No-Till Cover Cropping and Top Dressing with BrownGuy420

BrownGuy420 talks about cover cropping with crimson clover, then composting that into the soil with hay and other top dressing ingredients.

Plenty of ingredients!

Transcription:

What is up everybody. It’s BrownGuy420 here, solo farms. We’re going to talk a little about No Til and what the process is with that. Our cover cropping and composting and what keeps these beautiful ladies alive.

You know it all starts with good soil. We make a really basic soil; it’s not fully amended with guano and things like that. It’s a basic peat moss, we used a cal agro peat that was very nice, holds a lot of carbon and a lot of minerals. Very basic, we add worms to the soil and then we start with a cover crop which is called crimson clover. It’s a high nitrogen producing plant and we grow it in nice and thick. We let it grow pretty tall and that’s the basis and the start of your no till soil. With the worms down there, they’re aerating everything. The roots of the crimson clover will start to hold water retention a lot more so your soil doesn’t dry out as fast and then from there we bring in a nice thick layer of hay and we smother down that entire cover crop. What that’s gonna do is start your basic composting and it’s gonna make all that nitrogen producing cover crop break down, compost down, become worm food and it’s a boost of nitrogen for your plants as your worms start to compost it down into the soil.

We don’t feed with worm casting tea because the worms are already there. if you look at our soil it starts to form a pure casting layer so with just basic watering with pure water, you’re giving an earth worm casting tea every time you’re watering your plants. Other than that we do constant composting of our fan leaves and we just throw them down on top. There is no lifting the hay, you don’t need to do that, it’s unnecessary. All we’re doing is growing all of our fan leaves down doing constant stripping and causing more composting of nitrogen type material. The sticks, the leaves, everything gets thrown on top and that’s your basic start of composting. People call this your lasagna layering; it’s constant layering of dry carbon material, hay, and fresh nitrogen full material of leaves and your branches and sticks.

From there we do basic watering every other day with pure water. We don’t pH we don’t PPM anything. We let the plants do that. Once you let your soil fully thrive your plant will also thrive and your roots will start to talk to the soil and microbes within the soil to regulate pH, what wants, nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous. All we do is constantly add a good organic layer back to the soil that is full of everything we need. One day when, we do feed, it will be coconut powder, aloe vera powder, humic acid, and silica, your pretty much the basics what our soil does not have at the moment. We will start composting things like horse tail. Horse tail is full of silica and that will be a natural way of introducing it into the soil and letting it compost. After a number of years, our soil by all this layering, that lasagna layer that we’re talking about, brings in natural humic acids so therefore we can take out our top dressing of humic acid. From there it will just be coconut and aloe which will have small amounts of almost every nutrient that you do need but it’s at such a very low amount it keeps your soil very balanced out to where your plant can pick and choose on what it wants during what time or photo period that it’s living in. Then we’ll follow that up with a pure watering and then the next cycle that we water with, which is typically every other day, we will bring in a fish emulsion. Typically, we just a nice cheap Alaskan fertilizer 551. It just gives your plants a boost. We only do that in our vegetative state and we do that just for outdoor style plants that kind of demand that food right away.

Then we, of course, with water again, and then the next following feeding would be a product from down to earth nutrients which is called Bio-Live. Which is kind of a mix of crustaceans, some kelp, a little bit of fish bone mil and some basic organics that you can just top dress. We kind of throw it down like it’s a cover crop seed and just kind of throw it on top of the hay on top of your composted leaves everything like that and water it in again. It’s kind of like giving it a tea and just letting everything slowly kind of work itself in every time you water. No need to add a lot of. We just believe a little goes a long way. After that, of course, watering again, and then we bring things such as malted barley. Malted barley is just barley that’s been sprouted to its highest enzymatic counts and then freeze dried allowing us to have high enzymatic count barley already made for us. The beer industry is kind of taking care of that for us. From there we powder-ize it with an industrial coffee grinder and then once again, just top dress the plants and let it water in. That will introduce a load of enzymes, higher than anything you’re going to get out of a bottled enzyme product and those enzymes are going to go down and break up non-plant available nutrients and turn them into plant available nutrients so that your plant can uptake these nutrients faster and as it needs it. Following that, of course water, and then followed by a corn sprout tea, which is again, an enzyme tea. All we’re doing is trying to break down those organics so that the plant can take it up. The corn sprout tea we take organic popcorn seeds and we sprout them until the tail is about the length of the popcorn seed and at that point it’s around the time it’s at its highest enzymatic count and then we put into some sort of blending machine, a Cuisinart and we blend them all up and then strain all the duff out. One cup for every ten gallons of water is a lot of enzymes that’ll take and break up those organics for your plants. Then you can take the duff of that, and of course, compost it right back down.

And that’s about all we do. We don’t do very much other than that. We just, like a I said, throwing down a clean easy light mix of basic nutrients so that the plant can take it up any time it wants. In a few years, like I said, the lasagna layer will start to take effect. We can phase out our humic acids we know longer have to purchase that. It’s kind of made within the pot itself and the composting from our cannabis so thick that it’s actually feeding our plant itself. Within five or six years we can literally grow cannabis from cannabis. That’s the way it was always intended to be. By a plant flowering, typically they were males, they would pollinate your plant and they would seed and everything would die the next year and the plant stores everything it needs to follow up for a next season. Since we grow sensimilla cannabis we do the composting for it and we bring in clones or seedlings on our own so that we kind of mimic the nature on that way. But that’s about our process there and that takes care of everything. It’s a nice easy process you can have new people, experienced people, all pick up on this and it doesn’t have to be this or that after that. You can kind of throw it in as you want and it’s a process that works good and works every time. And you never have to replace your soil. You can keep your soil for the life of you and the life of the next generation to come.

Written by Cannabis Fabric Pots on September 7, 2017. Posted in Tips & Tricks

Tags: brownguy420, commercial, no-till, oregon, outdoor