Banana tea + FFOF, should this be okay for full grow?

I've got a bag seed I'm testing this on. She looks to be pretty healthy. She's in a 1gal pot, and she's in a Supercloset Superbox. I don't expect her to get larger than about a foot or so tall. The nutrients in the soil should be running out by now (it's been almost a month). I'll post some pics when I get the chance to show them.

My question to you guys is: should I be fine just using banana tea, and how often should I feed her this? I can afford bananas easily since we eat them anyway. I was considering some other teas but nothing seems good (i.e maybe orange or apple?)

I've got Thrive Alive Green Seaweed, but I take it's prob got too much N? or should I go ahead and add it anyway for support?

Here's pics of "k-douche" my bag seed sativa. She's about 34 days since starting 12/12, showed pistils around 3rd week:



Here's Berry bomb, about 10 days in 12/12, and she's already showing pistils, nothing I could really take pics of with my phone though:
I'm impressed with berry bomb's clones, one is showing a grip of roots after only 10 days, so she's probably going to be my super mother.

And I just put my Kushage into 12/12 on 4/20, she's a bit of a retard plant, but we'll see how she does in flower:

I also forgot to mention, the water out here (las vegas) has a ton of TDS's, and I'm using this water for my tea...it comes from the mountains

Water report claims these common 'contaminates': magnesium about 25ppm, calcium about 74ppm, 5ppm potassium, 87ppm sodium, 213ppm sulfates. Also TDS ~ 584....That's pretty close to what I tested with an digital TDS.

I've been watering mostly with purified drinking water bought from the store, but I'm considering switching up to de-chlorinated tap by leaving it open 24hrs but I'm just worried some of the contaminates could be very bad for wife's health...here's the full breakdown link:

http://www.lvvwd.com/assets/pdf/wq_summary_lvvwd.pdf

I've never actually used a banana tea, but I use banana compost.

I think you would be good in veg with FFOF and banana tea, but you'd need a little more for flower.

Also, do you guys eat cucumbers? The P value for cucumber peels is pretty high, maybe you could add that to the tea?

Howr you liking that superbox? I've debated buying one.

I like it a lot. There's a few words of caution for growing weed in it though:

--The DWC system sucks...they've updated it since I bought mine, however draining the res using the built-in pump doesn't fully drain the res...this means you have to move your plants to another res while cleaning your res...maybe if you go organic you don't need to flush/drain during one grow cycle? or at least you may not need to remove everything?
--The box gets a little crowded, so moving plants in/out can be a bit of a pain, but you get over it. With the DWC system, it gets extremely crowded, and removing plants can get difficult as the net pots are the small 3" pots.
--It's expensive for what it is. I can build a 6'Tx3'Wx2'D box for the same price, and have LED instead (using soil of course).
--If you want to grow more than 1 plant at a time and using soil, you will end up needing to let your plants get practically root-bound...I don't know what the implications of this are with organics, but when I was using the Technaflora recipe for success, I was using 4" pots and still grew giant sized buds.

However. The 200w 10k CFL is perfect for this box. I've grown some super fat buds in this box no problem.
Also, it is pretty stealthy, unless you're growing some skunky plants...it will not entirely keep your room from gaining a slight skunky musk, however I usually spray fabreeze in the room and it fixes that.

+ WitchDoctor + said:

I've never actually used a banana tea, but I use banana compost.

I think you would be good in veg with FFOF and banana tea, but you'd need a little more for flower.

Also, do you guys eat cucumbers? The P value for cucumber peels is pretty high, maybe you could add that to the tea?

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The thing with that is: I don't really use the soil to veg very long....the clones will be in small 4" pots until there's room in my flower chamber, then off they go into 12/12. So in reality, I'm not using up the nutrients from the soil as much for veg as I am for flower.

So with the cucumber what would you do? boil the skin? grind it up and soak or what?

No, I meant that the nutrients that come in FFOF won't have enough P for flower. It's a good mix for veg though. And I'm not sure, like I said, I've never made the banana tea, I just figured you'd use the cucumber peel in the same way. I bake my banana peels in the oven till they're crispy and crush them and mix them into my soil mix, but I haven't tried anything with cucumber peels yet, I just know they are high in phosphorus.

Banana peels have a PK value of 3.0-33.0 or something very close to that, so any tea or nutrient using bananas would have that value I believe. But you wouldn't get very big buds with just the bananas, not that you wouldn't be able to flower the plants successfully, I just think they would be deficient. But I've never grown in such small pots, so I'm not sure how much that's a factor..

okay. Yea, my plan was to use the organic teas similar to how I would use chemical ferts...like Feed-Water-Water or something similar, however adding the cucumber tea might be a good addition to that. So since the Potassium is 'chelated', does that mean it's in salt form and I'd need to flush every 4 weeks, despite being organic, to prevent salt buildup? or will the plant use it all up and not retain the salts? I do leach the plants every water though.

on a side note, since I'm not needing N, and I should stop giving it N, that coffee grounds would be bad for this stage, correct? I've heard both ways that it can be good or bad for plants...but just based on NPK ratios from the grounds(used) what would you say?

phillk6751 said:

okay. Yea, my plan was to use the organic teas similar to how I would use chemical ferts...like Feed-Water-Water or something similar, however adding the cucumber tea might be a good addition to that. So since the Potassium is 'chelated', does that mean it's in salt form and I'd need to flush every 4 weeks, despite being organic, to prevent salt buildup? or will the plant use it all up and not retain the salts? I do leach the plants every water though.

on a side note, since I'm not needing N, and I should stop giving it N, that coffee grounds would be bad for this stage, correct? I've heard both ways that it can be good or bad for plants...but just based on NPK ratios from the grounds(used) what would you say?

