Can you elaborate on that? I’m thinking of moving to Coco next grow.
Sure. Hydro is easy, yet easy to ruin a grow, fast, like overnight fast. Nutrient concentrations change rapidly in liquid due to plant uptake and evaporation, making nutrient problems much harder to monitor. As water volume decreases, salt concentrations increase. Soil is much more stable. Folks do hydro because of speed and yield, as a deep water culture grow is super simple, and veg rates are simply astounding. Check out OctoPots if you want the best of both, and Octopots grow HUGE plants! They are also so easy and forgiving, they’re boring, lol.
Regarding coco, NO, DONT DO IT!!! I hate that stuff. Here’s why: First, growth rates are much faster in peat based medium, like ProMix HP, and less twitchy. Coco locks up nutrients like mad, particularly calcium, and reusing it is not as easy as they claim. Though there are good coco products now, most need rinsing, as they’re full of salts. If its not, it will be after one or two grows. I ran coco exclusively for two years, and frankly, it absolutely sucks as a medium.
I don’t reuse soil anymore, it’s just not worth it. On a four month run, I want to know exactly what’s in my soil. I use 50/50 Happy Frog (or Ocean Forest) and ProMix, maybe add some worm castings and 10percent perlite, that’s it. That will get you through two months of veg, then I top dress once or twice in flower, done.
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I must’ve had a really shitty bag of Foxfarm because my plans damn near died of starvation in oceans forest . I was thinking it was gonna be so hot, I barely fed them anything (though they also could’ve been in a nutrient lockout state there was so many issues when I first started who knows)
Good to know. Definitely depends on who you talk to Regarding Coco .
I’m just getting into my fourth week of flower on my first grow in soil …I’m sitting here worried I’m not giving them enough nutrients at the recommended dose.
Being able to measure the nutrients is what is driving me to something like hydroponics. It’s not necessarily the Coco, It’s the control.
And I know a lot of this comes with time/experience and I’m on my first grow, but I don’t like not knowing if my plants need more or less nutrients like I need to know What I’m giving them versus what they need.
Right now, I don’t really have any idea at all. I’ve got one plant that’s budding out with tricomes at 3 weeks and another one that’s barely even started bud growth and they started flower at the same time.
Different strains… I know
Think I need to give octopots a good consider. Paps does those well.
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I have a bad experience with mold contaminated soil. Most of the time i get soil it’s contaminated and dampens off.
I hear that a lot with Fox Farm. In my experience, Happy Frog is almost always too hot, and Ocean Forest is almost always lighter on nutrients. I prefer Ocean Forest, as it’s a lighter soil, and won’t burn your plants. Happy Frog will burn them!
By mixing either with Promix, you reduce risk of being too hot. By adding some worm castings and compost, you reduce the risk of not enough.
Any large plant in 3 gallon pots is going to be hungry by mid flower in this mix. To solve that, I top dress a week or two before I think they’ll need it with a Terp Tea, and that carry’s it until the end.
My best grows ever have added a few handfuls of home made Midwest compost to my pots.
Every new grower wants to do too much, it’s one of the immutable laws of the universe.
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I believe it’s the opposite, i seen someone do a grow with both and the ocean forest was beautiful meanwhile the happy frog plants looked like trash with issues.
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Octopots rock. Gardenartus turned me on to them some years ago. And you can leave them for a week or more at a time with no worries. Once the roots reach the resevoir, watch out! They just explode.
The cool thing about Octopots is you have 6 gallons of soil, which will carry most seed to harvest. I plant them, and give them nothing except water seed to harvest. And the plants are HUGE!
The one drawback is they’re super boring, lol. You get great results without any stress. Here’s a super lemon haze in an Octopot this year. This one yielded seven ounces.
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Beautiful, used to smoke a lot of lemon haze and grew it back in the day from bagseeds.
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That paper towel looks way too wet it only needs to be damp, basically wet a few pieces and squeeze it out till the towel is still wet but more on the damp side of wet and not soaking wet through which is a no good at all for sprouting them.
A good idea before popping the seeds between the damp paper towel, especially with older seeds is to pop the seeds in a water h202 mix for 12 hours beforehand.
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