worm castings?

Hello! Just doing my hw on my first grow and was curious that my friends said they use straight worm castings/perlite and the worm tea as the only nutes. Would this be good enough or no? I want to stay as close to organic as possible.

Worm castings are great stuff, but as the only thing? NO, and neither is just castings and perlite.

BYW, I have 2 worm bins and make use of them. I'm not just spouting useless info.

Wet

you need to have more to your soil mix than EWC and perlite

Get some peat moss or coco

the EWC should make up about 25-30% of your soil mix

and youll need more than EWC tea for nutrients

Thanks Wet, I figured as much.

And you guys think something around 30% castings, 35% perlite, 35% peat moss would be good?

And what would be good nutes then? Again id like to stay organic or homemade type of nutes. Just for the fun of it. I've buit myself a pc case and wanna keep to the diy theme

I use GENERAL ORGANICS. It's made by General Hydroponics. (I don't use the fish crap.) It's pretty cheap, and works GREAT!

I am using Roots Organic and worm castings, thats it.

catmando said:

you need to have more to your soil mix than EWC and perlite

Get some peat moss or coco

the EWC should make up about 25-30% of your soil mix

and youll need more than EWC tea for nutrients

Click to expand...

That much?...stuff costs a fortune.

you can always use fish emulsion, earth worm castings, bat guano, kelp, blood and bone meal, etc, etc if you want to stay with organics.. there are plenty of organic tea recipes online, or check out skunk magazine if you can get it around you...
if you don't know, skunk is like high times, but way better imho, less commercial and more about the smaller guys... anyhoo's, the one guy who does a lot of articles for skunk, the rev, he's an organic freak, and therefore there's tons of info in each issue of skunk about tlo, or true living organics..
or you could always go over to either matt rizes veganics thread or subs organic thread on here, i'm sure they are both full of good info...

Hmm I'm going to have to check those out! Thanks guys!

As a commercial producer of organic worm castings I have used 50% castings as well as just worm tea for food. The use of just worm tea worked fine but I didn't quite get the yields as compared to using organic nutes, guano, kelp etc. Worm tea is not so much about nutrients as it is about innoculents, microbes, soil conditioning, and just about evrything a soil needs to remain healthy. Worm tea will make your soil and plants very healthy, allowing them to use the different nutes and other things more efficiently. I believe one of the most important benefits is the symbiotic relationship between the plant and the microbes in the root zone. Plants feed the microbes and the microbes produce or make available all of the food and medicine the plant needs to thrive, in other words it allows the roots to more easily absorb, and process materials more efficiently. I find it more useful as a foliar spray, plants will produce more foliage and larger stems. This is a good treatment for plants that are stressed or lacking enough sun. I could go on forever about the positive effects it has but for high yields of good bud use nutes as well.