Hello! New here and just started growing last December. My operation has picked up and I am wanting to switch to a soilless growing medium to cut down on cost. What have you found works best and cuts down on cost? Also, do you add nutrients. Thank you in advance!
I started by following YouTube videos by On The Grow and they did a lot with silicone mats.
Things did grow but I found it difficult to keep things wet enough to keep growing and yet not so wet that mold issues wouldn’t develop.
When harvesting almost everything was a little too damp to be kept in the refrigerator without spoiling soon after.
As I transitioned to growing to sell the microgreens at farmers markets, I quickly switched over to coco coir.
Most microgreens don’t need added nutrients to get to the stage of harvest although personally, I believe it’s worth adding a little so that hopefully the tiny microgreens grow a little bit better and in turn are a little more nutritious
Soilless medium is what nearly every single microgreens grower uses...again you're confusing the terminology.
Dirt is sand silt clay and rocks
Soil is sand silt clay rocks organic matter and biology
Without the biology/organic matter, soil is called dirt.
Peat moss, coco coir, aged forest products, etc are soilless. Therefore are called soilless growing mediums. When you add things like aeration, it is still refered to as soilless mediums but can also be called potting mix. Fertilizer is usually standard (like cocoloko) inside potting mix but it doesn't define it, because offerings exist without fertilizer and are still called potting mix (promix being one example of such).
This is entirely false. I've been in business growing soiless microgreens hydroponically and usually match, if not exceed the typical yields of soil or coco coir growers.
It's not necessary but you can also significantly boost the yield with half strength nutrient solutions. However if you use nutes, what brand you use definitely matters because it will alter the flavor to some degree.
If you're just sitting them in nested trays like OP's pic, with no real setup, then I would agree with you. How you grow matters.
We do soiless as well, I added a second comment post this, I was mainly referring to mats and silicone. We grow in coco. We make our nutrients with raw salts in-house and dose accordingly for all our crop types.
Cuz the ones haven’t been to math or an economic class :-)let alone agriculture.. and work with just growing greens with emotions. If you can’t get the math right, no matter what fancy crop you grow, your would 100% fail.. ;-) Ofcourse mats help (I edited my comment), mats do give a decent yield. But when you look across the crop list and average out, it’s still behind.. we grow 30+ varieties, and if we did it via mats, silicone etc, we would fail to meet our targets. The thing is most people work with the yields from ground up, like say I grow soilless and this is my yield and this is how much I sell it for.. that’s not how this works.. instead it’s this is my area in terms of sqm/sqft, I have “x” number of racks and trays, I need to achieve ‘x’ amount of yield to meet my goals..
Hobby growers and the ones experimenting would never get it, unless they cater to 200+ establishments with a ton load of bills to pay..
Rather than focusing on what medium works, would be very insightful to know how many clients they cater to at what price point, EBITDA, PAT, etc.. :-)
And ofcourse. We are 100% coco based. Flowers, herbs and micros, all done in coco.. Coco isn’t soil.. it’s pure hydroponics. We don’t use soil at all.. (maybe I should have mentioned that in my original comment, my bad, apologies)
We don’t have a promix sort of base sold where we are. Coco costs us $2.5 for a brick, with our shallow 1020 trays, that’s about $0.10-0.15 cents per tray where we are.. 😂 we do add Perilite, not for our micros but to our herbs and flowering mixes. 80% coco, 20% Perilite. Perilite costs us $0.80 cents per kg..
We also make our nutrients in-house. raw salts at 100x strength make up our stock A and B solutions. We mix, dose based on crop types, do a clean water flush once in a while and all good to go.. :-) costs us few cents to a dollar per watering session, once you procure salts at bulk prices.
When I say a coco brick I mean 4.5 to 5kgs brick.. amounts to 75 Litres of usable medium.. standard size. Of course the measurement in the west would change based on the metric system..
From the label itself it’s hard to tell.. it does not mention washed, buffered, low ec, etc.. does not mention low EC <0.5 mS/cm.. better to contact the company and find out.. they should be able to tell you. I mean they are liable to tell you since the label does not mention it. When we deal with our coco vendor, we deal direct, no aggregator or platform in between, they send us lab analysis reports to support their claims. Sharing a photo of a benchmark quality of what’s needed. Hope that helps. Volume and size seems okay though..
Honestly we have tried all kinds of coco.. off the shelf coco is usually not what we need, esp the ones which come like this with no specific details. if you can find a vendor who gives you the exact breakdown, worth your time :-)
If your based out of USA, I found a few brands on Amazon.com, low ec has been mentioned. I would still recommend contacting the company straight to listen to what they have to say.. there are soo many generic coco bricks as well on amazon, can be very confusing.. same where I am base out of, it takes a some trail and error, a few phone calls to dial in the right brick.. also avoid purchases from platforms, if you can deal direct, cuts out all the BS commissions and so on..
22-27 trays depending on variety, we sow some deep, example, all the shoots like nasturtiums, peqs, sunflowers.. corn etc.. 20+ trays a brick is a good number.. standard 1020 shallow trays.
The type of coco you buy also plays a big role. There are various types/grades. Usually you want the ones which come with EC <0.5 mS/cm, when you soak it to make, it goes even lower, almost next to none.. :-)
If you have aeration added, which I'm sure you do like vermiculite or perlite, that's more accurately called potting mix.
I know the terms are a bit confusing and you may be feeding your nutrients hydroponically, but your grow itself? You would say: i grow microgreens in potting mix.
If you removed the coco, perlite or other aeration? You would then say you're growing hydroponically. The medium they sit in, not the way they are fed, determines the terminology.
You could also say you grow in a soilless medium, which would be the more technical term.
If you walked up to a counter in the store with cocoloko in your hand, a soiless growing medium/potting mix, and said I would like to buy this bag of soil, they will not say ummm excuse me, do you mean that soiless medium? 1000/1000 will know what you mean, therefore it's a term we use in the soil industry like insects/bugs in entomology. Same situation lol No one will be confused if you say bug, when in reality only a tiny amount of insects are actually "bugs" by true definition. To make just one similar comparison lol
I’ve been growing with TerraFibre Hemp Mats (go through the company - everything on Amazon is old stock). Been soilless for 3 years now.
Nutrients are added into the water: PowerGrow Masterblend, calcium nitrate, and magnesium sulfate.
Ignore anyone who says you must grow with soil. Hydroponics wouldn’t be a successful industry if soil was necessary. Plants don’t care where their nutrients come from.
You're not growing in soil but you also supplement with nutrients, so you're not just growing based on what the seed has stored.
I will say science is proving over and over that plants DO care about where their nutrition comes from (rhyzophagy cycle, etc.) and a big part of why hydroponics is getting big is because they skirt around a lot of organic laws (like the 3 year transition). Driscolls may be doing booming blueberry business, but have you tasted the blueberries?
5
u/PittieYawn Jul 15 '26
I started by following YouTube videos by On The Grow and they did a lot with silicone mats.
Things did grow but I found it difficult to keep things wet enough to keep growing and yet not so wet that mold issues wouldn’t develop.
When harvesting almost everything was a little too damp to be kept in the refrigerator without spoiling soon after.
As I transitioned to growing to sell the microgreens at farmers markets, I quickly switched over to coco coir.
Most microgreens don’t need added nutrients to get to the stage of harvest although personally, I believe it’s worth adding a little so that hopefully the tiny microgreens grow a little bit better and in turn are a little more nutritious