I wanted to talk about how I've been growing my outdoor garden this year!!!! I've been doing some unconventional things and getting awesome results! I would do this as a slideshow, but I want to wait to go into more detail for that while I work out some little gardening presentations I've been preparing (going into the chemistry and in depth soil ecology) so I only want to focus on general nutrient availability and soil amendment for my outdoor grows right now and see what you all have to think!

I'll start off with some of my background. I was a biochem/plant physiology major in school before dropping out and being a rancher. I've been growing marijuana, indoors and out, for around 7 years now. Since I've been a rancher (off-grid) I've been needing to exclusively grow outdoors because the amount of solar panels we'd need for an indoor grow would be ridiculous and we're too poor ahhaha. Anyway, I started off growing outdoors here with some major difficulty, soil quality being one of the main problems, along with harsh weather. The native soil is volcanic ash: heavy super-alkaline calcerous clay. The pH of our well-water is about 8 and a half. Weird growing conditions, right? Well, the plants hate it in our soil, understandably. Even if we pH the water, they just hate it. There are NO nutrients in there aside from ample minerals, and actually getting water to even penetrate the soil is terrible. No amount of mulch, fertilizers or amendments had made a difference. So I've been growing soil and making my own fertilizers for some years and have gotten to the point where I can water the plants with my pH 8.5 water in amended soil and they're doing excellent! There have been TWO tricks that have made all the difference: dead animals and alfalfa tea. Alfalfa tea (decomposing alfalfa hay in water) is all you need for veg, it works JUST as well as the ferts we can buy in stores. And it works for indoor and outdoor grows (though it's really smelly for an indoor grow haha. urine also works just as well as those, and has more phosphorus than the tea). My healthiest plant this year is growing in a large compost-cylinder made up of old dead soil from an indoor grow, native clay, goat-poop filled old straw, and about 50 pounds of old pork meat, with a lot of bones. Everyone always warned me against growing plants in hot soil or that meat compost could be dangerous, pff.... Everything in moderation. The plants doing second best are growing in soil which I dug two and a half feet down and plopped the remains of about 50 dead chickens into, along with pearlite and some old hay, and covered back up. When I do the work and make excellent compost or heavily amended soil, I don't have to pH adjust our well water. I just use the garden hose! The funny thing is, if I put a plant in a 7 gallon container with the same sort of good soil, it will still die unless I pH adjust the water. There's a HUGE difference in scale between containers, even 100 gallon containers, and growing in garden boxes or straight in the ground. The soil ecosystem in my garden boxes is large, healthy and diverse enough that the pH of the water doesn't interfere with nutrient uptake. As such, I'm able to grow a bumper crop while spending literally ~zero~ dollars on ANY of the grow materials. And so my profit margin is almost 100% (gotta pay OMMP fees and whatnot still). Without the meat, my plants would get infested with mites (they love it here, dry and dusty) and have a severe lack of phosphate, without our native soil, they don't get enough silica, without some added wood-ash tea, they don't have enough potassium, without the alfalfa tea, they don't get enough nitrogen, and without the plant-matter in the compost the soil is too dense! So after some years I'm FINALLY perfecting the ultimate soil conditions for outdoor grows in my harsh, arid environment. Now if only they weren't a month behind... They'd be over 6 feet tall like last year.

AND, I grow some veggies and herbs in there with the cannabis, which boosts performance and makes the soil even more healthy. My plants seem to love leeks (separate from legumes), mints, strawberries, any legume (of course), winter squashes, carrots, oregano, hot peppers, basil, sunflowers... Lotsa stuff! So I get food and my medicine. I actually have about 100 leeks growing in with one plant.