Slade122's 2014 Greenhouse GLOG

juanitos · Jun 16, 2015

looking good

slade122 · Jul 1, 2015

Thanks Juanitos, I've been liking the coco so far. These things are definitely keeping me busy.

It's been a while since I last posted. Been pulling quite a number of 12-15 hour days. Then going out in the yard and taking care of things like watering and fertilizing. Mowing the lawn after 10PM gets pretty hard, probably makes my neighbors unhappy too, but what can you do when that's the only time you have. Money has been tight with having to re-do the upper portion of the fireplace, as well as having a water heater fail.

Needless today, I'm also in the process of applying for a couple of new jobs, aiming at double or more pay. Selling my soul for what I'm paid now just isn't worth it.

I didn't even take pictures of my last haul of 326 pods weighing 5lbs 14oz. Just scribbled it on a sticky and stuck it to my monitor, and processed them all as quickly as possible. I made a lot of salsa. A hell of a lot of salsa, using around 100 chile de arbol, 2 ghosts, a white naga, and a scorpion. My friends debate whether or not it's hot sauce, but with a lot of tomato. I've pickled up a number of big jars of peppers. Made another 2 of the previously pictured bottles of hot sauce with some minor tweaks to the recipe - still perfecting that yellow sauce. Chopped and ground up a bunch to add to those bags that were pictured before too.

Some Choco Ghosts compared to a frozen ghost from Baker Creek.
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I also made about 7lbs of pulled pork over the weekend. We had 7 friends over at our place for 3-4 days, making our household have a total of 9. I made my second batch ever of BBQ Sauce with the choco ghosts as pictured above. Had a nice kick to it.
Here's my pulled pork, with a bunch of bark on the top.

I've been hitting the plants hard with nitrogen, as well as a veganic rooting booster to help them fill out those 5 gallon pots. It seems to have prevented them from flowering, but I'm getting huge amounts of vegetative growth. I'll hammer them with a high PK fertilizer shortly, and should see epic quantities this next round.

The chineses are really picking up now. The heat has been good, and only the occasional thunderstorm. Still an odd year, temps are only in the upper 90's.

Anyways, I'm taking this weekend off for some R&R, and hope to upload some great pics of pods and the mini-farm, as well as finally finishing my last 20 or so pot-ups. Also trying to finalize some wedding stuff, as well as getting back in to shape and losing a bit of weight.

I'll be smoking a ton of various kinds of meat for our company BBQ tomorrow, as well as manning the grill. Should be a much better day at work than it has been.

slade122 · Jul 6, 2015

Did much work over the weekend, especially around the yard. Finally got everything tamed, trimmed branches hitting the shingles on the house, cleaned up all of the edges.

As promised, some pics of the plants. Hit them hard with some higher PK, should see a good amount of flowers popping up soon.

2lb 5 and 3/8 oz of peppers picked over the weekend (bowl weighed in at 6 1/4oz)

All spread out and sorted for processing.

Red and Yellow sauces. The red one is Moshi, mulato isleno, ghosts, scorpions, chile de arbol, thai, and large cayenne. Packs a hell of a lot of heat, lots of vinegar and garlic. The yellow one is scotch bonnet, bahamian goat, habanero, datil, and aji limon. Really love the flavor of that one. A good part of the house just turns in to toxic air, with coughing, burning eyes, etc. My fiancee invested in some masks to cover the mouth/nose while I'm making them. I'll be waiting for the day when she just instinctively puts it on when coming in to the kitchen :drooling:

Now for some pepper shots.

Bahamian Goat

Scorpion Moruga

Baker's Creek Ghost. Seems milder than other ghosts I've had. Still packs plenty of heat, but not quite as much as I would expect. The same goes for the Scorpions from Baker's Creek. Probably won't plant them again, and find another source. Probably Pepperlover.

Scorpion from Baker's Creek, once again, mild, and smooth skinned. Very dissapointed. This one is smoother than most, many of them even have points at the bottom, and generally just weird.

