Living soil ongoing diary

[FX]

Hi all, thanks for reading. This isn't going to be a grow diary per se, It's more a record of my pots of living soil that I am making, I will go through the initial building of the soil, what I plant in them and what ammends I add during each grow and after chop. THe idea is to see how these pots do over several grows.

The majority of the ingredients come from @GHO as he really seems to put in the work and make sure his products work as advertised.
I have made up 2 50l fabric pots with horizonal layers, I have watched this video by Leighton Morrison several times in order to get an understanding of the system:


I will also be making up 2 pots of "coots" type mix, which is basically just the 'O' layer from the horizonal system and what most people use. All four pots will live in my flower tent and so will have basically the same environment.

[Keeno]

Exciting stuff @FX. I'll tag along for the ride.

[IMO]

Sounds interesting am going to follow along

[FX]

Okay, so to start off with the 'E' horizon, I put a load of large gravel chips in the bottom of the pot to a depth of around 4cm, then added sand and wet it all and pushed down hard across the surface to get rid of any air pockets. I also added a cup of volcanic rock dust into the mix.

The pots I have are about 28cm deep, so the 1:2:4 ratio between the 3 layers works out to 4cm for E, 8cm for A and 18cm for the O layer, a few calulations with Pi gives me 7.5l, 15l and 30l for the three layers, two pots so double up.

The A layer needs to contain 20% of the O la I needyer so I will mix up the O first, I need a total of 66l, 30l for each pots O layer and 3l per pot for 20% of the A layer.
I used the following ingredients:

15l used biobizz allmix
15l live harvested Spaghum moss ( not peat)
6l charged biochar
15l buckwheat hulls (gho)
10l wormcastings (gho)
4l farmyard manure (elixir)
1l composted bark (elixir)

Which gives me the 66 litres that I need. I am trying to stop using peat moss for environmental reasons but I'm going to keep reusing what I already have just ammending it as necessary. I have added the maure and bark as this will increase the diversity of nutrients and microbial life in the soil.

I charged the biochar myself as I wanted to see the process but GHO does sell it already charged. Either works, just don't add uncharged char to your pots as they will initially suck all the nutrients out of your soil! I basically placed the char in a bucket and added water, a variety of liquid nutes that I had here ( biobiz stuff), ghos microbiome powder and wormcastings along with a bit of manure. This was mixed well and left to soak for 2 weeks, then dried and popped back in the bucket ready to be used.

I then added the following ammends to the O mix:
100g greensand (gho)
200g gypsum (gho)
175g soft rock phosphate (gho)
150g alfalfa powder (gho)
700g frass (gho)
400g Malted Barley Powder (gho)
300g volcanic rock dust (elixir)
200g Dolomite Lime (elixir)
a sprinkle of Dynomyco for additional microbial diversity

I then thoroughly mixed all these ingredients up and made up a spray of GHO's microbiome powder and sprayed it all well.

For the A layer I wasn't able to wild source clay, sand or silt as my health limits me from doing this so I used 24l of Levingtons organic topsoil and mixed in 6l of the prepared O mix.

I added this to the top of the E layer in the pots, smoothed it all down and then sprayed the microbes over the top until it looked like the glazed doughnut as Leighton says.

I then added the remaining O mix to the top and watereed them in.

[FX]

It was at this point I discovered I was moving in four weeks time so the pots have just sat there and got moved with me, I think they have survived with out too much messing up.
I checked the pH of the soil and it's a little low around 5.5, I can't have added enough dolomite to counter the acidity of the spaghum moss so I will be reammending with some more dolomite and maybe some limestone flour to hopefully bring the pH to around 6.5.

[Afton]

@FX looking good my friend as I am an organic guy I am real interested how your soil turns out.
Good luck!

[FX]

I forgot to add some of the pics :

[FX]

That's the sphagnum moss, interesting stuff for sure, I just broke some off and put it in a bucket and wet it for a while amazing how much water it absorbs.
it also what caused my pH issue, I've added another good scoop to each pot along with the last of the gho worm castings I had from before and worked it in to the top 10 cms or so of the soil, I will water it in and then leave it a few days and measure the pH again.

[FX]

I got my hands on 4 living soil kits from green hand organics today so making up the next two pots will be less arduous, I just mix in the different bags and I'm good to go lol, much easier but I do like to try things myself.
I'll get them done tomorrow probably...

[FX]

Okay, kits rock lol, much easier when gho has done all the hard work for you

Bags of peat, buckwheat hulls and worm castings (and worms) and the terra perma mix of powdered ingredients.
I mixed them altogether along with 250g (ish) of ghos bokashi mix, I did each kit separately and also mixed a litre of filtered water with 0.1g microbiome power and sprayed each mixture well with it.