coming up on garden talk go ahead and soak it in dechlorinated water that's been ph at 5.5 to 5.7 i try to aim rate at 5.7 that's kind of the sweet spot for cocoa so if i'm in a seedling stage looking for the 200 ppm i might make the compost tea 300 ppm for indoor grows i don't suggest anything bigger than a seven gallon you're gonna get some monstrous plants i generally try to tell people one gallons three gallons and five gallons are like really the best size pots you're going to get disheartened and you're not going to want to grow and you're not going to cultivate because you're going to feel like you wasted a whole bunch of money so less less less less is more let them brew let them really become accessible i mean it's a night and day difference when you feed compost teas within two days your plants will look completely different so that's my favorite thing about organics what's up everybody if you that don't know me my name is chris aka mr growit and you're tuned into the garden talk podcast this episode number 71. in this episode i interview derek also known as chronic he has been gardening for 13 years and grows a variety of plants such as tomatoes lettuce herbs medicinal varieties and more he makes his own super soil and that's what he's going to talk about in today's episode he also touches upon compost teas ph ppm container size and water sources thanks to all of you support this podcast through patreon if you'd like to support you can do so by going to patreon.com mr growit before we get into it i want to acknowledge that one of my goals for this podcast is to bring zero cost for information about gardening all plants to the general public that being said i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's episode who helped make that goal possible thanks to spider farmer for being a sponsor a new grow light they released here in 2022 is the se1000w this was designed specifically for those of you who run co280 grow space and really want to maximize the light intensity it has a 10 bar design for an even light spread pulls 1000 watts from the wall and comes in at 2.9 micro moles per joule efficacy the recommended coverage area is four feet by four feet or five feet by five feet use discount code mr groit5 to save on all spider farmer products and i'll leave a link in the video description section below ac infiniti is a sponsor of the podcast coupon code mr growit will get you a discount on their products i've been using their cloudline t6 and t4 inline fans for several years now and absolutely love the automation built into them on the inline fans controller you can have set points for high and low temperature as well as high and low humidity this greatly helps control my indoor garden environment so the temperature and humidity stays in the ideal ranges i will leave a link to ac infinity down in the description section below and don't forget to use coupon code mr growit for discount on their products and we are back welcome to the garden talk podcast today i am joined with derek from homegrown world how you doing today good man thanks for having me how are you doing doing pretty good yeah thanks for coming on i'm super excited about today's topic we're going to talk all about super soils and how to create them i think a lot of people listening in on this a lot of people garden in general wants to make things more efficient wants to be more hands-off the ability to mix up a soil and then use that one batch throughout the entire grow so you're just basically watering in the entire growth so i think that's a lot of people's goals i think it's easier said than done but today we're going to talk all about that and how you do that and so on and so forth but first can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into gardening yeah absolutely so i'm an educator for medicinal plant medicine as well as various mycology forums that i help write guides for and just in general i educate for various plant and cultivation purposes for the last two years i've done it on youtube instagram and um as well as my own podcast and it's been a wonderful experience i've grown up growing my own plants uh from lettuce tomatoes to medicinal mushrooms like shiitake or culinary mushrooms like pink oysters to just so many more plants that i'm a huge animal and herb lover so i definitely gotta get my own you know mints and peppermints out of my garden for use in in the kitchen so it's definitely been a passion of mine for many years sweet and then what's your style of gardening are you indoors outdoors what medium are you in are you organic could you grow synthetic inputs and so on so forth so i've touched uh on a little bit of all of those i mainly do organic cultivation with soils now but i've done pretty much every type of cultivation but i prefer organic okay cool let's get into the first question here which is what is a supersoil so zebra soil is essentially well that phrase was coined by actually for many people who don't know there was a grower named subcool that crafted a very legendary it's called a legacy mix actually now because it's created a legacy for himself he unfortunately has passed away but since then the dank company has kept this recipe which is basically a specific blended soil that has the proper aeration nutrient mixture acidity level whatever you're seeking as an individual cultivator to be able to grow your plant from start to finish whether it be tomato plants lettuce anything like that without having to add nutrients or if you have to add anything bare minimum of maybe a topping of earthworm castings so it's meant to pretty much be completely uh sufficient with microbiology you know generally they