True Living Organics - The Ultimate Guide to Growing All-Natural Marijuana Indoors (2012)

This is a filled spike hole in a 2 gallon container
Avoid using lime (of any kind) in spikes. I have consistently experienced bad results when adding
dolomite lime to spikes. I prefer to use ground oyster shell, and things like bulb food and steamed
bone meal to balance the pH of my spikes to some degree, keeping them from experiencing a drop in
pH from things like guanos, blood meal, and any raw organic matter like kelp or alfalfa meal.
Layers take on two basic meanings in TLO growing. You can layer with either an actual, specially
mixed soil mix used at some level of the container, like the custom steer manure bottom layer mix, or
you can create a layer of pure nutrients. Both of these can be very beneficial to your TLO grow. Any
time I am filling a container larger than ½ gallon I will use layers out of habit. The steer manure layer
on the bottom is standard TLO practice for me, and I will also very often mix in extra earthworm
castings for the top couple of inches of the soil mix—just under the bark mulch layer on the very top.
However, layering with pure nutrients is something I also do regularly. I really love the two granular
dry nutrients for usage here by Botanicare called “Pure,” and they come in both grow and bloom
versions. I will often use a tablespoon of these nutrients at various levels as I am filling my containers
during a transplant, and on the “floor” of the containers before I ever add a soil mix of any kind.
Typically in, say, a 1-gallon container, in the vegetative state, I would use something like blood meal,
or bird/bat guano (high-nitrogen type) on the floor along with the Botanicare Pure, before adding the
soil mix. If I didn’t have any Botanicare Pure, I would use another good, all-purpose style dry nutrient
in its place, with fairly even N-P-K numbers, such as 5-5-5. I would then use the Pure or all purpose
again at least once at some level, as I filled the container up, after I had placed the root ball in. This
would give a horizontal plane in the container surrounding the root ball with an extra tablespoon
worth of all-purpose dry nutrients of some type. This concentrates the nutrients so the roots can
choose to avoid it or dive in if they wish. This avoids frying your plants, by using spikes and layers,
rather than just goosing up the nutrient additions globally in the whole mix, which will frequently kill
or stunt your plants.
You can get carried away with the practice of layering, so start out easy and tune it up slowly as