2018 - The Farm

Well, I've been gone a few years from the board, and away from growing peppers, but looks like life is pushing me back that way again. 
 
I recently (last month) closed on a 25 acre farm in Central Illinois with some primo soil, and I'm going to give a commercial grow a test run. 
 

 

 
From up on the roof, when I was doing some roof repairs on the outbuildings. Not much as far as the eye can see, but cornfields...
 

 
 
Has a 4 stall garage and a horse stable on the property
 

 

 

 
Probably do my grow room upstairs here after I insulate it
 

 
Built some doors for the horse barn and patched the roof last month
 

 

 
 
Anyway just dropped a cold grand on seeds from pepperlover and buckeye, going to hit a greenhouse supplier up for other materials next week.
 
Have plans to build a 30x72' greenhouse in the spring, and a ~1200 sq foot dedicated grow room. Too late really to help with this year's grow, but next year it'll save me a lot of hassle on hardening off. 
 
The greenhouse, I am going to do a piped infloor heat slab, with a horizontal loop geothermal system (I own a mini excavator) that is solar powered. So heating should be nice, uniform, not create heat / cold bubbles, and not dry out plants like forced air would. I build circuit boards in my day job, so I will also build a microcontroller to handle the automated watering system with soil moisture monitors and actuated plumbing valves on the water supply.
 
Also plan on building a "deep winter" greenhouse for year round production. Got blueprints I made from a couple of years back, those are walled on three sides with heavy duty insulation, with the glass wall side angled to face winter solstice, so you can grow in the deep freeze months of the north. In the summer, those get hot enough to use as a natural dehydrator, replace the tables with racks for bulk drying.
 
Only doing a half acre or so of peppers to start with this year, the balance will be put in corn. I can't manage more than that with the labor I have available. (When you start talking thousands of plants, simple tasks like up-potting grow in to hundreds or thousands of man hours...)
 
Going to hire some local kids to help, school has a good ag co-op program for high schoolers, they can get school credit working on local farms. Since the plant out and harvest doesn't conflict too badly with corn, shouldn't have a problem finding labor around here.
 
Anyway, that's the plans.
 
We'll see how it goes.. er.. grows.
 

 

[TrentL]

Come to think of it the same thing happened in the garden when we had a drought back in 2012, I bought rain barrels so I'd have a neutral pH water supply. Back in 2012 my well water tested at 8.5 - it maxed out my gauge.
 
 
 

 

[CMJ]

Awesome thread, thanks for posting this! Do you plan to keep track of your test plants throughout the season? It would be interesting to see how the various methods affect overall yield.

 

[Walchit]

You can get the little yellow pH pens super cheap, like 10 bucks on the internet. I paid 25 for one at a pet store here in town

 

[Walchit]

The pH of my tap water is consistently over 9.

 

[TrentL]

Awesome thread, thanks for posting this! Do you plan to keep track of your test plants throughout the season? It would be interesting to see how the various methods affect overall yield.

 
Yes, that's the goal. I plan on using different potting soil compositions and tracking development during the indoor grow out stage. I may grab a commercial bag or two of something to use as a comparison point. I need to have *something* to use as a yard stick for comparing my soil mixes to.
 
Once they hit the field I will track information on pod development and production. I need data on lbs harvested, pod counts, and using those, the average weight of pod. Then I need to know when harvest starts, and how often it needs picked. 
 
We're going to build isolation cages for at least 15 varieties. Seeds alone cost me over a grand this year for a half acre, which is *not* a sustainable number. I have to work out any kinks on seed harvesting and get a washing / drying process hammered out.
 
This year is mainly geared towards a big learning experiment so I can figure out how to do logistics, select plants, and so on.  I have to figure out simple things, like when to start seeds (staggering so they are ready to go out at specific times), so I don't have employees standing around with their thumb up their butt for a week while there's nothing to do. If I were doing a big mono-variety grow that's simple; figure out how long it takes to pot up a tray or plant one out in the field, figure out how many you gotta do, figure out the employee count from that, then plant X trays a day throughout Y window so that staff can do Z amount of plants over a specific date range.
 