Moshi's coming out of everywhere.

tsurrie · Jul 6, 2015

Nice bowl of picked peppers man, and the sauces are looking fine. What else did you use for the yellow one? Any particular spices maybe?
That pepper area behind your house is awesome.

slade122 · Jul 7, 2015

Thank you, very much appreciated!

Honestly, the majority of the flavor that comes out of the yellow one is from the mix of peppers used. One would not expect for it to be sweet, fruity, and slightly floral tasting without the addition of any sugar or fruit, but it continues to amaze me how well it works. I made use of rice vinegar, and just enough garlic to balance out the acidic taste of the vinegar without ruining the sweet fruity flavors.

I have a raised bed with some plants in it too, but have been too embarrassed to post up pics. It was a weedy mess until this past weekend, finally got it cleaned up, and the plants are decently sized now.

Anyways, thought I'd throw up a pic of my epic white naga. Should be very close to done, hard to be patient with the white varieties.

I think most of the plants have almost filled out their 5 gallon pots. That was pretty quick. The coco coir isn't shifting around nearly as much. It's time to get a fertigated dripper system put in, I've been saving cash for it for a little while now.

slade122 · Jul 22, 2015

Pretty much the regular biz... but most plants are in heavy re-flower.

I'm testing coco + organics to see if that works out for me. I'll give it a month transition between fox farm synthecics and organics with a number of amendments from roots organics where I'm using both to give the organics time to break down.

Some pics of my hydro after a few months.

I took a break and went fishing for Alaska in a week. Went from 10% to 100% full in the garage freezer.

Nice fillets by the lodge. Salmon and halibut and yellow eye.

Some random salmon and halibut my fiance and I cought.

A Scorpion right, some moruga Scorpions left, and a big white naga in the middle.

Rairdog · Jul 22, 2015

Very jelly of the freezer stock! Looking forward to some pepper smoked salmon and grilled halibut pics.

slade122 · Jul 28, 2015

Rairdog said:
Very jelly of the freezer stock! Looking forward to some pepper smoked salmon and grilled halibut pics.

Yeah I could not believe it either when I was packing up the freezer. Very fortunate. I've been eating it a couple times a week, waiting to post up a killer dinner until it comes out absolutely perfect. Anyways, I did a small 11.5oz harvest this past weekend. 202 pods.

****EDIT: Man, I don't know what happened to this post when posting from my phone. I saved the text and re-loaded the picture links so you can actually read it like the rest of my posts.****

Sorted and half way through getting pods ready to smoke and turn in to powder

My first powder, Chile de Arbol, Thai, and Piquin "B"

A couple of angles of the plants, first the normal angle.

Back side

Chinese side

Random pod pics - Bishops hat

Ghosts getting close again

Arroz con pollo loaded down

More normal white naga

Thai anyone?

Camera fail, but looks cool

Habs at work

Blister · Jul 29, 2015

Looking good! I've never tried organics with coco. I've read about them, but up to this point I've really only trying to dial in coco with regular nutes. Seen to be having decent success rate at it too.

Neil

slade122 · Aug 3, 2015

Blister said:
Looking good! I've never tried organics with coco. I've read about them, but up to this point I've really only trying to dial in coco with regular nutes. Seen to be having decent success rate at it too.

Neil

Thanks Neil. Organics with coco is supposed to be possible from what I've read. Coco seems to be a great medium, I've really been liking what it has been doing for my plants. I really like the structure that it creates with all of the fiber in it. Calcium can be a bit of a challenge, but I just supplement it often.

Picked a small haul of pods over the weekend. 253 pods weighing in at 1lb 2 5/8 oz.

Spread and sorted

I made some hot sauce. Made a really, really hot orange colored one with a ton of ghosts, a few scorpions,Tobasco, and a few other varieties. Played with my yellow sauce that I'm still tweaking. Added some lemon. I think a touch of orange juice would really make it pop, but.... have to wait until I get more yellow and orange peppers!

