***No Till Or Die Trying (3x3 and 2x4 living soil beds)***

Indoor Growing Growroom Diaries
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#362

Nice. I was just browsing Amazon myself to find something for my fungus gnat problem, and was going to float these in my thread… glad to hear they’ve worked for others, and that nematodes are the right solution for organic living soil. BTI was the first suggestion that came up, and Google says it’s organic and natural - but it also has multiple warnings about poison exposure. :stuck_out_tongue: Doesn’t feel right putting that in a bioaccumulator that I’m going to extract and eat, much less smoke…

That particular item is the exact one I settled on too, the 50x 1 million packets is ideal for me and free 1-day shipping is nice too. :slight_smile:

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#363

I got the nematodes ,rove beetles and hypos.
In my personal experience the roves are what do the heavy lifting.
You have to keep a nice home for them or they wonder, so a nice mulch layer is a good thing for them.

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#364

Blah. Those are a lot more expensive. :frowning: It’s minor right now, I’m gonna see if the nematodes help before calling in any big guns. The fungus gnats happen to have shown up right around the same time my furnace broke down, and it’s time to get the AC checked up for summer too, so I’ve got a few things to spend my money on already…

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#365

I hear ya @Cormoran , they can put a dent on the wallet for sure…
Keep us updated with how the nematodes do by themselves please.

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#366

awesome! they did wonders for me. I had to use them off and on for maybe 6 months, but after that I haven’t seen one since. I wish they had these bigger boxes back when i needed them. They had these baseball sized plastic balls with only 8 pouches inside.

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#367

I have a solution but apparently its not a “healthy” solution…
Is your tent in a well ventilated area?

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#368

If that was directed at me, that tent is just crammed in my back room with other tents lol.

#369

And if it was directed at me, it’s not a tent. And no, it’s not ventilated at all. It’s a controlled environment with good air movement, but it’s sealed… not perfectly, but enough. I do have a N95 mask, but if I need to use it to spray something, it’s not something I want to spray during flower.

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#370

A little update; since I’m bottom-watering, and I’ve only seen 4 fliers at a time and possibly a larva eating a dead seed in some of the compost, I’m going to try cheaper remedies first. Specifically, I’m going to buy some potatoes. :slight_smile: Apparently the larvae like those a lot, and you can use them as traps; just cut them up into chunks, put them on top of the soil, and a few days later you’ll see if you have fungus gnats and how bad it is. If it’s not a bad infestation, along with bottom-watering, this might even wipe them out for 1/8 the price.

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#371

Good thinking!!

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#372

This is new info to me, thanks for sharing!!
:+1::+1::+1:
And you get extra credit from @Rogue fir bottom watering :slight_smile:

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#373

I was inspired by your easy dismissal of them, but I don’t have a cover crop to distract them at the moment. Thinking I might need to pick up some vetch, though. :slight_smile: I’m slowly learning from your thread, though I’m not sure how useful a cover crop will be in terms of nutrition since my pots are tall and thin. If they serve as IPM too, though…

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#374

Cover crops will help a lot, their roots go deep:)

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#375

Hmm. Actually, that might be something to think about too, if they’re taking up root space that’s space that can’t be used for the plants I really want to grow. :stuck_out_tongue: They’re in 10 gallon potato bags, and usually take up most of the soil and some of the stone at the bottom with their root systems. Could that do as much harm as good, I wonder?

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#376

Depends how natural your setup is.
The moment you feed stuff from a bottle all the living soil/no-till methods go out the window.

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#377

I would think if you dont overgrow your pots the more roots the better, its a symbiotic relationship

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#378

I’m certainly not sleeping with my plants, or feeding 200 gallons of soil with my kitchen scraps, so I’m sure it seems wholly unnatural to you. :wink: I top-dress regularly with a bagged fertilizer made of all-natural ingredients, give them a compost tea at the same time and let the microbes go to town. They seem to like it, for the most part.

This might qualify as overgrowing my pots. :stuck_out_tongue: I guess I’m not gonna have real living soil any time soon, anyway, but it is active microbially.

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#379

Room enough for vetch for sure!
It’s for chopping and dropping the moment the vetch starts flowering anyway.
Think of it as living fertilizer/nutrition, they don’t take anything away from the cannabis at all.
Let a a few of them live their full life cycle, then you can harvest the beans so you don’t need to keep buying them. Once harvested you have again mulch.

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#380

Hmm. It’s worth running an experiment, at least. :slight_smile: I’m already doing an experiment with my clones this grow, so it would have to be next, but I can try one in a pot with vetch and one without, varying only that. I’ll see how they turn out and go from there. Any particular kind of beans you recommend? Looks like vetch encompasses ~170 species.

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#381

My vetch is “Vicia sativa” from a company called “les semailles”, I guess whatever you can get that was grown organically is good enough. It’ll be different all over the world.

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