include microbial life whether it's you know some some different mycorrhizae bacterials and things like that so the good stuff that you want in your garden but it's a mixture that's just a just a good nutrient blend for your plants start to finish yeah i've heard about the sub cools super soil mix and there's a few other popular ones out there have you used any of those mixes or do you have kind of your own so i actually do my own blend i've used coots before once or twice i think i've used it once back on a farm years ago in florida i can't guarantee that but i have used it since then i like their blend quite a bit build the soil sub cools soil recipes and a few others are ones that i really want to try generally i just build my own and they're very simple it's just with what i have at my local gardening centers that just make it affordable so when you make this super soil talking about medicinal plants in general there's a balance of nutrition that has to happen right so generally speaking a lot of people notice that in the vegetation stage the plant typically uptakes more nitrogen and the flowering stage you've got there up taking more of the phosphorus and potassium right so when you're making this super soil is there a specific balance that you're trying to achieve that will last you throughout your entire throughout the entire grill or like how does that work since the plant has different nutritional needs throughout the different stages of growth that's a wonderful question and that's something that like pretty much every super soil creator really has to struggle with um you know dialing in their recipes i go for the 132 ratio just right off the gate for npk which is a you know one ratio of nitrogen to three ratios of potassium and two ratios of phosphorus or i think i got that backwards sorry um but uh i try to go for that mixture and i try to keep it simple now if i'm going to play around and do like maybe two four eight okay well i'm going to test it i'm going to see how that runs with the tomato plant just like how i'm going to see it it runs with a medicinal plant and those are the types of things you have to look for when i tell people to make their own recipes at home when i'm looking for my ratio just simple 132 is the simplistic um way to make sure that you're not going to burn your plants and you're going to have quality enough food now also what comes into play is ec and ppm when you're talking about that as well so um there's a little more variables into it but 132 is about the ratio that i like to to keep within okay we'll get deeper into the fertilizer and the amendments that you're using in a little bit here i know there's a lot of new folks that are just mixing up soil for the first time and i think one of the easier ways for the purposes of podcast of organization and try to simplify the information that you're about to say is is breaking it down into your base whether it be like a peat or a cocoa or something else aeration after that and then kind of talking about like compost and worm castings and then the additional fertilizers and amendments that you put into it that's kind of really makes up an entire super soil so starting with the peat and cocoa are using either one of those or is it something else that you're using as a base to begin so that's actually cocoa is the big one that i use i just get cocoa blocks i like there's a few companies i get them from sometimes i'll just actually snag the cocoa that's made for reptiles because it's a little more cleaner sometimes so it's actually a little cheaper too but if they don't have that my reptile store in the blocks because they're they're out or something i'll go with like a rio coco or a um a uh uh just a your in general uh pro mix coco just go ahead and break it down or whatever um but just a coconut husk or coconut fibers really does good aeration um i i do prefer sometimes i do prefer peat moss in my mixes depending on what i'm going to go ahead and add to it so if it's going to be a more earthworm heavy mix i'm going to go ahead and add a little more peat moss to my mix i find that it it holds a little more moisture for the long term versus cocoa cocoa can really let it out earthworm castings really like to not dry out as far as microbial life you know going after them and things it's a little more better when it's humid and things like that so promotes better bacteria so that's kind of the bases i like to stick to i don't really stray away from too many of those i like to stick to my cocoa not unfortunately not all cocoa is created equal you can get them in several different ways right the brick for example is very common to where it's dried up in a brick and you have to actually hydrate it first there's uh you know some people do the rinsing and buffering or you can get the bag stuff let's get deeper into coco what do you do to like prepare the cocoa to begin okay so that's a that's a wonderful question because a lot of people skip this process and even when they tell me it's like pre-ready or you know it's been phd or whatever i still do this i do this with all my cocoa just to make sure so first thing is is i go ahead and soak it in dechlorinated water that's been ph at 5.5 to pop 5.7 i try to aim rate at 5.7 that's kind of the sweet spot for coco when you're prepping it and i like to add a kelp extract so i use germ genie from the company i work with but you can really use you know if you have a little bit of kelp meal or any sort of kelp extra extract you can put it in there like a tea and basically just allow that to kind of soak up the nutrients from the kelp and use a bare minimum i'm talking about maybe 100 ppm 200 ppm max you don't