Blister · Aug 3, 2015

I really like the structure it gives for the root zone too. Perfect drainage and great water retention all at the same time.

Your plants and sauce look great.

Neil

slade122 · Sep 8, 2015

Sorry guys, been a while since my last post. Life has been busy indeed.

3lbs 6 and 7/8oz - 412 pods

Another harvest, but don't have the count or weight. was quite a few though

There was another big harvest in there, but I realized after I processed them that there was no memory card in the camera :shh:

I've made oodles and oodles of hot sauce, (have around 20 bottles that I havn't eaten yet) more and more smoked powder, plus just chopping some up with a blender and bagging for later use and stored in freezer.

Some current shots of my monsters, taken today. They keep getting bigger, and I don't understand how or why. Many have capped off in terms of max height though. I ultimately ended up going back to fox farm this week, but with the addition of PK 13/14 to boost my P and K. The amount of flowers is ridiculous. I mean, those things are on every inch of the plants. I'm a happy camper about that. I'm guessing that it will be my biggest pod set of the year so far.

Jumping ship to organics just didn't work out for me, plus since I plan to be gone for 2 weeks, a liquid solution is going to be best for the future (more on that later).

My drip irrigation parts should be here tomorrow (9/9/15). It's like waiting for Christmas as a kid, never comes soon enough. Anyways, there will be enough parts to irrigate EVERYTHING.

At the end of the week, I'm planning to order a fertilizer injector too, a Mixrite 571CW, capable to injecting from .3% to 2% by volume. It took me a few days to figure out the calculations, but I finally got it all figured out, along with a cost analysis included. :party:

I ended up going with a really good injector, because it is the only way to make it work the way I want. A large tank won't really work when you're dispensing 75 gallons every day or so, even if it is 300 gallons, it will be dry in a couple of days. A greenhouse style injector allows me quite a bit more versatility, without needing more than a small tank to hold concentrated fertilizer solution.

But the point is, now I will be able to feed small amounts of fertilizer every time they need to be watered, rather than a water-feed-water-feed schedule. However, if I do need to only water, the mixrite has a bypass switch. :dance:

Anyways, If you would like to see my calculations, a link to my spreadsheet is below. Anything in green can be modified to totally change out the characteristics and feed aspects. Anything in yellow I deem as "important info"

Link to my Fertilization Calculator!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxtcSBvq5uejN3RobnlnTzZfM0k/view?usp=sharing

All of that is basically setting up for next year, as I plan to run my own customer fertilizer mix, and buy dry bulk ingredients. Fox Farm is too expensive, as the chart clearly shows...

Blister said:
I really like the structure it gives for the root zone too. Perfect drainage and great water retention all at the same time.

Your plants and sauce look great.

Neil

Thanks for the response, I keep on trucking! Big fan of coco over here too.

juanitos · Sep 10, 2015

slade122 said:
Sorry guys, been a while since my last post. Life has been busy indeed.

just be careful mixing the Calcium with the other ferts at superconcentrate. it can cause precipitation.

see U of arizona video here

slade122 · Sep 10, 2015

juanitos said:
just be careful mixing the Calcium with the other ferts at superconcentrate. it can cause precipitation.

see U of arizona video here

Thanks for that tip. I've actually got an injector board designed (using that particular video) that will ultimately employ a 4-injector system like the the one in used by U of A. one for grow, one for blooom, one for Calcium, and one to lower PH (Acidifier).

I wanted to test with a single injector first though, as I'll be mixing around 90% water to 10% fertilizer by volume, and injecting at around 1%. I could dillute the solution even further and inject at 2%. The relative amount of calcium *Shouldn't* be enough to precipitate, but that's why I'm doing a test run first.

Without Further Ado, here is my super-high tech engineering drawing. Hopefullly you can translate my scribbles, but basically, it's every part in order and how it will be assembled.

