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]

Also, cal mag is on a scheduled test for next week. I need to see what the water pH change does, the lighting change does, get them stable before I mess with it. 
 
I can't tell my ass from a hole in the wall right now on the various nutrient deficiency issues I'm seeing because it's 99.999% likely that the vast majority of them are due to the pH being so far out of whack.
 
So I'll get that taken care of then .. we start liquid fertlizer tests on the potted-up plants.
 
Ideally I want to get my potting soil mix dead-nuts correct for peppers (as well as the field itself, where they'll spend the productive part of their lives), and minimize the use of liquid fertilizers. 
 
But I can't just let these little buggers die, because I do need to make some money on them. Lord knows I've spent enough!
 
At the point I start using liquid nutrients to prop them up, that soil experiment gets a big "FAILURE" flag. I'm running a ton of soil experiments though so hopefully I'll land on one that is "just right" this year, so next year isn't such a big pain in the ass. All this documentation is kicking my ass, big time. It takes 4 solid hours a day now just to water plants, take my population counts, and do the data entry. And that will get even harder once half of the crop heads out to the farm.
 

 

[Chilidude]

Maybe you could use some kind of more natural liquid fertilizers, like the Biobizz line of fertilizers. Biobizz grow+bloom mixture should work and even the Biobizz grow alone should work too for growing them till they are ready to go outside.

 

[TrentL]

Maybe you could use some kind of more natural liquid fertilizers, like the Biobizz line of fertilizers. Biobizz grow+bloom mixture should work and even the Biobizz grow alone should work too for growing them till they are ready to go outside.

 
I've got 2.5 gallons of liquid bone meal, 5 gallons of fish emulsion, and 1 gallon of organic cal mag (no nitrate) for the "prop up of failed experiments" plants
 
I don't want to rely on them as the primary source of nutrients though, not on this scale, it would be horrible. 
 
50 pounds of bone meal (dry) = $72. 2.5 gallons of bone meal (liquid) = $121, etc.. etc..  granted both costs will scale down noticeably when I make bulk orders. But I'd rather have the potting soil right, or close to right. 
 
Same cost differences when you look at kelp meal, worm turds, etc. 
 
This next batch of soil is getting mycorrhizae spores mixed in - otherwise plants will not take up phosphorous easily and it will become a limiting factor. Soilless media (coir) requires the addition of biologic agents that it would normally not have. Otherwise the solid organic nutrients won't be processed, broken down, and made in to a "transportable state." (I would further surmise this is the great failing of so many so called "organic" potting mixes; without bacteria and fungus to give the soilless media a shot in the arm, you could add as much solid fertilizer as you want and it will just sit there, doing absolutely nothing; which is why "organic" potting soil usually needs liquid nutrient infusions to keep plants healthy).
 
Worm castings will give bacteria; and I found so would kelp meal (that is where mold issues actually first appeared, was kelp meal trays). But in order to get the plants to take up phosphorous you need the symbiotic mycorrhiza colonies growing in the soil so they can bind with the plant roots. 
 
As usual with this test I'm adding components piece meal to look at the effects; without myco these early soil mixes will likely show P deficiencies sooner than later (which is why I ordered up some liquid bone meal, to give them a shot in the arm when it's time). The big question is how soon they will show them, how it will manifest, and how much of what I need to add to make things right.

 

[TrentL]

Phosphorous deficiency appearing in my first two soil mixes. Not surprising as I didn't have anything substantial in the mix adding phosphorous, nor any fungus allowing it to be processed.
 
Affecting both annuum and chinense.
 

 

 

 
The neutral pH flushed trays (I used a half gallon each tray on a top water, of 7.0 pH) are showing signs of rebounding. Cotys are greener than yesterday.
 

 
Next time they need watered I'll take another sample, if it's still high I'll use 6.5 pH water to continue to bring it down.
 
Have one of 10 tomatoes transplanted wilting off. Soil is moist, so it's not thirsty; thinking this is just a root I broke when doing the transplant.
 

 
Seedlings on this table were getting leggy.
 

 

 
I was low on chain when I put those in so I couldn't lower them down any more. I improvised and raised the trays up instead.
 

 
I cranked the lights up to full intensity on all trays and put a fan blowing down each table to keep them from burning up.
 

 

[PeriPeri]

 
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...)

 
 

Also, cal mag is on a scheduled test for next week. I need to see what the water pH change does, the lighting change does, get them stable before I mess with it. 
 
I can't tell my ass from a hole in the wall right now on the various nutrient deficiency issues I'm seeing because it's 99.999% likely that the vast majority of them are due to the pH being so far out of whack.
 