really want much you just want to soak it and allow some nutrients to do that you're going to leave that in there for 24 to 48 hours and generally after 48 hours i go ahead and ring it as long as i'm getting to where it's squeezable out to where it's just a few drops ringing out that's the proper moisture you don't want puddles and puddles of water i'm talking just maybe you know just a little puddle in your palm four or five drops out you squeeze it it's good um you make sure you drain the excess water thoroughly and you basically allow i usually do as a base um about five cups if i'm mixing uh let's say a five gallon uh bucket i'll do like five to six cups of cocoa at the base and then i'll start adding amendments and i'll usually do a cup of cocoa every so so often just to really make sure it's layered through okay so that's the cocoa and then for aeration let's talk about that a little bit are you using any type of aeration at all such as perlite humus uh or anything like that pumice is something i really like to get my hands on when um the local garden center here has it sometimes they don't have it so i'll usually use perlite because it's a little cheaper gotcha and then what's the amount you put in there with that five cups of cocoa so if i'm doing five cups of cocoa i usually try to do one to two cups of perlite and then i'll stack about a cup up so roughly about three cups to three and a half cups total so five cups of cocoa three cups of perlite nice aeration then i'll do about two and a half cups of earthworm castings to three cups of earthworm castings throughout make a really heavy mixture and then basically since i don't have a composter where i live i'm in an apartment i don't want a compost to be all stinky um i go ahead and add roots organic 707 blend which is kind of like a nice even blend that i like to add has a little bit of everything in it has some uh mycorrhizal fungi and then just for myself i'll go ahead and hit it with a shot of great white mico so that's kind of like the blends i like to make they're a little stronger now what i'm making more for is uh for strains that um i don't plant my seedlings directly in this mix so generally i use a happy frog just a very very bare minimum um or a rockwool cube or or just a cocoa pod or something like that or a peat moss pod and i'll get them started whatever it is tomato plants lettuce plants um or lettuce you know broccoli cabbage anything it gets started elsewhere once it's been adjusted and it can really start up taking nutrients i like to stick them into my mixes because they're a little more hotter or just a little more more nutrient heavy for the start you mentioned use worm castings to use any type of compost at all usually people either use the worm castings or the compost or some people will use both so i don't have access to compost currently i just use earthworm castings so that's pretty much all i do it's just the organic earthworm castings i get from my local garden center we have a composter here in in my garage but it doesn't get hot enough for it to compost currently if i was using compost i would back down on probably how much earthworm castings i'm using i'd probably increase uh just a little bit more of the aeration so instead of adding more perlite i'd probably add some play sand to my mixture and just kind of give it a little bit of a sand through the mixture kind of i've noticed that that's getting very popular and i like seeing that that that's also where i might think about swapping the perlite for pumice if i'm doing a more compost heavy mixture so those are those are things you would want to think think about if you do have compost to access what you're using for the specific uh aeration tools you know play sand is a very great granular tool to aerate some more heavier or denser types of compost so that's a yeah great question and then how about fertilizer to begin i think you kind of touched upon this but are you adding like a blend of fertilizer or you're doing individual amendments into the soil mix so it really just depends on how what kind of gardening i want to do so if i want a headache free hassle-free gardening and i want to do mostly just having to water just ph my water dechlorinate it not worry about too much i'm going to go ahead and make compost teas once bi-weekly and i'm going to make them um relatively so if i'm in a seedling stage looking for the 200 ppm i might make the compost tea 300 ppm why i do that is because there's going to be about 150 to 200 active ppms of of activated uh nutrients accessible after brewing the tea but then there's still going to be some of the leftover nutrients that haven't been completely digested by the microbial life that we added to that tea so you're still going to have like a a leaching factor so i'll feed my plants with a little bit of higher ppm and then through the week while i water them i kind of rid out that excess 100 ppm that they're digesting and then all of a sudden you you see that your plants might show some greenhouse burn which is for those who don't know greenhouse burn it's basically when people take up plants at your local garden centers and feed them immensely so that they can ship them out to walmart or various places and they're full of nutrients but they're just burned on the tips but they're not overly burned so that's kind of like where i get my plants and then from there it's just smooth sailing for two or three weeks and then just the compost tea you know two three weeks you know every two or three weeks and it's just smooth sailing um if i'm adding amendments it's gonna be a regiment so that's gonna be where um i'm gonna go based off my ppm if i'm