Walmart sells FFOF for $32.50 per 40lb bag, and they’ll deliver it to your local store for pickup. Let’s say you spend $318 plus tax to buy 10 bags. You could fill several huge fabric pots. I’d expect 8 ounces per plant around here, where dispensary prices are $220-440 per ounce.
You don’t need to add anything except water to a soil grow. You reamend the mix between crops, but that’s inexpensive.
Alternatively, using coco coir, with or without perlite, and fertigating with ionically available nutrients, is also a very productive way to grow.
Either way you’re spending hundreds to set up right, but almost nothing on an ongoing basis.
I don’t think you’d have great yields with just water though. I use happy frog and even my first wetting has about a 33% strength of my seedling fertilizer. Then calmag. After that I’m in veg and start veg nutes at half. I didn’t do that the first indoor. The size difference at 30 days is crazy.
Decomposing vegetation, insects, fungus, worms, bacteria, life/death/feces. Which I have considered using a living soil, but didn’t want to smell it. Of and hf are not living soils and I haven’t heard of anyone going beginning to end with just water in them. Some feed with hf from the beginning. Some wait till runoff reaches 800ppm. OF you pretty much have to wait though. It generally causes acute burn in seedlings but doesn’t kill them or even slow them much. Drops to 800ppm at around 6 weeks as to where HF hits there without adding at around 4 weeks. I have harmless cobweb in my flowering tent atm. Doesn’t mean I haven’t taken h202 to it just because I’d rather not see it. Don’t want the whole forest inside. I’ve not used strong enough dilution to kill it. Since there are microbes in the soil I’d rather not kill. Especially the ones I added extra. Just keep it mitigated
If OF isn’t a living soil, I don’t know what is. Maybe if we kill the microbiology by salting it into oblivion…
I have gone through vegetative growth and 10 weeks of flowering in a blend of ocean forest and happy frog with water and microbes. That’s indoors.
@sbgrow will be outdoors. There’s no reason they can’t buy a 50 gallon fabric pot and use FFOF repeatedly. I’d germinate and let seedlings harden off in ProMix first, but then right into Ocean Forest
I’m dead set against using ionically available nutrients in soil. Instead, I prepare my soil with organic amendments to carry it through the entire grow. I layer with a mixture of hotter soil like ocean forest and a cooler soil like happy frog, plus lots of organic amendments. I have not had any significant issues going water only for an entire grow.
Soil is not like soilless; soil will adsorb and absorb nutrients from your synthetic solution. You cannot predict what it’s going to take.
I send out soil samples periodically (once or twice a year) to a state lab which performs a detailed analysis and recommendations for amending as needed.
If you plan on relying on ionic nutrients eventually, just start there and stick with ProMix, which doesn’t have the same adsorption and absorbtion properties as an organic soil.
If you decide to go soilless, you should consider that you still need to purchase a pH and EC meter, mixing and measuring supplies, in addition to the nutrients and pH controls.
And if you elect to combine soil and nutrient fertigation (which I advise against), you still need the ancillary equipment I just mentioned. Yet another argument in favor of picking one route or the other.
Never comment/post/talk. Always been low key. That right there sir, you should be commended for! So thank you for the depth of insight that makes this place what it is. A kick ass collection of the things one needs, in order to successfully grow your own! Also, the native plant companion comparison is an avenue in dire need of direction. If you’ve any wisdom in this, I’d be grateful. Keep kicking ass!
Thanks for the comment, however, native plants are just that plants that grow locally. Canada thistle is a local plant that grows here and any soil it grows well in so does cannabis. Its best to look up local plants in your area.
