Don't Plant Your Cannabis Until YOU Know THIS About Soil and Growing Media

what's the perfect grow media well that depends on how you want to grow so today we're going to be talking about the different grow Medias and which one's going to work for you but before we do this video is brought to you by real Growers recharge if you want stronger healthier plants if you want bigger roots for bigger fruits you got to check out real Growers recharge over at real growers.com and while you're there use coupon code Scotty 420 it'll get you 20% off your first order for anything in the store that Scotty 420 for

20% off your first order and come on let's talk some grow High see all right man so I'm about to start my third grow and I'm looking at the different options out there and I'm seeing a lot of different media that I could use to kind of hold my plants in place and maybe get different benefits for different styles of growing hold your plants in place man Hang on we're doing more than that we got to hold our microbes in place we got to give the roots a nice environment the media does a lot okay

okay so let's get into the different type of media out there for the different styles of growing and I wanted to start with the first one that I went with which is called a Charged media and maybe talk about why I won't be going back to using that again did you didn't have success with your charged media I did not have success with my charged media at a certain point but first before we jump into that sure what is a charged media for the Newbie Growers out there I'm thinking the most uh the one the

most popular one is Fox Farm ocean forest and it is one of those grow I think they tell you to open you can just cut the bag open and plant right in it but it's fortified it has it has nutrients that are added to it and they're supposedly supposed to slowly release uh as your grow goes on which they do but really depends on the style of grow and how hard you're pushing those plants if you've got a lot of light and if you're growing a big plant or if you've got whatever the environment is

higher temperature higher CO2 you're going to be pushing that plant harder and in theory that nutrient is going to run out faster and that's exactly the problem I ran into I ran out of nutrient about halfway through my grow I was promised this will keep your plant fed the whole way through and it didn't my plant ended up fading out really quick right as I was getting into bloom I mean it's not catastrophic you can put some more nutrients on there and get to harvest but it does go against the promise of a water only

soil yeah and I did not know that you could add more nutrients the guy who was helping me originally he just said yeah just plant it in this it'll feed it all the way to the end okay all right so charged means that they have nutrients kind of injected or added to it fortifi added to them yeah they'll put some slow release nutrients they'll mix them in there and they'll slowly break down as the plant is growing and usually that is going to be synthetic nutrient uh it depends no they're using a lot of Organics

there when I think of Organics I'm thinking like the easy ones like blood meal and bone meal and those are things like bone meal is groundup bone it has to be I guess weathered or processed it has to be slowly processed microbially and then brought into made into its ionic form and brought into the plant so uh that's cool CU it's slow relase you're not going to just overwater and wash those nutrients out but there's a heck of a delayed reaction there too okay so that brings us into the second category so there's charged soil

that might have some synthetic nutrients in it but there's also charged soil you called it super soil yeah there's super soils and it's very similar concept to what fox farm and the the other pre-bagged uh charge soils are doing uh but these usually people will build them themselves they'll put a lot of organic components in there uh shout out to jery at builda soil that's what he does and they slowly break down over time and if you have someone like Jeremy help you design or design your soil mix for you usually it's a bunch of

components that you buy some Pete and then mix in there and add to them but uh you get a little bit better design you could probably talk to some folks and and get a better understanding of having the soil fit your grow style there's a lot of people they know what they're doing but they have a lot of success with super soils and this is usually preferred by people who like organic growing they it's an organic it is an organic thing okay and you mentioned the slow release which has its benefits you don't flood your

plant risk burning it with all the nutrients but you've also got some drawbacks when there's the slow release let me know about that it's slow release so if all of a sudden you see a problem and you're like oh gosh I really need I'll see a magnesium deficiency and I'll throw some Epsom salt which is organic ironically or at least considered so but very quickly it'll it'll correct the problem I can come back the next day and it correct the problem if I have a Calcium deficiency and I go hey let me put some bone

meal on here which is loaded with calcium that's got to be processed and broken down that is a solid that has to be uh assimilated into the plant and it's not plant available nutrient right off the bat not even close yeah so just fixing problems there right when you see them is you know it's going to be a little bit tough with Organics okay and you mentioned it also needs to break down those those nutrients and make them plant available shout out to recharge again recharge does a great job of doing that it does that's

what the microbes process it the microbes deliver it into that risos spere which is where the roots meet the soil and then they process it into this ionic form this plant available form uh plants use uh nutrients they can only uptake nutrients in this ionic in organic form so all your Organics have to be broken down microbially and then convert it into this uh ionic form and then deliver it into the plant the plant doesn't know an organic organically derived nitrogen molecule from a synthetically derived organ uh molecule rather n nitrogen molecule sorry I'm thinking

about all the people that are already yelling at me in the comments well one thing I know a lot of organic grow swear by recharge our other product grow dots it's not very favored by organic Growers because it's a it's not organic at all it's a synthetic so if I'm going to grow with synthetic nutrients uh what are the different options for media that way uh pretty wide open there you can grow with Pete which I prefer to grow with uh uh cocoa myself there's rock wool that's available that's completely inert it's kind of falling

out of out of fashion and Coco really does a good job there's a lot of microbial activity that can hang out in cocoa and it has a great air to water ratio so you can saturate the heck out of it and it won't hold on to all that water like Pete or heavily amended uh composted soils will compost is really heavy like that uh so it's one of those things where what do people do they a lot of times they'll overwater something I just watered them and now I see a a magnesium deficiency well I

