

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
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?