So I'll get that taken care of then .. we start liquid fertlizer tests on the potted-up plants.
 
Ideally I want to get my potting soil mix dead-nuts correct for peppers (as well as the field itself, where they'll spend the productive part of their lives), and minimize the use of liquid fertilizers. 
 
But I can't just let these little buggers die, because I do need to make some money on them. Lord knows I've spent enough!
 
At the point I start using liquid nutrients to prop them up, that soil experiment gets a big "FAILURE" flag. I'm running a ton of soil experiments though so hopefully I'll land on one that is "just right" this year, so next year isn't such a big pain in the ass. All this documentation is kicking my ass, big time. It takes 4 solid hours a day now just to water plants, take my population counts, and do the data entry. And that will get even harder once half of the crop heads out to the farm.
 

Trent buddy, that is a lot of checks and time. But I know it will turn out amazing! Couple of months from now the picture will look completely different

 

[Genetikx]

Think that's maybe just sunburn instead of phos deficiency? I have the same on some plants but I blamed the lights

 

[TrentL]

 
 
Trent buddy, that is a lot of checks and time. But I know it will turn out amazing! Couple of months from now the picture will look completely different

 
I hope so. With as much as I'm doing wrong so far, I'm amazed that room isn't one giant graveyard.
 
Learning curves are a bitch sometimes!
 
I'm just hoping these survive until liquid nutes show up in the mail. The first three soil mix tests are not working out so good. Can't blame that entirely on pH since these haven't been watered since they were planted; just an initial bottom soak and they are still moist. That's not enough time for a pH imbalance to build up to cause nute lockout on these transplants. This is just a lack of available nutrient exchange, or lack of nutrients.
 
The first three mixes were very short on phosphorous as I didn't have any bone meal on hand. The store I ordered from waited several days then cancelled the order as out of stock, refunded the money. SO I had to re-order, which delayed me a week on bone meal. Meanwhile I had plants needing transplanted, so I figured I'd throw something together and later prop them up with liquid fertilizer. Wasn't expecting to show severe deficiency problems so fast!
 

 
A spreadsheet when I was working up the soil mixes. This is mix B.
 
Mix C I cranked up the ingredients which doubled the amount of phosphorous, sulfur, potassium, and magnesium, as well as offering a smaller % bump in nitrogen. Phosphorous is still very low because there's no bone meal to be had yet. But it's better than the prior two mixes. Those plants aren't showing any purpling leaves (yet).
 

 
 
Once the bone meal shows up this is what I'm planning for it;
 

 

[TrentL]

Think that's maybe just sunburn instead of phos deficiency? I have the same on some plants but I blamed the lights

 
I turned down the lights for a while, and I moved some of the plants away to shade, but they didn't bounce back from that. This is a very distinct purple color, the kind that comes from nute deficiency. Sunburn (or light burn) makes 'em thin and yellow, then holes form. 
 
It started first on the 7-pot and habanero, but now I have annuums showing signs of it. 
 
It's not happening at all on Soil Mix C yet, which  are randomly intermingled with the others - so this makes it point as a nutrient difference, rather than a light difference, since I have them all jumbled and randomly placed under the lights together.
 
It is a matter of time before it happens since while those Mix C plants have about double the phosphorous of the Mix A and B plants, it is still not nearly enough. So I expect those will start showing the same pattern in a few more days.
 
By then I should have some liquid bone meal arriving so I can selectively test rebound. I'll segregate the affected plants and give it to half of them, while letting the other half suffer. Then I'll watch the results unfold...

 

[TrentL]

Did another pH test today, wife got some pool strips at walmart that goes up to 8.4. 

We topped out the damn color chart again. So water here at the house is at least 8.4.
 
At least I know what the biggest problem I'm having is. It sure explains some things from prior year grows, too.
 

 

[TrentL]

Just got shipping confirmation on the first 20 of the T5 8-bulbs for the farm! The other 10 will be coming in a week or so.
 
Things are about to get fun.
 

 

[tctenten]

Trent is this the first time you are using T5's?

 

[Devv]

Regarding the water. Mine is around 8.3-8.4 out of the well.
 
I tried this :
 
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FG0F9U/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
 
The bottle will do close to 1,300 gallons knocking the Ph down to 6.5. This is food grade stuff.  
 
Look into Logan labs out of Ohio for a soil test. They do water tests as well I believe. I was saddened by my crappy results and took measures that will take a few years. At least I'm on the right track.
 
I also have a 1,000 gallon storage tank on the way for rain water, which tests at 6.4. Gutters are in the shop. I need time and rain...LOL.
 
