First Horticultural Math Exercise, bucket chemistry 1

[Farmer_Dan]

I am not surprised by this. The local grow shop (ran by my friend) often had to pull H&G products due to a DoA Stop Sale for whatever reason. Usually labeling or false claims. Far more than any other company. I am pretty sure that their “Shooting Powder” contains unlisted PGRs, at least from what I have seen.

[Lowsky]

I’m going to take a deep breath … and then re-read this thread … truly great stuff!!!

[ethan]

Read the original post. I want you to cost the element.

This way we can compare fertilizer equally. Some sources of phosphorous come in different formulations. For example we used phosphoric acid for half of our total input of phosphorus. We had on adjust all of our feeds because of this unique problem.

We had a four custom blends made by peters just for our operation.

From the voices in my head

Ethan

[ethan]

Thank you.

The pot mum thread is good also. . It even better.

From the voices in my head
Ethan

[ethan]

@AmericanWeedwolf

My point is that any balanced fertilizer, natural or synthetic, can be deleterious to a soil over time because plants simply do not take up macronutrients at an even ratio. This just highlights the need for monitoring soil nutrient levels and using fertilizer blends that roughly match those a crop uses. It is far less important in container grown systems because the grower is not re-using the growing media from season to season. Perhaps even more important is the development and use of varieties that have high nutrient use efficiencies, something that most breeding programs don’t even think about. Conventional breeding has been all about high inputs for high outputs since WWII. Hopefully Cannabis won’t end up down the same route.

Field production has it own set of problems. Organic field production even harder.

I use to help organic vegetable and chicken growers in the Kansas city area for trade. I would get old hens process the way I like and I would do there soil chemistry and titrate there teas. This way we both knew exactly what was being added. I spoke at there big annual meeting about ipm when it was new. About 1993 was the keynote address. They served me a horrid vegetarian meal. Those plant killers. Vegetarian is fine, half my close friend are Hindu and strict veg only. I keep kosher at home, so eating go veg is fine. I allow any of them to bring food to my house. Or cook.

If you need help there are a lot of analytical chemist on the site.

We are feeding cannabis like it’s a tomato

The WW2 field growing guides will be a big help for you. This is pre inorganic fertilizer period. They have great publications the best for field nutrition where extention publication from minnasota and Kentucky.

They are all available on line. You get to them through the library of congress site. This will take you to the nation ag library. On the ag library search for Hemp for Victory. All the WW2 publication for Hemp have Hemp for Victory in the name. Google can to access LOC catalog. (That’s a longer story😱)

From the voices in my head
Ethan

[ethan]

@AmericanWeedwolf

The farm I currently work at has been fertilized heavily with compost over the years and now we have a situation where our soil has built up so much potash that levels in the soil are bordering on toxicity for many crops. Luckily Cannabis is great at taking up potash and we’re in the process of bioremediating it. Unfortunately this means we have to remove all that biomass rather than returning it to the soil. As a result we’ve had to resort to finding and using unusual sources of fertilizers and organic matter that do not contain significant amounts of K until we can get these levels down.

I was thinking about your field problem. There are a number of high salt tolerant plants. Even some cannabis growers who claim to grow in 2200ppm of what I don’t know.

But, I know of two land reclamation programs, one in Southern California and one in Israel. They planted high salt using crops and discarded the foder.

From the voices in my head
Ethan