starting at seedling stage i'm gonna look for maybe just simple kelp extracts or simple types of feeds that are 100 ppm to 200 ppm i'll just feed it with every feeding or feed it with every every other watering and that'll be that um all my early feeds get ph to 5.7 to 5.9 um that's generally the the range i like to go with it 5.9 is kind of my target range for the vegetative for um you know what they're up taking like you said it's those uh micronutrients they really like the calcium calcium the magnesium the boron the manganese all that fun stuff so it just really depends on what your nutrient line is and that's really vital and that's why if you're doing a super soil mix it's really good to kind of mix it a little bit heavier that a not a seedling but a juvenile you know a two week old plant three week old plant can go ahead and prosper in because then you find yourself not having to buy nutrients not having to buy a nutrient line you can just go to your local garden center and grab some earthworm castings and throw you know a cup on top mix it in and then just water if you need more food for your plants so i try to be just simple compost teas and that's it so you're not adding in any like bone meal rock phosphate any epsom salts anything like that at all you're just doing the the cocoa with the perlite with the worm castings with the 707 a little bit of 707 soil you mentioned and then just doing teas throughout the entire grow because they get the teas get all the bone meal the blood meal and all of that so i'll go ahead and enrich the soil um because i i like to make sure it's not too hot for hot from the get-go because i found when i was adding my bone meals my blood meals my ratios were always changing because i was finding that okay this one type of plant likes this mix but the next type doesn't early on so what i did find better was just to make a very not um neutral super super oil but kind of a neutral super soil mix that was happy with all my plants that i could okay if this strains of of lettuce like um you know the purple head cabbage or or this strain of you know lemongrass or compared to my my um my peppermints or my spearmints if they're eating heavy okay i can feed them more you know but if the the back the back basil's not eating heavy or the back um tomatoes aren't even eating heavy okay i can back off i don't have to feed them this compost tea so that's kind of where i found my even mix is just adding the things to adding my excess nutrients or excess additives to the compost tea let them brew let them really become accessible and then you'll see i mean it's a night and day difference when you feed compost teas within two days your plants will look completely different so that's my favorite thing about um organics let's get deeper into compost teas so i know some people have a recipe for the vegetation stage and some people have a recipe for the flower stage do you do that as well or you just one recipe or one tea type of tea throughout the whole grow oh i definitely change it up so it's uh i'm a believer of changing up your ppm range i'm a believer of changing up your ph ranges um you know shifting ph ranges are what's healthy for plants because that happens in nature uh so for my vegetative compost tea it's gonna be around the you know if we're talking about a a nice vegging plant five weeks old four weeks old something nice and hearty it's going to be around the 500 to 650 ppm range maybe 700 max um and that's going to give them a nice boost but what that's going to be is and what that's going to look like is usually uh it's going to be one cup of bat guano uh one and a half cups of earthworm castings and then i go ahead and add one cup of blood meal and then half a cup of oh no a quarter cup of bone meal and that bone meal is in there just to introduce some of that pk the earthworm casting is about guano all of it has npk throughout of it really um but it's just the back guano and the uh the uh earthworm casting is gonna be much higher in nitrogen and the calcium and magnesium and boron so i'm just gonna let that steep for 24 to 48 hours i generally hit it with some great white mico or if i um my local garden center has a brand called mike's m-y-k-e-s it's a really great brand if you guys have it in your garden centers it is actually a very nice brand of mycorrhizae but you always let it blend for about 24 hours generally that's ready to go my flower feeds gonna be uh one cup of bat guano one cup of earthworm castings two cups of bone meal and then i'm going to do a quarter cup of blood meal so it's basically going to be a pk heavy uh compost tea versus the you know nitrogen heavy vegetative okay and those ratios is that for your standard five gallon bucket with about four gallons of water yes yeah it's for a five gallon bucket um roughly i fill that thing to about four point five gallons i'm not gonna lie i fill it to the brim and then are you diluting that tea down with water or are you just giving it directly to the plants yeah so i'll actually take that tea and i have a one gallon uh jug that you know we have we go through milk so every so often i'll clean my milk jugs and i'll have a free jug but i'll use a one gallon jug i'll fill it up about halfway then i'll take another free jug i have for my normal water get dechlorinated water ph it proper go ahead and pour it in kind of dilute it half and half so it's 50 uh of a mix that way it goes longer i make more most of my compost tea and i'm able to off five gallons i'm able to feed for you know almost a month and and i can keep that key that tea brewing we have a lid for ours that keeps it sealed you know i go and check the smell i check the uh