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]

This is what the damping off ones look like. I gave them a sip of water to see if they'll come around but I don't have high hopes; this is exactly how the last one went down and it died.
 

 
This is it's twin; they were right about the same size.
 

 
Some of the others in various stages of death;
 

 

 

 
I bet if I de-potted them, the bottom 2/3 of the soil would be soaked; and hot to the touch. I think it the mix held too much water and got conditions just right for a bacterial bloom. Only thing that'd explain the warm-to-the-touch soil. 
 
Hopefully it won't take out any more. I'm going to give them sips of water to keep the top layer a little better. 
 
Coir doesn't wick as well as I'd expect; with the bottom 2/3 being sopping wet and the top 1" being bone dry... you'd think it'd even itself out at least a LITTLE. But it seems to not want to do that.
 
 

 
 
^^ dumping a pot full of H2O2 brought these back around. Killed off all the bacteria and fungus in the soil. I've transplanted the PDN already, but the others appear to be doing well "as is" so far. 
 
H2O2 is frigging amazing at ending fungal/bacterial infections in soil. I used it to save some overwinters several years ago (on the gallon scale). Figured why not give it a shot on those... and it worked.

 

[Walchit]

How do you mix your peroxide?

 

[TrentL]

How do you mix your peroxide?

 
I don't. I dump it straight out of the brown bottle it comes in from the store, right in to the plant's pot. I put the pots on cooling racks with a pan under them to catch the crud that comes out of the pot.  I flushed those 4" pots with about 1/3 of a bottle, each. 
 
Wife picked up the bottles at the dollar store for $1 per quart, pretty cheap remedy.
 
The goal was to get them propped up enough to be transplanted to clean soil.
 
H2O2 breaks down in to water and oxygen. It's the oxygen that kills the fungus & bacteria.
 
 

 

[TrentL]

926 peppers up now, closing in on the 1,000 mark!
 
The Reaper tray exploded over the last two days. Was trickling in 1's and 2's in # of sprouts for 8 days. Then suddenly 20 more one day, 13 the next. It's now at 92% germination rate. It's now tied with big sun habanero for highest germination %.
 
I put 5 more trays down to germinate, have put 2500 seeds in the dirt so far this year. Halfway there!
 
Since I'm in a wait and hold pattern on peppers, with nothing new to photograph, might as well go back through the photo archive.
 
Here's a rare pic of me in my other happy place, planting 50 caliber lead seeds. 
 

 
That's my Soviet DShK. By far the biggest gun in my collection.
 
It's a pretty rare treat, there's not many of those in the US. 
 
 

 

[Chilidude]

Nice Russian heavy machine gun!
 
This was the Russian heavy machine gun i shot in the army:

I loved the feeling of power and it almost fell down when i shot a long full auto burst with it.
 
You dont want to be in the front, when that thing starts to talk.

I shot the Rk 62 model.
 
Also this shitty kvkk 62 light machine gun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F6Qzop0pUI

 

[Chilidude]

Hey, have you shot with this gun:

This should Finnish off most lightly armored targets.

 

[Walchit]

Finnish off! That's what you say in Finland? Lol

 

[Chilidude]

Finnish off! That's what you say in Finland? Lol

 
Yeah we usually Finnish off lightly armored targets like reindeers, mooses, bears and rabbits with the 20mm Lahti L39 antitank rifle to make sure they will not suffer and the gun will do the skinning too as it will blow right off!
 

 

[Walchit]

Santa isn't coming to chilidude's house lol

 

[Chilidude]

Santa isn't coming to chilidude's house lol

 

Last time i saw Santa was about 30 years ago...HHhhhmmm i wonder why.

 

[TrentL]

I decorated our Christmas tree with my Kalashnikov collection after Mr. Kalasnikov passed away.
 

 

 

 
My wife was PISSED when she got home from Grocery Shopping.
 
"PUT THAT S*** AWAY RIGHT NOW MY LIVINGROOM DOESN'T NEED TO LOOK LIKE A RUSSIAN BUNKER"
 
I tried blaming the dog... but it didn't work.
 

 

[TrentL]

Hey, have you shot with this gun:
This should Finnish off most lightly armored targets.

 
Haha no, I haven't shot a 20mm. But I'm friends with Ian, the guy who runs Forgotten Weapons. A large chunk of his digital blueprint and old operators manual collection for guns came from me. 
 
I'll "spice up" the Glog with a "rare gun of the week" post each weekend from now on, featuring a different gun out of my collection. By the time I get through the 2020 Glog we might make a dent.
 
But for now, how about some good old German hardware.

 

 

[Walchit]

Got you a little dragunov there?

 

[TrentL]

Got you a little dragunov there?

 
That's a Yugoslavian M76 in 8mm. 
 
It's was the second one made. (As in, serial #00002)

 

[TrentL]

I de-potted one which died to day and the fungus is back growing again on those. I didn't wash the pots when re-potting. Not that it'd matter. The roots had it all on them anyway.
 
