2018 - The Farm

TrentL · Mar 2, 2018

Edmick said:
They're all getting started in 72 cell trays then transplanted straight into 4 inch nursery pots which is what they'll be sold in. So you think just straight coir in the cells? No liquid nutes or anything to help them along?

Yeah everything I did in straight coir worked out great. Seedlings will start to stall out about the time they get 4-5 days in to their first true leaves, but that's not too big of a deal. Not worth the risk of doing castings in the starter trays. Depending on your humidity and temp and a billion other factors, mold could become a factor in the trays with castings.

If you have *several* trays of a particular seedling and don't mind doing a little side by side testing, I'd be interested in your results if you dedicated one to a coir + worm castings mix of like 5:1 or so. If you count your sprouts each day and record them I can drop 'em in my spreadsheet as another point of comparison along with any notes about environment (mats, no mats, avg temp hi/lo, water pH, etc)

TrentL · Mar 2, 2018

As far as liquid nutes about 4-5 days after true leaf emergence give them a weak (25% or less) dilution of your favorite 12-x-x, they will start to stall out about 5-7 days after sprouting if they don't get a source of nitrogen. Phosphorous deficiency might come next; I plan on doing a weak 1-2-2 and cal/mag in the passive hydro test in a couple days to straight out some leaves. (This will be like day 8 or 9 of true leaf emergence, for a weakish P dose and cal/mag). Plants don't need *much* phosphorous early on but if there's none to be found, it'll kill them quicker than hell.

Stuff grown in coir is proving to go phosphorous deficient pretty quick in my grows - 7-14 days increasingly bad signs of P deficiency are showing up. Cal Mag and a does of some form of liquid P to keep them healthy and green.

You'll know if you get a P deficiency if the areas between veins starts to get a purple tinge to it. A week or so after you see that, the whole plant will start going full yellow, leaves horribly purple, and it'll start dropping leaves.

TrentL · Mar 2, 2018

The most uninteresting pictures of the whole glog coming up.

This is the "cat piss mix" - all of the pots that accumulated NH4 ammonium nitrate all tossed together. I poured a half gallon of great white in the blue one, and a half gallon of mycobloom in the other. Today both are noticeably less pissy smelling. Temp was 75-76F, so not much of any composting happening.

But, it's a sad picture, because in those two bins, are the soil from 199 dead plants.

Such is the price of progress. This will be a component of K mix when the ammonium finally gets converted to NH3 nitrate.

These two mixes are L (worm turd mix, in gray) and J mix (rotten fish mix, which is what it smells like, in the blue tub).

Now, worm turd mix is doing just fine, but that J mix... oh buddy.

OH MAN.

That blue tub clocked over 100F. It was HOT when I turned it over.. whereas worm turd mix wasn't.. ONLY difference (besides 50% less blood meal / bone meal), was a 100% elimination of Kelp meal.

So it's still cooking off. It will probably go anaerobic, that heat will kill off a lot of bacteria, which will then result in a fresh new batch of cat piss mix, that I'll re-treat with Great White. Eventually it'll make a kickass soil mix component; with that much composting going on, you KNOW the eventual nitrate amounts are going to be off the frigging charts.

I'm pretty damn sure that the crazy deaths I've had was kelp meal "going hot" and breaking down rapidly in to NH4. It got hot enough it killed the bacteria that would further process it in to the NH3 plant usable form.

So ... current theory on how to do organic mixes; for immediate available nitrogen, plus some slower longer term stuff;

Mix a batch with kelp meal, activate it with myco, and stand back while it lights itself on fire.

When the kelp meal cooks off (after a few days?) then re-treat the resultant cat piss smelling batch of crap with myco, which will convert that ammonium nitrate to NH3.

When it quits smelling like cat piss, mix it with fresh coco coir / perlite / worm turds, in a 4:1 ratio (so that the processed cooked batch is 25% or less of the total mix).

Everything OVER 4:1 is proving toxic so far. And 4:1 *may* prove toxic, it's still pretty early.

