Hello I am doing research on growing in soil that contains a wide variety of organism. I have isopods, springtails, lacewings, small spiders, soil mites, millipedes, snaggletooth snails and many more Invertebrates living on and around my plants. I use 10% - 25% raw soil from a healthy forest floor, mixed with some limestone, peat, and aspen chips colonized with Oyster and wincap mushrooms.
It seems to work well, I have spider mites present but they are mostly under control, no plants lost to them mabie a handful
of leafs.
At one Point some grasshoppers got in and did some damage but something took care of them relatively quickly.
Has anyone tryed a soil mix like this that inmates natural forest soil?
P.S Pseudo scorpions love to eat mites and springtails, and they are cute!
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Living soil is one of the best way to grow quality cannabis. Its done all the time.
However they usually start with a controlled living soil from a reputable soil company that specializes in it.
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So if I start with reputable living soil will it have micro-arthropods in it or just micohoriza? I will probably eventually work towards making something like sunshine mix , but with carefully cultured fungus spawn, and some isolated arthropod cultures.
I was hoping that by useing wild soil I could capture some beneficial organisms and see if they thrive in my pots, at the end of the winter when I start cloning and up potting larger perinials, I’ll go through samples of the soil with a dissection scope and look for cool stuff to isolated that can survive in a pot
I have some excellent soil on my family’s land, and have thought about the best way to use it indoors. The problem is all the weed seeds. Heating the soil to kill them would kill everything else. Probably a tea is the best way to extract live bacterial/fungal organisms and transfer them. I am just now looking into fungal teas. Mix the soil with oat flour and after about a week it grows white fuzz, then make tea with that.
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You can culture bacteria and fungus on agar then liquid culture.
soil arthropods can normally be cultured on a steral substrate like charcoal, clay, or expanded clay.
Predators need feed that is smaller then then like springtails, or spidermites.
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