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

I use the Down to Earth brand feather meal
Feather meal is very out of the ordinary and is a fantastic element in your TLO soil mix. N-P-K
ratios on this one usually are around 12–0-0, but it is a very “slow burning” source of nitrogen, and it
lasts for a long time, even in super natural living soil mixes. Calcium is another benefit from feather
meal, and while reading this book you will hear a lot about how very important both nitrogen and
calcium are to all the soil life. Take a look at pretty much any good, all-purpose, dry organic fertilizer
and you will see “feather meal” in the “derived from” portion of the label. There’s a very good
reason for this; this slow-release nitrogen is wonderful for larger flowering plants in an organic
garden.
You might read various opinions regarding feather meal, such as someone’s belief that the bioavailability
of nitrogen in feather meal may be very low, or how nematodes and bacteria are the
primary decomposers of feather meal. I can tell you firsthand that it is an extended-release nitrogen
source, and just like any other nutrient, you can overdose your soil mix with it, causing problems and
burning your plants. Feather meal is a byproduct of the poultry industry, and another perk of using it is
that it brings calcium to your mix. Feather meal gives a continuous medium to slow nitrogen feed for
about 10 weeks or so in my experience, and I dearly love this stuff.
Bone meal is the source of one of the most common problems when using a living soil mix. You
should assume that all bone meal is steamed bone meal, unless it is very granular; unsteamed bone
meal is granular compared to the steamed version. Whitney Farms brand offers a great unsteamed
bone meal that I use all the time. Let me explain why this matters so much, because it is a major issue.
Much like high-phosphorus bat or bird guanos, steamed bone meal simply puts too much phosphorus
into the soil mix for many of the good fungi, like the Mycorrhizal fungus, to handle. They just can’t
deal with it and usually you will end up locking out phosphorus, or having the iron or calcium from
the “extra” phosphorus bonding with calcium and/or iron, making them all unavailable to the plant.
Never mix anything with a lot of available phosphorus into a living soil mix such as the soil in a TLO
grow, because it is counter-productive.