I love ur setup and very nice plants i love organic grow that the last method i learn and should be the first one !
Do you use tea
Thank you much for the kind words!
I've gone away from teas and often recommend others do the same, unless it's an EWC, but even then. I get much better results making sure my soil is up to par when I build it and making sure to maintain that, so long as that holds true I pretty much never need teas. Whatever ingredients you used when you made your soil, be sure to have extras laying around for the necessary top dresses. For me, that means constantly having access to kelp/crab/neem meals as well as the freshest EWC I can get my hands on. I have my own worm farm, but it doesn't produce nearly enough for me with these pots so I have to supplement with others' EWC. But by top dressing your plants every 4-6 weeks with EWC and amendments you should never have to use teas of any sort, top dressing and watering allows your plant and the microbes to have more control over things where as I feel that teas tend to throw off the balance of your soil more often than not.
There are a lot of people that will tell you it is impossible to burn your plants with teas and let me just say this is
NOT true, you can in fact burn your plants with teas. If you use too much alfalfa meal or too much guano then you will get the same burn you would overdoing it with synthetics. When you top dress with amendments, the microbes will attack them at a nice, slow and steady pace that will be exactly what the plant wants. However, when you use teas, you're putting all of your organic amendments in a stocking/sock and speeding things up by oxygenating the water. As a result of this, the organic matter gets broken down quicker as a result of the extra microbes in your teas that are the result of the extra oxygen. However this isn't always a good thing, if you overdo it with guano and have too much of it available in your tea when you give it to your plants/soil then now your plants/soil have too much available guano since it wasn't decomposed at the normal rate the plant wanted.
And on that note, make sure you consider everything that is inside your organic amendments. Here's an example that happened to me within the last few weeks that I'm still dealing with. I top dressed with crab meal about 2-3 weeks ago to get the girls ready for weeks 5+ of flower, the stuff I got has an NPK of 2-3-1, but I forgot to account for the calcium in it (23%!). Now, normally this wouldn't be much of an issue if it weren't for my heavily calcified water. I didn't even consider the fact that my well water is pretty high in calcium already, so top dressing with the extra crab meal is giving me signs of calcium toxicity as well as the magnesium deficiencies that come with it. It's nothing too major and all I have to do is mix with some water from those water machines at grocery stores and I'm fine, had I made a tea instead of top dressing I'm sure my plants would have looked much worse.
People typically use teas because they want to "re-inoculate" their soil, but so long as you stay on top of things you should never have to do this. The microbes constantly reproduce and die off, much like worms they are capable of regulating their respective populations just fine on their own so long as you give them the tools they need to do so. If you constantly keep your living soil moist and stay on top of your top dressing, you should never need to re-inoculate your soil because nothing ever goes dormant when things are healthy in the first place.
However, shit happens and sometimes we make mistakes and allow our soil to get too dry, or perhaps we forget to maintain the no-till system after harvest. A lot of the microbes will either die off or go dormant, however hope is not lost. This is the point that people typically look to making a compost or EWC tea, but I've been using a product called "Growers Recharge" in place of teas. All the "Growers Recharge" is is just a bunch of various microbes ready to go, just add into your water and hit your girls with it. What you're doing with the recharge is the same thing as the compost/EWC teas, but it's much better because it's just pure microbes with no nutritional values to them. As a result of this, you can re-inoculate your soil with JUST microbes and the microbes from the Recharge will pick up where the last generation of microbes left off, decomposing everything in your soil as well as on your top dresses. If you have earthworms in your pots as well then you'll have some happy girls!
Living organic soil is all about putting the soil in charge, with teas you take that away and put yourself in charge instead. Seeing as how this is how plants were designed to grow and thrive, anything I do differently than that will be me intervening with an already perfectly constructed system. The soil and the setup are the only reason I'm getting decent results, these microbes and plants have been around much longer than I have and so I'm quite comfortable putting my faith in them instead of myself
I'm no expert, and I'm not here to knock anyone's style by any means. However, when researching grow journals/threads from the organic gurus of various forums I never saw many of them using teas and it was for the reasons above.
Hope that helped my man.
