flower and the effect on yield and cannabinoid content. Learning how to effectively Google a question to get the answer the quickest has been one of the most important skills I’ve learned in grad school.
Indeed. I used to have a full pass to all the academic publications when I worked in R&D at a small biotech outfit, scaling up probiotics for dairy cultures on the human side, bovine and swine feed supplements on ag. It was fantastic, even got published in a joint study with a South Korean counterpart a couple times. I got credit, but couldn’t read my own publication! Lol I spent alot time researching compost much to the dismay of my boss. But, I did get him to grant me a side project testing the benefits of low milled soy flour (retains a ton of active oxygenase) combined with calcium peroxide and chicory root powder (inulin source) as an organic input in a tomato plot. It increased biomass substantially. The other study he let me get away with was using the supernatant from production after they spun down the 100+ liter fermenters. Now that stuff really boosted the soil nutrient load and the plants loved it. We used anhydrous ammonia to regulate pH while the acidophilus strains digested and completed the full log growth so the supernatant was loaded with readily available chelated nutes and nitrogen. I didn’t get a chance to take that one a step further and spray dry that juice for a powdered input on an industrial scale, but it was successful at the laboratory level.
Shit that is cool!! I love seeing stuff repurchased like that supernatant was.
Paywalls for science articles is some of the dumbest shit ever. With the exception of industry grants, all of that is paid for by us. And then they keep it away from those who need it.
Looking forward to you commenting on new posts I make and looking forward to seeing more threads from you! I love that I can talk to people who passionate about cannabis here but also pay attention to science. Great community here at OG
Do you have a recipe for that “tomato plot” grow ? I mean 1 part this, 2 parts that kind of thing.
You can avoid the heavy metals with Clean Kelp and products like it. Heavy metals are removed in the process to make a homogenized liquid. I use it in my teas as an alternative to meal in the soil
It was native soil so we just spread it out and covered it with cardboard. The calcium peroxide was injected to down near the water table as it needs water to react with. But I have used it in containers by just adding it the rest of the organic inputs.
Do you get a breakdown of specifics in the kelp after? Kelp isn’t the worst product by any means, I just don’t see reasons to use it really. Especially if it needs further clarification before reaching my hands. I’m sure I’m introducing excess salt or a metal here or there elsewhere and minimizing adding to that is my goal.
Sorry @shag for not responding to your comment earlier. Must’ve slipped my mind after reading it one morning. Not intended. I think environment plays a big role in myco indoors. I certainly don’t think it will hurt anything so if it’s in the budget, I’d get it. Does that mean it does a lot when indoors in organic soil? I think it depends. When transplanting, I see absolutely zero reason not to sprinkle myco in the transplant hole and on the roots of the plant. I have seen countless times the rebound rate of plants with myco applied to their roots - and often as a dip. In hyrdo, I’d apply it pretty much during those times only as the focus isn’t really on a microherd, but to stress the roots as little as possible. In soil, I choose to apply myco after aggressive ipm sprays. Or after 4-5 weeks in veg and I’ll use it as a drench. My goal is to encourage the microbes I like indoors. As soil sits and feeds happen, concentrations of microbes change, float up and down and the goal is to flood the environment with myco in case 1. They’ve been damaged by iso/soap sprays or 2. There’s a microbe in there potentially out competing the myco and inhibiting my plant from taking up what it needs. I use a couple other microbe products as well. I can probably do a side by side run and not use myco on someone if we want the data… but! That’s a ramble. There’s no simple and fast way to count the live number of microbes so I have to rely on slurries under the microscope and even then I’m looking for diversity… so there’s a long answer! I see no reason not to use myco indoors.
I understand someone who lives in town needing to buy myco products. I am lucky. I live on a farm in the country so I just go out in the yard and grab a handfull of dirt. I also mix in some leaf mold and soil from my forest. A little bit of composted hay and cow manure from where we feed cattle in the winter tops it off. All local. All natural. 
Am EWC top dress is usually sufficient to inoculate an indoor container from what I’ve seen. I try not to get to caught up with manufactured products, but I do keep Recharge around. It serves as a pretty solid and diverse colonizer and tea starter. In fact, you can max out your supply by simply leaving 10% in the brew bucket when you add more water and inputs, so long as it’s oxygenated. I keep a perpetual tea brewing, one starting the next. That’s where I introduce that kelp juice usually with alfalfa meal(another prime soil inoculant), chicory root, and fish bone meal; recharge bump every other brew or so. If I’m lazy I’ll just use Craft Blend for a quick and dirty.
Some will scough at this, but I brew in 1:1 RO to Well brought to around 150 ppm with Jack’s 3-2-1 or Master blend. I believe the microbes and plants are better able to perform organic functions when a comprehensive baseline is available. Just enough to fill in any gaps and serve as a catalyst is the idea I suppose.
Shiiiiit, if people gonna slough at that, wait til I start my grow!
I think the canna products are largely unnecessary, the microbe inoculants are nice but they are easy to cultivate yourself and you can get an inoculate from almost anywhere plants are growing!
Include something like Lance leaf plantain in soil when not growing cannabis and you will have a microbial powerhouse in no time.
hah hah we strayed into regenerative agriculture! I’ll go out into the field with a scythe and cut down the weeds. Then I stuff 'em in a bucket and cover it with creek water. I put a lid and a rock on the top. After a week I dilute that into a kiddie swimming pool of water and use it on the plants. Yo I learned that shit from dragonfly earth medicine. The whole objective is to reduce your cost of growing the food as much as possible while improving the overall cation exchange of the soil.
So what’s your plan when those ladies come to harvest @Cannacryptic ? This whole thing got started because of your planties on day 49 right? Should be at 60 now. I’m just curious more than anything. Organics can be done a lot of ways and if it works for you, it works for you.
@JoeCrowe I love the scale of it. Picturing the kiddie pool… fermented plant juice is indeed the shit. We all just want more humus and good drainage 
I appreciate the love for both aerobic and anaerobic inputs.
I’d appreciate more research on the fungal/bacterial ratios in cannabis across the major growing regions. I think it’s mostly related because you mentioned feeding jacks. I use some salts in my organics too…largely because I believe cannabis functions better in a fungally dominated soil so I’m not as concerned about bacteria being inhibited by kcl or k2so4… but it’s still something I’m not certain about. Anyway. Ramble over. Here’s a paper if you want to read something this morning. Hard to know exactly which reactions in the plant are bacterial driven or fungal driven. At least for me at this point 
I went ahead and Chopped the small one as I normally do. The bigger of the two is still putting on mass and swelling. Getting those foxtail buttons, probably five days or so left.