How much organic material in your mix is too much?

Still tweaking my next batch of soil and I had a couple plants I aborted in last run that were budded up nicely and I've just left them sitting/drying in the room. I was in the midst of cleanup and thought about how many people put their old leaves and what not back into their mixes.

I currently have a portion of the 'vNext mix' sitting with my latest amendments (P sources) and the montmorrilonite clay I just added. This is heavily compost base (Bu's and Ancient Forest, both) with a good bit of EWC mixed in. The new clay will give some aeration and I did add more perlite as well.

When this is all ready I plan to mix the prior old soil with the new batch of goodies and I was considering tossing in all that aborted bud but now I'm wondering how much is too much? My thinking is that the plant selected the minerals needed to form those buds and putting them back in might be well worth the while.

Any thoughts on the point where you have too much OM in your mix? When this is all combined I did want my N to be lowered a tad while raising P a good bit & K just a tad. Not sure what adding this would do as far as what it will contribute both macro nutes and micro.

Also wondering if this new material input would need to 'cook' a while (that's the plan anyhow) - afraid I might get a thermal reaction from the new stuff breaking down since the original stuff has already. Still not sure 100% which of the inputs do & do not create the heat that could negatively impact seedlings/clones.

I don't know about putting it directly back into the soil mix, but composting it would be a good addition imo. Just want to mix in equal parts "brown" (paper, cardboard, etc) with it in your pile. I personally plan on feeding my old plant material to my worm bin.

Hopefully someone else will be along shortly with a better answer

rkmcdon said:

I don't know about putting it directly back into the soil mix, but composting it would be a good addition imo. Just want to mix in equal parts "brown" (paper, cardboard, etc) with it in your pile. I personally plan on feeding my old plant material to my worm bin.

Hopefully someone else will be along shortly with a better answer

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Yep, running it through the worms first usually gives the best results. Then to the mix.

I do remember reading that ~8-10% OM is the ideal amount in a mix.

Wet

Yeah my worm bin was an abort due to being in a cold garage. And for stealth reasons I don't have a compost pile I can use for this.

I took the bud and crumpled it up good and put a small amount in for the hell of it. Hopefully didn't shoot myself in the foot in the process. I figure it's not going to necessarily hurt unless I screw up the water retention or aeration aspects. It sure made the dirt smell nice.

It won’t hurt. As long as you let it set for at least 30 days. If your mix is active any loose plant material should pretty much disappear in that time. Cannabis has everything that cannabis needs; go figure.

NewGrower2011 said:

Also wondering if this new material input would need to 'cook' a while (that's the plan anyhow) - afraid I might get a thermal reaction from the new stuff breaking down since the original stuff has already. Still not sure 100% which of the inputs do & do not create the heat that could negatively impact seedlings/clones.

Click to expand...

Anything that increases the biological activity in your soil will cause an increase in heat, especially the stuff that bacteria love to eat like raw organic material with an ideal C:N ratio kept moist with plenty of oxygen. Alfalfa pellets are one of the worst (or best) for this. Of course to retain enough heat to cause damage, you'd need enough volume. Think compost pile as an extreme case. I recycle nearly everything except the trichomes from my grows, but do so by using the material as a mulch (no-till here) which will benefit the next cycle and/or maybe the cycle after that. If I used a crazy amount of organic material in my initial soil mix, I'd temperature probe it a week or two after sitting in the pot before planting anything just to make sure it's okay.

Fully composted material is safe to use because it's stuff that's already been eaten by bacteria, and has the benefit of giving you some available nutrients through the difficult first cycle. So a safe rule is that if your addition is organic material already eaten, then it shouldn't cause any major issues with heating.