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

Cooked root balls can be broken up with a shovel or trowel
It takes about 30 days or so for the broken-up root balls to finish decomposing, as long as ambient
temperatures are above 64°F. Keep the mix moist and turn it over at least once every 5 days or so.
You can also use a solution of 1 teaspoon of all-natural molasses to 1 gallon of chlorine/chloraminefree
water to use on the recycling mix. This will expedite the processes and really power up all the
microlife that are actually doing all the work for you. Don’t forget that they are your own personal
micro-farmers who work 24 hours a day for you and your plants, so treat them nicely!
I used to add all kinds of stuff to my soil mix as it recycled, like all my leftover cannabis plant
matter, stems and leaves, along with things like kelp meal, alfalfa meal, steer manure, greensand, and
dolomite lime. Since I got my own little worm farm, they do most of the big work for me, and my
recycling mix only actually needs to process the cannabis roots. I highly recommend the worm farm
approach to recycling, as it actually makes everything much easier to recycle, and faster too. If you
prefer, you could also go down the route of a home composting unit, like one of those barrels you can
spin. It’s all about getting a bunch of healthy broken-down organic matter back into your soil mix, so
whichever way suits you is the one you should choose.
Raw Organic Matter Considerations
When composting, it’s very important to understand that raw organic matter tends to burn “hot” and is
not totally root friendly during the process. In nature, organic matter decays mostly up top, slowly
working its way down towards the roots as it is broken further and further down. However, in a wellaerated
soil mix like a TLO mix, if you have something like alfalfa or kelp meal mixed in the soil, and
you put your plant in there too at the same time, things may not go so well. Even dolomite lime,
especially the powdered variety, needs to be cooked into the soil mix like organic matter, otherwise
lime in a raw reactive state does not get along well with roots. Any meals, blood, cotton, etc, that are
organic will fall into this category, and need to be cooked first. All guanos and farmyard-type
manures need to cook or be composted before use—always. This is all important stuff, so make sure
you “get” this, or else you will end up killing innocent plants—and when you kill them this way, they
die ugly!
Raw organic matter ready to cook for 30 days