Creating my own mix?

Raspberrykiwi said:

Hello, I’m a beginner in organics. My plants are currently 12 days old from the time they poked out of the soil. Their roots are already filling my solo cup and I need to transplant. I have 2, 3 gallon pots to transplant into. I want to create my own mix and have the “ingredients”. I really just need some advice on the amounts of each “ingredient” to add. I figure 6 gallons is 24 quarts.

ingredients:
Fox farm ocean forest
Malibu compost
Earth worm castings
Dr earth all purpose 4-4-4 50% of recommended mix per gallon
Dr earth flower girl 3-9-4 50% of recommended mix per gallon
Perlite

If you guys could help me mix my soil and the amount in quarts needed of each ingredient to have a healthy grow all the way to harvest. Thanks in advance.

My personal thought would be 12 quarts FFOF, 4 quarts worm castings, 4 quarts compost and 4 quarts of perlite.

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ilovereggae said:

I used a similar mix for a long time and experimented with more FFOF, more perlite etc. I have not tried Dr earth but very similar mix. I think your recipe looks good, you should just experiment and see how it works and decide from there what to add more or less of.

I think my most recent batch was 8 gallons FFOF, 4 EWC, 4 Bus compost, 4 perlite. I then top dress w EWC and DTE Vegan Mix in flower, and use Recharge 1x a week.

I also made a batch of "supersoil" substituting the Bus compost for BAS pinto bean compost and just used Sunshine peat, ewc, perlite, DTE vegan mix and some dolomite lime. Just tried the first test run of that in flower, and the new mix is crushing the FFOF version. I literally gave away the rest of my Bus and FF to my neighbor.

I then went to calculate how much it cost me to make my own mix, and even without my labor I was only able to save less than $20 per 24 gallon batch vs just buying BAS "light soil" which is pretty close to what we were making, arguably even better. Once I added in my labor, and then having to pre mix it 2 mos in advance, I said F it and just ordered a bunch of bags from BAS.

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Raspberrykiwi said:

Cool, I’ll mix my soil today and see how it goes. Hopefully it’s all ok. I don’t have a lot of soil (12 quart bag) that’s the only reason I would put quarts of ewc and 4 quarts of compost. Otherwise I would aim for maybe 2-3 quarts of each

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Raspberrykiwi said:

Today is day 27 from the seeds poking up, day 13 of veg.

Plant on the left is Gelato 41 and I topped all 8 of it’s tops and pulled the branches down to open her up.

The plant on the right is a bag seed and I topped all 4 of her tops and pulled the top 2 branches down some.

Let me know what you think!

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ilovereggae said:

Plants look healthy but are a little droopy looking. Had you just watered or something? Other than that they got nice structure, good job topping!

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