I'm wondering the purple tint on the leaves...a yellow pod plant? I see that a lot under the lights.

 

[TrentL]

Trent is this the first time you are using T5's?

 
Yessir. Last time I grew I used a whole mess of CFL's. This year, with the farm and scale of the grow, I decided to pony up the dough for actual lights.
 
T5's were chosen because of heat and power concerns; I had a lot of space to cover, but only so much electricity available at the farm without prohibitively costly upgrades to power.

 

[TrentL]

Regarding the water. Mine is around 8.3-8.4 out of the well.
 
I tried this :
 
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FG0F9U/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
 
The bottle will do close to 1,300 gallons knocking the Ph down to 6.5. This is food grade stuff.
 
Look into Logan labs out of Ohio for a soil test. They do water tests as well I believe. I was saddened by my crappy results and took measures that will take a few years. At least I'm on the right track.
 
I also have a 1,000 gallon storage tank on the way for rain water, which tests at 6.4. Gutters are in the shop. I need time and rain...LOL.
 
I'm wondering the purple tint on the leaves...a yellow pod plant? I see that a lot under the lights.

 
RE; the purple leaves; fresno, red habanero, 7-pot red, brown moruga.. lots of them are showing the purple tinting. I've seen whites and yellows do this before when they were too close to 200w CFL's, but not reds. 
 
I have a different soil mix going side by side with these, randomly placed under the same lights. Mix C isn't showing signs of this yet, but right next to it Mix A and Mix B plants are. It's got to be low phosphorous; I didn't have much of any P additives in my soil, and no mycorrhizae to process it down in to a usable form. Mix C had a bit more P in it, but not much; I expect them to show the same problems sooner, than later.
 
Mix D will have a *lot* more available phosphorous in it (once the damn bone meal gets here...) and I'm adding in mycorrhizae spores to get the ball rolling on the breakdown and availability process. That will also have a lot more aviailable calcium, which is generally deficient in coir grows.
 
PH down will be the answer when I get scaled up to the farm level. For now it's not a big deal to adjust with vinegar, already have it here and it's doing the job. But when I suddenly jump from 15 gallon waterings to 225 gallon waterings to field drip irrigation in the thousands of gallons... that'll change the entire scale. 
 
I'll need to figure out how to get the irrigation set up at the farm to do this properly. Right now I'm leaning towards a 2,000 gallon holding tank which I can pump the well water in to, then adjust the pH in, THEN pull the irrigation feed off of it via transfer pump. That'll let me get the mix precisely what I want before it hits the field, by making it a two step process. I *do not* trust doing an inline alteration on a free flowing run of water given the minute adjustments required. That just screams "point of failure" to me.
 
Once I can take some dry soil samples (everything right now is frozen mud), I'll get some soil samples shipped off. I tried getting in touch with a local place out of Athens, IL, but they don't seem to even have staff around this time of year. No response to emails and the phone just rings.

 

[Devv]

Logan labs had my results in around a week. I had 2 tests done on the same sample. One the standard M3 test and the other the AA 8.2. I had the AA 8.2 test performed because the "fizz test" was positive. The M3 showed Calcium @ 2,6490 pounds per acre and the AA 8.2 showed 3,341 pounds per acre. The AA 8.2 test shows a better window of the available calcium. The M3 test is showing an "unlocked" result. It uses and acid based mechanism to dissolve the minerals. Stickman has good info about this in his glog. Some really good info on his glog!

 

[TrentL]

I had a similar issue in 2015; I didn't realize it was probably pH related at the time so I hit them with the strong stuff.
 

 

 

 
Was just a matter of correcting Phosphorous;
 

 
 

 

[TrentL]

Logan labs had my results in around a week. I had 2 tests done on the same sample. One the standard M3 test and the other the AA 8.2. I had the AA 8.2 test performed because the "fizz test" was positive. The M3 showed Calcium @ 2,6490 pounds per acre and the AA 8.2 showed 3,341 pounds per acre. The AA 8.2 test shows a better window of the available calcium. The M3 test is showing an "unlocked" result. It uses and acid based mechanism to dissolve the minerals. Stickman has good info about this in his glog. Some really good info on his glog!

Yes, I've been studying his Glog and referring back to it several times.  That's a heck of a resource.
 
I was actually flipping back and forth between his glog and my spreadsheets when determining what I needed to do for Mix D.

 

[TrentL]

The thing is ... I really have no clue what I'm doing and probably shouldn't be undertaking this on such a big scale.
 
I was encouraged by past larger garden grows though, and figured "what the hell, let's go big!" once I bought the farm.
 
