2019 - The Farm

TrentL · Jan 16, 2019

tsurrie said:
Still not enough huh ?
Impressive list/lists. Will be following as usual as everything is always interesting and very inspiring when it comes to your grow.

Good luck with everything this season.

Thanks! Good luck for you too!

I'm looking forward to taste testing stuff. I've never even heard of half of these let alone tasted them before.

I grew 50 types one year (back in 2012 I think?, had about 300 plants) and it was a lot of work. But I was doing it in the evenings / weekends on top of a day job. Now I'm more or less part time at the day job, and can put a lot of time in to the grow.

To be fair once they are in the dirt there's not a lot to do except (occasionally) crank a valve open to give them water. I had some plants fall over last year, tried to get the all stood up again with posts / hemp rope, but they inevitably fell back down again, didn't seem to hurt production much.

Since the bulk of these types are going in to pots, and fed with drip emitters, I'll have to build a fertilizer injector manifold. The soil mix I developed only stands on it's own for about 6-8 weeks before plants go N deficient in a bad way, so I'll have to feed 'em fish hydrolysate and screened rock dust..

Hardest part of the isolation grow is going to be managing plant spacing, though. I'll have to prune them down, if they get too big. But definitely not going to top them - don't want the bushing out too much.

DWB · Jan 16, 2019

TrentL said:
Still, I've seen #15 potted chinense eat up a 6' diameter before.

My 4 year old TS Cardi in 15 gallon tree pots were over 7' tall this year.

TrentL · Jan 16, 2019

DWB said:
My 4 year old TS Cardi in 15 gallon tree pots were over 7' tall this year.

I've got 450 #15 pots. Bought them last year for the isolation grow, didn't get it rolling like I wanted. Things cost me $1800, GONNA USE THEM THIS YEAR lol

I also have 200x 3-gallon pots on hand, although those aren't going to be purposed to outdoor peppers this year. (Peppers will grow in them but you'll be lucky if they get more than 1.5' tall, and a half dozen pods)

Those 3 gal pots will probably be used as staging pots for indoor use on specific crosses. I can hold peppers in them for quite some time (indefinite), at a smallish manageable size. They'll let peppers get big enough to produce a few pods, nothing much, but if you're trying to get through several generations a year they'd work?

PaulG · Jan 17, 2019

TrentL said:
Those 3 gal pots will probably be used as staging pots for indoor use on specific crosses. I can hold peppers in them for quite some time (indefinite), at a smallish manageable size. They'll let peppers get big enough to produce a few pods, nothing much, but if you're trying to get through several generations a year they'd work?

I'm considering trying to isolate a few plants in #3 nursery pots,
keeping them pruned and small enough to isolate with a 5-gallon
paint strainer or at least some branches with the reusable drawstring
bags I get at the veggie section of the supermarket.

I think your idea of keeping small enough for a few seed pods,
then, pod-to-pot, so to speak, could yield two generations. Not
sure how you would hurry up the germination to ripe-pod time,
especially for the really long season varieties. What do you think?

I agree about the 3-gallon plants. You can grow a respectable
plant in one and they are very manageable.

Good luck with your crossing projects.

TrentL · Jan 17, 2019

Getting ready for a snowy weekend.

That's CBD hemp, Lifter strain. No THC, doesn't get you stoned, but sure helps my joint pain!

Not that we don't already HAVE enough snow on the ground, got 14" last weekend.

Had go park in the road and hoof it in.

Got some coco busted up, machine works pretty good. Sucked though, I forgot to bring in my hoses and they're all buried outside under waist high snow drifts, so I had to lug 5 gal buckets of water up a ladder to dump in to the coir buster.

Got enough done to start the chinese and pubes.

Rats got in to my grass seed! Smart suckers, they pushed the bin off of a lower shelf and opened the lid.

Clearly they've been at it a while. We put out some big traps to deal w/ them.

Most of the seeds showed up. Some were backordered, but no rush on 'em.

That's it for today, gotta go haul that coco down to the basement... back hurts.

TrentL · Jan 17, 2019

PaulG said:
I'm considering trying to isolate a few plants in #3 nursery pots,
keeping them pruned and small enough to isolate with a 5-gallon
paint strainer or at least some branches with the reusable drawstring
bags I get at the veggie section of the supermarket.

I think your idea of keeping small enough for a few seed pods,
then, pod-to-pot, so to speak, could yield two generations. Not
sure how you would hurry up the germination to ripe-pod time,
especially for the really long season varieties. What do you think?

I agree about the 3-gallon plants. You can grow a respectable
plant in one and they are very manageable.

Good luck with your crossing projects.

You can hurry them by running lights 24x7. Switch to bloom lights when they get flower buds. I ran lights 24x7 for 4 straight months last year, had no ill effect on the plants, they grew nice and pretty, dense, bushy. Can't really hurry maturity, although annuums will get flowers within 2 months so those you could (in theory) do 3 generations a year (2 mos to bloom, 1 to produce). Chinense, no way, it'll take 8 months to get good pods off most varieties so best you could do is 1.5-2 generations a year (3 generations / 2 years w/ 8 month maturity, or 2 generations a year w/ 6 mo maturity). Chinense are a lot wider range on how long for pods; stuff like reapers, etc just takes forever and there's really no way to hurry them.

Annuums would be much, much faster.

#3 nursery pots, you'll get 5-6 pods off most types - I grew 70 types in #3 containers last year and by and large all the chinense put out a half dozen pods at best. Some annuums were pretty loaded though. We had one bushy little chili plant that was just gorgeous, could have sold it as an ornamental. Thing had 100+ little pods off of it! Although, one thing to mention, I wasn't very good about feeding those #3's. Kept getting busy with other stuff. So they were pretty runty things. If you fed them good? Hell you could probably get nice bushy 3' wide/tall plants off of them with dozens of pods.