For scale, this thing will probably be around 6' x 6' or thereabouts. All parts and plumbing are 3/4" and the system will be able to flow about 600GPH (3x what I need right now). Everything will be mounted slightly off the board on small squares of wood 2x4. Conduit straps will be used to hold everything to the backboard. I'll build a small hut out of 2x4's and greenhouse siding to cover it all and protect from moisture.

Water input starts at the far right bottom, and connects to a brass garden hose connector (GHC), then flows vertically in a pipe until it goes perpendicular. At which point, it will connect to a valve, backflow preventer, pressure gauge, pressure regulator, and preliminary filter on that top row.

Next, the water flows down and around to form a middle row, which will be the injector row. I'll build in enough room to (ultimately) put up to 4 injectors (1 high N, 1 High P/K, 1 Cal/Mg, 1 Acidifier), but for now, I just plan to use a single injector, so that middle row will look pretty empty.

Finally, it will flow down and around to the bottom row, at which point it will hit a secondary filter (to mix and filter the newly formed solution from the injector), a Tee Filter (with pressure gauge to measure final pressure output), a valve for shutoff, and then turn downward and connect to a tubing connector which will head out to the drippers and sprinklers.

In the future I'd like to add real-time PPM/EC/TDS metering, some powered solenoid valves and a controller to zone things out (to other plants other than my peppers) and an efficient (and accurate) automated water timer.

On to what I'm up to right now...

It just rained, so I've got a day or two to get all of the drippers and tubing set up, and connect it to my temporary head for testing. At the end of the week, I'll be ordering all of the parts mentioned above that I need to complete the build (minus what I already have and the 3 extra injectors)

Planning and building all of this is getting me back in to the groove, and making growing seem like much less of a daunting task. I'm even more excited about what next year will bring, hopefully bigger, better plants, at a lower time and money expense, and with more "Fun" rather than work.

As stated in my profile, I'm a big fan of automation and making technology work for you, so this is right down my alley. I've got even more big ides, but there is enough verbage in this post already.

We've still got a good chunk of the growing season to go here in Texas, so I can probably get 2 or so more good harvests out of these guys, and finally be prepared for next year.

It's kind of sad to start thinking about who I'm going to Overwinter, and which ones I'm going to let die off to cold weather.

Anyways, more updates will follow over the next few days about irrigation upgrades!

juanitos · Sep 10, 2015

slade122 said:
Anyways, more updates will follow over the next few days about irrigation upgrades!

me and you are both moving toward same setup it seems =]
I work for automation company so i'm very familiar with what you're saying.

it's kind of funny we are just backyard "hobbyists" but will have systems just as good as university systems that people with phd's made.

slade122 · Sep 10, 2015

juanitos said:
me and you are both moving toward same setup it seems =]
I work for automation company so i'm very familiar with what you're saying.

it's kind of funny we are just backyard "hobbyists" but will have systems just as good as university systems that people with phd's made.

That will be great as we can bounce some ideas off of each other later on too - like ratios, bulk fertilizer mixes, injections rates, etc.

I feel like this type of system is kind of the natural evolution for people growing on a large scale and usually (but not always) with mediums that are not conventional (ie: soil) Especially with various forms of hydroponics because they tend to be more sensitive to watering times as well as needing constant feeding.

It just so happened that this was more or less the ultimate goal I had planned out from the end of last year. I just made baby steps along the way to get there, putting everything together piece by piece, one phase at a time - and usually out of necessity. While what I'm doing isn't completely necessary, it will really give me back a big chunk of my life that I spend doing repetitive tasks. Don't get me wrong, I love tending to my plants. However, when it is for several hours a day and tasks like watering and fertilizing are not performed there will be negative consequences, whether it's loss of yield, slowed growth, nutrient deficiencies or as extreme as the death of a plant. I just feel like this is the right way to go to give me consistent, repeatable results, and hopefully actually turn a profit from growing these things.

