Anybody else tried growing in 100% fresh vermicompost?
My grow area is small (a cube with just under 2 feet per side), so my plants can't be more than a foot high (less if the pot is tall).
I'm using small containers (ranging from small party cups to 2.5 - 3 gallons). The three larger pots contain a plant started in normal recycled soil and transplanted into 100% vermicompost. The party cup plants were grown from seed in straight vermicompost. The big pots get straight water all the way through flower, while the party cups had a drink of undiluted worm farm runoff at around week 4 of flower.
The plants are looking pretty healthy - they're a mix of bagseeds, some are very resistant to insect attack and disease, while some suffer a bit. In future grows I'll be concentrating more on cuttings and seeds from the more resistant plants. Before, when I tried mixing organic soils with a bit of vermicompost included, I had all sorts of problems. Poor growth, multiple deficiencies, spider mites, fungus gnats. Now that I just use vermicompost and old soil, the plants thrive.
Or, if they're weak to begin with, the mites in the soil eat them. The mites aren't a problem, though: they eat dead and dying plant matter (including sick seedlings), and they eat other arthropods. I haven't seen a spider mite since these mean creatures arrived. I never added them, by the way: they just made their home in my worm farm, and since they don't attack the worms, I let them be. Now there are few fungus gnats, and nothing else which seems to attack the plants.
My yields are not stellar, but that's to be expected for my low-power setup (40 watts for 2 square feet of ground). I'll be fine tuning a lot of other aspects of my grow from this point on (pot size, number of plants, harvest schedule), but my search for "perfect soil" seems to be over - the worms (with a good diet and some amendments) produce exactly what's needed, and with small pots, watering is no problem. Even if it dries and shrinks a bit, the top tends to curve inward, making a nice bowl, and water drains into the dried surface surprisingly well (assuming you don't let it dry out completely). A good layer of leaf mulch helps a lot here too.
I also want to thank all you guys for alerting me to aloe powder. I use whole leaf powder (not the inner leaf gel) when taking cuttings, and have seen much, much better results (than from using nothing - I've never used rooting hormone). Most cuttings survive, and many take off rapidly.