the healthy uh bacteria on top and make sure nothing's growing and make sure it's all clean that's one thing if you want to keep t for a long time you don't want to keep it prolonged if you don't have good aeration and and proper temperatures because you can grow bad bacteria really fast so that's that is key so um generally the rts go with how many plants um we usually run and just vegetables and herbs and everything our teas are gone in like a week but we'll feed you know i have 30 plus plants going plus maybe 20 vegetables so we'll feed all that in a week so every week will be a new tea for them basically sometimes it'll be every second week because if it is a heavier t it'll last a lot longer gotcha okay on your initial mix that you mix up are you aiming for a specific ec to begin or bpm is a little tough for me that's that's still things i'm getting used to uh as far as like you know i've never i've had organic farmers tell me about the electric electrical conductivity with organic farming and saying like yo if you're not reading current if your plants aren't putting out electrical currents you're not doing it right um so that's that's been the goal of mine to get there i'm more so getting there by measuring my ppm and making sure my ppms are more accurate and on par that was the big thing that i wasn't doing when i was first making my teas is i was just go ahead and jump in like two cups of this three cups of that four cups you know like just so much crap and just doing over doing it and then i checked my ppns and they'd be like my run off my plant would be like 4000 ppm and i'd be wondering why they were out of range and all messed up so that's where i started recently going okay you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna make my teas a lot less so when i check my ppmit okay my ppm might be a thousand but let me go check it diluted okay now diluted it's at 550 perfect i'm in range okay ph ph is 6.0 perfect let's go ahead and feed i check my runoff my runoffs are now you know if it's i'm feeding 600 and i have a super soil mix like we talked about generally the runoff would be about 750 800 and that's generally where i want to be for a vegging plant that's a really healthy amount of food for them because right as they get into flowering you're going to want to switch them over and they're going to want that a thousand range 1100 range 1200 range i've had plants that love 1500 range so you know it just completely depends on what you have what's fruiting on your plant tomatoes sometimes can take a lot of nutrients but yeah i find measuring my ppms have dialed me in much more than than what i used to do and then you touched a little bit about ph your base soil is cocoa and i know a lot of people don't aim for a different ph in cocoa than they would in soil what do you typically aim for when it comes to ph in your super soil so my ph and my super soil i try to keep it at 6.0 6.1 it's really good to run throughout the whole thing something you have to remember if you're going to use cocoa in any mix whatsoever you're going to use plain cocoa growing cocoa whatever you're doing cocoa cocoa holds pk and will leech it later on in the grow so you always have to remember okay my cocoa is holding this pk that means that my cocoa is holding on to a ph range of around 6.3 to 6.7 because that's roughly where those nutrients lie and that's why our plants absorb them best at the 6.0 to 6.5 range is because that's that flowering fruiting stage for the acidic and alkaline nutrients that flow in that range so i generally think like okay at 6.0 when one flower hits i'm going to start raging it to 6.1 but i'm going to back off and start watering those first few weeks because i know my cocoa has leech pk and generally the first two weeks of every time i switch to flour or i notice fruiting happening on my plants i'll i'll go ahead and just feed a very very minimal water i usually won't compost feed it'll just be like water and molasses or water and kelp and i'll notice that my ppms when i'm off the runoff will continue to rise will keep rising and then they'll just drop after about a week or so because that leaching has finally come out because they're it's something with um i don't know the science the true science behind cocoa but i do know it's something with uh those stages of cocoa the fibrous breaks down of the plant um something to do with coconut husk and finally releasing the potassium and phosphorus after so many weeks or something like that it's based on how much you feed but generally the rule of thumb is your cocoa generally can hold it on for six to eight weeks after you fed that's that's rule of thumb for most most cocoa growers that have taught me anything about cocoa all right so you have your initial super soil mix you have a clear plan of the teas you're going to be doing in the vegetation stage and the flower stage let's talk about container size you know i have people that are growing indoors what container size would you recommend for those folks and i also have folks that are growing outdoors is there a specific container size that you have that you recommend for those folks absolutely so indoors you can get away with pretty much plastic pot fabric pots i don't know wood pots pvc pots whatever you want to get uh grow in and get makeshift with e um and for indoor growers you always have to take your grow tent or space or height into consideration so you one thing people always think you know oh i have a two or uh six foot ten i have six foot of growth space no you really don't so you have to take in your height of your pot then you have to take in the distance from the ceiling to your light and then