Furthermore, I'd even like to take it a bit further and educate the community about how even a backyard gardener can produce huge amounts of ultra fresh food - with very little effort, even in containers. It's not like you need a huge plot of land or good soil, or work 60+ hours a week.

I ran my mainlines tonight, and put in a microsprinkler and 1 dripper just to test it out. Works beautifully. Tomorrow night I'll probably start adding drippers to my pots.

Anyways, a big thanks to all that follow my glog. Sometimes it feels like a monologue.

slade122 · Sep 14, 2015

Over the weekend I completed phase one of the irrigation system, the dripper and tubing install.

Here is a close up of how the row looks.

Same row, but with more of the plants in view for comparison.

Microsprinkler in a raised bed. They work really well, even with plants blocking the spray in some beds. Moisture seems to seep in and spread everywhere. It doesn't take long at all for the beds to be wetted. I had to pre-soak a few beds that were really dry in the corners. Pictured are potato vines, the leaves are eaten as greens. I grew mine from cuttings.

Here's how the whole thing looks, I left rocks at the ends of the rows to hold the tubing straight from the install, as it wanted to not be straight from being curled in to a roll. I'm waiting for a really hot day so that they stay straight, but they hold pretty well already.

I turned on the water and let the system pressurize. The drippers make a sort of "Chirping" noise as the air comes out. I was happy that there were not really any problems with it at all. There were a few places where I had to remove and re-insert the 1/4" tees in to the tubing to stop a spray from a small gap in the mainline. They all seem to drip at the same rate.

I also ran some lines and drippers to my hydroponic systems for automatic refill.

Overall, the installation was easy, it just took a bit of time. I ended up being about 50 feet short of micro tubing, a quick trip to home depot took care of that. Everything from Drip Depot felt pretty quality, and like it will last for a good amount of time. Free shipping on orders over $50 is nice too, the box with the tubing was pretty big.

I'll be recieving the parts for the fertilizer injection board wednesday, and I should have it together by the weekend!

slade122 · Sep 15, 2015

Christmas came a day early!

I layed everything out to make sure it all would work. I ended up having to mirror my design back the other way due to the flow of the injector being the opposite direction. Not a big deal. I'm also short 1 FHT x FHT connector. Other than that, the only thing that is missing are the right lengths of PVC pipe. I'll probably pick uup the pipe and missing connector tomorrow, along with 3 8ft 2x4's and a sheet of plywood. I'll paint the wood white probably.

Anyways, more on my project later. Nothing is really happening with the plants right now, other than the majority being in heavy flower.

dragonsfire · Sep 17, 2015

Great setup their Slade

slade122 · Sep 21, 2015

dragonsfire said:
Great setup their Slade

Thanks! Just wait a few days when I get my fertilizer injector project finished up, then it will be tops!

Anyways, a typical meal over at my place. Lightly breaded chicken covered in a ground habanero paste and baked. Some cream corn with sweets over orzo, and fresh tomato.

Did a small 1lb 2oz harvest over the weekend, all to be smoked and ground in to powder. At this point i just need loads of the stuff. Very efficient size once powderized too, not much space needed at all.

Anyways, here is some of my project.

All of the peices cut and layed out for sizing and painting.

A close up of the plumbing. Added plenty of extra room in for more components later, mixing bowls, injectors, etc. It's a 6' x 4' panel, pretty big.

Anyways, all of it is painted, fastened to the back panel, and ready to go. I just didn't want to do a picture before it's installed and ready to go. I just have to struggle to get it in to the back yard and dig some deep holes for the anchor posts. It's pretty heavy, but very sturdy, should last for years to come with outdoor paint on every square inch. My fiance demanded that it be painted the same color as the house so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.

I've got a few more parts coming for the tubing - and some batteries for my PH/EC pen. I decided to add a short line for easy filling of 5 gallon buckets for manual fertilization of other plants using the fertilizer inejctor so I don't have to manually mix. If all goes well, it should be installed by this evening or tomorrow if I end up needing a hand.

Ugh, I hate digging holes.