I really want to try supersoil but I have no clue where to start.
I see many Ogers have their own mix. This seems like a daunting task especially not understanding the science behind it.
Any advice on how to get started?
Any brands recommendations that take the guess work out of it?
Buddy is having good results with Roots Organic Lush combined with their teas.
Any thoughts on the subject is much appreciated.
I wouldn’t personally start with super soil. I would start with a equal parts of peat/compost/pumice and add a dry amendment pack from buildasoil. Then you can top dress with MBP, AACT and SST. Amend it again next season.
Something like this works great too.
Base mix:
1 part high quality compost
1 part pumice or perlite
1 part sphagnum peat moss-no additives
Food:
1 cup fertrell fish meal per cubic ft of base mix
1 cup acadian kelp meal per cu ft base mix
1 cup basalt rock dust per cu ft base mix
1 cup pacific pearl oyster shell powder
Stick with the roots. It’s easy and works great. Use the terp teas as soil amendments when your mixing up. I do 1/2 c if the veg tea per gallon of soil and then 1/2 c of the bloom tea per gallon for flowering (post transplant) soil. Did it for multiple runs with great results. Just pH your water to 6.3 and your golden. Or go coast of Maine, I only have about 3 weeks left and my plants are looking great with almost no feeding at all.
Do you use teas with coast of Maine?
I’m finding the process easy enough starting slow. I wouldn’t say I have a super soil, even though the ingredients are the same. I just use less. Can always add it later!
Thanks for the response. Again this kind of stuff is still a little over my head. Also seems like a lot of work to track down but maybe not.
I’d also hate to buy all that stuff to mix it wrong or something.
What is your reasoning for not liking supersoil?
Nope, pH down, Mr muchastache calmag, 3 feeds of coconut water, 2 feeds with molasses so far this grow. I’ve been growing for 11 years and always used bottles. I’m trying to break the addiction. If I can get down to 3 bottles (excluding some mycco innoculant) I’ll be damn happy.
I’m learning hydro and it’s 3 powders and 2 bottles. I’m digging it.
I’ve made super soil exact to the subcool recipe and it worked about the same as this after 3 grows. It’s a little hot until then
Cool,
When do you feed coconut water and molasses?
Alternating weeks during early flower, then I’ll hit them with 1 more feed of each around week 7. The coconut water I call liquid trichromes, they really ice up after you feed it in late bloom.
Blood meal
In my best Seinfeld voice…
“What’s the dealll with blood meal!.?”
Soil building is absolutely a headache at first, but most of it is trying to understand why things are necessary.
You can basically make a workable soil with pretty much anything as long as it fits the “theory” of soil building, but certain ingredients are more premium than others.
You need a base, which can be dirt, peat, coco coir, straw, or anything that roots can grow through and that can hold water and nutrients, without drowning the roots.
You need some kind of aeration, like pumice, perlite, vermiculite, rice hulls, or anything that will give pockets of air and loosen the density of base. Even hard shell pine cones can work in conjunction with another aerator.
You need the main nutrients- Nitrogen for vegetative growth, Phosphorus for flowers/fruits, and Potassium for overall health and root/cell development. Potassium regulates the turn over of intake, usage and building too, so plants can grow stronger and faster. Oxygen, carbon and hydrogen are also main, or “macro”, nutrients, but they are more naturally occurring and so aren’t really a concern for soil. Many natural fertilizers have varying nutrient ratios, so you have to look and decide what you need.
You need calcium, magnesium, and sometimes sulfur, but in much smaller quantities. Micronutes in even less quantities can be copper, iron, zinc, and some other things… but those are the least important for a basic soil. A quick google search can help tell you what to add to get some of each thing. Something like egg shells or bone or shell flour can work for calcium, and a simple decomposed banana can help for something like potassium. For rock dust, stick with basalt… it’s cheaper and has less overall toxins/heavy metals than other rock dusts.
Something like dolomite lime is calcium magnesium carbonate and can assist in balancing ph.
Plants cannot absorb anything until it breaks down to a basic form, so often times super soils will actually be better on the second use, when everything starts to gel better.
Then there’s a bunch of stuff for root health… microbes help break stuff down and give a clean boost to growth, and fungi help expand root growth which leads to better intake, but I’ll leave that to another to explain.
mixing it… this is where it can get tricky, because if you don’t mix it right, or if you are too wild with your mix, it can be too strong, too weak, or throw your ph way out of wack… which can lead to a bunch of problems… if ph is too high, it won’t let certain things be absorbed, and if it is too low, it can allow toxins to be absorbed.
Almost every individual ingredient can be switched out for another ingredient that does essentially the same thing, but as stated at the beginning of this long-ass post, some things are more premium. Bat guano and seabird guano are one example. Compost vs worm castings is another.
