Fg, boiling your water will tell you what kind of hardness you have (temporary versus permanent). Believe it or not, depending on what's in it, you can literally boil your water softer. Chlorine will dissipate naturally within 24 hours, chloramine will need something to break the chemical bond.
RO units waste a hell of a lot of water (I've never seen one reviewed that's not around 2:1), for on-demand watering I use a Mr. Clean Autodry ion-exchange resin cartridge. One thing to remember about it is that because it's only for washing cars it was developed to remove minerals, but not microbes and the like that an RO unit would filter. I only ever need
that for my indoor runs, never needed it OD. In fact,
everything about running OD is more forgiving, amazingly so.
i was just wondering what some of you guys use to amend your soil. i've tried just about everything from mushroom compost to spent grain ( from homebrewing). the spent grain worked pretty well, but i found if used to much the nats would show up like crazy. the grains are filled with sugar, enzymes, and all typre of good stuff. whats your take on this?
Month old, but caught my attention because last year's OD got my husband's expired malted barley extract. Worked great, though it's STICKY, especially compared to molasses. In any event, it worked very well for me. I ended up just putting a dollop under each dripper, by the next morning it had been watered in. I don't know how cost-effective it is to do this, it was a quart that came from a brew kit my husband never cooked up.
what your thoughts on using the spent grains for composting?
Use them! The sugars will do two things--feed microbes and feed the plants. Neither is a bad thing, as long as you're prepared for what happens when the microbes really kick in.
The bb sized dolomite takes months-years to break down in your soil, so it is pretty useless in container gardening. If thats all you can find, just take a rolling pin and crush it down. When I lived back in NY thats all I could find, so thats what I had to do. It was a pain in the ass but it saved many crops. But out here I can get a 50lb bag of powdered dolomite lime for $8...
The "bb" dolomitic lime is usually prilled dolomitic lime. That means that it's been made into little balls (pelletized) with clay that make it easier to use and it won't blow away.
As for how long it takes to break down, that's as much a function of the soil and watering conditions (relative to pH) as anything else. Do an experiment--take some RO or distilled water, test it for hardness and pH. Then drop in some prilled dolomitic lime, agitate for several minutes. Test again. What are you getting? If it's anything like what I got, I was able to demonstrate that the more acid the conditions the more quickly the lime is freed up into the water column. Hasn't worked much differently in soil for me, but I go super easy on the lime because my water is very, very hard out of the tap (well).
No one here has mentioned using alfalfa as a natural source of
triacontanol, and I'd like to offer that one up as one of my tips for getting SUPER vegetative growth. I make a tea, a 'casual' tea with the sweepings from our local feed store. A handful of the sweepings go into a liter or so of warm water, steep for an hour and either fed directly or put into whatever concoction I have going at the time.
