Jacking Up Your Bagged Soil

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As you begin along your path of jacking up your bagged soil, you will need to begin with what I consider to be a good standard bagged soil—Ocean Forest, by Fox Farm is a good one. This is the bagged soil I use for certain things, like sprouting, or planting freshly (bare) rooted aero-clones into. It is also usually the most affordable soil. My custom TLO recycled soil has too many potential sprouts that can happen, and it’s too strong for bare root clones. However, any good basic organic bagged soil should be satisfactory here, just read the ingredients that are in it.

You will need access to awesome compost—not bagged/commercial—or, you will need some worm castings (bagged/commercial castings are fine). You will also need some Perlite—the smaller the Perlite nuggets are, the better (It has to do with maths and total surface area). I’m going to use alfalfa meal here, crab/shrimp meal, rice, and greensand. You could use alternates if you need to. Like river sand. Not playground or beach sand. Any green plant “meal” will be fine here for the most part. Cannabis meal would be awesome. Just make sure the source plants are untreated with pesticides etc. I like alfalfa because of its high K value, and a growth hormone it contains called Triacontanol. Plus, rice. Rice is rice, no additives.

This soil mix requires little (3 days) curing, or “cooking” time, and it is ready to use in a few days after mixing. Yup.

As always, no AI used in writing this article. All me (Rev), and my half century plus of cannabis growing experience. I still learn new things every few months—it’s a wonderful journey baybee.

Okay, let’s roll…

Jacking Up Your Bagged Soil – Step One

I will work from a single bag of Ocean Forest soil here. These bags are 1.5 cubic feet, or about 11 gallons. You can expand or decrease this recipe easily with some simple maths. 1 cubic foot equals about 7.5 gallons. You only need to be close here, measurement-wise, not uber exact. Don’t heavily overdo any additions just because you think it would be “MORE POWERFUL” heh heh, okay? Okay. You can use a tarp to mix this up on, and this works great. Those larger rubberized water troughs (photo below) for animals you can find at animal feed stores etc., work really well. A strong kiddy pool works alright, but use plastic tools.

Combine your bag of Ocean Forest (1.5 cubic feet) soil with 1 cubic foot of worm castings or awesome compost. Add to this about 1.5 gallons of perlite. Mix this all well, and make sure the soil mix is moist. It should not be dry, nor should it be soaking wet. Make sure you have this accomplished before proceeding.

Step Two

Once those constituents are all mixed well and everything is nice and moist, add the following things in these ratios then mix well:

Greensand or River Sand— 1 cup
Rice 1 cup
Alfalfa Meal or Other Green Plant Meal— 3 cups
Crab/Shrimp Meal— 4 cups
Kelp Meal— ½ cup (Optional but Awesome)

Now … I would highly recommend using greensand here for its higher elemental values, and adding some kelp meal wouldn’t hurt anything either. If you are using river sand, then you will absolutely need to add the kelp meal at double the recommended ratios above. Got it? A’ight, lets wrap it up. You need to let this soil mix sit out in the open remaining moist, and as warm as possible, for about 72 hours, turning it over several times during the process. Super easy to turn it over on a tarp just by lifting corners.

You have just literally just fed your soil. Within 3 days’ time it will be in full swing with crazy levels of microlife and available nutrients. It will not be so jacked up that it will fry your plants, so don’t worry there. You could absolutely sprout your plants in this soil mix.

This is a Fine Soil Mix to Use Germinating

Jacking Up Your Bagged Soil—Ready to Use

The Ocean Forest soil, and the bagged worm castings will both already be buffered well. The crab shells will add some additional buffering for the new additions as well as adding some great nutrient values. If you are using another type of bagged soil, make sure it is buffered by reading the ingredients. You are looking for things like oyster shell, and lime here. If they are present in your bagged soil, then it is already buffered to some degree, and so yay!

This will be a fairly potent soil mix. Remember that during transplants not to compact the soil in bigtime. Just tamping it down a little bit is all good. Also, an excellent topdressing mixture you can easily employ here would be say, in a 3 gallon container:

1 tablespoon of alfalfa meal
2 teaspoons crab meal
½ teaspoon kelp meal

In other words, 6 parts alfalfa meal, 4 parts crab meal, and 1 part kelp meal. You could use this like once every couple of weeks or so, if you wanted to, or need to, due to plants staying in their pots longer than they really should. You can premix some and just use 3 tablespoons per plant (3 gallon container size) every 10 days or whatever.

Of Course, A Compost Tumbler is the Best Tool to Build and Recycle Soil

Jacking Up Your Bagged Soil the Super Simple Way

Okay then, there’s another way we can approach this, and that is with some all-purpose type all natural granular nutrients. True Organic brand seems pretty good, and I like the 4-4-4 N-P-K numbers here, along with the addition of some natural humic acids without going overboard with them. This mixture is called the Preplant Starter (photo below). They have other blends, but I would recommend this one.

True Organic 4-4-4 Preplant Starter Granular All Natural Fertilizer

You complete Step One just like above with the perlite and worm castings additions still based on a single bag of Ocean Forest soil. For this step two mixture you simply add a heaping ½ cup of the granular fertilizer, and 1 cup of crab/shrimp meal. Mix this all together very well, and again, let it sit for 72 hours before using. If you can’t find any True Organic brand, any decent all natural granular fertilizer with N-P-K numbers at or below 5 and mostly equal should be fine. Make sure it has decent amounts of calcium too, like via lime, oyster shell, crab/shrimp shell, and feather meal, etc. Phosphorus (P) number can be a little low, no worries. It should contain nutrients sourced from plants, animals, and minerals. So, something like 4-3-4 would be all good also.

In 3 gallon pots you could use a heaping tablespoon of the True Organic as a top dressing if you like, once every 10 days or so. You can also jack up your plant water as well, and I’ll show ya how in my latest book, True Living Organics the Druid’s Edition by the Rev. Go grab yourself a copy now.

True Living Organics the Druid’s Edition by The Rev

Afterword

I hope you enjoyed today’s article about jacking up your bagged soil. Recently the official Kingdom Organic Seeds website was closed by the owner of it—not me—Ugh, not owning the domain was a hard lesson learned. I would have fired him two years ago if not for that pesky ownership thing. Anyway, the good news is you can still get your KOS gear here:

Kingdom Organic Seeds (KOS) at JBC Seeds.

Hey, so wanna check out more Rev stuffs? How about my YouTubes channel – Rev’s YouTubes Channel Here – If ya wanna check out another article by yours truly here ya go: Curing Your Cannabis with Rev.

Now, don’t mess up this killer soil mix by pouring on some kind of weird liquid nutrients or anything synthetic. The power of this soil mix lies in its well-fed microscopic life—believe it. More cool moves can be found in my latest book (above).

One of My Latest Tents Full of a Malawi Hybrid

Well, I’m outty for now. Catch ya all on the rebound next time. In the coming weeks I have some medical stuffs I have to have done so I might be MIA for a few weeks here in the near future, maybe not, LoL, we’ll see how it goes. 😉 L8r G8rs.