ChiliNoobs first glog [2014]

Nulle · Feb 20, 2014

Best af luck with your grow this year. Great list you've got.

fern123 · Feb 20, 2014

All the best and keep us updated.

Big Kahuna · Feb 20, 2014

Thanks for the well-wishes guys!

Look what arrived today! :dance:

Things to do this weekend:

install new light
pot up some of the seedlings
decide which seeds to sow for the second round
sow second round of seeds
post pics!

Big Kahuna · Feb 23, 2014

I installed my new 2-foot T5 grow light this weekend and potted up 42 seedlings. Theres room for 25 plants under the T5 fixture, and room for another 25 on my other shelf, so I still have room for 8 more plants.

The second shelf is lit (poorly) by a ghetto-style combination of CFL (5000k & 6700k) & LED (5000k) bulbs. I really need to add a few more lumens to this shelf.

Here is one of the peat pellets I potted up, notice the nice healthy roots poking out of the sides. I know a lot of people dont like these things, but they seem to work well enough for me.

Seedlings were potted up into Pro Mix "Potting Mix".

I've had a few more seeds germinate since I last posted my grow list and I sowed six new varieties of seeds (two seeds of each type). My updated grow list is shown below (updates in red):

There are still no signs of any seedlings from the Aji Arnaucho, Charipita, Pequin, Lemon Habanero or Black Hungarian. Its looking very unlikely that theyll appear, but Ill give them at least another week or so, just in case.

Big Kahuna · Feb 24, 2014

First flower on my over-wintered piri piri!

jonnyb · Feb 25, 2014

I did pretty much everything wrong last year:

Sowed seeds too late

Didn’t give seedlings enough light

Didn’t harden off the plants sufficiently

Overwatered

And so on…

That sounds exactly like me! Except that your over wintered plant actually survived. Great selection you've got there! I hope you've got a lot of space!

Big Kahuna · Mar 2, 2014

Time for a quick update. I had my first lemon hab pop up after 25 days, folllowed by an Aji Arnaucho the next day. I had just about given up hope on both of them.

Several of the most recently sowed seeds have popped too; updates are shown in red below.

Here is an overall view of my setup. I've added some more light to the top shelf, but I'm not overly happy with it. I'm toying with the idea of going either all LED on this shelf, or springing for a second T5 since I'm really pleased with the first one.

jonnyb said:
That sounds exactly like me! Except that your over wintered plant actually survived. Great selection you've got there! I hope you've got a lot of space!

Thanks jonnyb, unfortunately the piri piri is the best of my over wintered plants, the rest are not so great.

Here are a couple of pics of my over wintered plants. First pic is a mystery habanero on the left and the piri piri on the right. These have both been in a south facing window since October. I didn't prune the piri piri at all before bringing it inside. It initially dropped most of it's leaves, but then just kept on slowly growing, it's covered in buds now. I'm just going to let it do it's own thing and see what happens. There are buds forming on the habanero too, but I'll pinch them off.

Second pic shows two morouga scorpions on left, a chocolate hab rear right and scotch bonnet front right. These were moved into the basement in October, then I battled with aphids for two months, so I stripped most of the leaves off them (apart from the larger scorpion) and doused them with pyrethrin. The larger scorpion needed a second dose a few days later, but I finally won the fight. Sadly the naga jolokia I was also overwintering wasn't so lucky.

Fingers crossed that the rest will make it.

Big Kahuna · Mar 6, 2014

DISASTER!

I woke up this morning to find that 1/2 of my plants had been EATEN! About a dozen have been completely destroyed, and another dozen have been nibbled on but may recover.

Last night I gave my plants their first dose of ferts. I guess I've got a mouse in the house, and he liked the smell...

fern123 · Mar 6, 2014

Keep us updated on the piri piri dude.
The animal that ate your plants might not be a mouse as the cups must have fallen over when the mouse leaned over them , it might be something bigger.

Big Kahuna · Mar 6, 2014

fern123 said:
Keep us updated on the piri piri dude.
The animal that ate your plants might not be a mouse as the cups must have fallen over when the mouse leaned over them , it might be something bigger.

Not much to report on the Piri Piri, the first two flowers both fell of but there are lots of buds ready to take their place. I'm really not expecting them to set fruit since we have such low light levels right now and I'm not providing any supplementary light.

The cups did not fall over, the plant were eaten "in place". Six of the plants were complete eaten and I was just left with a cup full of soil. Some others were chewed through the stems below the cotys and still more had either nibbled leaves, broken stems above the cotys, or leaves completely stripped off. It was definitely a mouse, as I found little black turds in front of my shelves.

Luckily the mouse didn't get to my second shelf so I'm still left with half of my plants, assuming I can trap him before the little son-of-a-b figures out how to get up there.

