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

Notable Liquid TLO Friendly All-Natural Nutrients
Many liquids that are actually all organic and even some that fly OMRI ratings are counter productive
in TLO growing, because they either kill or piss off the microlife, due to pH swings and unnatural
availability of nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen. I keep the liquids very simple in TLO, so
let’s just go over what I use, when and why. This way my experience can guide you here at first,
because trust me amigos, you DO NOT want to casually pour some kind of sneaky synthetic liquid
into your pristine TLO soil mix, lest disasters ensue! Your primary mission when TLO growing is to
NOT use anything with any synthetic salts in it, dry or liquid. Any synthetic nutrient salt kills
microbial life once the soil starts to dry out, and keeps the soil mix inhospitable to the beneficial
microbeasties as well.
Organic Acids
These are used for the same reasons synthetic salts are used. Synthetic nutrient salts and organic
acids, like fulvic, humic, and ascorbic acids chelate nutrients. For our purposes here, chelating
nutrients means making those nutrients very absorbable to the roots; I would argue it is actually more
like force-feeding. Mother Nature and the plants know what they need and when they need it. In TLO
growing, we put the plant in charge of choosing which nutrients it wants by allowing it to interact
with the microbial life in the soil mix, the way plants have been doing it for millions of years. Drastic
pH swings caused by these organic acids basically gives the microlife the microbial version of The
Bends, just like scuba divers get. Both the microlife and scuba divers suffer when there’s a drastic
change in the density of their environment, way too fast. Anything that messes with the soil mix
microbial life will cause the plant uptake problems shortly thereafter.