Have a look at our in house brother @dankstyle J who runs an all coco organic TLO type gig! He's growing his best plants yet that I've seen over the years here with him... But he did his homework long before even trying, using true soil. He just tinkered with things some to deal with pure coco's utter lack of native nutrients and odd CEC characteristics....
It's a bit of a learning curve to be sure, and more tricky than true soil (nothing changes the coco's peculiar CEC behavior with Ca and Mg), but it can be done...
Coco is a common component of many true soils as is,... I like them for the better breathing and compaction resistance than all-peat based stuff.
:smoking:
It's fair enough to be skeptical about that clown, but in principle this is not a BS thing at all,... Part of what trips peep's up is if they don't have some experience with all organic feeding, and all that entails for speed of availability, balance of the right nutes at the right time, and the critical need to have a strong diverse soil herd in there... They are the converters and cyclers, and if they aren't properly represented in the pot, results will suffer... Contrary to popular delusions with "organics", you can get burning, off-pH, toxicity and deficiencies using them!
Using straight coco just up's the tricky factor is all, but with coco's amazing positive attributes, it's a fine gig if you can swing it!
To be absolutely sure though, the quality of the coco is critical,... bad brands and batches are all too common, and that means major ass-pains to deal with... Bad coco that's not properly aged, rinsed and CEC buffered will be a shitshow to deal with,... usually it's too much native K and Na (toxic at low levels), and/or it wasn't well CEC buffered with a Ca/Mg solution to displace the excess K/Na, and ends up with coco's notorious Ca hogging issue keeping it from the plant...
Cations are strongly attracted to coco particles, and it's Ca++ and Mg++ with stronger charges than K+ and Na+ that displace them from the particle surfaces,... that's the deal with coco's bitchy CEC properties mostly....
Awesome!
Nice to know that there are other people using organic dry amendments in coco with success.
I’ve been having good luck with the (Big City) coco perlite mix I’ve been using, and also have tried a couple others without a problem. For the last couple years I just amend my used coco from previous grows to save money and hassle.
