Biology Vs Nutrients
Organic gardeners and growers have long been debating the topic of biology vs nutrients: feeding and tending to the biology in turn for robust and lush roots and plants versus giving your plant exactly what it wants, salts and nutrients.
Let’s go over what we mean by biology: You’re using microbes and organisms (like worms, isopods, etc) to break down substrates to make organic inputs available for plant intake. In easy terms, you’re focusing on the overall health and environment of your soil.
And what do we mean by nutrients: Using salts, hydroponics, synthetic nutrients, often in concentrates to treat plants with specific nutrients. So instead of targeting overall health of the system, you’re targeting specific nutrients.
What’s the goal for both? You want healthy roots and a healthy plant. You’re shooting for the same outcome, so which is better? It depends, but both are useful, and for a beginning gardener, you don’t need to make it too complicated. All you really need to worry about is that your plants have a little bit of either (or both) along with moisture.
But if you want those really lush indoor container gardens? Getting the optimum raw materials to your plant can be challenging and overwhelming. First off, we’re not using actual soil but technically a medium of decayed carbon mixed with aggregate for air and drainage.
What I’ve learned, if it works for you keep doing it, but for starters, if your choosing to grow in dirt, try to find quality clean composts, municipal composts can be the input that bits you, so the cleaner and more controlled the better, at home finished compost and or vermicompost (worm castings) are king. Unfortunately local city composts have too many variables that are difficult to control and manage so contaminants are not un common. Depending on your plant do your research for vegetative and fruiting lifycycles both cycles have different demands. Salts and resin growing can fail from even the smallest incorrect measurement, so do your research.
Both can be successful with time and attention. So just pay attention, get your moisture and PH right and youll do fine.