PeeJay's Prudent Home-Brewed Organic Soil - Outdoor Out of Sight Deck Grow

[Graytail]

CEC is a fundamental part of Doc's High Brix method, and I'd love to have a decent understanding of it too!

I've been timing dosages of cationic drench on dozens of plants for months and months, and I'm flying pretty much blind. I know that ammoniacal nutrient compounds have an opposite charge from nitrates, and will extract NPK, etc, from compounds bound to clays and other charged elements in the soil. Those nutrients are otherwise locked up by the ionic charges. The ammonia replaces the binding site and releases the nutes ... I think. Those nutes are also especially supportive of fruiting. So, if we can release those nutes right about the time the plant begins to fruit, it gets a free surge of custom tailored food.

But the whole CEC process? I'd like to fully understand it.

 

[PeeJay]

Cation Exchange Capacity in Soils, Simplified?

I'll need to think about how to explain all that so it is more easily understood for a bit. I'll see if I can come up with some meaningful analogies. It may take periodic thinking about it for a couple of days before I'm ready to try and tackle it...

I'm not sure that there is a link between CEC and the need to flush. I hadn't really though about it until Corgie mentioned it. My brain feels a little fuzzy today.

 

[GardenFaerie]

But the whole CEC process? I'd like to fully understand it.

That, my friend, is a huge topic. Not only is there CEC, but there are double or more negative or positive charges within certain elements in either the cation or anion fraction. I don't know how it works in terms of actual scientifically being able to explain it, but CEC can be improved greatly by using rock sands which are highly charged with paramagnetic properties, like lava sand, granite sand, etc.

I am so mumbled up in my brains. I know what it is, I can't explain it. Let me see if I can find a really good paper online somewhere. I think if we take on paper which is reputed accurate and dissect that it will be easier than just having a discussion. What say you? I hate that expression because Bill O'Reilly uses it. LOL

 

[PeeJay]

Update:

I'm not really sure what to say this week except the plants are doing well. I gave them a shot of SeaCom PGR as a foliar this week. It is made from a variety of cold water kelp that grows off the coast of Maine that is rich in trace minerals and hormones. The plants already looked great, so it's hard to say if it did anything. I can say with confidence that it didn't hurt them. A few Pictures.

 

[GardenFaerie]

Wow, 0-4-4 is nice for kelp. I think that may be the highest PK I've seen in a product using kelp as the source. I like that.
Any trace in there?

 

[PeeJay]

There are supposed to be tons of trace, GF. There is no analysis available for trace minerals.The product was recommended to me by the guy I used to get weed from before he moved to Colorado. He produces some insanely good organic artisan produce. If he hadn't moved I never would have started growing. It's a very concentrated extract. Most kelp extracts recommend 2 Tb per gallon. This one recommends 1 tsp per gallon. A little goes a long way. I used a quart of water and 1.25 ml to dose all the plants focusing as much mist as possible on the underside of the leaves.

 

[GardenFaerie]

I think I am going to ask my locals to order that in. I've never seen such a concentration. I like that. Even when dilute it is still 0-4-4 which is nice. I always feed foliar spray to the undersides where the majority of stomata are.

As a side note, I took a look at my outies today and glory be, they are stretching! It's funny how just today I was sitting in the breakfast nook looking out back and I noticed the light falling differently at that time of day. While it is still 100 degrees, the light is shorter and shorter. The north side of the house is starting to cast a shadow off the back. I also noticed the finches simply disappeared. ?

Anyway, do you recon if the plant starts to stretch, the buds will start to spread out as the stems develop length? Is that a question?
Currently, the buds are stacked and packed along the stems. Will it continue to bulk up or will those buds just develop and stretch out between one another? Capeesh?

 

[Lester Freeman]

You would be surprised how much more the buds will grow GF

 

[GardenFaerie]

You would be surprised how much more the buds will grow GF

I am already surprised! I have only one reason why I think growing inside is a tiny bit better. No environmental crap to deal with. You are in control of everything. The plants are cleaner. If it weren't for bud washing, I probably wouldn't ever smoke any of this. The junk that comes off from an outdoor grow is remarkable.

Carry on another day.

 

[COorganics]

Morning PeeJay and friends,

If PeeJay is in the mood, maybe we could continue with soil CEC. I'm not sure it's really relevant to flushing organic soil.

I found a simple explanation of Soil CEC on Gypsoil.com (a gypsum supplier I gather)


Soil particles and organic matter have negative charges on their surfaces. Mineral cations (with positively charged surfaces) are attracted to these negative charges on the soil particles. The number of exchangeable cations that a soil is capable of holding and available for exchange with the soil water solution is called the CEC. This is an indication of the level of nutrients the soil can hold. Clay soils tend to have a high CEC.

 

[COorganics]

Why do I suppose this is relevant to all of us?

Because when we build our soils, if we can understand CEC, and make soil that has a higher CEC, then it can hold more elemental nutrients. Grow bigger, healthy plants, denser fruit.

 

[Grayhawk]

you said clay has higher CEC content. so does that make it better for plants to grow or no.

if so does that also include clay beads. in hydro unit.