the distance from the light to your canopy so light to your canopy has to always be at minimum 12 inches generally you want about 14 so you don't burn your plants or bleach your plants you get a really nice par displacement and you can maximize your light 12 inches is like when you're really dialed in and everything so you always have to calculate that distance so whatever that distance in between so let's say you have five feet of gross speeds or or four feet of growth space in between okay so you know that at two feet you need to flip your plants to flower or fruiting so that those plants double and potentially don't outgrow your space generally i even like to do it a little shorter than two feet because some plants will go 300 stretch on you so you have to be careful um so with that height you got to take into consideration what size grow tent or what size pot you have for indoor grows i don't suggest anything bigger than a seven gallon you're going to get some monstrous plants i generally try to tell people one gallons three gallons and five gallons are like really the best size pots um if you have a smaller size tents your one gallons and three gallons can really do great your one gallons can be perfect for vegetating and then you can transplant to your three gallons to for your your flour and your fruiting stages and they can be you work wonders um you know your five gallons you're going to get into the much much much larger plants which this is you're talking about by four grow spaces five by five grow spaces maybe a four by eight grow space something that's larger even a three by three um you just really don't wanna surpass your space like you're not gonna throw a five gallon and a two by two by four that's really too much so just know your space i wouldn't suggest anything past the five gallon if you really want ease indoors um i always suggest more of a wider pot than a taller pot so that you have more grow room and more height to train your plants and then for outdoors it really makes a difference you don't want black plants or black pots for your plants outdoors because of the heat and you can burn your roots so you generally want tan white or some sort of reflective barrier for your pots outdoors uh you want a lot of aeration but you want a lot of moisture control so what i what a lot of growers do that i see is build grow boxes where they're actually have individual pots inside these grow boxes that'll be like uh rings of sand so it'll be like a pot of sand and then the the plant inside of it and it's like a big grow box and the roots can go out from underneath and actually grow within the grow box but there's a ring of sand around it that the growers can go okay it's a hot day i'm going to go pour cold water onto the sand make sure the roots are cold so you always have to think about outdoors for temperature and for size outdoors i mean it really depends you could go 50 gallon grow pots you could get 150 gallon grow pot you could do a a whole you know planted in the ground and then it's like a thousand gallon grow pot so um it really just depends on what your space is for your general average greenhouse grower if you're not trying to grow 20-foot trees or 10-foot monsters uh you would probably want something around the 35 to 45 or 50-gallon marker uh smart pots are really really handy like i said tan tan makes a great color for reflecting sun while also keeping in heat for the nighttime temperatures so that's that's some things to consider when you're choosing your pots and i believe you touched on paul on this in the beginning of the episodes you mentioned that you don't actually start out in this super soul mix right i think you said you like to use fox farm happy frog for example to start your seedlings in there so is that like just in a small solo cup and you're planting it in unhappy frog letting those plants grow to a certain point and then transplanting into your final container or are you going from like a solo cup to a one gallon then up to like a five gallon for example so generally i'll go solo cup one gallon five gallon um but if it's like an autoflower that i just want to go ahead and get them in their pot get them uh going or if it's like a uh a tomato plant where it's uh it's something where you wanna get it in a in a smaller viney more growing straightforward and get those little cherry tomatoes going maybe it's a it's a strawberry plant and you want your mini strawberries to grow more of a bush in a box or something so it depends on what i'm kind of doing if i want something that's more quicker more off going i want to get it instantly i need them the medicinal qualities now or whatever i'll keep them in small pots so that'll be my one gallons and three gallons and i'll just keep them in there i'll let them get root bound and then i'll go ahead and turn them over to the flowering cycle or whatever requires of them to go ahead and fruit um that way their roots stay locked uh the the hormone so for those listening wondering how plants even flower fruit or produ produce fruiting bodies it's ethylene it's a it's a female flowering hormone and so whenever the plants are root locked in most species of plants a self-preservation kind of signal goes off so they're genetically a little easier to produce ethylene with this is why hermaphroditian kind of happens in various species of plants and that's why plants will seed out themselves sometimes it's really cool so for most medicinal plants if i want a very fast response whether it's a photoperiod cycle or not i'll go ahead and keep them in a one gallon root lock them and then if i really maybe i want some a little bigger size to them you know those