Using the substrate selector
Before you take your plants outside, you have already chosen whether you’ll be growing in pots or open soil. You’ll need to fill pots with a substrate: a peat based soil. Obviously this is not necessary in open soil. But you can improve the soil you want to plant in by mixing in a good substrate. If you want to use Plagron products for these things, you’ll have to choose a grow style. There are two grow style that use soil based substrates: 100% NATURAL and 100% TERRA. But how do you choose the correct products from these styles?
A little help with choices
Plagron has a handy Substrate Selector that can help you to choose the correct soil. It will present you with several choices that you’ll have to answer.
Will you choose the best quality, smell and taste of your harvest? Or do you think a big harvest is more important? Since this is your first grow, we’re assuming you don’t have many plants. A large harvest is not as important in that case. So for this first outdoor grow, we’ll focus on quality and taste.
Do you want to grow many plants? If you put a lot of plants in a plot of your garden, the soil needs to be well prepared to handle it. For a first grow, it’s probably better to keep things small. So pick the option for fewer plants.
Finally, you need to choose whether you want to add iron and phosphorus to your substrate. These are two important elements for a plant, with phosphorus being one of three major elements that a plant needs. It’s a central part of your plants fuel and plays a big role in most major processes in the plant. Iron, on the other hand, is essential to photosynthesis: the transformation of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugars. Adding these elements in higher doses will improve the taste of your harvest.
For the best start
If you choose to add more phosphorus and iron in the last step, the Substrate Selector will advise you to choose Plagron's Batmix from the 100% NATURAL grow style. This is an airy substrate with a good water retention capacity. It contains bat guano and is prefertilised for six weeks, which means you won’t need additional nutrients for starters. Finally, you don’t need to worry about the pH value of the substrate or other values. The soil life will regulate these things for you.