 

[Lester Freeman]

I am already surprised! I have only one reason why I think growing inside is a tiny bit better. No environmental crap to deal with. You are in control of everything. The plants are cleaner. If it weren't for bud washing, I probably wouldn't ever smoke any of this. The junk that comes off from an outdoor grow is remarkable.

Carry on another day.

Outdoor organically grown cannabis (like its supposed to be) is better in all ways

 

[PeeJay]

I'm still formulating my answer about CEC. That blurb is not bad. What goes on is that the things a plant needs are mostly positively charged ions and they are rarely (almost never) free in the soil. They are always attached to something with an equal negative charge. When a plant takes up a positively charged ion (cation) it also gives a positive charge back to balance things out - usually an H+ from a water molecule.

Obviously, if the positively charged nutrients are attached to something that releases and accepts positive ions easily, there is a higher cation exchange between the plant and the growing medium. A soil with high CEC makes the exchange of positively charged ions easier.

There is more to it than all that because once the plant tears away a hydrogen cation from water it is left to deal with an OH- which is a strong base. It must get rid of that too. There must be something for the OH- to attach to as well.

 

[GardenFaerie]

Right, and in clay soils the elements are tightly locked into the particles (negative ions if you will) and a lot of that has to do with the pH levels. If you can manage to buffer the pH by adding as much as 50% OM to the soil, along with adjustment of pH through use of organic methods using sulfur or lime, you can aid in the CEC of the soil. It's not an explanation of how it works, but you can greatly increase the exchange capacity by monitoring the soil. This rarely is a problem in containers because you can completely change and keep the pH changed in a container. You cannot change the structure of soil in the ground. You can try. It will not work. This is why I work with materials which help, like the lava sand.

 

[COorganics]

you said clay has higher CEC content. so does that make it better for plants to grow or no.

if so does that also include clay beads. in hydro unit.

Hi gray hawk,
First and foremost I don't know very much about any of this yet. I do feel its important. So here I am trying to get PeeJay to help me figure it out..

I don't think Clay itself is good to grow in. I also don't think Hydro grows pertain. The clay balls are in my recycled dirt mix. I used to use them as a mulch layer. (Now use cottonwood bark). I also was wondering if the clay balls in my mix would improve soil CEC. Probably not, as they are big chunks. We would be better served adding a powdered clay to our soil such as bentonite. I actually looked for pottery stores in Denver the other day for some clay. I didn't end up purchasing anything yet as I still need more time to research.

 

[PeeJay]

The whole discussion about clay is completely moot in container growing. In a container mineral compounds facilitate ion exchange. There are lots of different mineral compounds. Amendments like Excellerite and Azomite are great for increasing the CEC of your soil growing medium.

 

[b.real]

I have some tomato and basil plants in clay and they're doing well.

 

[PeeJay]

Here's the thing about CEC. It is really just about how efficiently the medium and the plant can transfer things back and fourth. It is hard to understand unless you are familiar with ionic chemistry. All I have to do is look at Corgie's produce and I know his soil has a high CEC. You will rarely see nugs that soaked in resin grown in off the shelf soil or hydro. There are some exceptions, but not many. After all the medium is only one factor. So are lighting and environment.

Corgie's real question is how he can improve the CEC of his medium. That is a complicated question because there are too many different reactions going on. I'd have to study it for years in order to give any meaningful answers, and I'd have to have a bunch of expensive lab equipment to do analysis in order to apply what I'd learned.

CEC is related to brix. Higher CEC = higher brix. When transport is fast and smooth the plant sap is rich and high brix. Simple as that. The company that Doc Bud works with is not cannabis friendly. They will analyze soil and develop amendments that result in ideal CEC for specific crops. Different crops benefit from different mineral ratios. They have the tech to do the job. Without their years of study and expensive lab equipment it is basically a crap shoot.

One of the things I know from reading Doc is that Potassium (K) interferes with CEC. Potassium is very easy to transport. When there is too much there it interferes with other things the plant needs being transported from the soil. So, don't load too much potassium into the soil. If you want to deliver more to the plant for some reason use a foliar feed like the kelp concentrate I'm using. That way you bypass the soil. I'm not saying there shouldn't be any K in the soil, you just don't want to load it up.

In a brief discussion about my soil and brix readings and how to improve it Doc gave me some very good advice; "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it." I think this is great advice for Corgie, too.

 

[GardenFaerie]

Clay in and of itself can not help the CEC. Clay HAS its own CEC, but it has nothing to do with the surrounding particles it is near. It is the EXCHANGE which is effected. For example, clay is generally very fertile with most all micronutrients. HOWEVER, because the clay particles have a double negative charge, they hold those elements very tightly, like a magnet, to itself. It would be unlocked with the addition of buffering organic matter which can help neutralize the CEC reaction of clay. Nobody grows in full clay. But, when you get a soil test, they measure organic matter to determine how available the nutrients in the clay are. Lowering the pH also increases the CEC of clay and other negatively charged cations.

I also said on a number of occasions that lava sand has paramagnetic properties and can actually increase the CEC by reacting with the --ion in clay particles. I think maybe this is getting far more complicated than necessary. There are many very simple explanations in many papers online as well as some of the most intensely difficult to understand.

I do not believe one way or the other you can effect your grow by adjusting the CEC of your soil unless you have some very sensitive instrumentation and ability to do organic chemistry.