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

Spikes, Layers, and Zones, Oh My!
Here’s the first real big twist that separates TLO growing from most other all-natural styles. Spikes
give a lot of power to hungry weeds indeed. The TLO soil mix in this book requires additional
elements in the container, and spikes are essential for bringing in more important elements such as
nitrogen and phosphorus, to name two biggies. Nitrogen and phosphorus cannot be added globally to
the soil mix in sufficient amounts, or there would be big problems with the microlife, and that is never
a good thing in TLO growing.
Here are a couple of the main spike mixes I use, made from all-natural dry elements blended together:
ALL PURPOSE HIGH N SPIKE
2 parts blood meal
1 part steamed bone meal
1 part high N bat/bird guano (N-P-K example 12-8-2)
1 part feather meal
1 part kelp meal
FLOWERING SPIKE
1 part bulb food (NPK example 3-8-8)
1 part feather meal
2 parts high N bat/bird guano
1 part steamed bone meal
1 part kelp meal
In the picture of the store-bought Jobe spikes, you can see the concept that we’re going for here. You
push these spikes into the soil mix for your roots to find and feed from. In TLO you can use these
spikes if you like, as long as they are all natural, or you can blend your own—like I do—with the
recipes above. In TLO you just make holes in your containers’ soil mix and fill in those holes with the
spike blends. I find a wooden dowel about ½ an inch wide makes for a great spike hole maker. You
want to make the spikes BEFORE there are roots present, so I always do this during transplant, then
the roots can find the spiked nutrients and adapt to them accordingly.