now I understand. I germinated two seeds this weekend and put them in the same soil, but this time I put some cinnamon and baking soda in it, which is said to be very good against fungos. I put them in the soil two days ago and they are growing normaly so far. next week I will send pics and news of them.
I hope so my friend!
you mean too much light? I use a quantum board
I dont think so. I keep with some moisture. as I use a worm compost it is always wet.
I would highly recommend going the other direction: instead of trying to go anti-fungal, try inoculating with a diverse microbe source at planting. Think in terms of giving life, and creating desirable habitats for beneficial life, rather than trying to kill and make your soil inhospitable.
I’m on the other side of the fence. I grow in hydro, so I’ll pool shock the life out of anything that looks suspicious. I germinate in a glass of water and H2O2.
I am curious, what is a diverse microbe source? And how would you get it to colonize a solo cup?
Well regarding your pic the medium looks too dry for sure!
Is there a drainage at the bottom of pots?
In fact It looks dry but only on the Surface… Yes, there are roles in the botom of the pot
Just growing in soil made with high quality compost will go a long way. You can take it further with multiple compost sources, worm castings, LABs for facultative anaerobes, etc. It’s equally if not more important to create a habitat they can actually live in, so good aeration, porosity, draining, etc are all very important to making sure everything is alive and active.
In hydro I don’t know how you’d balance a need for a good habitat for microbes with the need to keep them contained… never grown in that style. I’ve seen others mention the biofilm issue and I can attest to that being a problem with microbes and irrigation lines/reservoirs from using blumats. There may be a way to make microbes work in hydro, but it would definitely be uphill as there’s so many environmental niches for all sorts of life to proliferate unchecked. What likes living in an irrigation line might not survive on hydroton, and what survives in the hydroton might not like that little crevice in the pump, and so on.
Is a solo cup enough to support that system? I do grow vegetables in soil. I’m always interested in learning, but for seed starting nothing beats a cube of sterile medium.
What wattage light are you using ?
Solo cup is plenty during germination and seedling stage to reap the protective benefits of a microbe-rich environment, but it’s difficult to grow a plant start to finish in small volumes with just soil and water with organics. If your veggie plants are eventually going to be transplanted into soil though, starting them with microbes on and around the seed/roots is a great way to get protection and inoculation from the jump.
That depends if you’re going organic or not, liquid fertilizers will kill the microbiota …
@joao, how are you going to feed them?
What kind of liquid fertilizer? Any salts? Calmag? Cal-nit?
I appreciate the conversation! The way I garden and the way I grow weed are opposite. The small volumes of medium are what get me confused. I struggle with anything less than 10 gal
Agree, it’s an interesting subject I was interested in as I grow with liquid ferts and was wondering if adding Trichoderma or mycorrhizal would help, asked the experts and this is what they told me:
In organic microbes transform the nutrients and make them available for the plant, with bottled nutes they are already chelated so you don’t need those microbes, so I guess there’s no need to improve them, you should choose one way or another …
The risk with salts is driving the EC high to the point of impeding soil metabolism. If you carefully monitored the soil solution EC, in theory you could supplement salt fertilizers and not see declines in microbe health. Figuring out those thresholds would be a challenge though, and there’s a lot of options available now for increasing soluble nutrition that don’t raise EC nearly so much.
I see your point but the question is if you really need those microbes once you’re already feeding enough your plant and soil not being organic …
I personally don’t think they’re compatible styles, no. To directly feed the plant with salts you either need to use concentrations that are so high as to be toxic to the microbes, or you would have to constantly monitor the soil and adjust the feed solution to the point of the the amount of work not justifying the return. The goal, I would think, of feeding salts in an organic system would be to ride the threshold of maximum plant growth and minimal microbial detriment. Too much work for a lazy gardener like myself
I think the beauty of organics lies in the fact that in moderation and balance, you can achieve abundance. The soil solution is never too “hot” but there’s always enough to go around because when soil is healthy, there is rapid interchange of nutrients between various forms. The faster you get that process going through higher populations and more diverse populations of microbes, the better everything seems to operate. Adding salts is essentially feeding waste products of microbes to the system, and frankly I’m not a good enough grower to know how to feed microbes their own shit without killing them
for how long do you keep them here until you transplant them to a fertilized solo?
Mine never grows this long neck… Do you think I migh giving them too much light? I use a Qauntum board 65 w with 40 per cent of power in a distance about 70 cm high…