Organic vs Chemical - What is missing?

[Kriaze]

As the title states, I'm growing some plants 'organically' using a mix of my own compost plus a cannabis based soil mix, Alpha Mix is the main one but there are some with All-Mix and some with Canna Terra Pro. In my compost I mainly add veg, fruits, egg shells, sea shells, seaweed, brown leaves and cardboard for Nitrogen and any amendments I see that might help. Volcanic chips, a bit of perlite and Dolomite Lime for the soil PH. I prefer alkali to acidic.

Still my organic plants seem to be missing something. The chemical plants (using AN Micro, Grow, Bloom and Calmag+) are much healthier, even happy yet my organic plants are suffering either a cal/mag lockout (definitely calcium too the leaves are spotted dark brown with no sign of mites) or deficiency. I feed them Plantmagic Grow while in veg and either Epsom Salts for magnesium or Black Treacle which is pretty much the same ratio of calcium to magnesium as Molasses when they need a calcium boost.

Has anyone an idea of how to improve these organic plants?

The chemical plants have a green peg on their pot:

It's not quite as noticeable in the other tent but I still see a difference:

 

[TheFertilizer]

I'm kind of questioning cardboard as your source of nitrogen. Cardboard is a very diverse material, manufactured in a lot of difference ways. Not only could there be any number of untold adulterants--just saying in case you're really trying to go organic--there's also a quesitonable level of wood pulp that goes into a lot of cardboard now days as we're continuing to use more and more recycled material. Lots of papers and cardboards are made out of cottons now, not sure what the nitrogen content of that would be. But seriously if you're really trying to go totally organic, cardboard is not what you want--that stuff gets treated with so much chemicals it's not even funny.

Maybe try composting up some wood for a few months. It will be high in nitrogen once it's all composted, but that will take a while. If you can source some manure you might try to make a compost tea, but again even that's going to take a few weeks to cook right. Your best bet might be to buy some quano or some other organic source of nitrogen ingredient to hold you over until you can make your own.

 

[Kriaze]

Thanks for informing me in regards to cardboard and it's treatment with chemicals as I was unaware of this, I've been using only plain brown cardboard with the recyclable symbol on it as everywhere I read up on this pretty much said that it was safe. I hope I haven't made too serious a mistake as it's also what I add as a top layer covering my worms in their farms and it's definitely something that I will look deeper into.

I do add amendments to my compost as stated earlier although I didn't go too much into detail and I should have. I add:-

Prepackaged Materials:

Calcified seaweed
Fish, Blood and Bone
Bonemeal
Bat Guano
Garden Lime
Chicken Manure
Volcanic Rock Dust/Chips

Along with this I add pretty much whatever you would expect from household waste for a compost heap/tumbler.

As a booster feed instead of brewing teas I use EWC, Plant Magic Oldtimer's Grow, Bloom and either Epsom Salts or Black Treacle (Molasses).

The main issue that I have is that the supplements just never seem to be enough to keep the girls fully healthy let alone happy, usually suffering from Nitrogen deficiencies within the first few weeks which I rectify by adding EWC, this keeps the plants healthy up until around weeks five and six where the calcium or magnesium deficiencies start appearing and never seem to end. So I'm wondering what if anything I can do to ensure that these deficiencies don't get to the point where they are today, and pretty much every round of growing around the same timeline. The compost has been in the tumblers for well over a year I might add, it certainly looks and smells just as good compost should, taste I'm not so sure

 

[grimmreefer]

Never heard of cardboard as a fert. It makes sense... I grow organic and have never had an N def. The bat shit alone ahould be taking care of that. Do you check your pH? I never thought it mattered while growing organic but this last go-round I noticed something. When I did check the pH of my tap I realized it was about pH8. After lowering it everything seemed to work itself out.

 

[Kriaze]

I do have a PH meter grimmreefer but to my shame I haven't used it in over a year. I'll check it out as like you mentioned I too was under the impression that organic doesn't tend to need PH checks, plus the chemical nutrients that I use on certain plants are all all from the PH Perfect range so I never felt a need to even use it for that.

I'll do a feed PH and a runoff PH check when they next need feeding, which should be in an hour or two as these girls are drinking a lot even if not so healthy. Thanks for the heads up, although if I do find a soil PH problem it is something that I would look at rectifying by amendments pre potting

 

[grimmreefer]

I'd think the D lime should drop it enough. I use seltzer water to drop the pH of my tap. One can in one gallon drops it from about 8 to about 6.5. And I think the co2 is killing the bugs.

 

[Kriaze]

The Dolomite Lime should make the soil more alkali instead of acidic but I do still have my bottle of lemon juice in there to bring it down. That plus some PH down but I'm clumsy and get fed up with burning myself with it lol.

 

[grimmreefer]

Learn something new every day.. I always assumed the lime was dropping my pH. Never really looked into it though. Try the seltzer.. sounds like you have the same feelings about the orange stuff that I do.

 

[redmud]

Definitely check your ph last summer I locked out my plants with one tea made with beets i had a ph of 4.something and it was stable it took a lot of Dolomite lime to adjust my soil.

I don't trust run off test I prefer the slurry test since it's a bit more accurate.

this usually helps to confirm what the test shows by what's missing and what's being absorbed at the ph of the soil then I also reference this

here are my organic girls and I also use paper bags to compost with when I run out of brown leaves and woods to compost

Good luck

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[redmud]

Oh I forgot to mention I've only watered once in just over a month so they are purely on soil nutrients.

.........

 

[NuttyProfessor]

the top pictures if i am seeing it right looks a tad root bound/over watered/under watered look like root problem ,,, are they all in the same pots

 

[Kriaze]

Hey Red thanks for the input, when I do a soil PH test it is indeed a slurry test that I meant. I just never remember the name for it lol.

Hey Nutty they're all in mixed sized pots due to the fact that I ran out of soil when transplanting. I went in today and Sod's law not a one of them needed watering so no PH check today. The one at the back looking closely did seem a tad overwatered yesterday but she has picked up today, but she's still yellowing like crazy. I'm not sure if that would be a Nitrogen or magnesium deficiency, but she is also probably rootbound.

I've no chance of ordering any more soil for awhile and don't fancy filling pots with pure compost as I'm pretty sure that will cause more problems than it's worth. Which leaves me with the decision of do I keep them in veg until I get more soil in, or do I do the flip and hope for the best? To be fair though the chemical plants in the same size pots look great, so I'm unsure as to how rootbound the biggest girl can actually be.