But, importantly, while that mix J started going compost after 4 days, the *pots* are not going hot (yet) even though the soil is the same age. I am chalking that up to diluting it with fresh medium below the 50% mark. Doesn't matter; anything over 4:1 is proving too potent for the little transplants to handle.

Next experiment (after J cools back off) is to test 4:1, 6:1, and 8:1, hopefully that'll be a much more successful, longer term test. I'll broaden that out, to cover a lot more transplants, if this weeks' testing goes well. After it's done cooking 4:1 will most certainly be fatal, 6:1 and lighter dilutions will be required to avoid killing transplants with too high of levels of immediately available nitrates.

Anyway getting closer; things are proceeding about exactly as I expected they would at this point.

Just sucks so many false starts so far, but damn, my curiousity is pegged at the limit at this point. Gut is telling me I've just about got it.

TrentL · Mar 2, 2018

Solved my seed head problem.

I had quite a LOT of sprouts come up with seed heads. Never had that happen this bad, in the past.

Well, on my 31st seed tray, I decided to change it up. I tamped the coir slightly down, compressing it (not much, just like 1/8-1/4"), after dropping the seedling in to a 1/2" hole. Just like I used to do, before one of my kids told me at the start of this grow "dad, you aren't supposed to tamp that down!"

"Why's that?"

"We learned it in school!"

....

I had the first sprouts pop up yesterday out of that tray; MOA scotch bonnets.

On the straight coir tray without tamping (just brushing the soil over the hole), that I'd done earlier, I had 16 of 32 sprouts with seed heads (50%). On another tray of MOA's, with vermiculite, I had 10/35. On yet another tray of MOA's (#22), I had 18 seed heads, out of 25 plants.

With untamped cells, that was a whopping 44 seed heads out of 92!

This newest tray of MOA scotch bonnets #31,on it's 2nd day of sprouting, I currently have 2 of 24.

That's a massive difference in # of seed heads, and all I did was compress the top layer of soil down a bit with my fingers when I seeded the cells.

That's it.

I lost quite a bit to seed head death this year, amazing that that little difference will cut that % loss down so much.

Devv · Mar 2, 2018

Trent,

I have B.O.C., P. Dreadie, and Scotchbrain seeds from my 2017 harvest. OP, but these plants were pretty damn well isolated from the bulk of the grow by about 135 yards. Yours if you PM me an address.

We all want to see success with your grow....

TrentL · Mar 2, 2018

So I was getting ready to do a tray of Sugar Cane tonight and noticed.. I struck out on the test trays in January. Naught for 6.

I got to looking at the seeds and noticed about half of them were dark, the other half.. not dark.

So I got to wondering.

Tray 39 has white meat in front 36, dark meat in back 36 cells.

Curious to see what the germ rates are like with segregated dark / not dark seeds.

TrentL · Mar 3, 2018

Started trays 36 through 45 tonight.

36 Sweet French Bell (x72) - struck out on all 6 test sprouts in January, hope this goes better
37 is Matay (x72)
38 Sweet Charlston (x72)
39 Sugar Cane (x72) - again, struck out on this one as well, during test sprouts in January.
40 Sweet Anaheim (x72) - another one I struck out on 0 for 6 in Jan
41 Drying Serrano (x72) - I had one of six sprout in the Jan test, it promptly fell over dead. Think this, and some others, were particularly susceptible to the tap water pH I was using in Jan.
42 Giant Aconcagua (x72)
43 Cayenne Long Red (x72) - Another strike out from the test trays.
44 Brown Moruga (x72)
45 Brown Moruga (x72 with a lot of "double seeded" cells

The two brown moruga trays should give some idea about my disappointment at the first 78 sprouting attempts failing. So I went "all in" planting about 200 seeds in trays 44-45. I *really* want those to pop. When I grew them last, in 2015, they absolutely smoked the carolina reaper seeds I had in heat. I only had one plant germ in 2015, but the pods it produced were frigging INSANE. It's the only pod that's ever caused my gums to blister up and bleed a little.

