I used it once and don’t really have any other experience with it. It was also my first crack at soil and was outdoors. Wish I could be more help.
3 Likes
I have been using Osmocote for many years for my guerilla grows. I have also used other things like micro sponges to retain water in desert areas. Osmocote is a very good product but as Ben has stated without water is useless.
I just layer mine in the first few inches of soil after planting and it will feed your plant throughout its life.
7 Likes
These plants were my last outdoor plants using Osmocote:
17 Likes
Sorry, not familiar with your drill.
1 Like
rgr. they are setup like this. basically mimicking water table underground.
I think I’ll give it a try in one of the future runs and see what happens. I saw 10lb bags of osmacote 14-14-14 at my local amish store, 18$. Just wondering on how to mix it in. should I make it uniform in the media or just on top.
4 Likes
Indoor grows are different. Screw the organic religion. Whatever gives you the best yield for the lowest amount of inputs is what counts.
Having said that, I paid for a contractor to sow Hairy vetch and Madrid yellow sweet clover on my land before moving in. I also drilled in Elbon rye…all to increase N and humus on my acreage.
I do organics.
Pix or it doesn’t exist.
7 Likes
On top if you water from the top down.
2 Likes
ok, thank you. I’ll experiment. how do you calculate the amount? sorry for all the questions. I’m trying to least amount of work to end result. this wold be a considerable jump towards simplicity. your field looks peaceful.
2 Likes
Trial and error. It’s a bit harder to get a burn with slow release foods. Start somewhere and learn. Good luck.
3 Likes
Looks great. How’s the profit margin?
1 Like
IDK, I just work there and sling vegetables in the wash and shipping barn, but margins are tight for sure. We spent like $20k extra on irrigation water this summer with a couple week drought. And inputs were weird not many super sacks available in bulk we had to get a lot of palletized stuff, that was a pain for the field crew, also expensive. We just built that big super insulated tractor barn to keep more crops for winter sales at better prices. Fortunately most of our land is leased from nonprofit and conservation groups who own protected farmland, and we have a long term relationship with them. We just got one of those federal food safety grants to put up a deer fence around our biggest 30 acre field on some Audubon land and it’ll belong to them, so it works out for everyone pretty good, they need to lease to organic farmers since it’s protected migratory bird habitat. This is just the home farm it’s only ten acres or so, the rest is scattered over three nearby towns in different soil zones and micro climates
5 Likes
For me the Grow Dots are, too coin Scotty’s analogy, like the meat and potatoes of a diet. It’s the basics. Yes other things can be used with them, I’ve been known to give my girls a hit of a few things along the way but most additives are covered by Recharge. Humic, fulvic, kelp, its all in Recharge. I know i sound like a schill, but Grow Dots and Recharge make it easy, almost too easy.
4 Likes
Fascinating and you can appreciate what a farmer goes thru!
I put in almost a mile of high tensile 8’ high (deer) fence back in 2004 at $3.00/ft. Included 2 gates, one 8’ wide and one 16’ wide. I hear it costs $10/ft around here now.
It’s tough, and you have to use whatever it takes to make money. The commercial, conventional farming industry has seen many changes over the years regarding safety, efficiency, stewardship of the land. I have/had a Texas Pesticide Applicator’s License. 95% of the class room teachings was along the lines of “less is more”, supporting natural predators, protecting the environment, health of workers. Days of DDT are long gone.
Sometimes you can’t do that and organic purists will cheat when going “organic and natural” becomes too challenging. I have one such commercial organic “purist” friend who had to resort to using glyphosate in his field of blackberries, which is OK. That maligned herbicide is about as close to being organic as it gets.
3 Likes
Totally. We do fully organic so mostly we’re using compost tea sprays, potassium soaps, milky spore, sulfur, copper, and there’s a couple big jugs of pyrethrin and spinosad in the shed for when it gets ugly. But there’s a lot of IPM places around and I’m good with that, everyone’s gotta do what works for their particular crops and environment. The big ag school in our area operates a student farm and a research orchard, both of those are IPM and we sell the stone fruits, apples, cranberries and everything else from the IPM places at our organic farm store. Fantastic fruits, they do it right with just enough to keep the fruits nice without laying it on thick, I’ve talked to their guy who comes in the van to deliver and he’s said they are probably organic 90-95% of the time but that option to use conventional products carefully means that last 5% saves and probably doubles their crops vs if they were stricter. He also said it’s incredibly hard to do fruiting stuff without some non-organics, at least in the Northeast with our cool wet weather and the blight around here has been gnarly lately with global warming. That’s probably complicated by the fact that they largely grow heirloom types from very old rootstock, they took over a very old orchard in the 70s so they probably have apple trees well over a century old, that’s not uncommon in New England or upstate New York, or on the East Coast in general. My favorite apple is one called the Black Twig, which is a Tennessee heirloom from about 150 years ago that you find every once in a while here from one of those old orchards.
3 Likes
Fascinating! Sounds like a great place to work.
1 Like
Thanks been lookking for these !
It’s a really good farm, yeah. I was getting my produce from them and liked the folks enough to go work there when I needed a job, I’ll be back in the spring.
3 Likes
Both great products. Pyrethrin is used in shampoos for head lice and all kinds of commercial concoctions as you probably know. Killer with insects, benign with mammals. Due to droughts we have been invaded by millions of grasshoppers. They get so bad they killed a 25’ pine by stripping the smaller branches, eating peach tree bark, etc. One hit from a qt. bottle of this stuff and they go down when taking up residency in the greenhouse. I keep a spray bottle hanging from a greenhouse bench. Pyrethrins General Fact Sheet
2 Likes
They’re both pretty great, my boss was talking about how pyrethrin has a half-life of around twelve hours and spinosad about two to three weeks, so applying them is pretty low-risk when it comes to the residuals in plant tissues.
2 Likes