hey everyone you're here with mark bauer at perfectgardens.com so today i just want to
say thank you so much to jeremy and uncle duck are you tired of getting crappy advice from your
local hydroponics store or having to search all over forums to get advice that only takes you in
different directions than solving your immediate problem well join our membership for fifty dollars
a month you get direct access to me we'll connect on whatsapp and just like this gentleman that
started back in july with us as problems arise we are here for you i just want to say thank you
so much to jeremy and uncle duck for stimulating this conversation around using cocoa and perlite
and versus soil and also popping seeds so i'm going to add an additional detail in i i didn't
see them talk much about and i happy that you guys discussed this for the last two months and we're
able to further this problem sometimes i fall behind on the youtube questions okay so it looks
like they were having a seed issue some deficiency was coming up and then they ended up watering with
some cow mag and the plant's been healthy ever since then they talk about different opinions
around whether you need to provide any nutrients to your plants right when you get into cocoa small
difference of opinion although one of the things they did point out which i would like to talk
more about is the cocoa brand they get from so one thing they brought up here was the cocoa not being
buffered this is correct there are some brands when they get your cocoa in the bag there's going
to be salt deposits on that and from the salt deposits it could cause some nutrient lockout
other brands completely sterilize and wash their cocoa so you really are getting just cocoa fiber
another really great thing they brought up was a ph issue ph can always be an issue especially if
you're watering with tap water or anything along those signs i've talked a lot of videos about
water so i highly recommend checking some of those out the one secret i thought was pertinent to this
and it wasn't talked about around the calmag is the suggestion of adding some really high quality
earthworm castings if you are going to take this suggestion i would recommend a small handful in
every pot of earthworm castings make sure you get good stuff because you don't want to be bringing
in any type of pathogens into your grow room the reason why i would recommend arthrocastings is
because of the carbon specifically the magnesium it takes time for it to do its specific process
and if there's nothing for the magnesium to hold on to in your growing media you will begin to run
into some deficiency issues remember we're talking about magnesium being used to unlock all the other
minerals right so you really need magnesium in your soil or in your growing media while
all the other minerals are being unlocked through ph changes throughout the rhizosphere
so the one mineral that really needs to be in your environment doesn't matter whether
your rhizosphere is releasing or taking up co2 or oxygen to help control its ph of its surface area
magnesium needs to be in the environment and when you have carbon in the environment that
mineral is going to hang out longer and when you just have cocoa every time you're watering the
magnesium is going to be flushing in and out of your soil or your growing media
so the reason why most people run into cal mag issues using cocoa is specifically because they're
not giving enough time for the magnesium to do its function with the other minerals once again
the magnesium is not being given enough time to do its function with the other minerals and the other
minerals become available and adjust dependent upon the ph of the rhizosphere so having some
carbon in the form of earthworm castings i have found to be extremely successful while growing
in cocoa from there i'm normally adding in my drops of balance because it has an array of trace
minerals and from there i'm working up from that because i could be using my grow my bloom maybe a
little bit of supplemental cow mag if i'm seeing some silica whatever because i'm the chemist at
that point and i'm providing exactly what i want my plants to be taking up i hope this video was
helpful i give you my word if you just do this one thing while you're using cocoa your plants
will start off healthier and i promise you you will get less deficiencies throughout your grow