2019 - The Farm

TrentL · Feb 23, 2019

sinensis said:
so awesome

manual mixing with a shovel on tarps sucks arse

You aren't kidding dude. My back didn't hurt after mixing up a cubic yard, which was most excellent. Last year took a heavy toll on my back.

Devv · Feb 23, 2019

I love the scientific approach here Trent!

Wishing you much success this season

TrentL · Feb 23, 2019

Devv said:
I love the scientific approach here Trent!

Wishing you much success this season

Thanks Scott!

There's so many studies and known-good soil-less mixes using sphagnum peat moss, but zilch when it comes to doing an organic potting soil blend.

Cracking this particular nut is more than a hobby at this point.

TrentL · Feb 23, 2019

Andy, I got 135 viable transplants out of tray 30. I could have transplanted a dozen or two more, but the roots on those weren't quite as well developed so didn't make the cut. Besides, 9x15 4" trays is all I can fit in the SUV in one shot.. so 135 it was.

Should get another 135 out of the other tray I started.

Gonna be a good year for Habaneros! There's another couple of trays of habs from other folks I've got going. At this rate I'll have a whole acre of the damn things.

TrentL · Feb 23, 2019

First 4 days were small batch hand-mixed soil tests.. 5th day and part of 6th day were using graveyard dirt form last year. I should get about 960 transplants out of each batch of the big mixer, got 120 out of the first 30 gal tub, and have 8 tubs mixed and ready to go.

Downside is I can only transport 135 at a shot out at the farm. I'm doing another 120 here (because I brought two tubs of soil home to do over the weekend).. Monday I start full time at the farm so I should be able to crank out 840 per 12 hour day. That'll empty the grow room out and I can start seeding the annuums

Ruid · Feb 23, 2019

Is the guy who bought the peppers you thought we're gonna go to waste on board for this year's crop too?

TrentL · Feb 23, 2019

Ruid said:
Is the guy who bought the peppers you thought we're gonna go to waste on board for this year's crop too?

He ended up never getting back in touch with me after saying he was gonna buy everything we got.

So, no, he's not.

TrentL · Feb 23, 2019

Was looking in to doing fresh produce shipments this year, on top of peppers.

http://www.polar-tech.com/index.htm

That place isn't too awful far away from me, I could pick up and save paying shipping for shipping materials

We have a dry ice factory close by, but only really need that for frozen stuff; frozen gel packs are better suited for shipping produce. I guess they're supposed to stay cold for a LONG time in an insulated box - like 6-7 days.. Kind of like shipping a mini-fridge.

I'm wondering if the price will work out better for shipping fresh peppers this year? Insulated package + gel packs + cheaper shipping, vs. paying premium for 2 day or 3 day shipping.

Ruid · Feb 23, 2019

TrentL said:
He ended up never getting back in touch with me after saying he was gonna buy everything we got.

So, no, he's not.

That sucks butt..

Walchit · Feb 24, 2019

That coir buster is seriously bad ass! I wish I lived close enough to just buy soil from you.

Nice work on the carribean reds! An acre of habs should be fun to pick, lol.

TrentL · Feb 24, 2019

Walchit said:
That coir buster is seriously bad ass! I wish I lived close enough to just buy soil from you.

Nice work on the carribean reds! An acre of habs should be fun to pick, lol.

Yeah the coir buster is pretty handy. We busted up 2+ cubic yards of soil in no time. It took longer to get the plastic wrap off the blocks than it did to bust them up!

The roots on those Caribbean reds were very well developed. Lots of forking, and the roots on those seedlings were 4"+ long when shaken out of their starter cells. That's pretty impressive for being only a month old. All they've had for fertilizer is a 50% drink of fish emulsion back on 2/10. They were already on their second set of full leaves at 26 days old.

I didn't have too much trouble de-tangling roots as I let the trays mostly dry out before transplanting. I tossed a LOT of viable plants - I was able to set the bar pretty high on transplants. If the roots weren't at least 3" long and branched well, or they didn't have their second set of leaves, they didn't make the cut. Even then I had 135 viable transplants out of a 72 cell starter tray.

I potted 120 of them in to 4" injection mold pots (the sturdier reusable ones) and I also potted up a tray of 15 in to the sheet-molded 4" pots (cheap black thin plastic like you see plants come in at greenhouses). Those sheet trays are designed for bulk-load of soil; instead of filling each individual pot you dump soil on top of the entire tray in a carrier and level it off. Makes for very fast filling. There's conveyor belt pot filling machines you can load those through which fill soil, knock off excess, and then drill your plug holes for you; but I'm not *quite* there on volume yet to justify such a contraption.

The excess plants will be taken to a charity market in Champaign-Urbana in May, the proceeds of the charity plant sale will go towards that local food cooperative and towards instruction of youth on growing plants.

TrentL · Feb 24, 2019

The calm before the storm.. all there is to do right now is transplant, and try to clear out the sprout room as quickly as possible before a flood of other plants.

Have room for 29 trays of annuums after factoring in the other stuff I have to start indoors.