first two weeks of flower i'll i'll put them into uh a three gallon and then they'll get a little bigger they'll get a little bulkier but they'll stay relatively smaller i can keep them in a little uh um you know two by two herb garden that i have going with a little mars hydro or something you know something small nothing crazy so that's what i like to do now if i want monsters if i want some really nice trees really nice quality plants really nice herbs whatever i'm doing it's gonna go from the one gallon to a three gallon proper feeding proper compost teas training the whole what nine yards then it's gonna go straight to a five gallon uh one week before i go ahead and flip under flour so the roots can actually uh adjust handle the shock and then properly stretch out root bound and really get a nice root system and i usually dust those roots with uh mycorrhizae i go the full nine yards and really try to make sure that when they're going into those bigger homes i'm doing them justice because just because you put a plant in a bigger pot doesn't mean it's going to get bigger successfully there's still a lot of uh microbiology you know root science that has to go into it what they're eating and if they're taking in all those things so i guess it just depends on what i'm growing but generally i like to stick at that three gallon to five gallon marker three gallons are my my quick my quick medicine plants okay and i probably should ask this earlier but are you letting that soil cook for a period of time some people let it sit for a while to let the microbes get to work start breaking down some of those organic amendments and then they'll plant into it whether that be a week later two weeks later a month later i've heard upwards of two months later people after they mix two months later them actually planting into that super soil mix your mix that you mentioned in this podcast episode are you letting it cook at all if so how long so i'm not two months i'm not that that you know patient crazy about it but yes i do let it sit so i'll usually feed um so if you can picture a little four by four tent for those listening and you have you know just a few rows of of grow pots filled with soil imagine the back row you know four pots filled with plants the rest of them completely empty i'll water all of them with compost give them all food and i'll let those soils cook just under the light in the humidity and the temperatures and i'll let them cook for about one to two weeks and then i get to planting that way i know the microbial life is active there's some activated nutrients ready for the plants and it's healthy and going that makes sense i want to dig into water source water can certainly be a variable right uh you can start with aurora water which has little to no ppm distilled water you've got rain water tap water i mean my tap water comes in at 485 ppm so like what are you using for a water source and um do you have a recommended like a different soil mix recommended for somebody who's using hard water with a high ppm versus somebody using ro water that's a very good question uh that's one of the biggest questions i think i get all the time is about water because water can seriously mess up and grow uh yeah so i use tap water luckily i'm in a place in colorado where we have well water that comes out roughly less than 50 ppm it's a little high in ph so i have to dechlorinate it you know just make sure i ph ph it right but it's nice when i was in florida i never used tap water it was very harsh unless i had a water softener and or some sort of you know rain softener system or something like that i was never using tap water so my best recommendations for those people who are using um any sort of or living in areas where it's harsh water and you don't want to spend money on an ro system because ro is the best reverse osmosis is the best i think if i could have an arrow system to pump all my water i totally would but i get it it's not always affordable for most people so i would suggest if you have to have to use tap water get aquatic dechlorinators to at least take the harsh chemicals and chlorine out of the water um it's very cheap it's it's literally just a little couple drops in your water and it goes a long way and on top of it you're going to want to use a mixture that is generally i'm talking maybe 150 ppms hot so you're you're looking at like getting a very heavy base of happy frog mixed with like if not three quarters of cocoa and just doing that as a mix with a little bit of earthworm castings because your minerals and all your your stuff from your water is going to add salts and various things that your plants are actually going to feed or try to eat so if you're not going to use distilled water if you're not going to use anything to rid those salts or clean those salts or minerals or nutrients or whatever's inside your water because sometimes it's limestone in people's water and it's super heavy limestone you get limestone buildup in your soil and that's an extremely um you know they could combine some toxic fear plants depending on what you're growing so that's something to consider um so with water problems if you have a severe enough problem and you want to cultivate your own garden medicine whatever you're trying to do to be self-sufficient i always tell people it it is an investment to try to get a rain softener system a water softener system an ro system but really at the end of the day the amount of headaches and jumps and and and hoops you're gonna have to go through to try to just get a successful harvest or plant or fruit or flower or whatever you're trying to get with tap water it's it's very hard you're gonna