Spellbinding Molasses – marijuana growers guide to soil sweeteners. Part 4
Liquid All Purpose Plant Food in water.
Water plants completely with solution once each 7-14 days in spring and summer, each 14-30 days in fall and winter. Inside , use half small spoon per quart ( one spoon per gallon ) ; out of doors, one little spoon per quart ( four small spoons per gallon ). 32 liquid oz ( 946ml ). Contains 3.0% soluble Nitrogen, 1.0% Available Phosphate, 5.0% Soluble Potash obtained from molasses. In our own experience with Garden Safe Liquid fertilizers, we’ve utilized a real close identical to the outside rate on indoor herbs with some good success. Our best application rate for Garden Safe 3-1-5 ended up being around one Spoon per gallon ( one Big spoon = three little spoons ). Used alone it’s actually not a fave for continuos use, since we do not see Garden Safe 3-1-5 as a balanced fertilizer. It does not have enough phosphorous to sustain good root expansion and flower formation over the long run. It’s best use would be in an outside soil grow where there are potential pest issues. Animal byproducts like blood meal and bone meal are widely known for tempting varmints, so Garden Safe sugar beet molasses manure could offer a glorious plant based source of Nitrogen and Potassium for a soil that has already been heavily amended with a good slow release source of phosphorous, our choice would be soft rock phosphate. Blackstrap molasses is also utilized in a corresponding fashion, as a stand alone liquid fertilizer for the biological farmer who wishes to avoid potential varmint issues due to animal based products.
However we believe there’s a better overall use for molasses in the organic farmer’s armoury of manure. Our proposal for the best available use, would be to use the diverse molasses products as a part making organic teas for watering and foliar feeding. Since plenty of the people reading this are acquainted with our Guano Guide, it’ll come as barely a surprise to our audience that molasses is a product we find extremely helpful as an ingredient in Guano and Fertilizer teas. Most bat and seabird guanos are reasonably near to being complete manure, with the primary exception being they are sometimes short in Potassium. Molasses is turns out is a good source of that obligatory Potassium. As we learned earlier, molasses also acts as a chelating agent and will help to make micronutrients in the Guano easier available for our fave herbs. A fine example of a guano tea recipe at the Bird’s Nest is actually as straightforward as the following : one Gallon of water. One TBSP of guano ( for a blooming mix we would use Jamaican or Indonesian Bat Guano – for a rather more general use fertilizer we would select Peruvian Seabird Guano. ). One tsp blackstrap or sugar beet molasses. We mix the ingredients straight into the water and permit the tea mix to brew for twenty-four hours. It is often best to use an aquarium pump to bubble the tea, but an occasional shaking can suffice if required and still produce a top quality tea.
We’re going to give you one hint from hard private experience, confirm if you use the shake methodology that you hold the lid on soundly, no-one appreciate having a crap milkshake spread over the room. Some people wish to utilize a lady’s nylon or stocking to hold the guano and keep it from making things sloppy, but we figure the organic material the fertilizer can make a contribution to the soil is a nice thing. Using this technique we want to we receive the advantages of a fertilizer tea and a guano top-dressing all together in the same application. If you wish to use the stocking technique, feel at ease to feed thetea bagleftovers to your worm or composting bin, even after a good brewing there’s lots of organic goodness left in that crap! We also use molasses to sweeten and improve Alfalfa meal teas. Our standard recipe for this use is : four gallons of water. One cup of fine ground alfalfa meal.
One TBSP blackstrap or sugar beet molasses. After a twenty-four hour brew, this 100 pc plant-based manure is prepared for application. Alfalfa is a great organic plant food, with numerous benefits over and above just the NP-K it can make a contribution to a soil mix or tea. We do plan to cover Alfalfa and it’s many uses in more detail shortly in one more thread. We wish to mix our alfalfa meal straight into the tea, but many gardeners use the stockingtea bagmethod with great effectiveness, both work fine, it’s truly merely a matter of private choice. The alfalfa tea recipe we described can be employed as a soil drench, and also as a foliar feed. And foliar feeding is the final use of molasses we would like to detail. Foliar feeding, for the unfamiliar, is just the art of using fine mist sprays as a method to get nutrient elements to the plant thru the minute pores a plantbreathesthrough. It is easily the fastest and handiest way to fix nutrient inadequacies, and can be a very important part of any gardener’s toolchest. Molasses is a great ingredient in foliar feeding recipes due to it’s capability to chelate nutrient elements and bring them to the table in a form that may be at once soaked up and employed by the plant.
This truly improves the usefulness of foliar feeds when using them as a plant tonic. In truth it improves them enough that we often can water down our teas or mix them more lean – with less manure – than we would use without the added molasses. Naturally it is actually possible to use molasses as a foliar feed alone, without any added guano or alfalfa. It’s first use is to treat plants who are insufficient in Potassium, though molasses also provides serious boosts in other necessary minerals like Sulfur, Iron and Magnesium. Natural farming guides suggest application rates of between one pint and one quart per acre relying on the target plant. For growing a fast growing yearly plant like blow, we would suggest a recipe of one spoon molasses per gallon of water. In all honesty, we would probably suggest a foliar feeding with kelp concentrate as a better solution for an obvious Potassium dearth. Kelp is one of our fave foliar feeds because it’s a complete source of micronutrients as well as being a fine source of Potassium. Kelp has a range of other traits that we adore, and we plan that it’ll be the subject of it’s own detailed thread at a future date. However for growers that can’t find kelp, or who might have issues with the potential odours a kelp foliar feeding can create, molasses can supply a superb alternative cure for Potassium deficient plants at an inexpensive cost. That examines almost all of the constructive uses of Molasses for the modern organic or biological farmer. Just when you believe that is all there may be from our beaks on the subject of molasses, that molasses and it’s sweet sticky goodness certainly have been covered in their totality, the birds chirp in to point out, there’s another specialized use for molasses in the garden. Spellbinding molasses can also help in the control over Fire Ants, and maybe some other garden pests.