Pepper-Guru · Feb 24, 2019

TrentL said:
Last year the big revelation was "kelp meal cooks off"

The soil which was 100% fatal to plants in 2018, that I'd saved in bins, is kicking ass and taking names this year.

Same goal this year as last year - try to find an organic potting soil mix based on coir which does NOT require additional fertilizers for 3 months.

Last year so much labor time was spent giving them metered doses of fish emulsion every 2 weeks, was a real pain in the ass. Can't keep that up as I scale this out further. If I have to provide supplemental fertilizer on a per-pot basis this year it will create about 40 man hours of work each week, with the volume of stuff we are starting in the high tunnels.

Absolutely. That's the name of the game really in containers...

I think if you split the difference, or just shy of the difference that you'll make things just hot enough for them to set out for a month or so, while things are still indoors, by the time you're ready to plant out it would be just right. I'm certain you can get that years time wayyyy down without killing plants as soon as they go in.

I do find it interesting you consider peat based mixes non organic yet you refer to coir as an organic potting mix base.

I love using kelp meal and doing ferments with it for soil drenching. Creating a coir or peat based container mix that you can add enough amendments to, that will keep you from needing to individually tend to them for three months is very achievable. The smaller the container, the less time you give yourself though. The larger the container, the greater lengths of time can go by without adding nutrients.

One thing I will recommend if you're serious about not having to constantly fertilize and gain back some time and energy on the scale you're at, definitely get into probiotic farming. The more humic and lactic acid/bacteria you have on hand living in the soil root zone, the less nutrients you need present in the soil. Lots of guys I know (myself included) are having amazing results with covered SIP boxes and bokashi teks to inoculate their medium which is resulting in using less than 1/3 the traditional nutrient requirements throughout the season.

I generally like to keep a few barrels of stuff going at all times to pull from and get a wide range of microbes for soil drenches. Mykos and all that is great, but it has never created that mycelial mat like you would see lifting back the cover on a bokashi/grokashi sip earthbox. It incredible. I don't use the sip boxes but I take all the korean natural farming practices and sort of jam them all together for my soil drenches. It has made all the difference for us. Now when I think about "fertilizing", I just kind of chuckle while remaining humble and grateful.

This will video will get you thinking, visualizing (disregard crop, its all applicable) Also, that true microbial environment will be better equipped to deliver and buffer a very hot mix to your plants in a safe and effective manner.

Scale up for larger ops and you can also experiment with other inputs

TrentL said:
700 bucks each (1 ton)

Works out to 35 cents a pound, which is a lot less than the $1+ you'll pay getting 30 lb bags.

Downside is. you gotta get 2 tons to get that price break.. Lucky for me the projected requirement of it this year is 2.15 tons so I might run a little short?

Great prices.

TrentL said:
He ended up never getting back in touch with me after saying he was gonna buy everything we got.

So, no, he's not.

Deposits deposits deposits

TrentL · Feb 25, 2019

Pepper-Guru said:
Absolutely. That's the name of the game really in containers...

I think if you split the difference, or just shy of the difference that you'll make things just hot enough for them to set out for a month or so, while things are still indoors, by the time you're ready to plant out it would be just right. I'm certain you can get that years time wayyyy down without killing plants as soon as they go in.

I need to figure out optimal rest time with the soil.

I do find it interesting you consider peat based mixes non organic yet you refer to coir as an organic potting mix base.

Peat is organic, according to NOP guidelines; just not what I'd consider environmentally friendly or sustainable. When they drain the bogs they basically wipe out all animal, insect, and microbial life in those peat bogs. They try to re-introduce it afterwards but it's never the same.

Meanwhile coconuts, they come back year after year, and the hulls would otherwise be wasted if they weren't turned in to something else.

I love using kelp meal and doing ferments with it for soil drenching. Creating a coir or peat based container mix that you can add enough amendments to, that will keep you from needing to individually tend to them for three months is very achievable. The smaller the container, the less time you give yourself though. The larger the container, the greater lengths of time can go by without adding nutrients.

Kelp meal will cook off in soil, large container, or small. The big bins I had of soilless mix last year (30 gal containers) hit 120F+, a week or so after mixing, and adding myco. The rate at which things are growing in the year old soil vs. the freshly mixed soil is .. well, staggering.

These are fatal mixes this year;

Roots die, plants shrivel and die. It's looking to be 100% fatal, although time will tell, I'm not pulling plants until they are crispy critters. Last year I pulled them when they looked about like this and ended up with "miracle survivor" (the one I just lopped in half and grew back out again a year later)

This is LAST year's dirt (pot I'm holding) vs. test mixes (left, which will be fatal), and the new "batch mix G" (right)

MAN I wish I had about 30 more cubic yards of last year's dirt that had rested for a year. Those things are growing like crazy!

