Saaod, I can only relate my experience doing container gardening living in hot, dry Las Vegas, but I think some of the same principles will apply to you. Water sitting in a saucer is bad if the bottom of the pot is not elevated up off the sitting water's surface. It doesn't matter if it's 3 minutes or 3 hours. In my experience, even 1" of water in a saucer will not evaporate in direct 115degree Vegas heat inside of a couple of days. You would think it would, but for me it doesn't. Two days is way too long for my pot bottoms to be marinating in their saucers. I am anal about emptying saucers or making sure the pot bottom is up off the standing water either with blocks or pebbles. I want that salty high-alkalinity water away (and all the salts/impurities/wastes picked up from the soil, etc) from my pot soil as soon as possible with zero chance of it sucking back up into the soil through the drainage holes. The Gritty outside in the extreme desert is not really an option except for maybe some really hardy cacti/drought tolerant plants. It works ok for houseplants inside in the desert. The vanilla 5-1-1 works ok outside but you're going to need to water everyday in summer most likely, especially if the pot gets more than a few hours of direct sunlight. The 5-1-1 works great indoors in the hot, dry desert. Drew's advice about the "muddy mess" in the desert is bad except for plants that tolerate soggy conditions.

Another topic that has so many variables that there is no one correct statement that can be made. I'm wondering whether you are pushing these products for some ulterior motive. I'm not calling those amendments snake oil, in fact I haven't looked at the links. I've just come to the opinion over 60+ years of gardening that expensive fertilizers and amendments are usually overpriced for what they are and there are usually less expensive ways to obtain the same results. Anyhow, here's my 2 cents, which is more than anyone is paying me for it! I don't get all hung up on whether my soil has every nutrient imaginable. IMO if one adds organic matter regularly, uses a good quality mulch, and perhaps uses an appropriate fertilizer/amendment for certain plants that may need that, the soil will be healthy and the plants will do well. I've found making teas and applying them a lot of work. I used to have up to ten 5-10 gallon buckets of alfalfa tea brewing at any given time and constantly applied it to my large garden as well as the lawn. Way too much work for me altho I did it for years. I now make one bucket and apply small amounts to various plants that may need more nutrients because they are heavy feeders. I mostly depend on the worms to fertilize my soil which requires me to *only* provide a healthy environment for the worms. As another poster mentioned organic molasses is a good amendment which is probably under-utilized. Every gardener has to find what works best for them but I know that expensive and/or extremely labor intensive methods are not self-sustaining. Gardening is a lot of work and it's worthwhile to find the easiest and cheapest methods or you'll soon give up. Best of luck to you blazeaglory with whatever you decide to do.

Mike, the directions on the bottle are a good starting point with the flora series. Tomatoes are heavy feeders so they can take a broad range of ppm's. I grow mine typically around 800 ppm. For peppers, I normally grow them closer to 600. for leafy plants 400 to 600 is a good starting range. The reason the levels are always the same regardless of fertilzer is because the major nutrients make up the bulk of EC measurements and all the manufactureres have round about the same levels of those nutrients. Also, be aware the different manufacturers calibrate ppm meters different ways. If your meter can output EC instead of ppm use that numbers. EC is what is actually measured. Then the meter will convert it to ppm based on a scaling factor (which is different for different manufacturers.)

The commercial hydroponic product "Floralicious" promoted as "enhances flavor" & boosts "complex secondary aromatic compounds" is not available everywhere ( I worked in Asia 2 years). It includes 2% humic acid, which has a cation exchange capacity (CEC) +/- 10 times greater than normally found; chelated multiple (++) charged trace mineral ions get more uptake with improved membrane permiability. If you take the leachate (distinct from aerobic brewed worm casting "tea") from worm bins' drainage run off this has humic acid (as would the tea). The leachate pH can be 7+ ; make sure bin conditions have not gone anaerobic. Alternately, if you have soft shale (or soft lignite/leonardite) you can bring up the pH to 6.5 - 8.0 (say 25% sodium bicarbonate, or less if use lye/sodium hdroxide) to soak it crushed for 2 days agitated in water (say 50%) to get humic acid into solution & then precipitate the unwanted elements. In N. Thailand (Chiang Mai was sleepy in mid-1980s) you might only have decaying fresh water drift wood to chop up & work with; the guideline is if that old tree carbon's soak water stains yellow you've got humic acid. When working with hard water it will require more source substrate & soft water dissolves the humic acid more readily. (The carbonates affect the process & alkaline/hard water classification is not the same as a solution's pH reading.) Always highly dilute humic acid, because an excess of the plant growth hormones it carries can diminish N,P,K uptake. Another ingredient of the de-" licious" product is a soil organism to regulate root microbial population & keep the undesireables away; it is bacterial innoculation with Bacillus subtilis. Bacillus subtilis encompases a wide choice of varieties. Apart from the beneficial human medical implications of different strains, it is commonly living in one form or another in the soil. The USDA maintains a culture bank of freeze dried strains in vials for the public & many universities around the world will be experimenting it. (Scientific supply companies sell cultures of it to secondary school classes for students to learn how to culture benign bacteria in a petri dish with soy broth nutrient.) As for the other components: hydrolysed protein is meals of blood (say 50%) , fish bone (say 50%) & poultry feather (say 20%) individually dissolved in enough citric acid ( say 50% each extraction) to lower the pH to free their nitrogen (not as nitrate); seaweed (washed) is the multiple trace minerals source; & mannitol (a long chain carbohydrate, such as those found in mushrooms) is a "sugar" for the bacterial growth that acts acidic to help balance the pH.