Soil Grow Guide

The soil will be in many respects both the home and the food for your plants, so it should be taken seriously. Many veteran growers develop their own mixtures of raw soil, nutrients and absorptive material, but when you're starting out, it's best to find some commercial potting soil.

Soil character is specified by the ratio of three elemental components, Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium, usually written N:P:K. Plants like to grow in a soil that is rich in Nitrogen, so find a soil with a higher N value and lower P and K values. A typical good ratio is 20:10:10.

• Soil Growing Guide
• Intro to Soil

Many people prefer using organic soil for growing plants, but as long as it has the appropriate N:P:K ratio, good acidity, and enough plant food to feed the plant for three months, it should work fine. Another ideal characteristic is that the soil protects against over and under watering. Some soil manufacturers include materials that take care of this. While it is still very important to control your watering, this will help provide you with a margin of error.

Advanced Soil Options

For a slightly more advanced choice you can go with a good organic soil medium, and carefully mix in some organic nutrients for a proper growing environment. If you decide to go with this organic soil and nutrient solution for your grow, make sure you carefully follow the nutrient mixture and watering schedule. Thinking more is always better will result in you burning your plants and possibly compromising your harvest. The benefits of using this more advanced methods will be in possibly a more robust harvest. The drawbacks are more work and more margin of error.

For an organic soil choice for your grow, FoxFarm Ocean Forest Potting Soil simply is the growers choice. FoxFarm has other quality growing mediums, but they are not optimum for all plants. There are many other fine quality growing mediums around. Please call or stop by our store for any organic soil or nutrients needs.

On last word on soil is that there are as many recipes for the perfect soil as there are cannabis growers. You can find any number of variations of peat moss, Perlite, vermiculite, bat guano, bone meal, kelp, ash, worm castings and buried dead fish carcasses to write a small novel. The fact is that optimizing your grow soil to this degree is growing way beyond work vs reward ratio. Start out small and basic and then decide to work on highly optimizing your soil in your own small increments.

Advanced Nutrient Options

Now we have our high quality organic soil, we are going to have to also use some high quality organic nutrients added to our watering schedule. FoxFarm provides a good choice for high quality nutrients needed for growing any type of plant. They have a three step organic based fertilizer and plant food liquid nutrients system. To use these products; simply mix with correct ratio of water and use for your watering cycle in every other plant watering. So have one watering jug filled with clean water, while the other contains the proper nutrients mixture. Each type of nutrient should be added at different ratios during different weeks of the plants development that I have outlined in the chart below. Also be sure when adding nutrients to the water, you never mix any two nutrients together even if they both should be used at the same time. Always add the nutrients to the water separately.

Final note on growing mediums
There are alternative growing mediums to use. Another popular technique is the hydroponic method of growing plants. It involves growing plants in a reservoir of water and nutrients. The plant is held in some solid medium while the root system is suspended in the reservoir where it can absorb nutrients. This method tends to be more complicated and more expensive, but because you are able to control the nutrients the plant receives directly, you can end up with a higher quality product.

Organic Growing Supplies in Colorado