Can you provide a link to your “passive hydro” guide? Sounds very interesting :)

In general I’m interested in learning some non-soil method that is still forgiving, does not need special tech (like pumps and stuff) and ideally not much more maintenance than a soil grow. Maybe I’m asking for something impossible.

Btw, I do have Tropf-Blumat and was going to set it up indoors anyway, to automate and optimize watering. not sure whether it helps for hydro, if you always have to supply nutrients in the water (I would not put nutes into the normal watering tank). I got that, full spectrum lights and ventilation. That’s as “high-tech” as I wanted to get :D

I guess in any case I’m going to try Plagron or Masterblend then, you convinced me! Maybe I should not make my life more difficult than needed when just starting out.

In any case, thanks for the patience with a total newbie :)

Good to know about reusing soil, I always thought it’s wasteful and inconvenient to throw it away and in an actual garden nobody would do that. So I am also definitely going to try reusing soil I use in the pots, just bought a sieve to simplify the process of removing roots etc. from used soil.

Only 5% compost ? I don’t know how dense compost is, but typical suggested DIY mixes use more like 1/4-1/2 compost, by volume.

I was planning to do 1/3 coir for the loose structure, 1/3 of some perlite or similar, to hold water better, and 1/3 compost for initial nutrients, and then see how it behaves and adjust.

Would you recommend to use other proportions? I was going to experiment with the perlite percentage and see how it behaves with respect to watering etc. But with compost I really don’t know how I would even estimate how much I need to add so that a plant has enough “food” from seedling up to the first weeks of growth.

Would adding more compost to the mix simply extend the “nutrient store” for longer? I’ve read that you cannot so easily over-fertilize with compost / organic fertilizers, so I guess it’s then more about price/availability?

Is it cheaper or simpler to have less compost and more of that (I guess solid) slow release fertilizer, is that why 5% is enough?

That does sound very convenient. If I could mix some soil with slow release fertilizer and it would last the whole season, that sounds pretty awesome. I guess it’s released due to repeated watering? Or is it decomposing and releasing at its own pace? Like, do I have to worry about releasing too much if I water too much?

Thanks for suggesting the right search terms.

I almost expected that someone would say that.

I often end up reading university level stuff when researching a topic, but in areas that are far from my own academic background it’s pretty painful to try and piece together the kind of semi-rigorous understanding I’m looking for.

Wish there was more material available on that level of “studied some other STEM field, but did not and will not study this field so lacks a lot of details taken for granted in that area, yet wants to learn more depth than pop-sci and dummy tutorials provide” for various disciplines.

Thanks for the great reply! I just assumed that this community is probably bigger, but yeah maybe next time I should ask in the German one, talking about plants in english not knowing a lot of normal words from gardening is a bit annoying :D

I see that I have mixed up a lot of things, between things relevant for soil and hydro. So your recommendation seems to be not to try to mix because it is counter productive, and if I use some compost-based approach I should stick with organic fertilization? I guess I could try to do that on the balcony, where the plants will live by the normal sun and weather cycle. Then I’m gonna research a bit more about organic fertilization too. Soil feels like a “black box” and more of a vibe thing than an exact science and that makes it somewhat hard for me to get into.

Indoors I’m pretty interested in doing “hydro” in coco coir, because I can store a lot of it dry and compact in the basement for years and not worry about insects or mold.

With hydro stuff however I am worried that I become too dependent on some “fertilization system” supplier and if I only learn to paint-by-numbers I don’t learn any transferable knowledge, even though hydro seems to be much more precise. Like, are there vendor-independent hydroponics recommendations per plant? Or you always just pick some fertilizer brand and follow the instructions, regardless of plant? And I can read info about hydroponics and apply it to growing in coco or something else which is non soil or are there some caveats? Because I’m not planning to have a hydro tank system, just interested in non-soil substrates.

And a very stupid question: is “compo complete” a soil or a mineral fertilizer? I thought it was mineral which is intended for soil, and now I’m confused as you said not to do such things. Thought organic fertilizer must be some worm humus or plant material or other stuff they add into soil, like indirect complex compounds of something decaying which is broken down by micro organisms, and that liquids are always mineral NPK mixes with immediate availability, or is that assumption completely wrong?

The most “outdoor” I have is the balcony, so it will be a pot- and box-based little garden (some that will be permanently outside and some more movable).

Thanks for the tips! Good point, I also maybe should not overthink or over-engineer it. I’m a software engineer so maybe I approach this way too analytical :D

Oh great, thanks! I’ll check them out. All the blog tutorials only scratch the surface (while copying from each other), but it is hard to find a suitable book that is reasonably comprehensive, written by someone who really understands the topic, but also approachable for someone without a lot of experience.

A truly free society maximizes relative freedom for as many as possible, not absolute freedom for some at the cost of freedom of others.

And yes, this is exactly the line drawn by the paradox of tolerance.

The difference between left and right wing, non - economically, is still about distribution of power. But not only monetary power, but also the power granted by the positive and negative freedoms we have in a social system. Only that in our societies, freedom and wealth are heavily entangled, and increasingly so.

Fair enough. I’m sure NixOS is a great tool, like Haskell is a great programming language (in fact my previously favorite language with a special place in my heart that taught me most about properly structuring and thinking about code).

I just wanted to put it into perspective, because not everybody wants to go into THAT deep end. But anyway, it’s all good.

On a side note, your first sentence is something that I have never seen being said ever by anyone on Reddit. Yeah respectfully agreeing to disagree is also a perfectly fine option.

How is that useful to OP who asked for something “without terminals”? Unless that was a joke.

Because I’ve been using Arch Linux for 15 years and live in the terminal, but even though I like the idea of NixOS, it’s not only scary because it is alien and I have neither motivation nor enough free time to learn a parallel world and gain non-transferable skills for a niche solution. And that with being interested in what NixOS is doing.

I would say it is horrible advice to a novice, unless you want to scare people away from learning terminals and configs and managing an operating system without GUI tools.

I agree with you that it did not have to be pointed out, and I dislike that intolerant attitude where people making a mistake, because they don’t know, or maybe even don’t care, but are not actively hostile, and are being presented as “micro aggressive” or whatever behavior.

There is a degree of all that where a reasonable and valid desire - to be accepted and respected in some form of “otherness”, but when done in a zealous and self righteous way, it just pushes people away and is in a way toxic.

It’s the same as vegans and aggressively militant vegans. You do things you believe are morally superior? Nice, go for it. But nobody likes THAT person who will not stop making you feel bad because you don’t feel so strongly about it.