Let’s Debate Indoor Growing: Organics/Living Soil vs. Inorganic (synthetic) Media/Nutes

Just wanted to get a feeler question out there for the experienced indoor growers out there: What is your experience with organics/living soil (I.E. dry organic amendments, compost teas, soil food web) vs. inorganic/chemical/hydro (I.E. coco coir and h3ads 6/9 with GH bottled nutes)? Which growing technique do you prefer, and why?

As a newer grower myself, I have tried several different growing techniques/mediums/feeding regimens, etc. So far, I seem to have grown quite fond of organics and living soil. However, coco coir and bottled nute regimens have their own unique strengths (faster rooting, faster growing, easier to correct a def/tox quickly/less drastically).

Always nice to hear from other growers.

None, dial any in and you get primo bud none can tell how grown.

Organics has a slight edge for me but i dont care mixing in chems too as that works equally well.

Dont fret the small detail just yeild the most you can anyway you fancy

I guess I put a bunch of care and thought into my grows now, and there’s just something addicting about wanting to get better and better results. I mean, the hobby of growing for me has kind of become a challenge to myself to learn and do it better each time. I’m still learning as a grower... this present grow is really only my 2.5th grow hah. M

I’ve enjoyed both methods myself, and I think doing both simultaneously in the past helped me to be more well rounded in my knowledge of growing. That said, there’s so many people here with so much experience that I love to hear what everyone has to say.

I’ve been growing for about 15 years now the last five with canna in coco, I have to say that has been the easiest trouble free fire grows I have had.
yes, it is addictive trying to get better and better, as satisfied as I am with coco I can’t help wondering if I’m missing something not doing living soil.
So of course here I go down another rabbit hole as I change to 15 gal no-til living soil, I hope it turns out to be better.

Pretty sure there isnt a real better. just different styles to get the same results if dialed in. I grow in living soil, simply because I do auto watering with blumats and feel like I do nothing except top dress once a cycle. I am doing another grow in ebb&flow and just learning/starting. Can't even comment on it yet.

Maximusmin said:

I’ve been growing for about 15 years now the last five with canna in coco, I have to say that has been the easiest trouble free fire grows I have had.
yes, it is addictive trying to get better and better, as satisfied as I am with coco I can’t help wondering if I’m missing something not doing living soil.
So of course here I go down another rabbit hole as I change to 15 gal no-til living soil, I hope it turns out to be better.

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Sounds like lunacy doesn’t it? I always find myself down the rabbit hole as far as growing goes. Like, what can I do to push the shit out of my plants to make them the frostiest, tastiest, most potent bud I can grow.

I almost think I like growing more than I like smoking, and that’s saying something.

I agree though about coco - it’s absolutely unreal how fast a new seedling can shoot out huge roots and grow like someone is just jamming success down its throat. I mean, I had a bush at 21 days from seed in coco with airpots. I just found that my lack of experience (though I did extensive research on cannabis nute requirements, calculated the ppl of each micro/macro nute, and measured the pH/ppm every single gallon of water I fed) caused me to just kind of mis-apply my knowledge. I really think I overfed, even though I grew fantastic and copious amounts of bud. There was something just missing from the bud - a sort of complexity that I’ve attributed to nature being fully capable of out-performing me in “approximating” or “interpreting” what a plant needs, and doing it in the way that the plant has evolved — under the sun in the elements.

I keep an open mind though, and I’m not a staunch organics-only grower. I think my experiences have just been really positive with organic growing; I have less of a tendency to want to “give nutes”.

Yea I definitely don’t lead an organic life style but I’ve heard that living soil brings out some different terps and I’m all about trying that out

Maximusmin said:

Yea I definitely don’t lead an organic life style but I’ve heard that living soil brings out some different terps and I’m all about trying that out

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It’s worth doing just to get some more tools in your growing tool box and to gain insight into growing IMO. Even if you ultimately went back to coco, you may still come out with some new angles and thoughts on growing.

