Soil & Soil Amendments

Garden Soil and Nutrient Solution Testing - pH, TDS, and More!

Garden soil and nutrient testing will be your biggest responsibility on a day-to-day basis while growing. Plants are generally pretty resilient, but they can develop some pretty nasty issues if certain aspects of their nutrition are out of whack. 

Some of the most common things you’ll need to test include pH, PPM, TDS, EC, Temperature, and moisture. You won’t need to test all of these, but there are a few that are definitely important to measure regularly.

We’ll break this post into two sections - testing your garden soil and testing your nutrient solution. If you’re growing hydroponically, you’ll just need to worry about testing your hydroponic reservoir.

But if you grow in soil, you may need to test not just your nutrients, but your soil, and sometimes even your runoff.

Best Soil For Indoor Plants Of 2020

If you aren’t growing in a hydroponic system, you need the very best soil for indoor plants. Something as simple as dirt can still get complicated.

Certain brands may skimp on ingredients, and won’t provide the level of aeration or drainage your grow needs. That’s why we put this guide together - to help you find the best soil for your indoor grow!

Before we start covering some of the top soils of 2019, we need to cover some basic information on soil.

Super Soil Recipe

Growing organically can be very challenging, and that's why more and more growers are turning to a super soil recipe. Super soil is a way to increase your success with organic growing, and allows growers of any skill level to achieve a heavy, plentiful harvest.

What is super soil?

The original idea was developed by Subcool, a world renowned grower.  Super soil is a heavily amended organic soil, and provides plants everything they need at just the right times. The idea is that if you mix your recipe correctly, you will not have to feed synthetic liquid nutrients throughout the plant’s life. Instead, you can simply water and occasionally top dress dry amendments during veg and bloom.

Using super soil simplifies the growing process by throwing feeding charts out the window, and mitigates the risk of under or overfeeding. Simply follow a recipe, monitor the water you use for pH, and watch for deficiencies and address them with organic dry amendments as they come.

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The Definitive Guide To Traditional And Hydroponic Grow Media

We’ll look at soil, soilless, coco, clay pebbles and growstones, rockwool, and perlite as well as other amendments you can add to improve your grow media.