Here's a couple pics of the iron issue.. We added a filtration system to the farm to stop this. Last year I was scratching my head over why the first group of plants I brought out turned purple from P deficiency and lagged behind everything else; this year, I finally realized why.. iron oxide had built up in the well casing over the winter. The first few 5 gal buckets I ran this year, you couldn't even see the bottom. I ran a few more until it looked like the water was running clear, and used it. 2 days later this crap started showing up (and buckets left to sit overnight had brown bottoms the next morning from iron settling out):

Last year when it happened I thought I'd overdosed them on bone meal or something, but it also happened to the hydroponic control grow, so I was scratching my head. This year, I finally figured it out. We flushed the well, ran at least 500 gallons out of it, added a 5 micron filter, and all of the plants I've taken out since have been doing just fine.

But those first 160 or so.. they're in for a rough time.

TrentL · Feb 25, 2019

Last year these pics were taken the same day. Table 5 was the first of the plants to come out to the farm. You can see where I"ve been removing dead plants, and there is very little growth. A few plants had missed the worst of it, apparently, but by and large, this table looks horrible. They got the worst of the early-iron dose, as the well had sat idle for .. ohh, 10 years or so before I used it to water these?

Meanwhile these plants were potted up and brought out two weeks AFTER the plants on that table. The seedlings are the same age; this second pic were potted up AFTER the first pic and brought out after the well had been running for a couple weeks.

The iron stunting thing is horrible.

A month after we moved plants out there I got a well test done for the organic certification, iron was still 4.6 mg/L. So elevated, but not dangerously so. 50 mg/L will stunt growth by 80% or so. I'm sure those earliest plants got a dose far bigger than that.

TrentL · Feb 25, 2019

Also as far as remediation of the plants that are currently in growing pains over iron, plan is to continue watering with the 7.78 pH well water (filtered).

Iron is much less available with higher pH, while other nutrients remain more or less OK (not optimal, but still available)

Last year we were knocking pH down to 6.0 which certainly didn't help the iron issue, it took FOREVER for those plants to pull through.

So plants that are affected will continue to get 7.78 ph water straight from the well for a while, while other plants will get the more optimal 6.0-6.2 pH

TrentL · Feb 25, 2019

Final count of trays 1-8

To the "duh" incident early on (lights on too strong, too close, turned the T5's on full blast and cooked 8 trays), the final count is 189 transplants lost vs. cells seeded (they were double seeded, so technically I lost 253 to heat). I transplanted every viable seedling, some cells on the edge had 2x good ones, very very few in the middle of the trays. Final count of transplants was 302.

Of those 302, 166 participated in early lethal soil tests, so that knocked me down to 136.

Of those, 100% are in nutrient lock from iron toxicity. My experience last year, was about 50% fatalities of plants so stricken.

So outlook is grim on the first 8 trays.

I re-seeded last year, after similar experience, and had viable transplants in may on seeds I started 2/23, so I'm going to go ahead and start additional trays. A little late, perhaps, but right now I won't have reapers, moruga/reapers, MOA scotch bonnets, or big sun habanero, if I don't restart them.

sinensis · Feb 25, 2019

can you just flush the crap out of your stunted seedlings with slightly acidic water and then add nutes?

TrentL · Feb 25, 2019

Trays 9 and 10, which were mainly 2012 seeds, I had 25 transplants and 7 transplants, respectively. The 25 transplants from tray 9 were 2018 seeds which were dropped in to 12 cells as a control. The 7 transplants from tray 10 were 2018 seeds which were in 6 cells, as a control.

Trays 11 and 12 were complete losses, all 2012 seeds, pitched at 15 days with no sprouts.

Tray 13, mixed stuff from WHP, has had 66 transplants. I still have 18 cells left to transplant (elisium oxide scotch bonnet, and devils nagabrains red) so that number should still go up.

Tray 14 has had 94 transplants from 66 cells, with 6 which are too small to transplant, remaining (devils nagabrains chocolate, sprout time was over 25 days on those).

Tray 23 has had 128 transplants from 48 cells, with bhut jolokia chocolate remaining. Had bad germination rates on those, only 9 transplants pending out of 24 cells seeded 4x each.

Still easily on track for 3200 transplants. Later I'll have to be more selective with how many I'm transplanting. I've been splitting multiples in cells, later I'll have to start culling. Right now I'm (overall) -12 transplants vs. seeded cells processed. But the trays in the pipeline are heavily loaded with 3-4 transplants per cell, and if I keep splitting them, I'll end up with 2x as many transplants as I have room for.

TrentL · Feb 25, 2019

sinensis said:
can you just flush the crap out of your stunted seedlings with slightly acidic water and then add nutes?

No, it's tiny particles of iron, no way I'll get it out, they'll be stuck in the media. If I try, I'll waterlog the plants so badly they'll go nutrient deficient, mildew, and die.

Also Iron toxicity damages plant DNA and ruptures cells, so "the damage is already done", for the most part.

All "purple" growth will eventually fall off. Only new leaves (which may or may not grow at this point) will be healthy. Last year it set the affected plants back by about a month or more. It takes a lot of time for new true leaves to grow out and eventually the purple tinged ones will drop off; that tissue is damaged to the point the plant can't repair it.