2019 - The Farm

CDNmatt · Feb 18, 2019

My wife would not allow me to name and keep the spider around, we live in the middle of the bush and still freaks out when the smallest of ones pop out. Mind you we get some very large wolf spiders or dock spiders is what I call them kicking around, can be the size of your palm and literally jump at you which is kind of creepy.

I have an issue with a cat that has lived under our house off and on for the past 2 years...It is completely wild and thrives on its own hunting and foraging skills (my garbage cans) and toughs out the cold winters we have here. I just don't have the heart to shoot the bugger and it has evaded every attempt at trapping the thing we have tried.

Last year it dug up the garden a few times when the plants were first put in and for some reason chewed the tops off a bunch of bell pepper plants, even after that I still could not bring myself to shooting the bugger.

edit - Opps PT'd Trents thread ftw

Kennylay · Feb 18, 2019

Is there a vendor "Andy" is affiliated with? Is that @walchit from here or another fella? I noticed a lot of your stock was from there.

Walchit · Feb 18, 2019

I just sent him a bunch of seeds last year when he had some sort of mishap or something. Maybe one of these years I will be "vending"

PaulG · Feb 18, 2019

Kudos Matty!

Trent, I don't envy your 80 hour weeks coming up.
I feel like caring for 30-50 plants is a lot of work!

What was your job before you started the Farm?

TrentL · Feb 18, 2019

PaulG said:
Kudos Matty!

Trent, I don't envy your 80 hour weeks coming up.
I feel like caring for 30-50 plants is a lot of work!

What was your job before you started the Farm?

I had started and ran a small computer shop until getting headhunted in early 1998, for database programming. Then built large enterprise business software early in my career, for a Very Large Company that builds Big Green Tractors. I invented a RM COBOL / SQL Server data replication system which allow real-time bidirectional data usage of old COBOL business systems within Windows. Then using that as a foundation built financial reporting, sales management, inventory management, forecasting, service scheduling, and other software in windows, which communicated back to the old mainframe stuff that dealerships were still using on old system V and HP-UX OS's.

Late 2003, I went independent and started selling software direct to dealerships. Was doing pretty well, until I had the feet kicked out of me when they moved to a new business system, running powerbuilder on Sybase SQL with a firm out of Australia. By 2008 many dealers started converting to the new business system. The big company bought the source rights then promptly outsourced all development to India.

So I changed tracts and started building supercomputers. I spent a couple of years designing a new physical high performance computing architecture, then built three highly available clusters, one prototype, and the other two parked in datacenters. On those I started offering virtualized discreet colocation hosting for that new business system. I linked the datacenters with private fiber and we offer realtime replication of business data between sites for disaster recovery. Each dealership is physically and logically segregated on their own physical server nodes but able to use the larger infrastructure and scalability of the system, to take advantage of the real time data replication between datacenters.

Well the Very Big Company has decided they're changing tracts again and all of the dealerships will be eventually moving to MIcrosoft Navision 365, hosted at Microsoft. Which will end our discreet colocation hosting, and more than likely put my tech firm out of business in a few years.

Having no real leads on anything else, having had my feet kicked out from under me several times by the Big Corporation, and zero desire to start from scratch and go work for someone else, I figured I'd take a break from systems architecture and apply my mind towards something new.

TrentL · Feb 18, 2019

Kennylay said:
Is there a vendor "Andy" is affiliated with? Is that @walchit from here or another fella? I noticed a lot of your stock was from there.

Last year I had a couple mishaps; one, a bunch of seed I'd ordered from a vendor was sterile and wouldn't sprout at ALL (I suspect it was heated too high when dehydrating), and another vendor I got incredibly low germination %'s out of. Which left me very, very light on viable plants. Then the 300 or so that I did get in the first batch, I promptly killed while trying to develop an organic soilless potting mix. So I kind of threw out a "if anyone has spare seeds I could use them" post and over the next week had enough seeds show up to pretty much plant for two years at the farm. Unfortunately by that point it was getting pretty late to be planting chinense, and still have a crop, so I only dropped annuums in the dirt that folks had sent me.

So this year I'm getting back around to the longer-growing seeds I didn't get in the dirt last year, from those guys.

