wanna pick your brain a bit, what's your soil mix? I'm in Organic..I took Alfalfa Horse Feed Cubes and peed in my 55 gall and threw comfrey tea all over, have added mineral dust/kelp/gypsum/lyme/humic granuals, tomatoe mix, that bio alive (DTE products), I wanna try Rice Bran Powder and I need to get some oyster shell..but I've put the malted barley from Coots Mix in the past, but I feel like it should be added like a month to cook before breaking the soil up because of that white almost mycillic fungus it creates..but..I've put neem in there..I feel like I have enough in my soil, but I guess I'm thinking aloud...I'll probably cut it 60/40 or maybe 50/50 to cut in Bark Pieces for more aeration, so 50% Soil to 15 percent perlite 15percent fir bark chunks, and 20 percent peat or cocoa
Dang that sounds like a pretty awesome mix you've got going there
I use two Growboxes in a 3x3 tent (1.5 cu ft each/roughly same as an earthbox). I don't recall what my original mix was, probably something like equal parts compost, perlite, and store-bought potting mix, and I think I amended it with oyster shell flour, kelp meal, and some all-in-one dry fertilizer blend.
I've been recycling it for several runs, and in between I dump both boxes out and add:
- 4 cups KiS Organics Nutrient Pack
- 2 cups Espoma Tomato-Tone (because the KiS seems a bit light on K and Ca)
- 1 gallon perlite
- 1 galllon worm castings (store-bought)
So each Growbox gets about half of that added to it between runs.
I will occasionally top-dress with smaller amounts of those same amendments (minus the perlite).
I try to keep it low-effort, and I prefer the dry fert blends over individual meals/flours/etc. One area I could definitely improve on is the bio-activity, at least the stuff you can actually see moving. Not many worms or hypoaspis when I went to fill the boxes this round. Maybe I will just buy some, or amend with compost from the backyard, which has tons of critters moving about, but I have been reluctant to use for fear of bringing pests indoors...