Life-Cycle - Organic Soil Amendment
Ecothrive
- Allows soil potting mixes to be reused again and again
- Adds a broad spectrum of premium organic nutrition and beneficial microbiology
- Provides a tactical boost at any time during growth or bloom as an easy-to-use top dressing
Tired of buying endless bags of growing media? Life-Cycle allows you to re-use your depleted soil mixes for multiple crop cycles. A carefully formulated, balanced organic nutrient mix designed to feed your soil with a diverse blend of essential nutrients and minerals, Life-Cycle has been created for organic growers using our Eco-Life potting soil—but it’s great for enhancing any soil or coco-based potting mix too. Made from only premium quality, raw, dry ingredients, Life-Cycle gives you a simple way to quickly reinvigorate your old potting mix so you can keep on growing and blooming.
Why do Organic Cultivators Love Life-Cycle?
- Easy to use and extremely versatile
- Natural and organic
- Consistently high yields and improved flavour profiles
- No more bags of spent growing media to deal with
- Massive reduction in per crop cycle costs due to growing media re-use
Life-Cycle is the product of a collaboration between Ecothrive and Indoor Organics. We work together in partnership to provide genuine organic products using the highest quality ingredients.
What's in Life-Cycle?
Mealworm Frass (Ecothrive Charge)
Our flagship product, Charge, is well-known for its nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium boosting power, as well as being an excellent source of beneficial microbes. This natural and ecological product helps to boost key primary nutrients in your soil mix. As a secondary benefit, mealworm frass also contains tiny fragments of mealworm skins and other body parts providing a great source of chitin to stimulate plant immune response and elevate defences.
Neem
Neem is a potent source of soil fertility largely thanks to being a nutrient accumulator itself. Neem has deep reaching roots which pull up nutrition from deep down below the soil surface where other plants can’t reach. Neem is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium as well as calcium and magnesium. As an additional key benefit, neem also helps to ward off soil pests and pathogens.
Premium Seaweed Meal
We sometimes call this “green gold” because of all the treasures it brings to the soil! Our seaweed meal is exclusively sourced from the highly-prized species Ascophyllum nodosum and contains an impressive spectrum of minerals—over 60 trace elements! This incredible, natural soil amendment gives your plants a luxurious nutritional diet complemented with valuable natural plant growth hormones including cytokinins to help drive cell division and speed up growth, auxins and gibberellins for assisting the mobility of essential nutrients, and indoles for turbocharged root development.
Gypsum
Gypsum provides extra calcium and sulphur for improved aroma, flavour development and overall health in fast-growing plants. It also conditions your soil by improving water penetration and reducing water logging.
Insect Meal
Our ecologically-sourced crustacean meal replacement! Insect meal is very similar to curstacean meal in its nutrinet profile, but has very low sodium, making it an ideal living soil amendment. Rich in amino acids, nitrogen and phosphorus, this is a great source of nutrition for the plants, and for the soil biology. Most important, Insect meal is much more sustainable that crustacean meal, the insects are black soldier fly larvae and are grown indoors on controlled food waste streams. The time has come to stop depleting our oceans, and small moves like this can make a difference.
Rock Phosphate
Providing a long term slow release of phosphorus, rock phosphate is added to our Eco-Life mix to raise this key nutrient and allow the beenfical soil biology to steadily deliver it to the plant. Phosphors is a key nutrient for all plants and plays an important role in root development, vegetaive growth and fruit and flower production.
Basalt Rock Dust
The “magic ingredient” for essential trace minerals and silica—essential for optimal plant health and vigour but often lacking from lesser soil mixes. Trace minerals form the building blocks of enzymes, proteins and many other metabolites while silica helps plants to grow big and strong with thick stems and branches to support heavy yields.
Humic and Fulvic Acids
Humus is the final product of decomposition and is rich in humic and fulvic acids. Life-Cycle contains both humic and fulvic acids derived from naturally mined deposits of ancient vegetation. These key fractions are great at chelating nutrients making them easy for plants to uptake, as well as stimulating microbial activity and improving plant health and root growth.
How to use Life-Cycle
Top Dress
Lightly dust the surface of each 40-50L pot with 1-2 tablespoons (15-30ml). Water as usual after application. When using fresh Eco-Life soil, top-dress once in late veg-early flower, and again 3-4 weeks later. Apply the last top dress 4-5 weeks before harvest.
Used Eco-Life Soil
At the end of the cycle, lightly dust 2-8 tablespoons (30-120g) onto 45-60L of used soil to rejuvenate it. Adding high-quality fresh compost or worm casting at 5% of the pot volume is also recommended. Over multiple cycles, application rates can be reduced.