But I don't want a single variety. I want a bunch of them. Which complicates things greatly as every one of those has different growth characteristics. Huge differences in an annuum that takes 85 days before setting fruit, and a chinense that takes 110 days just to *ripen* a fruit.
 
It's very possible though that after this year, I'll select a handful of "good performers" and "good sellers" and scale back the variety for the field crop, to simplify things. I can see cutting back to a dozen or less. 
 
I'd like to keep it organized so I can grow a "half acre of this" or "an acre of that" - big blocks that are simpler to manage. You can pack 13,000-15,000 annuums in an acre. That's a mess of plants.
 
Will get complicated (and stay too complicated) if I have "two rows of this, a half row of that", etc. 

 

[TrentL]

You can get the little yellow pH pens super cheap, like 10 bucks on the internet. I paid 25 for one at a pet store here in town

 
I've got one of those digital, highly accurate ones for hot sauce making. It should do the trick.
 
Only problem is I left it at new-old-house (long story) and I will have to go over there and do some searching to find it. 
 
(new-old-house is a renovation project that's been ongoing for a couple years, when I'm not working on other things)

 

[TrentL]

The transplants are starting to get some nitrogen from the potting soil.
 
The Fresno from yesterday;

 
vs. Today
 

 
 
The chlorinosis in the veins will hopefully clear up in a day or two.
 
Here's another one; a Jalapeno Biker Billy.
 

 
The veins aren't getting "more yellow" - rather, the leaves are getting darker green. Once they aren't starved of nitrogen the veins should catch up in color.
 
Some plants are showing signs of phosphorus deficiency. Yesterday's MOA scotch bonnet transplant, for example. (I expected this to be fatal to such a young plant, having only erupted from the soil 2 days ago)
 

 
 
Some of the chinense are also showing it.
 

 
The odd part? It's only the 7 pots. Multiple varieties of 7-pots, from 3 different trays, are all showing purplish leaves which would indicate a phosphorus uptake problem. But this isn't showing up in other varieties.
 
I don't recall any of the 7-pots I grew in the past having 'purplish' leaves ... so don't know what is going on here. If it were showing in multiple varieties I'd say it's nutrients, but restricted to one variety? That sounds more like a plant reaction to the strong lights, that I didn't see in past grows, because I wasn't using a half million lumens to blast seedlings with light.
 
 

 

[TrentL]

[emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23] Thats some funny shiz right there!

 
So you know what happens if a dumbass plant decides to grow roots-first up out of the soil when you have high output T5's blazing down on them?
 
The roots turn in to leaves.
 
Tiny, tiny leaves.
 

 
Now I know what the hell happened to a few of the others that I marked "dwarfs."
 
I tested my water tonight.
 
I don't like the results.
 

 
I'm *not* quite sure what to do about this. Wife picked up some distilled water at the grocery store today.  THAT tested high too. So I'll have to shop around for a source.. or figure out how to lower the pH of my water.
 
Out of curiosity I tested some of the peat that has had rather crappy results at sprouting.
 
It's a bit darker than the 7.0 mark. Now that was DRY, from the surface of a dried out cell that was in dire need of watering. So when I water, what happens? It bumps the pH up to the point the plant isn't able to move any nutrients.
 

 
In other news, that's not so grim, I discovered my first *true* triplet tonight. 
 

 
Had three sets of cotys *and* three sets of true leaves. That's the first time I've ever seen that happen. Every other triplet I've seen (and now I've got dozens) has only ever grown out 2 true leaves.
 
Went to take the garbage out tonight. 
 
"Oh hey bonkers. What are you doing in the damn garbage can?"
 
(Bonkers is our outdoor rodent killing death machine feline pet).
 

 
"Uhhh... You aren't bonkers, dude."
 

 
I figured he'd run away. Coons usually scurry away when humans show up.
 