The thing is this feeling has stuck with me in the 2 years I wasn't growing;
 

 
I like growing things, and I like the beauty it brings. It's a good balance to my tech-heavy career.
 
I don't get this at the day job;
 

 
Or this.
 

 
Or this.
 

 
It doesn't matter what I'm growing, really, I just gotta grow SOMETHING.
 
I have a feeling somewhere inside, that this year's peppers and tomato crop are just a first step towards a larger nursery operation.
 
If I can figure out what the hell I'm doing!
 

 

[tctenten]

 
Yessir. Last time I grew I used a whole mess of CFL's. This year, with the farm and scale of the grow, I decided to pony up the dough for actual lights.
 
T5's were chosen because of heat and power concerns; I had a lot of space to cover, but only so much electricity available at the farm without prohibitively costly upgrades to power.

Reason I asked is I had that type of discoloration on my small seedlings when I switched to T5's. Pretty sure if you search around there are a few threads about it.

Then again it might be something different, but I would hate for you to try and become a mad chemist with nutes for a lighting side effect.

 

[TrentL]

Reason I asked is I had that type of discoloration on my small seedlings when I switched to T5's. Pretty sure if you search around there are a few threads about it.

Then again it might be something different, but I would hate for you to try and become a mad chemist with nutes for a lighting side effect.

 
If it were doing it on all of them of a certain variety, I'd think it was lighting. But I have Fresnos and Biker Billies and 7-pots and all sorts of the same exact varieties at the same stage of growth mixed in with them, just from a different potting soil blend. And the C batch isn't doing it, whatsoever.
 
Now is it linked to lights? Youbetcha. The plants on the border which aren't getting *as much* light are still dark green and lush looking.
 
But those T5's put out so much light it causes the plant to want to GROW. FAST. NOW.
 
Which is fine... if there's available free nutrients to support it (as there are on the border plants, which are getting 30-40% of the light.)
 
But when there's a shortage of a few things, and they're growing *fast right now* under intense light, those shortages show up *fast right now*.
 
I ran my peppers back in 2015-2016 under CFL's which were a fraction of the brightness of these, and it took a week and a half longer for issues to manifest. Nute shortages happened pretty much overnight in this case. They were fine one morning (after being under these T5's for a week), then suddenly... they weren't anymore. 
 
So yes, I think the lights are part of the picture; but they're the driving force, not the cause. The driving force is a whole lotta light causing a whole lotta growth. The underlying root cause is lack of nutrients to support that increased growth. 
 
If I didn't have comparisons of different soils under the exact same conditions behaving differently, I'd have drawn the same conclusion you did. But this isn't a monolithic grow where all plants are treated the same, to the same soil, etc. Because I have control pots next to experimental ones, the behavioral differences make it easier to reach conclusions and draw deductions that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
 
It's not just phosphorous I'm running short on. Nitrogen is running low (general yellowing of older leaves first), and I also have signs of a sulfur uptake shortage in A and B groups, too. The yellow leaf veins are a dead giveaway of that, as well as the upward cupped leaves on most plants.
 
The high pH sure as hell wasn't helping the nitrogen uptake. 
 
But anyway, I digress; yes, lights are a factor, and if you look at it as accelerating growth beyond what the soil can handle immediately (using up everything available within the day/night cycle) then yes. They recover slightly overnight (soil has time to "fix" itself as sulfate sulfur, NH4*, etc are fixed up). Available nitrogen will radically increase as I correct the pH, so that should be fine. But phosphorous is going to be damn slow to replenish given a lack of microbial activity in the coir, and no mycorrhizae to help push it along.
 
 
TL;DR; Your current soil has only so much nutrients immediately available at a given pH, soil temp, and moisture level. If you run the lights harder than the soil can supply, stuff goes deficient fast. It takes time to replenish the available nutrients (assuming you don't give it a shot in the arm with liquid nutes), which the night cycle might not be sufficient to allow.
 
ETA:
 
* pH is a logarithmic scale, my understanding is that a 1.0 change in pH is a 10x difference in hydrogen atoms, while a 2.0 change is 100x. Thus my soil being 8.4 (at least, I peaked the damn scale on the test kid my wife got), I've got 50x fewer hydrogen atoms available.  There's also a lack of microbiotic activity in the A group of plants; those didn't have worm poop in them. B group isn't doing *as* bad, but it's not good. C group is doing best; but I doubled the amount of kelp meal and blood meal in it, which contributes some water soluble nitrogen supply, as well as additional phosphorous. So when those factors combine, additional microbiotics and available soluble nitrogen and phosphorous, it is understandable those plants in C group are withstanding the high intensity lighting better; they can actually support the increased growth rate it's trying to push for.