I decided to fight fire with fire and gave each plant a 2 tablespoon dose of mycorrhizae blend (Great White). That's 1/3 what a 4" pot would normally call for on their instructions. Figure a small dose of bacteria and fungus to fight bacteria and fungus, what the hell. I didn't give the called-for 3 ounces because I didn't want to saturate the seedlings.
 
I put both teaspoons each pot received right down the plant stem so that it would spread out from there. Figured that was logical since the old fungus, whatever it was, was in the process of growing from the outside of the pot to the inside, when I examined the one which had died today. In 24 hours the fungus had spread from the pot walls to 1/2" in to the pot on all sides, and from the bottom up to 1" up the soil line, across the entirety of the pot.
 
Unreal how fast that crap grows!
 
Hopefully the Great White concoction will shield the roots. It took 2 gallons of the mix to do all of the transplants, 2 tablespoons each. Plus a few hours....
 
Pics of the transplants; these are the ones which were re-potted; I don't expect some of them to live another 24 hours; their roots were nearly totally gone when they were re-transplanted yesterday. It'd be a miracle if 1 out of 10 of these survived, as bad as their roots looked.
 

 

 

 

 

 
These are new transplants
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
These are the tomatoes 
 

 
 

 

[TrentL]

Seedlings are doing much better now that they are a couple of waterings in to the 6.5pH regimen. The soil pH is slowly working it's way back to normal and they are mighty happy.
 

 

 

 

[TrentL]

I hope batches E1, E2, E3 and F1, F2, F3, H, and G of the soil mixes I transplanted tonight work OK.
 
I'll be transplanting something like 300-400 of these later this week, so hopefully the worst of the problems are behind me. 
 
I didn't start seeing problems with batches B or C until 9 days out, though. So if these newest 8 soil mixes have issues I might not know about it in time for the first big transplant this week. (Batch A was my control group, it was dying from nute starvation, they have been re-transplanted. They had kickass roots so they should take off now. Batch B & C were fungus infested, probably lose all of them. D was pulled after 2 days once B&C showed problems. Those should be fine in their new homes *IF* the micorrhizae solution I added works to inoculate them against whatever that nasty, deadly fungus was that got B&C)
 
Meh. It is what it is. They live or they die. Death in the name of data entry! A death is still a useful statistic, after all. Teaches me something.
 
 
 

 

[TrentL]

This is what 11 days in straight Coir with no fertilizer does to plants. This was part of A group, which was my control group with no nutes.
 

 
Severe deficiencies of everything except K. This was a zoom in of the above pic. What you can't see is the gnarly purple color on the leaves. 
 
Coir alone kills plants in .. oooh, about 11 days. The roots on that thing were amazing. But the plant is most likely dead. I don't know if it'll pull out of it. I transplanted it in to a pretty solid mix of everything, more out of curiosity than anything. To be true to the experiment I should have let it die, but couldn't bring myself to do it. I potted it up in group F's soil out of sympathy. Each plant from the control group went to a different "see if you survive" group; E, F, G, and H. I'll keep track of which one recovers the best.
 
 

 

[Chilidude]

It will surely now start growing pretty good after you transplanted it to a better growing medium mixture.

 

[TrentL]

It will surely now start growing pretty good after you transplanted it to a better growing medium mixture.

 
Same basic mixtures, just no bottom watering. These are identical to C & D except I did isolated coir, coir + prewetted vermiculite, coir + perlite, and coir + perlite + prewetted vermiculite.
 
Oh, and I left out the worm poop this time. 
 
And didn't bottom water.
 
They're still VERY heavy on fertilizers (E, F, G, and H) with 1 cup of blood meal, 1 cup of kelp, and 1 cup of bone meal per 5 gallons. Plus some azomite for trace minerals.
 
E 1/2/3 and F 1/2/3 take that fertilizer ratio down fractionally, with 3/4, 1/2 of blood and bone meal, with the third being 1/2 again with reduced kelp and azomite.
 
The major difference is on E-H I didn't bottom water soak. I mixed water in to the potting soil mix (or pre-wetted vermiculite in one case) to get a nice moist (but not damp) composition before potting up. 
 
And, on each of them, I Inoculated with 1 ounce of mycorrhizae solution, to try to fend off mildew which annihilated the roots of B&C groups.
 
Mix K (skipping "I" as it looks too much like the number 1),  will re-introduce the worm poop, Mix K will be with sub-classes of 1-4 with different ratios of worm poo. The soil will be dried completely and 3 oz per 4" cup of mycorrhizae will be added to the coir along with kelp (to give it something to feed on), a few days before mixing the ferts in and potting up. That'll give the myco a chance to establish cultures, so when I mix the worm poop in it will already be prevalent throughout the coir.
 
That's the plan anyway. 
 
Each tray as I pot it up will have seedlings split between various soil groups - E, F, G, H, and K, with 1/5th of the seedlings getting each of the soil groups. On trays with more than 50 sprouts I will sub-class it; on those with fewer sprouts I will choose a subclass from E, F, and K instead of doing the main group.
 
Between 66 trays I will have 330+ different soil experiments running; at least 5 per variety, because it's possible each cultivar will like slightly different "stuff."
 
We're getting to the point where things will get more interesting. Not QUITE there.. yet.. but "soon."