TrentL · Feb 18, 2019

Clock is ticking on these guys. I accidentally doubled fertilizer on them (screwed up when dividing the recipe to half scale mix), so they should not have much longer on this world.

There's already a strong odor of ammonia from the pots if I sniff them, the blood meal and kelp meal are "cooking off" like they did last year.

So I don't expect those plants to live much longer; the roots were destroyed during this process last year and the plants keeled over at roughly this point in time.

Interestingly enough, so far from these transplants 2/9, no ill effects. This soil was 99.7% fatal to plants last year, only one plant survived (the one that was topped recently).

But this year, after resting a year, that old soil looks to be doing real well, nice, healthy, rapidly growing plants.

The rate I was using which worked comes out to approx 23 lbs of dry fertilizer per cubic yard, although some of that dry fert is relatively benign (azomite, only adds trace nutes). If you knock out the azomite it comes out to 19lb of organic dry fert per cubic yard; still a relatively strong mix, with the major constituents being equal 4 parts rock phosphate, 2 parts blood meal, 1 part kelp meal. No K fertilizers added as coco coir is already heavy in K availability. The 4 part phosphate in the dry fert blend is very strong, meant to overcome coir's reluctance to allow phosphorous to become available to plants.

In the same catch 22 I was last year, not enough time to develop out a really good mix before I have to pot up in bulk.

There's such a lag time in the lethality of the mixes (2-3 weeks before plants keel over dead if a mix cooks off) that it takes a long time to figure out "hey, is this gonna work?"

TrentL · Feb 18, 2019

This little guy keeled over last night.

Mix B was substantially the same mix from last year, so this has me somewhat worried.

Not sure if I damaged its roots when transplanting, or if something else is going on.

Like the mix from last year I hit plants with a 50% diluted fish emulsion and myco right after transplant, to give them a little bit of available nutrients until the dry mix can supply some nutrients.

PaulG · Feb 18, 2019

Trent, can't you flush the over-fertilized plants
with plain water, and then start the fertilizing
over again?

Kennylay · Feb 18, 2019

Walchit said:
I just sent him a bunch of seeds last year when he had some sort of mishap or something. Maybe one of these years I will be "vending"

Ok thanks for clearing that up. And since I'm curious did you have a hand in the unreaper line? I have a few and was just wondering. Promise no more Andy questions

PaulG · Feb 18, 2019

It's okay, Andy's got nothing but time :rofl:

And he is very generous with it

TrentL · Feb 18, 2019

PaulG said:
Trent, can't you flush the over-fertilized plants
with plain water, and then start the fertilizing
over again?

Not in 4" pots when they are this small. They'd stay waterlogged way too long. I could re-pot them, but will just let them grow out (or die).

ETA: also this is dry fertilizer mixed in with the soil, not wet, don't think flushing them would help

Moved the soil test plants to the farm today.

Walchit · Feb 18, 2019

Kennylay said:
Ok thanks for clearing that up. And since I'm curious did you have a hand in the unreaper line? I have a few and was just wondering. Promise no more Andy questions

That's actually a different Andy. He's a member here too. 96Strat
Cool dude. I haven't developed anything. Andy's king boc is also 96Strat

If I do create a pepper it will be labeled "Bhuthead Andy's" B.A. for short lol

TrentL · Feb 19, 2019

Think some of the peppers at the farm croaked yesterday. Got a call early AM that my grandmother had a stroke, was up at the hospital most the day. Didn't get out to water them in time. I finally got out there to water them in the afternoon, had about 20 or so seedlings dried up and bent over. Dunno if they'll come back around or not. Sometimes they pop back up, sometimes they don't.

Wife watered the plants at home so crossing fingers those are OK..!

TrentL · Feb 20, 2019

Got another 135 potted up this morning, gotta take 'em out to the farm later, once the ice melts. We've got a layer of ice on everything outside, with 2" of snow on top of it. Very slick.

I have to average 275 pot-ups per day to make the mark by March 1st when I start seeding annuums (about 2200 chinense left to pot up)

Next month of work, is going to be a real chore. Nothing but pot-up, water, pot up, water more, pot up, seed more trays, pot up.. water... sigh

Walchit · Feb 20, 2019

Hope your grandma is doing alright Trent.