better get my epson salts out and water them again hey they still look lousy I'm going to put some recharge on there you so people it's a easy mistake to make overwatering overwatering and so you know things like rock wool but uh specifically cocoa really uh just has this a lot of space in between the uh in between the particles I guess and so there's a lot of air capacity that hangs in there and where we're talking about microbes we're talking about aerobic microbes the Anor robic microbes the one that don't need air are the

things like Pym the the root rot things the bad guys so if you get oversaturated those anerobic microbes love it and they'll go and attack your plants but Coco kind of helps protect it by keeping that perfect air to water rate you mentioned inert you called Coco inert you called uh I think Rockwell inert explain what inert versus charged means inert just means there's nothing in it when you take rock wool that is spun rock that is literally Rock that just uh they heat up and spin so there is no nutrition in there there's just

something to hold your plant uh cocoa core it doesn't really have much nutrient in it actually that's a kind of dangerous I will say just really quick buy a good Coco core something that's buffered because cocoa core doesn't have a lot of nutrient in it when you feed it nutrient it can suck it up let's talk about buffer versus non-buffered Coco cuz I know that you've ordered some cheap Coco off of Amazon right found out that it was unbuffered and what happened I had nutrient imbalances I couldn't get my magnesium and my potassium were really

screwed up and that's because Coco has these sights it's almost like PL uh soils act like magnetic they have a little bit of magnetic positive and negative charges so uh Coco was ready to hang on all my potassium and it was ready to hang on it had all these open spots for potassium and had all these open spots for magnesium so as I would would water them in it would suck them up and so the idea is you need to pre-charge your soil with these components so that when you actually use your nutrients they uh

stay plant available and not locked up locked up in that cocoa so buffering they add a little bit of potassium magnesium to the cocoa so that when you pour it on when you've got a plant in there it can actually make it to the plant rather than getting locked up in the in the cocoa correct correct all right and let's talk about the last style of growing and this one intimidates the heck out of me CU it looks like a laboratory almost and that's deep water culture explain what that is hey my brother just bought

a Corvette I can get you on this one no it's it is like driving around a dragster I think that is when you just have a tiny little net pot and usually they use like a five gallon bucket or something similar to that you have a tiny little net pot and then you just have in that five gallon bucket air just air and water just at the perfect ratio just a whole bunch we were talking about air being really good for uh Roots well this is just getting rid of the media and just having this

super air rated water mixture just constantly the roots are just bathed in it and they seem to it reminds me of Ivan Drago if you remember I'm I'm old but an Old Rocky movie where it was the Russian and he was all chemical up and all that it's completely unnatural there's no media to hold the plant there's no place for microbes to colonize uh there's no place for the nutrients to slowly break down and be stored it is just on uh on time delivery of nutrients and water and if something goes wrong if a pump

clogs up if uh you actually have to have the water at a really nice low temperature so it holds oxygen 68 69° so if your water they call them water chillers just an air conditioner for your water or if your circulation system or if you have one of your airstones and the buckets that gets clogged there's a lot of fail points to it I used to run a lot of these so it was a pain in the butt I imagine if you're running two or three cells of these is probably really fun it's a cool

experiment okay and so to take it back to the media uh I've seen when people do this sometimes they do have like a little is it a net pot is that what it's called yeah just a little net pot that is filled you just to hold the plant up all that's doing is just holding the plant in place filled with what uh you can use hydron little expanded clay pellets sometimes they'll use a little rock wall Cube or something in there but I love how you're fascinated by this because you keep on uh gravitating towards

the media and the whole thing about deep water culture is there is no media there is no media those those uh uh little expanded clay pellets they're doing absolutely nothing 100% of the action is hanging out and uh under the water line or in in that uh container and it is counterintuitive right right mhm okay so you mentioned this is kind of the way to turbocharge your grow but I've also seen people complain about you you kind of mentioned a clogged pump or a clogged AirStone I've heard people say uh maybe a pathogen or something

infects one plant and then it quickly spreads to every other plant sure so there's that that possibility as well there is a downside to Growing this way a huge downside don't forget what are we doing three four months we're growing these plants for that's a long time to not have your dragster break down something break down in your dragster you know right because it's just going nonstop yeah and don't forget you've got all this micro microbial activity hanging out in your soil your cocoa you've got tricoderma hanging out there so when a couple pathogens make

their way over there they're just out competed by all this really aggressive fungus this a super aggressive trichoderma growing in traditional medium growing in traditional medium when you're deep water culture it's wide open I call it bare wire you know you just got this bare copper wire and there's nothing protecting it okay all right so I know you have grown all of these Styles you've used all of the media and the lack of media that we talked about today out of all of that what's your favorite way to grow cocoa Coco Coco great air to

water ratio you can it's the biggest mistake or a very big mistake new Growers do is they overwater their plants like I said they'll have a magnesium deficiency the water and epson salts uh the plants still won't look right so they'll go hit them with some recharge the next day and next thing you know in Pete they're just oversaturated there is nowhere no air space for the roots or the microbes to breathe and you got an Anor robic situation uh with cocoa core it really does drain out and as long as you let it drain

out it holds the right amount of water and it lets got enough air space in there to let all the those microbes work it's forgiving and it allows you to make mistakes and then it compensates for those mistakes you know Coco is forgiving and it allows you to make mistakes and then it compensates for those mistakes but that is just me that's the way I grow but what about you how do you grow what is your favorite media let me know in the comments and if you like this video please hit that like button press

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