Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Notable Liquid TLO Friendly All-Natural Nutrients
Many liquids that are actually all organic and even some that fly OMRI ratings are counter productive in
TLOgrowing,becausetheyeitherkillorpissoffthemicrolife,duetopHswingsandunnaturalavailability
of nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen. I keep the liquids very simple in TLO, so let's just go over
what I use, when and why. This way my experience can guide you here at first, because trust me amigos,
you DO NOT want to casually pour some kind of sneaky synthetic liquid into your pristine TLO soil mix,
lest disasters ensue! Your primary mission when TLO growing is to NOT use anything with any synthetic
salts in it, dry or liquid. Any synthetic nutrient salt kills microbial life once the soil starts to dry out, and
keeps the soil mix inhospitable to the beneficial microbeasties as well.
Organic Acids
These are used for the same reasons synthetic salts are used. Synthetic nutrient salts and organic acids,
like fulvic, humic, and ascorbic acids chelate nutrients. For our purposes here, chelating nutrients means
making those nutrients very absorbable to the roots; I would argue it is actually more like force-feeding.
Mother Nature and the plants know what they need and when they need it. In TLO growing, we put the
plant in charge of choosing which nutrients it wants by allowing it to interact with the microbial life in the
soilmix,thewayplantshavebeendoingitformillionsofyears.DrasticpHswingscausedbytheseorgan-
ic acids basically gives the microlife the microbial version of The Bends, just like scuba divers get. Both
themicrolifeandscubadiverssufferwhenthere'sadrasticchangeinthedensityoftheirenvironment,way
too fast. Anything that messes with the soil mix microbial life will cause the plant uptake problems shortly
thereafter.
Humic shale ore makes nutrients very available to your plants
Organic acids are all well and good, but liquid nutrient products that have high amounts of these acids
should be used with great care, and I recommend avoiding them in TLO growing, especially the products
that are straight humic, and/or fulvic acid. True Living Organics lets life do what it does best, not what hu-
mans think it should do. Force-feeding is not the way to the highest quality harvest in my experience, and
