PRO MIX BX WITH MYCORRHIZAE

bluerock said:

Perhaps the single biggest advantage to the table setup is that you can go out of town for a week - or longer, depending on res size - and everything will be fine when you get back. That was an important consideration for me. The same is likely true for the ebb/flo buckets, but I prefer a smaller container size...and mobility.

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GOLDBERG71 said:

I've never done it but doesn't the PH need adjusting during that time?

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bluerock said:

I've done it quite few times due to my former employment requirements, with rockwool. Rockwool, due to it's inorganic nature, will not itself alter the pH once established. There will be a little drift due to the organic plant root system, but provided that there are no reservoir contaminant issues, it is minimal and does not noticeably affect the plants.

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bluerock said:

Another note is that the reservoir solution must be aerated. For whatever reason, that stabilizes pH over time. Some nutrient solutions may squeak by without aeration, but it is better safe than sorry. I run two of the big airstones off a double-outlet air pump for a 40 gln. res. Rule of thumb for me has been one big airstone per 20 gln.

This process has worked with MaxiGrow/Bloom, GH 3 part, and Dynagrow liquids. I don't know that it would work with something semi-organic like FloraNova.

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GOLDBERG71 said:

PRO MIX BX WITH MYCORRHIZAE this is my basic soil mix. To date this is the only mix I've used. I buy the 3.8 cubic foot bales and I mix it with a 4 cubic foot bag a extra coarse perlite for better drainage. At first this is all I did was mix, wet and use. After a year or so I decided from my reading on this site I would add a cup of dolomite lime per cubic foot of soil. So for the following year I added 4 cups of dolomite lime to each bale/bag. For the longest time I was fighting my fan leaves from turning yellow. At first I thought my problems were with my soil. Then I thought I wasn't giving them enough N so I gave them a little more. Finally I thought it was my not understanding the plants were dry. I start in 1 gallon pots and then transplant into 5 gallon squat pots. Since I was still having the occasional plant have it's fan leaves slowly go yellow. I began to think about the soil again. This time I started to think that although I'm lifting each pot daily and judging the need of water by weight. I might be fooling myself because the center root mass 1 gallon could be dry but the other 4 gallons of soil could still be 90% saturated making harder for the plant to suck up the nutes?

Well this grow it turns out I had my first bout with bugs other than fungus gnats. So the issue I noticed with the leaves was actually from spider mites. I've solved that problem. But I focused on my soil at first. The first thing I did was flush the plants with plain RO water. I've read that you shouldn't trust tests of runoff water but I decided to test it just so I could take notes. What I found was an average PH of 6 and 400 PPM. The ph was as low as 5.9 and as high as 6.2. The PPM was a low of 350 and a max of 450. This run I'm trying the less is more theory so I've never fed above 300 PPM at the time of the test and all watering/feeding was at 6.5 PH. Not wanting to put to much faith in the runoff numbers last night I decided to PH test my UNUSED soil. This is probably where I should have started because what I found out was my UNUSED soil tested at 5.7 PH.

A few months ago I was told by a guy I trust to eliminate the lime. I didn't ask question I just stopped using it. I won't be able to compare the results because of the spider mites this time. But after the low PH test on unused soil I started googling PH and raising the soil PH. I found 5 things you can add to your soil to raise the PH. They are dolomite lime, hardwood ash, bone meal, crushed marble, crushed oyster shells.

DOLOMITE LIME - 15-45% MAGNESIUM CARBONATE 85-55% CALCIUM CARBONATE

HARDWOOD ASH - 10% POTASH 1% PHOSPHATE + TRACE AMOUNTS OF IRON, MANGANESE, BORON, COPPER, AND ZINC

BONE MEAL - CALCIUM AND PHOSPHORUS (COULDN'T FIND %)

CRUSHED MARBLE - ? COULDN'T FIND WHAT IF ANYTHING IT SUPPLIED TO THE SOIL.

CRUSHED OYSTER SHELLS - 96% CALCIUM CARBONATE AND 10 MICRONUTRIENTS.

I haven't been able to contact my trusted source yet but I'd imagine he will tell me that dolomite lime provides to much magnesium and calcium and those numbers would support that. At this point I'm no longer going to guess. Tomorrow I'm going to clean my mixing box and mix up a new batch of soil and box up a sample and send it off to be tested by the local college. They charge 2 bucks for a PH test and 28 bucks for a PH and nutrient test and they'll recommend the amendments to the soil. I figure since I only mix the pro mix with perlite this info will provide me the perfect soil until they change their recipe at promix. I just thought this info could help others. Right now it seems to me that hardwood ash would be the way to go. Since the whole idea behind soilless mix is to be adding what we want when we want to the soil via feeding it and the ash adds the least.

Does anyone have any helpful input? I'm really curious if anyone is using hardwood ash?

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