I potted up until I ran out of soil again lol.

I'm running out of room fast too.

TrentL · Feb 20, 2019

Walchit said:
Hope your grandma is doing alright Trent.

I potted up until I ran out of soil again lol.

I'm running out of room fast too.

Family is running shifts sitting with her up at Methodist, dunno if she's going to make it out of there. So someone will always be with her 24/7. She's in real bad shape, yesterday morning, she didn't know who anyone was. They've got a good stroke team up there, but there's only so much they can do.

I'm out of soil as well, once the ice melts I gotta go out to the farm and mix up another batch.

Got a spreadsheet with a lot of math on it for that too.

Can tweak the #'s w/ different fertilizer amounts, and figure out roughly what it costs per 2 cu ft "bag"

My cost for soil this year is looking to be about $6,000, give or take, depending on how these potting soil tests work out.

PaulG · Feb 21, 2019

TrentL said:
Think some of the peppers at the farm croaked yesterday. Got a call early AM that my grandmother had a stroke, was up at the hospital most the day. Didn't get out to water them in time. I finally got out there to water them in the afternoon, had about 20 or so seedlings dried up and bent over. Dunno if they'll come back around or not. Sometimes they pop back up, sometimes they don't.

Wife watered the plants at home so crossing fingers those are OK..!

Very sorry to hear about your Grandmother, Trent.
I hope she recovers. How old is she?

Good luck recovering the seedlings. I had a couple
of sprouts do that this season, and putting them in
a cooler spot under cool light brought them back.
I was amazed at their resiliency!

TrentL · Feb 21, 2019

PaulG said:
Very sorry to hear about your Grandmother, Trent.
I hope she recovers. How old is she?

Good luck recovering the seedlings. I had a couple
of sprouts do that this season, and putting them in
a cooler spot under cool light brought them back.
I was amazed at their resiliency!

Thanks Paul. She's 82.

I figured out FINALLY what was wrong with the seedlings. It took two years!!!!

Signs of incredibly bad phosphorous deficiency again this year, 3 days after I took them out there. But ONLY on the peppers I took to the farm; the control group from each mix at home is still fine.

So what could cause peppers to go phosphorous deficient in one physical location but not another?

Water.

And what does the farm have in ultra-abundance?

Iron. I had to run a couple of buckets through before I could even water them the first time out there because the water was BROWN. I mean, like you couldn't see the bottom of the bucket, brown.

Well, I ran it until it was clear, watered plants, and (something I normally don't do) I left a full bucket sitting on the floor overnight last night.

Today I noted severe phosphorous deficiency signs in about 80% of the plants.

And the bottom of that (yesterday was clear water) bucket? Brown with iron oxide precipitant.

Sooooo... I literally have killed my plants with iron. Iron was VERY high last year - but that was after the well was run for over a month, before I got lab tests. This well? It's sat all winter long without being run at all, so the entire casing is full of rust again.

Iron toxicity causes a total nutrient lockout of phosphorous, as well as other nutrients. Severe iron toxicity even damages plant DNA.

So that first group of 115 seedlings I took out, they're done. Cooked. FUBAR. Finished. El Finito. F'n Dead.

Some don't know it yet, but they will soon.

Last year I thought I effed up a fertilizer run and gave them too much calcium - no... I didn't. I'd killed the firs table off last year with the WELL WATER and I mis-identified what it was, because I didn't have a CONTROL group at home. This year I was smart enough to keep a sampling of each batch of plants at home for comparison.

Anyway, there you have it. The end of the story. What hit me so awfully bad early last year. I had over 300 seedlings die at the farm early on, entire table and a half, then after that, everything grew fine - well, that first batch got all of the rust, the rest were much cleaner water.

We installed a 5 micron filter at the farm today - restricts my water flow to 5 gpm, but should filter out the worst of the iron.

For a few weeks I'll fill buckets and let them "settle out" and top-water plants. Going to be a pain in the ass, but it should help prevent killing more.

PaulG · Feb 21, 2019

Good lesson on the desirability of having a
control to check against, Trent. At least
your loss isn't catastrophic, and you have
nailed down the cause of the problem.