 
Seriously?
 
He sat there and waited for me to toss the garbage in.
 

 
So I went in to the deep freeze and found him.. a treat. These are a couple years old so no good really, but ...
 
why not feed the raccoon a bag full of 2 year old Butch T's?
 

 
Interestingly enough, he opened the bag, took a bite of one, and hasn't been back!
 
Last time I saw him he was hightailing it to the treeline sneezing and stumbling.
 
Picked the wrong garbage can dude!

 

[Chilidude]

It seems the bottom feeding of the coco coir is very good method with not so strong fertilizer mixture with those young plants. The top portion of the coco coir stays nice and airy while the roots in the bottom feeds the plants. I have been top feeding them with fertilizer solution, but the coco coir gets more compact in time because of it and the young plants dont like it so much, so i filled the voids with fresh coco coir+perlite mixture and will start to feed them from the bottom to see how they will respond to it.
 
I have been top feeding them because of the salt build up, but i think the not so strong fertilizer mixture will migitate some of that salt build up, so it will not become a problem for any time soon and i can always flush them from the top if need be.
 
I have done this bottom feeding before with coco, but have not much thinked about how it really affects the grow of the plant vs top feeding, but you will never become a better grower if you dont try different growing methods with the coco coir.

 

[TrentL]

It seems the bottom feeding of the coco coir is very good method with not so strong fertilizer mixture with those young plants. The top portion of the coco coir stays nice and airy while the roots in the bottom feeds the plants. I have been top feeding them with fertilizer solution, but the coco coir gets more compact in time because of it and the young plants dont like it so much, so i filled the voids with fresh coco coir+perlite mixture and will start to feed them from the bottom to see how they will respond to it.
 
I have been top feeding them because of the salt build up, but i think the not so strong fertilizer mixture will migitate some of that salt build up, so it will not become a problem for any time soon and i can always flush them from the top if need be.
 
I have done this bottom feeding before with coco, but have not much thinked about how it really affects the grow of the plant vs top feeding, but you will never become a better grower if you dont try different growing methods with the coco coir.

 
I've been bottom feeding everything this year. I'm not doing any fertilizer additives to watering, as I have experiments running comparing baseline no additives to trays with organic components in them. The first time some of these plants will see anything at all is when they get moved to potting soil.
 
I'm noticing since the fans came on more trays are showing surface mold; been spot treating that with H2O2 as I see it. This is likely from spores going airborne on the wind.
 
I let the trays get feather-light dry before watering them.  8-10 oz of water is added to a soaking tray and they are left to soak for a half hour.  No excess water is allowed to remain in the their trays; don't want it going stagnant or contributing to the mold issue.
 
My water pH level being so alkaline is concerning me, as it is raising the pH level slowly in the trays. By week 3 the trays are getting pretty hostile to plant life. This is becoming a problem for long-germinating (20+ day) varieties. They are sprouting; but they look pretty bad by the time they come up. The faster growing stuff is thriving but it's already getting transplanted out to a bigger home by the time some of these seeds germinate.
 
I'm going to start keeping an eye on baseline pH the next time I put some trays together for the annuums. I think I have the temperature kinks worked out of the grow now, to the point I no longer bother with reading temperature every day on the trays as I was doing.
 
So the second sprouting session with the annuums will be pH testing instead of temperature testing. 
 
The trays with pearlite and vermiculite *do* have worse germination rates by a noticeable percentage. It's not just delayed, but rather, overall the rates are way lower than just straight coir. 
 
I thought this was because of the media, but now, I'm thinking it is because those additives are absorbing alkaline water and holding it, which makes it tough for the plants to do anything. When the pH level goes much over 7 they stop moving nutrients around, and it stalls them out or kills them slowly.

 

[TrentL]

As far as pH goes the farm well water is FULL of sulfer. It reeks like rotten eggs. I haven't done a pH test yet but I will almost certainly have the direct opposite problem when these move to the farm, that I have at home. Sulfur lowers pH in soil. 
 