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You can feed almost every watering with organics. I do feed>tea>feed ever week, never plain water. As long as everything is 100% organic you won't have any salt build up, and you NEVER flush unless you have a pH problem or something, which also isn't likely to happen in organics.

I use coffee grounds in my mix, but I don't top dress. Either way it's good for the soil and you can use it in both flower and veg, as long as you don't use more than is recommended. Which I think is a tablespoon or two per gallon of soil.

Just remember that growing organic and chemical are so completely different that people that have been growing amazing pot for years with chemical nutrients find themselves very confused when first starting organics. They are used to constantly checking pH and making sure they do everything perfect. With organics, the plant does everything for you, you just have to give it what it needs. So it becomes a different science, because you have to "predict" what the soil needs, and then "learn" from what it tells you.

Either way just make sure you don't mix chemical ferts with organic ones, and you won't have any issues with salt build up or anything like that, and pH shouldn't be an issue.

Your banana peels have to decompose in order to get the full nutritive value from them. As is all of your elements are locked up in biological compounds within. Microbial activity is integral to getting them back into an ionic, available form.

There ya go, so to use the bananas effectively in your tea, or the cucumber peels, you would have to compost both of them first.

So would it be a good idea to let it compost in a bucket of water for say a week then use the water? Or would that lend to bad bacterial growth?

phillk6751 said:

So would it be a good idea to let it compost in a bucket of water for say a week then use the water? Or would that lend to bad bacterial growth?

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No, no. Stagnant water = no oxygen = anearobic microbes, which aren't good for plants (many are pathogens and/or produce alcohols which are toxic). Good compost requires oxygen and aerobic organisms. It also requires time, patience, and some knowledge of how composting works and what materials are required. You would need a bit more than banana and fruit peels. You have to mix 'green' nitrogen-rich materials with 'brown' carbon rich materials in the proper proportions. If you want finished compost in the shortest amount of time you also need to mulch the material or cut it up into the smallest pieces possible. Coffee grounds, newspapers, paper-based animal bedding, wood chips or dust (not treated), sphagnum peat, autum leaves are all examples of good 'brown' carbon rich materials.

So maybe add an air pump to the mix and a few of those materials?

You can't actually just mix them up in the tea, they will have to be properly composted first.

Let's start over lol. Instead of chasing this idea around let's start the idea over and I'll give you a better answer than I first did

So your objective is to feed with banana tea for flowering, and use the nutrients in the FFOF for veg.

My answer is the FFOF will be good for veg, but you will need to do more than banana tea for flower. I would recommend Bio Canna Flores or General Organics Bloom for your base nutrients, and General Organics Bio Root. You can use them in very small amounts, along with the teas.

Now, as I said the bananas alone will not be enough P for flower, but you can throw in some lemon peels, cucumber peels, cantalope peels...all reasonably high in P.

Now back to composting the ingredients for the tea...you can't just chop them up and throw them in the water, doesn't work like that. They have to be properly composted. Google worm composting. If you start worm composting you can use this nutrient rich compost to get you through flower in your soil mix. You can also use this compost to make teas (AACT) to use during flower as well.

You can make a worm bin with a storage bin lying around the house. Google DIY worm bin, or use the search function on this site and their are probably some threads with instructions. Worms will be able to compost your bananas along with any of these other high PK food scraps in less than a week.

Red Wigglers are the best to use, you can get them from unclejimswormfarm.com, they usually have 1000 for about 20 bucks. Or you can dig them up in your yard, but I would just order them...anyways, after the worms have composted the materials, you can use the compost in your tea. You can also google DIY outdoor worm compost or try searching this site for that as well.

okay, I think I'm starting to understand. So the banana tea (i.e boiling banana peel) really only provides some P, however to get the full potential from the banana peel I need to compost it.

I was leaning against composting because I thought of it as a super long, drawn out process...plus I don't really have room in my yard for a compost heap. So I can take a storage tote, throw scraps in, and throw in some worms....and I should be able to get plenty of compost in a matter of weeks? In my grow, I don't really see needing much at all. I go through on average about 1 gal of water per day....so if I mixed what, 10-20% tea with every watering it'd take about 5gal/week of tea? So whatever amount of compost would make 10-20 gallons of tea should probably be fine to support me for ~2 weeks?

However, if I were to go with say FF big bloom, I would add like 1-2 tsp per watering, and that'd cost me like $20 for almost 100-200 waterings.

You can dilute 1 gallon of compost tea with up to 15 gallons of water. So if you make a gallon of it, you can dilute it with another 4 gallons of water in a 5 gallon bucket and you can water some outdoor plants or something as well. but you can't bottle and save the compost tea, it has to be used within 24 hours. I make tea every week.

but you can however save the compost, correct? does it have to remain wet/moist to retain the live organisms? or can you dry it out and re-add water when you're ready to use it?

Once the compost is ready, you can seal it and store it...for I believe as long as you want. I always store mine before using it because there are tiny little bugs in it usually that help break down the food as well, and I don't wanna chance those being in my soil. However, as soon as you unseal the finished compost, life will start to grow on it again right away, as soon as it gets the oxygen. So you can actually seal it in separate bags to use one for each batch of tea.

Make sure to actually google how to set up your worm bin though. It's easy as hell, but it's not as simple as throwing worms and food in a bin.

Good luck!