have a very hard time your ph is usually all over the place the problem with salts and minerals and water is the leaching effect so cocoa leaches and holds nutrients well when you put salts in things and you have salt build up eventually that salt does break down and that salt will leach and cause toxicities it'll it'll shoot your plants out of range it'll cause your ppms to go from you're sitting at 500 next thing you know you're at 2 000 because all these salts just leached into the soil and they became bio accessible and now your plants are eating them and and now your plants are absorbing them and now your plants are also dropping them all up back into the soil because it can't take anymore and now your plants are just stuck in this cocoon drowning of nutrients because they that's what's happening with the salt underneath the soil essentially i mean there's much more into it i'm not a scientist or a biologist but um yeah i think we're spending the money in an ro system or bob gallons of distilled water man it makes a difference i wouldn't use tap water if it's too high i just that's just my best suggestion um you really water is everything for plants collecting rainwater and filtering it with a youtube how to filter you know little gravel salt things that can make a difference um you know so yeah i wouldn't suggest tap water if it's if it's a hard water like florida georgia alabama or even pennsylvania new york those i wouldn't suggest it i tried to use my tap water for a grow and it did not turn out good at all uh you know like i mentioned 485 ppm that's very high i think the epa approval is like no higher than 500 so it's like dancing the line on not being approved by the epa and it was that flint's level right there that's not good it uh it did not come up my my plans didn't like it i invested in ro system and i haven't looked back and i know there's a lot of people out there that say ro systems are a waste because you're wasting water for every gallon of ro water it's two or three times that amount is coming out of the drain line well you can actually take that water from the drain line you can not hook it up to your drain you can actually put it into a bucket and use it for your outdoor plants for example that's what a lot of people commonly do they take that water and they use it for something else so that's one thing just to keep in mind for anyone who is uh considering using aura water but maybe not to go towards it because of the fact they don't want to waste the water but for someone like me i had to go to ro just because my water that's accessible to me is just not usable really for uh for the plants that i'm growing it just kills them it just doesn't do anything good for your plants so yeah i love your suggestions go to ro guys go to it so taking a step back and thinking about everything that has to do with mixing soils you know creating a super soil what advice do you have for someone who's new to mixing soils less is more yeah don't overdo it just uh less is so much more if you're if you're really you're going down to your local grow center this is all you need you know i've talked to a bunch of different cultivators kyle cushman eric branstad um the dank duchess uh smoking with pod all sorts of people and mr growitz now getting to talk you know get to talk to us so it's definitely been really great but i think every one of you guys will always agree that less is more you know just go ahead and do bare minimum grab if you're not sure if you want peat moss or cocoa okay go grab a nice blend of soil go grab a little bit of peat moss toss it in go grab a little bone meal blood meal toss a little in and leave it that don't do anything crazy i'm talking to you like half recipe of everything i i decided to tell you test the waters just do do less is more because when you go extravag extravagant and go buying everything and go spend your money on all this and then your plants fail you're going to get disheartened and you're not going to want to grow and you're not going to cultivate because you're going to feel like you wasted a whole bunch of money so less less less less is more definitely some good advice there so wrapping things up how can the listeners find you and what do you have upcoming in the future well i am known as derrick aka chronic from homegrown world you can go check out at homegrown world on instagram it has all the wonderful information of where to find us what we do what the company is uh what we're about and what kind of seeds we have for purchase that are top-notch quality and all that fun stuff mainly i do educational content so you can check out my page there you guys can always ask me questions i'm an open book i know a lot of youtubers and various faces are kind of hard to get a hold of and it's kind of scary like should i drop my question now guys drop your question i'm happy to answer and uh it was a it was an absolute pleasure to come on this podcast man thank you so much for having me yeah thanks for coming on if you enjoyed this episode click that thumbs up button trying to get as many thumbs up as possible youtube loves the thumbs up but they recommend videos that get a lot of thumbs up so hit that thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you haven't already every single weekend i'm releasing a new garden talk podcast episode and i'd love for you to tune in to future episodes derek once again thanks so much for coming on to this podcast today i definitely have a new super soil to potentially try out in the future uh thanks for revealing your secrets there and i hope you enjoy the rest of your day yeah it was a pleasure man you as well take care peace out everyone