I'm going to go measure the pH of that farm water today. If it's better pH than what I have here at home, I may go out and buy a water hauler tank for the pick up truck and bring some of that water here for a test, to see if it helps clear up some of these issues.
 

 

[Chilidude]

 
I've been bottom feeding everything this year. I'm not doing any fertilizer additives to watering, as I have experiments running comparing baseline no additives to trays with organic components in them. The first time some of these plants will see anything at all is when they get moved to potting soil.
 

 
After doing some more reading about the bottom feeding with fertilizer mixture, it is much better idea to stick with the top feeding method to reduce the salt build up in the coco over time.
 

 

[Genetikx]

Are you able to introduce a ph down product to some kind of drip irrigation? My water is coming in at about 8.4 so I started using Botanicare ph down for the 1st season ever. I need to use exactly 1mL per gallon to get ph around 6.5-6.8. No telling yet the effect and I'm not going to have anything to compare, all plants will get the ph down from here on out.

 

[TrentL]

Are you able to introduce a ph down product to some kind of drip irrigation? My water is coming in at about 8.4 so I started using Botanicare ph down for the 1st season ever. I need to use exactly 1mL per gallon to get ph around 6.5-6.8. No telling yet the effect and I'm not going to have anything to compare, all plants will get the ph down from here on out.

 
I tested the farm water today and it made the solution turn darker than I've ever seen it before. Was nearly black. It's off the scale hard.
 
I am taking the "cheap route" for now. 5.0% vinegar.
 

 
The left vial was after 4 tablespoons were added to a 5 gallon bucket. The right was after 1 additional - it seems 1 tablespoon per gallon puts me dead on at 7.0 pH
 

 
 
The three coir test trays were looking HORRIBLE today. And I truly mean horrible. There's purple blotches on the cotys and they are rapidly fading to yellow. I have complete nute lock out on those trays. I absolutely FLUSHED them with that 7.0 ph water tonight, let them drain in to a solid 10/20 tray, then dumped the excess water out.
 
The three peat trays are also starting to fade away, what's left of them anyway. Same thing; yellowing cotys.  I flushed what was left of them as well. 
 
I think the peat buffered the seedlings longer than the coir did, against the high pH tap water. I'm on day 25 of those peat trays, and only day 16 of the coir trays. 
 
The bulk of the first ~90 transplants were light green today, some fading to yellow. Except for those which weren't directly under the T5's. Those are still darker green.... I turned the lights down about 1 PM today to 50% intensity. By midnight the ones which were fading to light green had begun darkening up again in between the veins. The veins remain a yellow color, however. That generally indicates a sulfur deficiency.
 
I also have leaf cupping (upwards) and stems with purple streaks, so I'll hit them with cal-mag in a day or two if they don't bounce back under less aggressive lighting. These plants are still young, many are only on their first or second set of true leaves, so 100% intensity under 4' T5's might be a bit ... much for them.
 
The intense lighting at such a young age is making them grow FAST, so it's no surprise they are fighting for nutrients and showing a few deficiencies here or there. I have a fresno that grew over 1" taller in just the last 24 hours and it's true leaves have broadened out by about the same. So they are really being pushed hard under the 100% intensity 40,000 lumen banks of lights. Plus I've been running them at an 18/6 schedule.
 
So I'm going to back off just a bit and not push them as hard.

 

[Chilidude]

Start collecting rainwater from the roof to water your plants, it is much better than the tap water you are now giving them and should not need to adjust the ph either.
 
I am using this very basic rainwater collector:
 
http://thehotpepper.com/topic/60664-diy-rainwater-collector-for-watering-my-chilis/?hl=rainwater
 
Last year i collected rainwater from the roof of my greenhouse and it worked fine.

 

[TrentL]

I would, if it wasn't for that pesky ice flake stuff falling out of the sky right now
 
I've got two rain barrels outside but they're drained and unusable while it's freezing.
 
Vinegar is $1 a quart and I only need 1 tablespoon per US gallon to fix my water pH.
 