Make Your Own Living Soil
Light fertility - 300-400g per 50L
Moderate fertility - 500-600g per 50L
High fertility - 800-1000g per 50L
Mix Life-Cycle with your soil mix using the largest container available to promote a stable, homogenous mix. Adding additional nutrition to soils can sometimes cause an exothermic (heat-producing) reaction—this is all perfectly natural and normal! Allow some time for the soil mix to warm up and cool down before using. Larger volumes of soil (500+L) with a higher dose of amendment will warm up more and may need turning every two to three days for up to two weeks. When making a small batch (50L or so) with a light dose of amendment, this “cooking time” is not always necessary.
When making your own soil mix with Life-Cycle, we recommend using 20-30% high-quality compost or worm castings/vermicompost. This will increase biological diversity and speed up the conversion of organic ingredients into plant-available nutrition.
Typical - N/P2O5/K2O/+ Mg/Ca - 2 /4.5 /2.4/ + 1/6
Due to the small degree of inconsistency with natural organic ingredients, the NPK and visual appearance is subject to slight variability.
Important Information
If you have any questions, please check out the below or get in touch via our contact formWe're devoted to sending our customers quality plants with the best service around. Every plant is backed by our 7-day guarantee, so they arrive in good health.
Our team takes extra steps when prepping plants for transportation, but they're still sensitive to changes, so there may be minor cosmetic issues. We always aim to photograph and disclose any flaws before shipping, but a living creature travelling across the country in a box can take a hot minute to adjust to its new life.
If you have any issues within 7 days of receiving your order, holler at our customer support team on our contact form with your order details and some pics of the issue. After the guarantee has expired, though, we can't refund as we can't guarantee care and environmental factors. If you repot the plant during the 7 days, the guarantee is void.
We have been sending plants up and down the country for many year now and we like to think we have our way down to an art.
We protect the plant from falling out of the soil with tissue paper and tape if needed, then we wrap the plant in corrugated cardboard, and sometimes we protect the leaves with extra tissue paper if required. This is then placed into a box and if there is any empty space, we fill this with void fill to stop the plants moving around inside the box. Sometimes we will write a note on your packing slip to water the plant on arrival, so please look out for this. This is due a freshly watered plant going in a box will not only be soggy, but as the plant is in darkness this can sometimes make the plant unhappy when just freshly watered.
If your plant arrives to you unhappy, please send us a photo of the plant and packaging if relevant straight away, so we can advise you.
Online orders are packed and dispatched within a few days. Usually depending on volumes, we aim to get your order dispatched within 1 working day. We have collections from Royal Mail 6 days a week so deliveries tend to be speedy.
Our standard parcel delivery service is £4.99 for Royal Mail Tracked48, you can upgrade to Tracked24 for £2.50.
We do offer a Tracked48 Large Letter option for £2.99, and Tracked24 for £1 extra, but this only applies to products less than 2.5cm thick.
*Deliveries 7 days a week only included Tracked24 parcels.
Link to your shipping policy
We get a lot of boxes, packaging and whatnot at Sprouts from all our various supplier's deliveries. We re-use this packaging material where possible, plus we take in donations from local businesses and customers to our shop to avoid excess packaging going to landfill. Sometimes your delivery might look a little different, or come in a branded box from another company, but rest assured the items inside are carefully packed with love and attention inside. We use paper tape and all our branded materials included are fully recyclable. Sometimes we use polystyrene, bubble wrap or plastic wrap in the packaging, all these items are not new and where possible, please use them again.
We have partnered with Zedify to offer low-carbon deliveries in Central Bristol for £6.99.
Zedify collect and deliver orders from us Monday - Friday and will usually deliver your order the same day its collected. If you place your order before 11am, we will aim to get it collected the same day but this isnt always possible. When you have received your dispatch email, Zedify should be delivering your order the same day, anytime before 6pm.
We cannot give an idea of time, but if you would prefer delivery on a certain date (Monday - Friday) please get in touch or leave a note at check out with your preferred delivery date and we will do our best to accommodate your request.
Zedify deliver to the following postcodes BS1, BS2, BS3, BS4, BS5, BS6, BS7, BS8 (1, 2, 3A - 3N, 4), BS9 (1,3,4).
Select click and collect at checkout to collect your order from our Bristol shop.
You will get an email when your order is ready to collect, where possible please come and collect your order the same day as we have limited space. If you are going to collect your order at a later date, please let us know in the message box at check out so we know when to expect you. Some items such as gift sets, kits and pre-order items may not be ready to collect the same day, again please let us know what day you would like to collect and we will let you know if there's any issues.
We do not offer free returns, but if you are unhappy with your delivery, please get in touch. If your parcel or order has been damaged, please take photos and send these over to our team so we can look into this for you.
If you have ordered an item and you would like to exchange it, we should be able to do this for you. There may be an extra charge for delivery, but get in touch to discuss. For plants there is a 7 day return policy and 30 days for everything else, apart from sale items which are none returnable.
You can return or exchange in our Bristol shop for free.
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