That is a lot to take in, but I will probably save this page in my toolbar. I was looking at making three to four 35gal totes and store them for a few weeks... I read the no till method, but I am still pretty new to this.
Could I use the cheap peat that is like $5 a bale or stick with the $20 bags? The local hydro store wants $30 for premium soil!
The rotten wood? Are you talking about the stuff that crumbles in your hands??? The stuff that has all the mycelium fungi? I think that I understand. I have mostly oak around here and a few hickory. What kind of tree do you look for? I live in the woods by the way, I come across this stuff all the time looking for firewood! It looks yellow around here.
How much of this do you buy online? I would like to get most of it from the same place. I am boycotting my local hydro store and I stumbled into a landscaping store that is much more reasonable. They had a few things like rock phosphate and $20 FFoF, but not much more that was on your list. I might have to do most of my shopping online.
Insect meal? Did you say that was chicken feed? I have a feed store down the street, haha it is closer than any other store really!
Yeah the rotten wood that crumbles in your hand is perfect, and I have used oak and redwood, but redwood mostly, I don't look at it like it's redwood anymore though, more like a soil conditioner, its been rotting for a long time.
If you want it a lil easier you can buy a bale of promix, that'll cover your peat and some of your aeration, from there you could just add biochar and rotten wood
And yeah, the insect meal is chicken feed, you'll see a big plastic tub of cricket and mealworms. it's sorta expensive ($15-20) but in my mind it's worth it, You also gotta mash em up too, and that's a bitch, I used two weight plates, for working out, a 22 lb (10kg) one and a 11 lb (5kg) one, from there I just mashed em up to a powder and then put it back in the bucket, kinda sucks the bucket even FULL of the insects mashes down to like a quarter full. I'd say you'd get probably 5-6 cups full, for lets say 15 bucks.
So depending on how much you want to use, either a half or a full cup, per cubic foot. You'll get enough for about 90 gallons at the rate that I use it, you could totally use it for a bigger portion of your nutrients but then you'd only get 45 gallons worth if you use it at a full cup per cubic foot.
It's not water soluble (very much anyways) so I expect it to last at least two harvests worth, after all that's only 6-7 months.
------- keep in mind I DO NOT know what the NPK rating of the insect meal is, I normally don't care a whole lot about that as almost all of the nuttrients I have are slow release, but I imagine the rating to be sorta high, in nitrogen and phosphorus if I were to guess.
Totally a guess though.
So it breaks down to be a lil more on the expensive side of nutrients really, and i'm positive you could go without it, but I
personally won't go without it, this run i'm having much less problems with mites, and with our warm weather I normally have problems, no matter what I do, so im thinking my soil recipe and IPMs are the reason why.
or that's what i'm tellin myself, so I feel cooler.
neem meal, crab meal, and insect meal work well for that.
The only thing i'm curious about is maybe in the future i'll do a small controlled batch of soil, I want to buy some karanja meal and cut my neem down to a half cup and my karanja to a half cup, I've read that mixing them apparently may have additional advantages. In regards to pest management anyways.
Plus neem meal stinks.
If you can, maybe age your soil in 35 gallon smartpots, or bigger I think that's a better way to age the soil, no chance for anaerobic condition there, but they're a bitch to move..
Age them with your vermicompost and everything in there, let them all make a nice little symbiotic family. I don't screen my vermicompost, I throw a double handful of worms, cocoons, and castings all in a double handful per 12 or 15 gallon smartpot. This is in addition to the normal percentage of EWC I have in my soil, but that EWC is screened.