Big Kahuna · Mar 6, 2014

Final Totals:
Dead: 8
Critical condition: 6
Wounded: 11

Of the eight dead, five of them we're duplicates, so I only lost 3 varieties.

I've moved my shelves up out of the basement and into a spare room. Hopefully the survivors will enjoy the warmer temps.

On a brighter note, I ordered a second T5 fixture which arrived today, and the first of the two 7-pot Douglahs hooked last night.

Big Kahuna · Mar 9, 2014

Just a quick update to show what's happening with the mouse-eaten plants. Here are four of the six that I put on the critical list, you can see that all of them are putting out new growth.

Here is another from the critical list. This was the largest of my plants before the mouse got to it, it should have been bigger than than the others that you can see in this picture. This plant was unusual in that it only had a single cotyledon, and it each node it produced only had one leaf growing out of it instead of the usual pair of leaves. It will be interesting to see if it continues to grow that way.

P.S. The mouse is no more. He has ceased to be. He has expired and gone to see his maker. He is an ex-mouse.

jonnyb · Mar 14, 2014

Ah that's bad luck but I think you came out on top overall! The rest will be fine again in no time

Big Kahuna · Mar 19, 2014

jonnyb said:
Ah that's bad luck but I think you came out on top overall! The rest will be fine again in no time

Thanks Jonnyb. Most of the mouse eaten plants are doing pretty well and are putting out lots of new branches. It will be interesting to see how they perform against the ones that weren't attacked.

I'm starting to have some problems with some of my other plants. Both of my rocotos have developed black spots on the lower leaves and one of them is looking pale. A few of the other plants are looking a little pale too, the worst of the bunch is shown below on the left, along with the two rocotos.

Does anyone have any ideas what the problem could be? I've been bottom watering every three or four days. They were last watered two days ago and they had a light feed three days before that (organic tomato food 4-6-8, diluted). The top inch or so of the soil is bone dry, below that it is damp. Am I under watering? Not enough nitrogen? Something else?

Ragnar · Mar 21, 2014

ChiliNoob said:
P.S. The mouse is no more. He has ceased to be. He has expired and gone to see his maker. He is an ex-mouse.

Hahaha

Good to see the criticals are on the up and up. Good looking grow, too. You're ahead of me by a long shot! (I had a watering and soil issue...) As for your troubled plants above, I'd venture if the soil is damp after the inch you're definitely not under watering. Try popping one out and seeing how damp they are further down, first thing I'd want to eliminate the possibility of would be too much water. Damp all the way down and I'd leave them 'til they started to wilt before watering a couple times.

GiantSmasher · Mar 21, 2014

Good looking grow, CN.

Wish you luck in finding out what's up with this one - I've got some looking the same at the moment (a little younger, but not by much - same symptoms, other than the mouse chomping...). Same leaf curl at the top and yellowing at the bottom, with the leaves looking patchy.

Edit: Your lights - are they on 24x7? Or timed/manually turned off? I wonder, with mine at least, if it's too much light as they're on 24x7 at the moment. Grasping at straws 'cos nothing seems to match any of the normal troubleshooting, but it's the only thing I can really attribute. Mine were moved to a full light box - 365` light from a top source, reflecting off metal - just before it became an issue (though have been on 24x7 for about a month).

Logged it for assistance - something there might help out maybe?

Capture%20-%20ChiliNoobs%20similar%20issue.JPG

Big Kahuna · Mar 21, 2014

Thanks AR and GS. GS - my lights are on 16h and off 8h.

After looking at other pictures on this site, I suspect the two rocotos have BLS, so I removed the affected leaves (four on one plant and one on the other) and have isolated these plants from the others. I'll try to find a copper spray for these.

The one with the leaf curl is the only one like this, another half a dozen or so have yellowing leaves but no leaf curl. The other 40+ are doing fine, so I must be doing something right.

The yellowing seems to be only on the larger plants (mostly annuums), which lead me to think it's one of two things, either under watering (i.e. the larger plants are thirstier) or lack of N (the larger plants are hungrier). I gave them a watering with a weak fertilizer last night and the plants look about the same tonight. But I could be completely wrong and have been overwatering the whole time, since I've been watering all plants as soon as just one of them started to droop. I'll stop doing that wait until each one wilts before watering it again.

I thought I'd post a few pictures comparing some the mouse eaten plants to their siblings.

First one is a large hot red cherry, this is the plant that was born with a single cotyledon that I posted earlier. Notice that both of these are starting to put out buds already! Not even six weeks old yet.

Next up is a fatalii. The mouse eaten one on the left germinated 12 days before the one on the right. It now has four branches instead of one main stem.

Last one for tonight is an Aji verde; this one also has four branches. Its brother has one leaf that's very yellow.

Big Kahuna · Mar 22, 2014

First week of spring?

unk3390 · Mar 22, 2014

Good start here, too bad about the mouse but congrats on the kill. What are you thoughts on the new T5 unit?