I’m thinking about creating a wet setup (pots and bags perpetually standing in an inch of water) and a moist setup (pots and bags standing on dry ground).
Cycling between anaerobic dominant and aerobic dominant in my perma pots. Growing beans and clover for nitrogen, and mint and chives to keep the bugs in check in the wet setup while growing wacky baccy in the moist setup. Then switching after every grow cycle.
After each harvest of da dank I’ll be chopping and dropping the cover crops in the wet setup, adding a very small amount of horse manure, some basalt, malted barley, nettle, dandelion and thistle, then sowing the new weed seed in the saturated soil, which I probably won’t have to water in the next month or longer. When soil has been standing an inch in water for months on end it turns black as a moonless night. I’ve never seen soil so rich and alive. Anaerbic microbes are vastly underrated. Anaerobic microbes have been around for much longer than aerobic ones, they are millions of years older. Remember that this planet started off as one giant ball of ocean teeming with life.
Sure, the fungus gnats are all over the place, but they don’t affect the mature plants who have established roots deeper than an inch if you give them chopped banana peels (they contain lots of phosphor + potassium) placed at the periphery, away from the plant. It’s worked for 6 of my plants so far and they’re thriving, I’ll see how my latest seedling (Mr.Nice NL5 x Afghan) holds up, it’s doing well and I sowed it straight into a fungus gnat larvae infested pot. It’s throwing its second set of leaves now. If it dies I’ll start sowing in small pots and transplant once the roots are deep enough to be unaffected by the larvae which only live in the top inch of the soil anyway.
EDIT: I added a thin layer of peat & sand mix to my pots and it drastically reduced the gnats. Others are saying pure sand works too but I wanted to have some organic matter in there because there’s going more layers on top after harvest.
The more life you have in your soil the more water it is capable of retaining.
There’s really not much else to do now except observing and sowing clover and beans in my currently unused pots. I don’t bother with teas or adding stuff during the grow cycle. It’s simply not necessary when you start off with great living saturated soil.
Aphids and other insects come and go on their own, only affecting the red beets and bell pepper plants I have growing alongside my weed. And the damage is only minimal. A few holes in the leaves here and there, so what? It’s so simple if you don’t give a fuck about a few bugs. We need to stop this insect phobia, they are all there for a reason and in one way or another beneficial, just like nettles, dandelions and thistles, which all contain a wide range of minerals and trace elements, and plenty of them, along with all kinds of compounds that battle all kinds of diseases.
I eat dandelion flowers raw and drink nettle tea every day. They are extremely healthy. And yet, people actually spray them with poison because they want their lawn to be a boring green carpet… It’s insane. You’re getting extremely healthy food for free and you’re killing it off?
Nature is perfect as it is, nothing is extra, nothing is useless, everything has a function. All we need to do as humans is keep our hands off, making balance possible through inaction so that all living organisms can coexist.
Nature does it all on her own. She does all the hard work, for free! More than anything we need to observe without judgement or fear, and see what happens when we don’t immediately take action when some insect shows up we don’t know or understand, wringing our hands, seeing it as pest. WE are currently the pest on this planet, ladies and gentlemen. Everything else is biased for balance and benevolence. So consider keeping your hands in your pockets a little more often instead of wringing them in worry. Nature balances herself. We’ve been attempting to control nature and are destroying her and ourselves in the process, we suck at it, so let’s take a step back and observe how she does it. With patience. To observe without judgement first and foremost.