I ran across this a few years ago on another site, and the title pretty much says it all.
The base soil is 1/3 peat, 1/3 castings/compost, 1/3 perlite. For nutes, it’s Espoma’s Tomato Tone, (or equivalent. I’ve used DTE Bio-Live with excellent results), Kelp Meal, Rock Dust, and Lime. I tried it once just to see what it was like, and it grew some very nice plants.
I imagine that BuildASoil nutrient/mineral combo pack @SCJedi mentioned would work just as well, and would probably be easier to use since It’s pre-mixed. I’ve used their v2.0 mineral pack, but never the nute pack.
I bought a electric cement mixer for soil. It’ll hold 2 cu ft, or 15 gallons of finished soil, so I use 5 gal each of soil, castings/compost, and perlite, then add my amendments.
With subcools soil recipe I found grows 3 and 4 to be the highest yielding
I used Coots mix from Buildasoil along with SST and AACT that I made and got 2# per 30g of soil. The recipe I posted above is a modified version of Cornell University’s base recipe that Coot and Gas came up with.
Renting a mixer is cheap and easy if you don’t wanna splurged buy one but I believe the saying us to “work smart, not hard” Most large orange box shaped hardware stores that have rental yards should have one available
This is a fantastic answer by the way ,)
Personally it took me a while to wrap my head around how to grow in living soil & how it all worked. But after buttloads of reading & asking questions. I ended up doing this.
Base Soil Mixture
85% HP Pro all purpose
10% Earth Worm Castings
05% Valcanic Rock
Soil cover
Neem leaves 
(Pest repellent)
Promix Orchid mix (Western fir bark mostly)
Bamboo charcoal (smell reducer, pest prevention & microbes refuge)
Soil Airration Amendments:
Lava Rocks
(Pearlite already in HP Pro)
Soil Nutrients Amendments:
Organic Raw Coconut powder
Organic Kelp Powder
Seven Sea Veggies
Crushed Eggs shells
Bannana leaves diced up
Gaia Green 444
Gaia Green 284
Dynomyco C
Fish Shit Liquid
Worms 🪱 Red Wigglers (Eisenia Fetida)
1st run completed, was pretty good.
Starting 2nd run within a month. Only additional inputs is 10 lbs of Worm bin contents I’ve been building up for the last 6 ish months.
Seems easy enough for me 
The soil mix in the first post of this thread is what I’ve been using for years and it’s excellent: No-Till Gardening: Revisited | Grasscity Forums - The #1 Marijuana Community Online It’s a super-long thread, but there’s a lot of good info in it, if you feel like reading it. You really only need to read the first post, though. I don’t grow no till, but I’ve used that mix in three, five and seven gallon pots with no issues. It’s pretty much water-only, but if you wanna add things to your water occasionally, like coconut or fulvic or whatever, you can. Some grows I’ll do that, some grows I won’t.
Also, the biochar and the malted barley powder aren’t really necessary, I don’t think. I’ve used batches with and without biochar (my current mix doesn’t have any, but I’ve been slowly adding it to my soil bins). The MBP you can just top dress with, if you don’t have any when you’re actually mixing up the soil. If you’re gonna use biochar, though, be sure it’s pre-charged or charge it yourself before you add it to the soil.
A cubic foot is 7.5 gallons, so what I’ll do when I mix up some soil (which isn’t often these days; I use my soil over and over again) is get a 45 or 65 gallon Rubbermaid container (the ones with wheels are best, just because moving 65 gallons of soil around is heavy haha) and drill a bunch of little holes all over the sides and bottom of the bin. Then I’ll take a five gallon bucket and fill it up three times, once with the peat moss, once with the EWC/compost and once with the pumice. That’s fifteen gallons of the “base mix.” Then I just double the amount of amendments, according to the recipe in that post in the no till thread: 1-2 cups of neem, 1-2 cups of kelp etc etc.
It’s a super-easy mix to make and, like I said, you can use it over and over again. I honestly don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but I know how to read instructions haha! I started using that mix six years ago and I’ve never considered changing it. Honestly, organic gardening is the easiest and cheapest way to grow, in my opinion. I’m not sure why people think it’s so complicated, because it really isn’t. Definitely easier than hydro, for sure.
Duuuuude, I’ve been thinking about doing that for years. Or renting one, anyway. I like mixing up my soil, I think it’s fun. Kind of haha. But man, a cement mixer would be so much easier. I’m super-anal about that shit and wanna make sure that everything is mixed in evenly and thoroughly, so I’ll spend literally like a morning or an afternoon (with breaks for beers and smokes, of course) just hand-mixing my soil. By the time I’m done, my forearms are always crazy-sore haha.