I grew cloth bagged 5 gallon plants outdoors about 6 years ago and THOSE did really spectacular. You could get a good pick off of those.

If you were closer I'd toss you some #3's, I'm not going to use all 200 I have this year. Probably going to dump herbs in them and sell them at market?

Ethansm · Jan 17, 2019

Looking forward to following this glog, sounds like a hell of a grow list.

internationalfish · Jan 17, 2019

TrentL said:
You can hurry them by running lights 24x7. Switch to bloom lights when they get flower buds. I ran lights 24x7 for 4 straight months last year, had no ill effect on the plants, they grew nice and pretty, dense, bushy.

For some reason that hadn't occurred to me. Will probably plan on doing this to fail faster with my hybrids.

PaulG · Jan 17, 2019

Thanks for your thoughts on the 'forcing' issue, Trent.

I have three c. chinense in #3s (PdN x BMJ) this
season, so we'll get a look!

TrentL · Jan 17, 2019

internationalfish said:
For some reason that hadn't occurred to me. Will probably plan on doing this to fail faster with my hybrids.

That was after 2 1/2 months under 50,000 lumen 8 bulb T4's 24x7

TrentL · Jan 17, 2019

Only reason I left the lights on the whole time was I was too cheap to buy 48 timers and too lazy to drive out to the farm twice a day to turn 'em on and off.

TrentL · Jan 17, 2019

Also, in early April I *did* start shutting the lights out at night because I needed to control temperatures in doors. It was getting 90+ in the loft at the farm where I have them set up, and the plants were starting to get some problems.

That, and it started f'n raining indoors.

TrentL · Jan 17, 2019

Forgot to mention in the OP, but one of the more interesting (passive) experiments will be on germination rates for old seed. Since I'm going "all in" for seed production, every type of seed I've ever laid my hands on is going in the dirt. Some of the seeds I'll be putting in the dirt are *8* years old now, and have spent nearly a decade lost in the back of a kitchen cabinet. I'm not overly optimistic about their viability, but... "we will see"!

PaulG · Jan 18, 2019

I've started a few 'teenaged' seeds this season.
Not very old, but back to 2013. Any tricks for
spurring the old-timers into action?

TrentL · Jan 18, 2019

tsurrie said:
Still not enough huh ?
Impressive list/lists. Will be following as usual as everything is always interesting and very inspiring when it comes to your grow.

Good luck with everything this season.

Thanks! I'm sure I'll have some setbacks this year, but got a much better plan going in to this year!

TrentL · Jan 18, 2019

PaulG said:
I've started a few 'teenaged' seeds this season.
Not very old, but back to 2013. Any tricks for
spurring the old-timers into action?

I'm not doing anything special, gonna treat them like any other. I *might* let some sit in H2O2 for a bit before I plant them, just because the seeds I saved from 2010, were from a garden that later developed septoria (thanks to Wally world tomatoes). I don't know how long that can stay dormant on seeds (or if it's seedborne at all).

All of the seeds I shipped out were 2018 open pollinated harvest at the farm. No major pathogens to speak of. There was a bit of late blight that tried to take, I culled those plants and it didn't spread beyond the initial MOA scotch bonnet, and the adjacent plants around that one on the east side of the field. Notice I don't have ANY numex seeds listed? Those all got torched, too. We ripped that entire patch up and piled them up to burn. They developed bacterial leaf spot late in the season.

When you are growing on this scale daily field walks to check for pathogens are a MUST. If you miss an outbreak early it will spread like wildfire. We'd quit harvesting NuMex in early Sept due to non-existant sales and I didn't keep as close of an eye on those, so an unnoticed leaf spot got out of control on them.

TrentL · Jan 18, 2019

Playing with some 3d printed brackets.

At my tech firm I have a basement storeroom full of old servers, the guys at work harvested a bunch of fans from old chassis today for me. I'll build a power supply and wire them in to a simple analog circuit w/ a calibrated thermistor. These will go on brackets on the sides of each grow shelf - when thermistor reaches a set value it'll start ramping fans up. The hotter it gets the more air they'll move.

Figure since I'm "going vertical" this year with shelves and lights I might as well get airflow figured out sooner than later, don't want to cook the little dudes.

PaulG · Jan 18, 2019

Like I say, always astounded by what I see here :shocked:

You are going to rock this season, buddy!

TrentL · Jan 18, 2019

Oh my, in for a long snowy weekend.

My seeds from Justin showed up today AND I got 4 big ass boxes of trays and flats and pots in from Greenhouse Megastore.

Now have 114 72-cell starter trays on hand (started w/ 100 72-cell last year, used 86). I also bought 100x 36-cell deep inserts for doing melon, cucumber, and other sprouts.

Also got a case of 4" form molded pots for the "intended to sell as live plant" batch. Don't want to give up my expensive pots that I use for my own crop at market. Big frigging difference in price between the heavy duty injection molded 4" pots I use, and the flimsy form molded ones.

So now all I gotta do is haul my 4wd over to the lumber yard tomorrow to pick up wood to build the shelves, and we're off to the races.

I'm going to start a few trays tonight, or until I get tired of it anwyay (doing trays with a bunch of different types is painstakingly slow, w/ the cell sheet you gotta build, all the different packets to open, etc)

Some of my older varieties I only have like 3-4 seeds of for each, so those will all go in to one cell together. Which means I may end up having 72 types per tray for a few trays. Last year, those "misc" trays took me about 2 hours each to prep.

TrentL · Jan 19, 2019

2 trays of MOA and 2 trays of Big Sun seeded today. We're growing those two in volume in the field. Might do some more after dinner.