 

[Chilidude]

I would, if it wasn't for that pesky ice flake stuff falling out of the sky right now
 
I've got two rain barrels outside but they're drained and unusable while it's freezing.
 
 

 
Collect that stuff then to a inside container with a water tap and let it warm to a room temperature before use. Snow or rainwater, it is all the same and far superior compared to any tap water for watering your plants...I got a lot of snow behind my apartment, maybe i will go and collect some for the chilis.

 

[PeriPeri]

Trent buddy - what an amazing glog! Looks like you are going to be in for a bumper busy season my friend.

With the chloramination of tap water and high alkaline levels, I no longer use tap water for my pre-soak and watering. I don't have nearly as many plants as you do, so I suppose it is easier to get around the tap water issue. The borehole on the farm has good water, so we use this for everything.
 


I too had an inkling about the coco peat this season. I have always preferred growing plants in coco peat. I have always purchased the coco peat bricks at our local nursery in bulk. But this season started experiencing bad germination rates, poor growth, underdeveloped roots and seedlings just narrowing at the base and keeling over. After everything else was eliminated, it was the coco peat that was the issue. My contact from Jiffy also mentioned that salinity can be an issue with coco peat. Cococ Peat that is sold in bulk can sometimes be too acidic or high in salinity - depending on where the coco peat came from. All I can say is using a buffered, ph tested coco peat is important. Buffering Coco Peat is an important step around using Coco Peat that has not been buffered. I believe CalMag is used in buffering Coco Peat. On a molecular level it impacts the uptake of nutrients - the availability of nutrients in coco peat. It all has to do with molecular charges - way heady stuff for me to figure out. Problems may not apparent at first, but can impact later. I now only use Jiffy Pellets - all pre buffered and packed with nutrients required for the seedling stage. Have had great results with the pellets.
 
I just love what you are doing and totally jealous of your great farm and potential there. What fun man, best of luck... roll on summer
 
 

 

[TrentL]

 
Collect that stuff then to a inside container with a water tap and let it warm to a room temperature before use. Snow or rainwater, it is all the same and far superior compared to any tap water for watering your plants...I got a lot of snow behind my apartment, maybe i will go and collect some for the chilis.

 
I go through about 15 gallons of water a day right now, just in the seedling room. As far as snow goes, right now I'd need approx 150 gallons to melt in to those 15 gallons that the seedlings room uses each day. That's 30 trips out to pack snow in to buckets. No way I have time for that (or enough snow!).
 
When the farm is full I'll be going through 225 gallons per day (rough estimate based on my watering schedule on 3.5" pots; I'm using 4" pots this time around). We also just don't get that much rain, once they hit the farm....
 
Then when they hit the field, during dry spells the drip irrigation will average between 750 to 1500 gallons a day (projected, based on research papers I've found on growing pepper crops in this zone). 
 
So no, I need a cost effective way of altering pH on a large scale. This isn't hydroponics, I don't have to worry about vinegar spawning off colonies of "mother of vinegar" slime cultures. This is a dirt grow, so that's not a concern. 
 
When we're talking about high usage, like the field, 1500 gallons a day will need approx 8 gallons of vinegar (256 tablespoons in a gallon). The cost on that will be $32 per 1500 gallons. No biggie, compared to other stuff. Of course the farm water is high sulfur, which lowers pH once it integrates with the soil, so I probably won't need THAT much alteration. 
 
I'll know exactly what the farm has available in about a week; doing a full ag panel work up of the well water I'll be using for irrigation.
 

 

[TrentL]

Trent buddy - what an amazing glog! Looks like you are going to be in for a bumper busy season my friend.
With the chloramination of tap water and high alkaline levels, I no longer use tap water for my pre-soak and watering. I don't have nearly as many plants as you do, so I suppose it is easier to get around the tap water issue. The borehole on the farm has good water, so we use this for everything.
 


