I feel that if your soil is working and growth is green that a tea is to be used twice in bloom and once in veg. I am using the teas to assure I have enough in my mix to finish strong. I have decided to run the Rev's mix without the fertilizer spikes. Those seem crazy. I am also taking the N and P layers out of the mix. I am really curious to hear how often and how much you guys feed your plants. Do you check the ec/ppms of your teas? What do you add to your teas and why? I know I could run my soil for the whole cycle without a problem but I think I can get my yields up by a 1/3 at least if I tweak things. I don't want to sacrifice quality of course. I guess I am a ready to push the line again. The last time I went over it by a touch. I love tweaking this and finding out just where to run these. I was thinking that I owe it to them to get the best out of them. I plan to use my soil over and over. That is where I will be aiming long term to fix things. So much to be humbled by. Organics has helped heal my soul.
So far, I have only given one feed of a veg tea in the time the LVBK has been in living soil. After that it has been pure water only. A little while after transplanting, I gave them a tea at a ppm of 350, not very strong at all. And it has been much more than they needed really. I had a tiny bit of leaf curl and gave them a little dose of pure water and they came right. They are looking better every single day bro. The only reason I fed the tea was because I had no other delivery system for the Lacto B I felt like adding, I think it is a great organism to promote as it really is nature's workhorse bacteria from what I have read.
What I fed was a tea made out of some very simple ingredients: A little bit of horse manure COMPOST, that was pretty much nothing but knobbles of myco-webs, with a tiny bit of kelp mixed in, and a tiny bit of a friend's well-aged chicken manure compost. These ingredients I added simply for a boost in fungal activity of the right kind, as I had not yet had access to the mushroom compost at the time of doing the first soil mix, and as a bio-food for the Lacto Bacilli. I knew that simply by bubbling I would attract all the bacteria I could possibly need too, so it is a nice 'indigenous' mix of microbes. And I wanted a foliar spray to promote a healthy phyllosphere, I have used it twice in foliar form at even lower PPM's. I have used this on the hydro plants too, and I can tell they are loving it.
I am pretty confident that they need very little more for their entire life, but I will still do the occasional foliar feed to make sure the phyllosphere is as strong as possible, this is basically to prevent any kind of 'fast and nasty' moulds to ever take hold.
I have two kinds of water I am using: Rain water to mix the teas, seeing as when I get to about 350 to 400ppm, the high pH of the rainwater tank is brought down to 6.6 to 6.7. For normal watering, I use river water that is available to me, pH 6.5. So my grow is now 100 percent chemical free, not even pH up or down. Nothing but stuff nature gave me and I can tweak with all the accuracy of hydroponics. It's really blowing my mind.
I am a little addicted to making teas now... So my garden has been getting some, my mom's garden has been getting, my gran's garden has been getting... I have given bottles of Lacto B bolstered teas to friends who have used it, and all of us are still to find a plant that did NOT benefit. I even have a friend who has ordered a large scale batch for his commercial greenhouse.
Yup. I have gone tea mad.