link to part one: https://steemit.com/organic/@avinash.miles/how-to-grow-high-quality-organic-cannabis-intro
Part Two; Intro to Fertilization
Once an adequate soil structure is accomplished we must be concerned with the nutrients or fertilizer available to your plants; balanced nutrition for plants can be accomplished in different ways.
The major nutrients to be concerned with are Nitrogen, Potassium, Phosphorus, and Calcium. Each of these major nutrients are essential for healthy plant growth but also must be provided in proper ratios to each other at the different times of plant growth. For example marijuana plants (our "subject") need plenty of nitrogen early in their life to get BIG and sturdy and healthy during the vegetative part of their life - when they make roots, shoots and leaves. The need for nitrogen decreases over time as the plant enters into its blooming period and sets flowers (the "buds" or end goal of most marijuana grows).
Attaining this mix of nutrition for your plants can be accomplished via different routes just like attaining proper base soil structure can be accomplished with various different forms of moisture retaining material (peat, coco, native top and sub soil), aerating and draining material (chunky compost, rice hulls, perlite, sand) and living material in the forms of composted organic material.
One common method entails adding nutrient rich solutions in the form of fertilizer teas, compost teas, fermented plant extracts, botanical teas and various other liquid extractions of plant available nutrients.
Liquid fertilizers can be home brewed using similar techniques as kimchi, sourkraut, and kombucha.
Botanical teas are the results of soaking specific fresh and dried plant matter in water for various amounts of time. Even rock dusts can be used in fermentations to extract minerals from rocks to make liquid plant food concentrates!
Specific families of bacteria and fungus can be captured from the wild and utilized to make home-made compost accelerating agents. Compost teas can be made from high quality compost.
Another typical method of organic soil fertilization consists of supplying specific organic materials directly into the soil mix that will provide nutrition to the soil and your plants as they are broken down and digested by the living soil micro-organisms.
Often times a combination of these techniques is employed for the sake of diversity.
Commercial greenhouse and gardening mixes are premixed with amendments pre-diluted into a base soil mix that will sustain plants at proper levels of nutrition for a short amount of time, but can easily be replicated if studied and broken down.
A typical commercial growing media is peat based, has equal parts peat and perlite and usually a slightly lower ratio of compost material (because compost is more valuable than peat and perlite is is used less in commercial mixes in order to boost profits), and a few well rounded amendments to provide nutrition for the plants; rock dusts for phosphorus and minerals, dried or decomposed green plant matter for nitrogen, bone dusts and eggshells and specific rocks for calcium. A vast amount of soil life is necessary to decompose ("convert") raw organic materials (rock dusts and dead plant material and animal waste) into plant available nutrients aka fertilizer. Plant roots do not simply wrap around amendment material and extract their needed nutrition out of them, they depend upon various forms of soil life to process the amendments into plant food.
This soil life is the "magic" that was previously referred to with compost, because compost is filled with this mostly microscopic soil life. Commercial products are also available to inoculate, or introduce, specific forms of this life to your soil, whether they are fungal or bacterial or insects and even earthworms. Beneficial insects can be trapped in the wild or purchased just like earthworms can be attracted and collected. "Mycorrhizae" refer to beneficial fungus spores that create symbiotic relationships with plant roots by processing raw organic amendment material into readily available plant food; there are many mycorrhizae products on the market. Local native mycorrhizae and bacteria can be collected just like earthworms and insects can be "wildcrafted" or collected and created from nature. Techniques for wildcrafting native local micro-organisms, earthworms and insects will be covered later.
In the future posts I will explain how to provide plant available nutrition to your plants by amending soil (safely, cheaply, and creatively) and making your own specific organic liquid fertilizers from materials that are readily available - without ever resorting to expensive designer materials or harmful toxic chemicals. Basically by growing organically on any scale you are enriching the soil you use, literally making the Earth a better place as you grow!
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