I too had an inkling about the coco peat this season. I have always preferred growing plants in coco peat. I have always purchased the coco peat bricks at our local nursery in bulk. But this season started experiencing bad germination rates, poor growth, underdeveloped roots and seedlings just narrowing at the base and keeling over. After everything else was eliminated, it was the coco peat that was the issue. My contact from Jiffy also mentioned that salinity can be an issue with coco peat. Cococ Peat that is sold in bulk can sometimes be too acidic or high in salinity - depending on where the coco peat came from. All I can say is using a buffered, ph tested coco peat is important. Buffering Coco Peat is an important step around using Coco Peat that has not been buffered. I believe CalMag is used in buffering Coco Peat. On a molecular level it impacts the uptake of nutrients - the availability of nutrients in coco peat. It all has to do with molecular charges - way heady stuff for me to figure out. Problems may not apparent at first, but can impact later. I now only use Jiffy Pellets - all pre buffered and packed with nutrients required for the seedling stage. Have had great results with the pellets.
 
I just love what you are doing and totally jealous of your great farm and potential there. What fun man, best of luck... roll on summer
 
 

 
Thanks for the feedback!
 
This is my first year growing with coco peat, and it's going to be a challenge. I have enough materials to make 80 cubic *yards* of potting soil now.  But I'm waiting on these experiments I'm running to pan out, before I finalize a mixture. 
 
The peat I'm using is double washed and has an EC of 0.3, so it *should* be fine. Right now I'm running under the assumption that the coco coir has a lower buffering potential than the sphagnum peat trays I am comparing them to have; which would make sense as sphagnum is slow to respond to pH changes in general. Even so, after 25 days of sitting in sprouting trays, those sphagnum peat moss trays pegged the scale at 7.5+ pH when I tested dirt dried out from them yesterday. The water has slowly raised it to the point that the sprouts in them can't progress; everything is stalled out.
 
The coco coir peat has fewer receptor sites for ion exchange than peat, and less buffering potential against pH changes. So it's not surprising after 16 days I'm seeing the same things the sphagnum trays started showing after 25 days; yellowing of leaves, stalling of plant growth, etc. The effect is amplified by the two coco peat trays containing perlite and vermiculite, compared to the base 100% coir peat tray. Both of those amendments are well known for their ability to alter pH in soil as they absorb the water. Vermiculite can't even be used for experiments involving pH alterations because of this.
 
Tonight I gave all of the starter trays a drenching of 7.0 pH water - an excessive amount of water - to flush out the old high pH. Then I dumped what ecxess flowed through and left a fan running down there overnight to try to dry out the soil more quickly.
 
Tomorrow I'll take another soil reading; but the plan moving forward is to amend further waterings to a pH of 6.5 to get the plants back in healthy shape. I can't determine what fertilizer compositions are doing, until I get this pH issue sorted out! At a pH of 7.5+, as they sit right now, I could dunk them in pure fertilizer and it wouldn't matter. They can't exchange any nutrients, period. Total lock out!
 
Hopefully they pull through this, it's starting to get a little late to hit the reset button and start over on all of the chinense - don't have the seeds for it, nor the time... I just hope I caught it in time. Most of the trays are only 6-8 days old. And the fast sprouting ones (comparatively) are doing just fine. I've got 92% germination success on big sun habanero, 83% on Fatalli yellow, after 13 days.  I have an 8-day old Aji Cereza tray that's already hit 78% germination. 
 
But the 7-pots and morugas and some of the other habaneros I'm worried about. Those have 20+ day germination times and if they're sitting there in 7.5+ pH for that long.. well, it won't turn out very good for them....
 
On the flip side, I know that in sphagnum peat with a tested pH of over 7.5, Chocolate Bhutlas will sprout after 25 days. I just had one come up today. 
 
Granted, it was already yellow the moment it popped out of the soil. But it DID germinate.
 
Not sure how that helps anyone, but it's kind of impressive considering the averse conditions (they were cooked inadvertently at 114F for a day, and have been in highly alkaline soil for over 3 weeks...)