Ok, this will be my spot to start documenting my grows. I will be growing in a 300 gallon living soil bed I made to fit in my 5 x 5 tent. I’ll be using a homemade super soil made with 1/3 of peat, worm castings, and pumice.
Ammendments include rock dust, greensand, barley, fish meal, crab meal, neem meal, feather meal, kelp meal, karanja meal, wheat bran, beet meal, oyster shell flour, lime, diatomaceous earth, biochar, and soldier fly/meal worm insect frass.
I have the HLG 600 rspec as well as a 300 rspec in the tent. I’m trying to target my VPD around 1 for veg and around 1.2-1.5 for flower. The VPD will be raised as buds mature.
Currently in the tent I have Sugar Belts, Nana Glue, Black Velvet x Pablo’s revenge, Ayuhuasca Purple, and PBB x Pure Michigan. All plants have been bred to a Sugar Belts male I selected.
The seeds I just popped to run in the tent next will be Molokai Frost, Sour Grape, and Tropical Fuel(Exotic seeds version of Tropicana Cookies).
The seed starter 2000 custom built by yours truely. I needed something and somewhere warm enough to start some seeds. This stays at a nice 75 degrees in the cold garage.
Wow, nice grow setup I’m jealous!
Thanks! I always wanted to try a bed with more soil than the plants need. A huge battery! It’s working really well!
So basically no need to top dress or anything… just water & microbes, maybe some teas? Super cool man, I love it.
The 300 gallon smart pot fit perfectly into a 4’ by 4’ by 2’ deep frame built of 2 by 4’s. Then I just stapled the pot to the inside of the frame. I stapled plastic on the bottom and have a small slope to the floor to drain any water to the front where I can vacuum it up.
But… in living soil you don’t want runoff, because that’s lost nutrients. I’m using blumats which I can adjust to keep the soil in the optimum moisture range. This is important because when soil drys out the microbes/bacteria/fungi will go dormant or die. You want them to be thriving in order to break down your organic inputs faster into plant available form.
I like to have a nice 4-6” mulch layer on top of the soil as well which is constantly being broken down and keeps the moisture in the upper soil. (upload://cjpod3LyEdhaHa7tzAws8Qfbqk6.jpeg)
The soil has everything in it to run a crop for sure. But I do apply teas once per week or so and foliars. I absolutely love SST’s. Seed Sprouted Teas. I use corn and barley and sprout them, then grind them up in the blender with an aloe frawn, and some bioAG fulpower. I also make teas with fish emulsions, guano, kelp, or whatever else I’m feeling like haha.
The idea of this style of growing is to test your soil. Get as close to the target #’s of nutrients you’re wanting. Then test at the end of the grow and you’ll know what to re ammend with. After you do this several times you will get an idea of what you need to supplement with to stay at optimum levels at all times throughout the grow. Once you have what you want in your soil you want to keep soil moist to keep the life at optimum levels that live in it, which feed your plants. It’s fun! You’re focusing on your soil more than your plants. Which in turn forms a symbiotic relationship with the plants and creates super dank buds😜
Here’s a cool Triploid I was surprised with in my seeds. It’s one of the Molokai Frost plants I was lucky enough to be gifted from a member on here. It’s the first one I’ve ever found, and I’ve sprouted A lot of seeds lol. Here’s a pic, I’ll be excited to see what the morphology of this plant turns out to be.
They are found naturally in soil in the los Angeles area! 
Yep I took my outdoor soil and am using it indoor in the tent so whatever is outside to balance the ecosystem I have inside. As long as the environment is suitable. I actually haven’t had hardly any fungus gnats the whole run because the predatory mites eat their babies. It’s pretty cool. Those things have always been an issue when I’ve ran bottles nutrients.
Yup…the mites do go after the fungus nat eggs. Haha, I actually had some evolve to survive…real big and look nothing like a regular fungus nat. They are my buds ! Don’t seem to go after leaves like fungus nats either.
Here’s a close up of the Nana Glue. It’s already frosty but the trichomes are starting to really swell up. I’m sure they’ll get quite a bit bigger and look more pronounced once they turn from clear to milky. I like sending these pics to my buddy. He’s pretty upset I pollinated them and they’re full of seeds😂
The beet meal was a new one on me, so I had to look it up… Nice source of iron etc.
I didn’t see a mention… do you have worms in there as well?
Love the whorled phyllotaxy, I haven’t seen one actually start with the cotyledons before. It will be interesting to see if it holds all the way to the finish.
Excellent setup! 
Cheers
G
Yep I do have worms in there too. The beet meal was to add more diversity and food plus maybe add more fungal growth in the soil. I also added wheat bran. I look at the bed as a worm bin. That’s part of the reason I try and keep a solid mulch layer. I want to see how many worms I can get in there. It’s a lot of fun!
Beets would definitely be a good source of sugar for microbes I would imagine too
Here’s another little project a buddy and I threw together with materials we had at hand. I mixed up three yards of custom soil with everything but the kitchen sink. Although I do follow a baseline for a balanced soil. I let this soil cook for a few weeks and man did it heat the room up. I’ve planted some cover crops and wanted to let the soil balance out before planting some babies in there, but I couldn’t t resist. I figure the quality will only get better as the soil matures a bit. I’m still working on the irrigation and controls to dial the room in. The ceiling is pretty low so I think we’ll focus mainly on indica strains due to their bushy short nature.
Really cool to stop in and see what your up to Otta… love what your doing to.
your beds are just killing it, are these starting off in a little bit of a hot soil, is that the discoloring or just genetics.?
The boxes your building remind me of when I ran Soma Boxes. It was a lot of work, but for outdoors it was a great raised bed method that worked well.
Keep up the great organic works bro