When to add bloom dry amendments?

Hi all, currently have a watermelon zkittles vegging lovely and am about to flip to flower. She is 35 days old and is in bio bizz light mix soil and during veg I used living soil grow dry amendments, do I have to add bloom before the light cycle changes? I was planning on flipping the next few days. The reason I ask is I usually use bottle nutes and don't start using bloom until 2 weeks after the flip, but I've heard dry amendments need a while to be broken down by the soil before it's available to the plant. Am I correct?

What i do for my organic grows is to do a 50/50 blend of veg and bloom nutes for a top dressing the week of the flip. Plants need the nitrogen for the stretch period and the pk for bud development. So for my 1 gallon pots I do a 1 tbs of down to earth veg nutes and 1 tbs of dr. Earth flower girl top dress and then will do a pk boost dressing around week 4 of flower and final top dress of 2 tbs of flower girl at week 7. The only other thing I do is a weekly watering of recharge and weekly watering of cal mag. Hope this helps

Greenthumbgrower1986 said:

Hi all, currently have a watermelon zkittles vegging lovely and am about to flip to flower. She is 35 days old and is in bio bizz light mix soil and during veg I used living soil grow dry amendments, do I have to add bloom before the light cycle changes? I was planning on flipping the next few days. The reason I ask is I usually use bottle nutes and don't start using bloom until 2 weeks after the flip, but I've heard dry amendments need a while to be broken down by the soil before it's available to the plant. Am I correct?

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I'm more of a bottle baby myself and started adding some bloom and a half dose of Big Bud a week before flipping. The other half at the flip with more bloom leaning nutes. Don't know why people wait 2 or 3 weeks until after the flip to add bloom nutes. The stretch period is a massive growth spurt and the plants feed up to 4X as much and also begin setting bud sites so that's when things like P/K do their magic. I tried a side-by-side once years ago and the difference was huge in amount of sites and size of buds 3 weeks in. At least 50% better yield as well. This was in DWC tho where the only food they get is what I feed them.

If you're running organics and they have been getting a good balance of all nutes there's probably lots of P and K in the soil already so the difference isn't likely so pronounced but I would get that dry bloom mix in there now so it has a bit of time to go to work.

Stay away from anything in bottles of you are trying to maintain an organic environment, unless it’s designed for a living organics. I recommend continuing as you are but with a living soil base for best results.
As far as adding nutes they probably only start being available to the plant 7-10 after amending so think ahead. Personally about week to I amend with bloom, couple weeks before I start adding some to the grow as plant will be old enough.

What kind of dry amendments are you planning on using like what's in your arsenal

Probably safe to say adding compost and worm castings would be a great start a couple days before you hit the switch imo

Top dress with fresh medium, and add bloom on day of flip...thats what i do

Kelp and neem every 10days
Mbp aloe fulvic coconut every ten
Fish hydrolsate is my new flower amendment top up of needed
Otherwise a good bag of compost like sheep’s wool comfrey mix I get

I use top dress with veg amendments until stretch Is finished, then I switch to flower amendments.

2cent said:

Otherwise a good bag of compost like sheep’s wool comfrey mix I get

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Are you in the UK? That Dalefoot sheep’s wool comfrey compost is intriguing to me but I can't seem to find it in the US.

Funkentelechy said:

Are you in the UK? That Dalefoot sheep’s wool comfrey compost is intriguing to me but I can't seem to find it in the US.

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It is and it’s the black gold of uk it is so spongy u stand on it and it will spring up so big I think u have slippers on first observation on repot was the root wrap the wool that’s not composted like mad the hairs on them are insane and best of all it’s like coot says top with comfrey leaves tea whatever that stuff holds ancient nutes and the fern bracken makes micro life like your wouldn’t believe and holds a n amazing structure to the soil totally soil association approved and one of three companies that are here

everything u put in it goes dark green high brix I even took cuttings into it no burns
The veg yield off it doubles so doing organic I was like that’s off on top worms are so much I can’t even dig a soil test haha