I feel like organics is very forgiving - it’s hard to overfeed when all of your additives require decomposition and conversion into more elemental forms of nutes by microbial activity. I really feel like the girls can tolerate anything because of their well-buffered, rich medium. The goal of feeding the microbes as a primary method for fertilization is pretty contrary to the techniques of hydroponics/inert mediums. I find that trying to maintain a “non-biotic” or sterile medium removes the defense that beneficial microbes provide. Fill up the medium with good guys so that the bad guys have to really fight to get established.

Beneficial microbes form symbiotic relationships with the plant and plant’s roots, and an oxygen-rich medium facilitates their proliferation. That’s why I feel like airflow is of massive importance. You can NEVER have too much fresh air. Contrarily, in overwatered, humid, stagnate environments, you are inviting the presence of predominantly anaerobic pathogens.

There's no debate: the best way to grow cannabis is the way you find that works for you. I've tried doing it many ways: dwc, aeroponics, soil/nutrients, living soil. Pros and cons to each.
Switched over to living soil and never looked back. The catalyst was every time I harvested some lovely looking bud it tasted kind of off. Maybe I didn't flush properly or was using cheapo nutes but the weed always had a weird/bad taste. Decided to go ditch the nutes and everything was going fairly well until I went to my local hydro store to get worm castings and was sold a sky high npk value bloom booster that was "organic." Sent my plants into a severe ph lockout which was only solved by clean water. Never again; no more bottles of "stuff." Clean water and worm compost soon became pretty much the only thing I put on my plants.
You don't need nutrients. In fact they suck. I found it easier to put all of what the plants need for the entire grow into the soil and then just water the plants. I also learned that if you focus on keeping the soil healthy the plants just grow; they already know what to do.
The thing is not everyone has access to a rich source of compost and clean water. These are what changed the game for me. Started using water collected from a dehumidifier instead of tap; I was just dumping it all down the drain everyday anyway. Got a worm factory 360 and acquired a few soil amendments. The soil got even better with age; water only. Easy breezy. My time is focused on training for max yields instead of trying to figure out what's wrong.

I think if peeps want to understand organic benefits more indepth the simple assumption that salts are but 14/16 essential elements and organics are the same but with an added hundred or so extra un-needed but usefull elements that turn on and facilitate other plant systems and defence etc etc.

I can tell a very slight taste difference but its really subjective, if i have a well grown organic tomato i can swear it has a morexearthy taste than hydro but again very subjective and both taste of tomato.

Richard Drysift said:

There's no debate: the best way to grow cannabis is the way you find that works for you. I've tried doing it many ways: dwc, aeroponics, soil/nutrients, living soil. Pros and cons to each.
Switched over to living soil and never looked back. The catalyst was every time I harvested some lovely looking bud it tasted kind of off. Maybe I didn't flush properly or was using cheapo nutes but the weed always had a weird/bad taste. Decided to go ditch the nutes and everything was going fairly well until I went to my local hydro store to get worm castings and was sold a sky high npk value bloom booster that was "organic." Sent my plants into a severe ph lockout which was only solved by clean water. Never again; no more bottles of "stuff." Clean water and worm compost soon became pretty much the only thing I put on my plants.
You don't need nutrients. In fact they suck. I found it easier to put all of what the plants need for the entire grow into the soil and then just water the plants. I also learned that if you focus on keeping the soil healthy the plants just grow; they already know what to do.
The thing is not everyone has access to a rich source of compost and clean water. These are what changed the game for me. Started using water collected from a dehumidifier instead of tap; I was just dumping it all down the drain everyday anyway. Got a worm factory 360 and acquired a few soil amendments. The soil got even better with age; water only. Easy breezy. My time is focused on training for max yields instead of trying to figure out what's wrong.

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Care to help a noob build his own soil? Was contemplating using stoningtons, or fox farms ocean and just using ro water for my first indoor. Just to keep it simple forvthr plants sake haha

Kingrow1 said:

None, dial any in and you get primo bud none can tell how grown.

Organics has a slight edge for me but i dont care mixing in chems too as that works equally well.

Dont fret the small detail just yeild the most you can anyway you fancy

Click to expand...

