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.

Do you have the feeling that YOUR feelings are being adequately considered?

That is a very important question to ask yourself.

From many comments you see the suggestion you might be in an unhealthy relationship, and it might be not you who is wrong. However you feel the need to explain to others that your partner has a kind of “excuse”, the migraines. Only the two of you know how your relationship feels like, so only you can know whether it is something worth to continue, or is hurting at least one of you enough that breakup would be better.

You make an impression that YOU TRY YOUR BEST. Your partner must trust you enough to accept that THIS IS THE BEST THEY WILL EVER GET.

If they cannot learn to accept that, you should probably break up. But of course you gotta communicate and verbalize so your partner can know how your reasoning was and that you cared and that you tried.

I’ve been together with my partner for over 10 years. Since I got my ADHD diagnosis like 2 years ago and she learned that it’s not like I am not trying, but I just can’t meet her standards because my brain is literally wired in a different way. And she understood. And our relationship, which was already pretty good, immediately got much much better. Because she started accepting that certain of my quirks are not fixable. And she trusts me enough that I’m honest when I do my best vs. I’m not trying or caring and do not even want to try. We distinguish between “me” (there we can discuss and argue) and things that are “because of ADHD” (there she knows the fight is futile and expecting something from me I can never do is a setup for disappointment).

That is the way this works, between ADHD and a non-ADHD partner. My partner also has her share of “quirks” and struggles, which in turn require my acceptance. You need to talk very openly, and trust each other that you are being honest with yourselves and them.

It’s maybe not relevant to the discussion, but not using the pronoun used by OP means you assume a pronoun. It’s like I would say “partner” and you would just assume “husband” or “wife”, and tell me things about “my husband” even though I actually have a “wife”, which would be pretty… Weird, at the very least.

I have a neutral position on that pronouns matter, just trying to explain it to you, unless you were being passively aggressive. Cannot read your undertone.

Yep 100% agree, and it’s not just the US. I don’t want to even say that this is necessarily some kind of capitalist-fascist conscious conspiracy (in the early stages), but in a capitalist society there always is the push to strip the state to the minimum, lower taxes, privatize infrastructure and well, stripping education to the minimum needed to produce workers that perform just well enough for “the market” so they are not too qualified and do not have to be paid too much and are quickly and cheaply available.

Instead of focusing on developing well rounded human beings, education is reduced to a factory of cheap labor. With that comes the intellectual decline. German public schooling is facing a growing crisis as well and soon will get to the abysmal level of what one hears about the US.

Well and if you do that for a generation or two, society is too dumb to vote in their own interests or see through bullshit (which requires a certain foundation with respect to natural and social sciences). And NOW you have opened the door to the really bad actors who abuse the shit out of the weakened society. Which is the point where we are now.

And here we go, we got political from an initially non political discussion… Well, I guess there is some truth to the saying that everything is political, and right now it looks like most of the big problems have the same political cause.

I wonder how much it was manufactured and how much is just the worst of human nature self amplifying. Probably bit of both. It’s just easier to spread hate and fear than make people chill the fuck out and respect each other.

Any human community that tolarates bad behavior and does not sanction it appropriately will eventually fail and degenerate into a pile of shit, i.e. simply implode. The paradox of tolerance. Good social spaces are like gardens, they need to be maintained and weeds need to be removed. Otherwise it happens what happens.

Well I mostly never used any kind of social media for political things until very recently. Just read news on the respective newspaper websites. Maybe that did the trick.

And just wow. Yeah well, some people are just always trying to pick up a useless tribal fight or stir up some drama, or just mess with others i.e. troll…

That’s why good mods are worth their weight in gold.

Just check a sub like /r/askhistorians, they might sometimes appear harsh but they managed to keep that place true to its vision and purpose (accepting only high quality responses by people who know what they are talking about). But sure, that is rather the exception.

Compared to say the Meta networks, reddit always felt to me like a platform where I can still control what I see. The feed is only filled by stuff I actively chose to subscribe to.

Sure it is a part of the problem - it’s the reason I joined Lemmy. And I wonder how long it will take to become the same kind of wasteland of trash. Not sure that the “smaller community and less viral incentives” approach will be enough to keep it more civil than the “offers” by the commercial attention economy.

Just as a reminder, before the internet was privatized, people were on self hosted forums. Some were good places and some were toxic shit holes. Really depends more on the moderation and community than anything else if you ask me.

That said, surely I am distrusting any platform owned by some oligarch to have policy in the interest of the user base.

I’m in multiple ways part of minorities, but luckily invisibly so, so I perfectly understand what you are saying with being “white” helping.

This year I started to learn some self defense, together with my wife. My gut feeling says we need to toughen up for whatever times are coming up, because in any case they won’t be good, that is for sure. I must say, no idea how much it would help in practice, and I hope to never find out, but it at least does help psychologically.

Having to watch all this insanity unfold on one hand slow motion (compared to movies) and also on ultra high speed (objectively / historically) and seeing where this is going without any ability to stop it leaves one feeling pretty helpless. Enact change… But how? Ultimately even hundreds of thousands protesters do not change a thing. We saw the same thing with climate change. Everybody knows what’s going on, nobody is really doing anything. Sadly, not only for such abstract threats but also very concrete and personified evils.

I think all we can do is try staying calm (but prepared) and remain decent human beings. I hope when the time comes I will have the courage and trust to help people who need and deserve it. Decent people helping each other could at some point be the only thing that remains, when all institutions have crumbed or gone rogue, and it’s crucial. Little actions by regular people can mean life or death. We cannot stop the storm, but we gotta try what we can in whatever sphere of personal influence we have. That’s all we can do and the best we can hope for. Everybody with a mind and heart keeping going and trying to do the right thing.

I wish you the best of luck to get through all this. Stay safe, stay sane.

Okay wow, thanks for the clarification. That is indeed weird. Yeah, then I guess I agree, it’s really … Just not very healthy behavior.

Okay I mean for some people maybe this whole Internet thing, becomes too much an end in itself, maybe they are missing something in life and trying to get it that way.

If you are employed, have family and/or friends and a hobby or two, how do you even have the time to mod dozens of subs and stuff like that?

So if they are doing it while being nice, one can actually say they could need some empathy. If they are not being nice, well, for such cases it might explain why the other things in life might be lacking.

Good one. I am the frame of reference myself… And we rewind time around me, kind of.

Okay, that at least does not sound so wrong like the “teleportation-style” approach!

What you say is like the extreme form of how time travel worked in Primer (the movie), which in fact is an interesting variation.

This is not wrong, but only in the sense of everything can be made money off. That’s just capitalism.

But apart from that, renewables are better for people, for the environment and for power distribution (no pun intended) because people can have solar energy themselves making energy more decentralized.

So what if somebody does get rich on solar and wind? Its important to not become too dependent on one Capitalist supplying some central piece of the non-fossil tech stack, for sure, but I think your simplification is not doing the whole topic justice and equating two very different things.

It’s like saying, plant based meat is bad because some capitalist is getting rich. Okay, rather keep eating meat, more than before, just to spite the evil startups producing veggie sausages!