It was not pleasant. I shipped most of the pods off in mixed SFRB to friends to challenge them. Shared the pain far and wide.

Anyway.. that's it.

Planted 3242 sprouting cells so far.

Another 2k or so to go and I might be "done".. sigh.

Oh, all of the above trays above were 100% coir with no amendments. Only tests I'm running on this batch is germ time and % between warming mats, and not on warming mats.

* Although after first true leaves emerge I may do some side by side comparisons of 1-2-2 hydro development, on half of some trays, and a myco inoculation followed by liquid organics on some others.

TrentL · Mar 3, 2018

Special request... Anyone have any Pimenta de Neyde seeds they could send? I had a friend specifically request some PDN's from this years grow, he loves the damn things, and I just realized that of the 6 remaining seeds I had in my seed collection, all 6 went in to the test trays in January. They were part of the initial soil testing - and all 4 sprouts from the 6 seeds I'd saved from 2014 are now in those soil recycling bins....

I don't need them in bulk, just want a few I can grow out to supply an old soldier friend of mine who lives down in Georgia, with some good tasting pods, and one that I can grow in isolation to harvest some seeds from for future grows.

I'll happily pay shipping via paypal or whatever, or send you back a random sampling of leftover seeds from my collection, or publicly acknowledge you are the greatest human on the planet to assuage your sadistic ego, whatever floats your boat.

Walchit · Mar 3, 2018

I think I have some, I didn't realize they were an annuum x chinense or I would have added them to your package, if no one else has any I will send you some, it would have to be Monday though. Trying to finish this septic tank if I can find a load of gravel on Saturday

Chilidude · Mar 3, 2018

If you cant get those seeds in a more normal way:
https://www.semillas.de/shop_en/
This place have most of the chili varieties you could ever need, including those Pimenta de Neyde seeds.

TrentL · Mar 3, 2018

Man, up all night reading again.

For those that don't know my backstory, after a motorcycle crash in 2010 my day/night cycle randomly flips on me multiple times per year. I'm currently in a ... "transitional period" where I am awake for like 30 hours, and sleep for 8. It's annoying. Hoping to get back on a more normal schedule soon. I don't do pharmaceuticals of any sort, but alcohol can sometimes remedy this condition if sufficient quantities are consumed at the appropriate window of opportunity.

But I learned a lot about microbiology tonight. Or what little we actually KNOW about the subject.

Like how a single gram of soil can have billions of different bacteria in it.

Or that scientists have only really identified a very small fraction of that.

And that no one really knows which are "good" or "bad" for plants.

I was kicking around getting a microscope but now see how futile it is. It wouldn't tell me anything I can't already figure out by other observation methods. Smell, temperature, how plants are responding.

Oh well. That's 9 hours of my life I'll never get back.

It amazes me how little we know about this rock we're all walking around on.

Chilidude · Mar 3, 2018

Well most people still believe that we are alone in this universe or ghost do not exist. I have seen/heard so much shit in my own ears/eyes with multiple other people witnessing the same thing, that i simply had to start believing things that are way above "normal" levels.

I am still a sceptic when it comes to things that are not "normal" like ghost or spirits for most people and i first want to hear them myself or see something that is way above that level, before i start thinking maybe this is something else.

It is fine if you dont believe in ghost or aliens and i honestly would not care one bit if most people dont believe in them.

TrentL · Mar 3, 2018

Speaking of things that go bump in the middle of the night... I about jumped out of my skin tonight when I was alone in the basement, house quiet and dark, turned around and the oscillating fan moved.

In related news, cheap walmart oscillating fans stand up REMARKABLY well to being punched hard. It was still oscillating on the ground, like someone who'd had too much to drink trying fruitlessly to stand back up.

Oh well. At least this time it wasn't Dave. (Long story... poor Dave. He triggered my defense reflex once at a party and got dropped hard.)