The problem with this opinion is that it fails to acknowledge the massive amounts of heavy metals contamination in horticultural grade fertilizers. Your dank might look as good in a jar vs. organic, but you can't un-do the poisoning you've added to it. By growing with hydro chelated synthetics, you're not only losing diversity of terpene profiles, you're literally poisoning people with mercury, cadmium, aluminum, and many other heavy metals, each of which contribute to neurological conditions such as alzheimers.

Richard Drysift said:

There's no debate: the best way to grow cannabis is the way you find that works for you. I've tried doing it many ways: dwc, aeroponics, soil/nutrients, living soil. Pros and cons to each.
Switched over to living soil and never looked back. The catalyst was every time I harvested some lovely looking bud it tasted kind of off. Maybe I didn't flush properly or was using cheapo nutes but the weed always had a weird/bad taste.

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That weird/bad taste is the heavy metals. Hydro synthetic is pure poison for profit. If you care about medicinal value and your community, stop growing hydro immediately and make the switch to the higher-quality, higher-yielding, lower-cost production system: living soil organics.

Yellowboatyellowboat said:

Care to help a noob build his own soil? Was contemplating using stoningtons, or fox farms ocean and just using ro water for my first indoor. Just to keep it simple forvthr plants sake haha

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I just started with ffof bagged soil and kept on amending it after each run. It gets better each time you recycle it. The secret to organic grows is compost; namely worm castings. Starting a worm bin will up your game like nothing else will. Check out my thread in the organic section if ya wanna see how I do it.

Seven Trees said:

That weird/bad taste is the heavy metals. Hydro synthetic is pure poison for profit. If you care about medicinal value and your community, stop growing hydro immediately and make the switch to the higher-quality, higher-yielding, lower-cost production system: living soil organics.

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Not sure I'd go quite that far. Hydro nutrients are not poison and soil does not necessarily yield more than synthetic chelates potentially could. But naturally fed plants taste better than force fed nutrients and are generally healthier in my opinion. You get an exotic end product with minimal efforts in living soil; & all you need to do is water the plants.

Richard Drysift said:

Not sure I'd go quite that far. Hydro nutrients are not poison and soil does not necessarily yield more than synthetic chelates potentially could. But naturally fed plants taste better than force fed nutrients and are generally healthier in my opinion. You get an exotic end product with minimal efforts in living soil; & all you need to do is water the plants.

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Care to share your recipe for your soil?

I often wonder if soil makes the smoke taste a little better, but coco/perlite/biochar has been ok so far for me... but I have a lot to learn and like reading about growing.. probably like all of us here. Stay lifted

Buds taste better from soil because the plants only pull what they need as they need as opposed to being force fed everything all the time. Any soluble nutrient you put into the soil for immediate uptake will eventually end up being deposited in the flesh of the plant. It is the same reason wine grapes taste different from different regions: the minerals, ph, and soil composition add complexity to the flavor.
I don't have a soil recipe to share but I do add in a lot of the same amendments used in coots mix and other popular soil recipes. I just bought a few bags of ocean forest soil and added worm castings to it. Used it as-is for most of the run but after each harvest I amend the soil with npk inputs, minerals, and fresh vermicompost. The key is compost; keeping the soil active is more important than what inputs you add to it. Add lots of different things in small amounts for diversity.
For bloom phase I add a handful (or 2) of chicken compost, ewc, and 2 Jobes organic spikes per each 10g smart pot. Feeds them through to harvest. If plants start to look pale in late veg or mid bloom I give a dose of liquid fish like neptunes harvest with seaweed and an ewc top dress to get things rockin again.

I run semi- organic. It's been argued with me for years. But my buds are more popular than my buddy I share clones with in his uppity, fancy pants laboratory. I vote dirt.

MICHI-CAN said:

I run semi- organic. It's been argued with me for years. But my buds are more popular than my buddy I share clones with in his uppity, fancy pants laboratory. I vote dirt.

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I have a 1970's Sunbeam mechanical thermometer/hygrometer in my profile pic. OLD SCHOOL. Tried and true.