Large Scale Blumat Irrigation Design

I'm starting this thread to get info from others here who may have used blumat successfully in larger applications.

I have used Blumat for the last 3 years in two of my greenhouses... They consisted of six 50'x6' beds, and blumat worked great. I was using them on a no-till, living soil setup.

This year, I got a new place and had 80 200 gallon pots and I didn't use blumats, now I'm kicking myself.

This year, I'm going bigger, so I'll have around 100 200 gallon pots, and six hoop houses with two 50x7 beds in each one, so 12 total 50x7 beds... I will also have another place running with two 96' x 24' and another 50 200 gallon pots out there. I'm doing soil in everything, I would love to just do no till living soil, but due to my startup costs and everything else, I cannot afford to risk not having a good harvest. I know it took me a couple runs to get my last living soil beds dialed in.

I do, however want to run blu mats and then just feed weekly with something soluble like Organics Alive.

My current idea is blumats for everything, then drip lines for feeding... Has anyone tried this method? Has anyone just fed with blumats and dosatrons?

The carrots like to clog with anything thats not plain water. Probably be a bigger headache than hand watering.

Perhaps setup an irrigation setup with drop emitters and a timer.

Also remember when feeding salts you will want to water to runoff unlike the TLO soil. That may put a stress on your water supply and the ability of your beds to drain.

Renfro said:

Also remember when feeding salts you will want to water to runoff unlike the TLO soil. That may put a stress on your water supply and the ability of your beds to drain.

Click to expand...

I was thinking Blu Mat AND perhaps drip and do an Organic’s Alice type soluble (no salts)

I fed through them with no worry. They worked great for me for years and the only reason I stopped using them was I didn’t like having my root ball wet all the time and I got sick of fungus gnats everywhere. I also got tired of not being able to flush.

I switched back to timed drippers to give me more control. Unless I was on site all the time, I wouldn’t use them in as big of application as you described. Dialing them in is a pain and for me I would setup a large room and come back a few days later to one or two plants that were flooded etc.

I do have a buddy or two that use them in big rooms and love them though. They use the pressurized system and spend some time dialing in each site. One is still using the Lucas formula so his feeding is light as hell the other feeds organics by hand once a week or something like that. Neither runs nuts through their system.