In some regards we are like monkeys operating a microwave (to paraphrase the Expanse sci-fi line of books). We can understand things we can touch, measure, and quantify. But if something falls outside of those rules, we just don't get it. A monkey can push buttons on a microwave. He can open the door. He can even get food out of the refrigerator and put food in the microwave. But he's never going to reliably cook his own dinner.

There's tools and phenomenon in this world that are like that microwave, and we are like the monkey.

Like our sense of time. We know time changes "speed" in a gravity well; we have to calibrate our GPS satellites to run a little different clock rate than we have on earth, to compensate for it. Time doesn't pass at the same rate in orbit, as it does on the surface. But we still don't truly understand gravity. Or time. We can measure them. We can observe them. We can quantify them with calculations. But the fundamental force of it?

We're still monkeys touching buttons on a microwave.

Take nature as another example. Two decades ago I was big in to theoretical physics, the unexplained stuff. Like bifurcating nonlinear algorithms and fractal patterns. And how those patterns match some of the way nature works. The shape of leaves. The chaotic way things disburse and flow in hydrodynamics. How cells replicate and differentiate to form leaves. How no two snowflakes are ever truly the same.

The discovery I made, back then, was these chaotic algorithms - fractals, etc - are simply rounding errors in our 10 base math. Like how "Pi" is infinitely long. When you change the degree of precision on a microcomputer (say, rounding off at the 1000th digit instead of the 100th digit), the bifurcation of feedback in to these fractal nonlinear algorithms *change*. The conclusion is that the fractal patterns are occurring not because of some "chaos theory" but rather, rounding.

Simple as that. Poof. Chaos theory solved.

But it does us no good as a species.

My conclusion, although I can't prove it, and it's just a theory, is that we are fundamentally looking at things from the wrong direction. Everything we do functions around 10 base math (well, not everything, I just made the programmer inside myself squirm with that statement), but basically, we're a 10-base species.

Because we have 10 fingers.

And 10 toes.

And that makes sense to us, because for a very, very long time mankind has been counting things based on how many fingers and toes we have.

Anyway, we've trained ourselves to attack all mathematical problems (with very rare exception) with a form of math that works only on this 10 base scale.

At the atomic level, things don't work that way. You have some atoms working on a 3 base, some on a 98 base, some probably on a 22.4215(to infinity) base, and when those components interact with one another, they do so on their terms, using Natures Math. Rounding errors? There are none. Rounding errors in Nature are caught in an electron shell - latent energy reserved for the next "transaction" with whatever component that cell, molecule, enzyme, or atom happens to rub up against next. And what the electrons can't store because of their finite resolution, other subatomic particles likely keep track of.

But we can SEE these patterns in 10 base math due to rounding; rounding is what causes fractal patterns to bifurcate on nonlinear feedback algorithms.

No one understands it, really, and there's never been a serious study on it, as best I can tell, and no one would understand how to make use of it even if we DID manage to figure some of it out.

We don't understand it, and we *can't* fully understand it.

Because we're monkeys pushing buttons on a microwave.

Walchit · Mar 3, 2018

Growing up I always thought that scientists had already figured everything out, that lead to me not being very interested in expanding my knowledge. Idk I was probably just more worried about smoking some weed, speaking of that,works great if your needing a nap lol

Chilidude · Mar 3, 2018

TrentL said:
Because we're monkeys pushing buttons on a microwave.

Well said, even if most of the more technical mumbo jumbo things fly right above my head at my current stage of learning. :rolleyes:

TrentL · Mar 3, 2018

Walchit I'm sitting at the 20-something year mark on my career. I dropped out of school and went self-employed right away. Got headhunted by a Really Big Company to do lots of complex programming stuff. I went from homeless (literally), to a pretty decent 7 figure net worth, in 20 years.

If there's one piece of advice I could offer anyone, at any time, about anything in particular, the most important one is always going to be the same.

"Never stop learning."

I spend every waking hour I'm not eating, working, taking care of the kids, or banging my old lady, learning about stuff that I don't know anything about.

