First you make your soil mix. Then grow your plants. Then chop. Pull the stalk. Now ROLS begins ( recycling soil). Recook the soil while its still in the pot for 30 days, topdressing with compost and castings. Watering the pot with teas. This breaks down the roots and builds the microbial populations. Sort of an ecosystem beneath the surface. Then you plant your next small plant. top dress with compost and casting and grow. after a week or 2 one the plant has acclamated itself. Its ready for nutes. So top dress nutes and then more casting and compost. thats it. With Rols microbes are everything. Homemade vermicompost is the cornerstone of living organics...
I use compost teas once every few weeks. Seed sprout teas (enzymes and minerals) once a week. Spray with kelp and aloe twice a week.
You can use what ever soil recipe you like. Rols is about longevity and sustainability. Re-using the same soil for years. The bacteria, fungi, and enzymes make it possible and more beneficial and more efficient. Rols is true organics. So no bottled nutes because they all have chems no matter what they claim. Hydro in not organic. with organics. you feed the soil. microbes do all the work. The plant eats what it wants and when it wants. Be able to grow to its full potential. with hydro yyou are force feeding the plant. so the plant adapts and eats when its supplied. In turn diminishing its potential of its genetics.
All this is clearly explained at the beginning of the thread..
Ah, good, that helped me refine my line of questioning. I want to understand how to start from the right place, so that, from the beginning, i'm building a soil that i can reuse for many years, preferably "no till." I saw someone around here leaving their root balls in the soil. How many people think that's a viable strat?
So i suppose the recycling part is an advanced concept, and isn't something i need to worry about until after i've built and used a soil.
i don't want to spend a fortune on soil, or take months to get the soil ready to go, or build anything into the soil that will cause problems for either me or the plants or the earth.
I want the cleanest, safest, most natural and organic, but still sufficient quality to be worth the extra effort... and not take forever getting it to a useful starting point. I don't care if the first crop doesn't win a cup. Or even the second for that matter.
I know virtually nothing about compost or teas or worms (aside from the fact that they're apparently prioritized).
I do understand the concept of having a micro-ecosystem, and while i do not understand the details of the microbes, that "microbes do all the work" concept does make sense to me.
So i suppose my biggest question is this: is there a way i can "throw something together and go," and evolve that into a sustainable recyclable soil for myself, over time? (and i realize "throw together and go" will probably require some "cook" time anyway).
Some of my already established preferences are:
coco not peat, because i don't like the idea of harvesting those peat bogs (although i feel like a hypocrite because i use the opposite argument against vegetarians: "the animal was already killed; it would be a shame to waste it!" likewise, the peat bog is going to be harvested regardless, so if peat is better... but i still end up feeling better about coco, because it's "sustainable," even if we haven't quite established the potential long term impacts of all the salt runoff...)
Don't want to use guano because habitat destructive harvesting...
don't like the idea of anything unnatural really... which is the biggest reason why i want to avoid hydro.
Then again, i often make the "everything that exists is nature" argument. Superconductors are a natural byproduct of the human's natural quest for knowledge and technology (but i would say that type of "natural" has quite a different context).
So yeah. Clean/green/safe is what i'm after, whether you call that "organic" or "all natural" or whatever. I don't want anything in me that shouldn't be in me, same goes for my plants, or anything else in my environment.
In accordance w/ that statement, i need to build a worm bin and start composting.
Meanwhile... i need soil now, and do not want to wait however many months it takes to make my own worm bin and compost, and i will need to source acceptable products in that regard, and i have no idea how to determine what is or isn't an acceptable product. You guys seem like you'd know that kind of stuff, or at least, how to guide me to where i can learn it.