There are two options here. Either buy a brand of soil and use liquid nutrients, etc. Or construct your own soil that will not need additional nutrients. In the end it is much more rewarding and cheaper to build your own soil - but it can be a lot of work and more expensive up front. I have used roots organic before and it is pretty damn good as far as bagged soil goes. Expect to get fungus gnats with the soil...this is common across all brands. Roots will run out of juice about the 2nd week flowering if you are not feeding somehow. Don't know how much soil you need, but assuming you would want about 6 cuft, you could get 4 bags of roots for around $50. It will cost you at least $100 to build 6cuft of your own soil, but you will also have the ingredients to build much more soil in the future for cheap...
Go to a nursery - pick up kelp meal ($7 for 3 lbs), crab meal($12 for 3.5lbs), neem meal ($15 for 5 lbs, if they have it but they probably wont...), glacial rock dust ($20 for 40lbs...), and peat moss ($9 for 3 cuft). If you can't find peat at the nursery, go to home depot or lowes and get their Premier brand (should be 3+ cuft bales). For your scale you probably only need 1 bag, maybe 2 if you want to make a hot soil mix for flowering (I highly recommend this). Then go to a feed store, and get some rice hulls ($8 for 60lbs...its sold as horse bedding) or pumice ($12 for 40lbs, it's marketed as "dry stall"), and crushed oyster shells ($7 for 25lbs - optional but a great addition). Then source some
quality humus, such as fresh local earthworm castings, or fresh compost. If you have to used bagged humus (I highly recommend against this!!!) find the highest quality earthworm castings you can (natures solution is good, big worm by aurora is decent, don't have experience with anything else...). Low quality humus = low quality soil and there is no getting around that. The worm castings might be the most expensive part of the mix, about $1 per lb in my experience for true quality castings, and you are going to want at least 1.5 cuft which is around 30lbs I would think. Here is the mix:
50% peat
25% aeration (pumice, rice hulls, perlite if you have absolutely no choice)
25% humus (EWC, compost, alaska humus if you have to...)
per cuft of this mix, add:
3-4 cups glacial rock dust
1/2 cup kelp meal
1/2 cup crab meal
1/2 cup neem meal
1/4 cup oyster shell
Now the one downside is that you will have to let this mix mature for about 30 days before you use it, similar to subcools supersoil if you are familiar...after 30 days you can plant into this directly, you don't use it as a hot mix like supersoil which only goes on the bottom 1/3 of the pot. This will provide your plants with everything they need through flowering, with the exception of a few microbially charged AACT's to kickstart your microherd. In the end it is much more effective than roots, much cheaper, and IMO much more enjoyable (creating your own soil from scratch is a good experience for everyone). If you need to plant right now, I would say pick up one bag of roots and use that sparingly until your soil is done maturing. Your plants will be fine in roots for the first month at least...
Invest in an RO system if you can...or just buy from the RO water machines around town. Also, look into some sort of mycorrhizal supplement - I would suggest MycoGrow by Fungi perfecti (
www.fungi.com), or Oregonism XL by aurora. Also, if you can't find neem cake locally you can find it here (
www.neemresource.com). Neem provides systemic defense against mildew, pests, etc. while providing nitrogen and other micronutrients. Make sure you get neem cake, not neem oil!
IMO this style of growing will produce better results than using fox farm soil and fox farm nutes, etc. at a fraction of the cost in the long run - and it will be much more rewarding to boot!
When my current soil finishes maturing I will be running a side by side comparison of Roots 707 + the roots line (buddha grow, buddha bloom, trinity, ancient amber, HP2, HPK, etc.) vs. my soil mixes with straight RO water and the occasional AACT and FPE (fermented plant extract) consisted of nettle, comfrey, horsetail, chamomile, or some combination of those. I wish I had the results already so I could show you lol.
Good luck
and let me know if you need help sourcing any of those ingredients. I know it can be a daunting task..but hard work pays off in the end. Also, if you are near a beach you can collect kelp, oyster shells, etc. Scrounge around if you are trying to be cheap...some of these things are easier to find than you might think
EDIT: sorry for the essay in your thread
...hope it makes sense