Oh, and sometimes I sleep. That's when the connections get made, on what I've been reading.

Doesn't matter what subject. I soak it all in and hope that it completes some other bit of information where I'm lacking.

Walchit · Mar 3, 2018

I wake up around 4:30 every morning, even if I stay up past my usual bedtime of around 10 lol. It seems like most people wake up a lot later than me even if we go to bed at the same time. So I hear ya on the weird sleep schedule. If it works for you, that's cool. But 30 on 8 off would not work for me lol

Chilidude · Mar 3, 2018

TrentL said:
"Never stop learning".

What the hell you think i am doing right now! :rofl:

Learning new thing of course all the time 24/7.

Walchit · Mar 3, 2018

"Never stop learning."

I spend every waking hour I'm not eating, working, taking care of the kids, or banging my old lady, learning about stuff that I don't know anything about.

Doesn't matter what subject. I soak it all in and hope that it completes some other bit of information where I'm lacking.

I'm not good with the quote feature, but that is exactly how I feel too(minus the 7 figure income, that would be nice)
I have spent a little too much time on conspiracy research if we are being honest, and banging the old lady never gets old lol

TrentL · Mar 3, 2018

Walchit said:
I wake up around 4:30 every morning, even if I stay up past my usual bedtime of around 10 lol. It seems like most people wake up a lot later than me even if we go to bed at the same time. So I hear ya on the weird sleep schedule. If it works for you, that's cool. But 30 on 8 off would not work for me lol

It don't work for me very long either.

The cycle is repetitive, and it sucks. At {insert some random day with no forewarning} I start getting absolutely dead tired about 10 hours after I last woke up; this usually works out to about 5-6 PM when I'm on a normal day night schedule. What happens then, is for a period of time I end up on a "two sleep" schedule, where I wake up at say, 8, fall asleep (forcefully, no choice) at around 6, sleep until 10 or 11, wake up, stay up until about 4-5, sleep until 8 again, then repeat.
That two-sleep phase lasts a week or so, sometimes two. It's not so bad, I can stay functional during that time.

But eventually, every time, the second sleep isn't triggered. Get 4 hours then can't fall back asleep later that night to save my life. So I'm up.

Usually I have to force myself to stay awake until after work, but after a few days go by 4 hours each night just isn't enough, and I end up crashing out about 9 or 10 AM.

Poof. Day / night cycle flips.

Suddenly I'm falling asleep at dawn, getting up mid afternoon-ish, and then awake until the next dawn.

Then that eventually fades in to a different version of 2 sleep, and back to normal days I go.

It's not predictable, it's not weather or light or season or temperature or humidity or diet or {insert hundreds of other things I've tried to link to it}.

Seems to just be a seratonin malfunction in my brain. Spent quite a bit of money on doctors who pretty much shrugged at the end of the tests and said "well, yeah, there's a problem but nothing we can do to fix it - BUT WE WILL SELL YOU SOME MEDICINE THAT MIGHT HELP!"

Screw that.

I'll just deal with it. I don't need your sleep regulating medicine which has a five page list of potential side effects including "sudden death" or "suicidal actions" in big bold letters.

So I re-structured my life so that I can work 3rds when I need to, 1sts when I need to, etc.

(ETA: the brain injury I suffered was a severe coup/contracoup injury - I was hit by another motorcycle while laying in the road in the back of the head, after I had crashed. The other rider swerved to miss my motorcycle and t-boned me instead. The other motorcycle was doing about 80mph at point of impact, and i was thrown 60 feet off the roadway. Cracked my helmet in three places and led to 9 months of anterograde amnesia. The back protector left horizontal bruise marks on my back that faded some months later. The helmet and back protector saved my life, but the frontal lobe of my brain took a bit of a beating in the process. Damage on high speed impacts is always worse on the opposite side of the brain from the point of impact due to fluid dynamics; brain fluid don't compress. So you take an impact on one side, brain presses up against that side, fluid flows to the other; then the brain bounces and the fluid "spikes" the brain tissue on the other side.)