• Everything other than hot peppers. Questions, discussion, and grow logs. Cannabis grow pics are only allowed when posted from a legal juridstiction.

The Farm - 2020

Well, back again for another year of hard work. 
 
The girls are busy sorting and packing seeds from the isolation greenhouse grow last year, will have them loaded on the website once we get them inventoried. I know, it's late, and most of y'all are already starting / have already started your grow season, but unfortunately it was one of those "when we get time to breathe" tasks that got pushed off. 
 
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The seed counter was busy for a while though, counting a different kind of seed.
 
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(Still have like 2+ million cannabis seeds to count and inventory but put it on hold for a bit to get pepper stock done.)
 
Got the new grow room done. New flower room, the veg room is at the other farm.
 
Admin edit: Legal Industrial Hemp
 
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Week 4 on this run
 
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We pipe the waste heat from the grow in to the chicken coop for the layer hens. It increased their production by 200% once they got warmed up.
 
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Those hens are laying some mighty big eggs now that they are warm
 
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Almost a half ounce over jumbo, there
 
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Birds are happy, although this was taken before all the snow hit... f'n snow. I hate snow.
 
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Oh yeah forgot to mention, we bought a second farm, so "all our eggs aren't in one basket" - not getting fucking flooded out again, this year's grow is replicated across two different pieces of land.
 
I guess that's kind of the very definition of "doubling down"? 
 
Hey, Trent! Good to see you actually have
time to start another grow log.
 
Your weed looks great! When do you start
planting the outdoor crop? The buds look
just deadly! Are those the CBD plants?
 
Good luck getting your dual farms underway.
I was sick when I saw how flooded out you
were last year! That was just cruel and unusual
punishment.
 
:cheers: for a great 2020 season!
 
Glad to see you around for 2020. I have planted some of your seeds this month. All the Chinese varieties had excellent germination. Planted some jalapenos and others from you last night I suspect they will do just as well. Now I just gotta keep them alive.
I'll follow along this year as well. Your glogs are always full of great reading material and pictures.
 
Mr.joe said:
Glad to see you around for 2020. I have planted some of your seeds this month. All the Chinese varieties had excellent germination. Planted some jalapenos and others from you last night I suspect they will do just as well. Now I just gotta keep them alive.
I'll follow along this year as well. Your glogs are always full of great reading material and pictures.
 
Mods keep bouncing it around because of the industrial hemp. First thought it was marijuana, and they moved it to hot button topics, now it got parked in "Other"
 
Y'all want to chime in and tell them we grow peppers? LOL!
 
I dunno how many dozens/ hundreds of pepper growers we've helped over the years but every year the glog has 1000+ posts w/ lots of coverage of growing peppers at scale.
 
If we aren't welcome because of our other crops, so be it. I volunteer my time, don't have to do it.
 
Feel free to post your peppers in Glogs. This is in the correct section.
 
The Hot Pepper said:
Best of luck with your season!
 
So to be clear (don't wan't to piss anyone off) we can post the full range of our farm stuff this year in this subforum? In past years I tried to keep it as pepper-oriented as possible (with the occasional cause thread drift lol) but we have over 500 distinct species and varieties of plants in our operation, so I could cover a lot more if we can "cover it all." 
 
This is the best section since it's mostly "other". Some people post pepper glogs with the occasional tomato. You are posting other with the occasional pepper. If you prefer GLOGS, I'm fine with that too. Just Like this  post and I will move it.
 
The Hot Pepper said:
This is the best section since it's mostly "other". Some people post pepper glogs with the occasional tomato. You are posting other with the occasional pepper. If you prefer GLOGS, I'm fine with that too. Just Like this  post and I will move it.
 
Whatever you feel is best for the community. I don't think "Growing Other" gets the same visibility as threads under Glog, but there is a tremendous amount of crossover knowledge transfer for growing other things besides peppers, so it would be more useful perhaps if we DO post more about other crops and how the interaction with the capsicum crops happen (there's interesting dynamics we're finding on rotations, etc). We also grow at scale with mechanization now, so the way we do things now might be a bit outside the average gardener's reach, but there's still knowledge to be found. The problems we tend to face get magnified greatly - you make a mistake on a home garden you lose a few plants; at the scale we're at now we lose entire fields. :)
 
I'm fine with wherever you want to place it. Our intention is to present good growing information, lessons learned (especially on stuff we screw up), and that doesn't just have to be about peppers. So it may be more useful to remain here and post in depth information on both peppers and other crops we grow and how they may differentiate from peppers? Makes it easier to transfer knowledge to other stuff if there's a starting point.
 
Well, along the line of "especially on stuff we screw up" the isolation greenhouse idea was a total failure.
 
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Started adding up seeds that had been counted today and after the first 32 counted, it was clear that the isolated greenhouse grow was a complete failure. Of the 32 varieties of seed I've counted so far, only 6 of those varieties have enough seed to be able to sell (after reserving 100 for germ test / subsequent propagation). Most types (23 out of 32) don't even have enough for a full germination test, with fewer than 100 seeds harvested. 
 
Pods in the greenhouse mostly didn't set - the temps were too high and flowers mainly dropped. Pods that DID set had very few seeds, which is typical of self-pollination, but also an indication that the fertilizer regimen was a bit off during production. The soil kept plants alive and healthy vegetatively but fruit production was curtailed. Even with most of the flowers hitting the floor from sterilized pollen in the 100F+ temps, something else was going on that resulted in lower production.  Some blossom end rot was noted, so there was a calcium deficiency. But the big healthy green plants just didn't put on much in the way of poddage, so I'm thinking PK was very low towards the tail end of the season. There was plenty of PK in the soil mix, and some P was in the liquid fertilizer, but the high greenhouse temps probably also curtailed the microbiological growth in the organic potting soil mix, meaning that the unavailable PK wasn't broken down in to a usable form for the plants. 
 
Anyway we ended up with very few isolated seeds. 
 
The new plan this year is to do row-by-row isolation with 50 micron mesh on low tunnel conduit hoops. I already have the mesh and clips and most of the conduit. But that should at least keep pollinators off. Wind pollination is still a concern (pepper pollen is far smaller than 50 micron). I have can do a 3' wide conduit bend w/ the tool I got from Johnny's.
 
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By the time the peppers outgrow that and the mesh comes off, we will be well in to late June / early July when the temps are high enough to cause pollen sterilization anyway.
 
In 2018 we harvested tens of thousands of seeds from the open pollinated field, in 2019 we harvested tens of seeds from a very expensive experimental isolation grow, which was a very costly failure. I need better results; and with the low tunnel isolation we can at least get "bushels" of pods from a proper soil grow, instead of "a handful of pods" 
 
These are the rows we'd be going over (2019 photo of peppers and tomatoes in our north field)
 
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This is all that really managed to set in the greenhouse last year (pics taken July 17) before the temps got too high; plants kept growing (some of the chinense got 6' tall in the greenhouse by end of season) but no new pods were set.
 
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We did run 50% shade cloth and 24,000 cfm exhaust fans, but the summer temps were just too high.
 
Anyway moral of the story is, hundreds of hours of labor, thousands of dollars in pots, soil mix, fertilizers, etc, etc, and really nothing to show for it on the seed end of things. We harvested enough seeds, basically, to try again, and that's about it. We'll be adding a few types to the store but not many.
 
The redeeming factor is the soil mix can get dumped in the organic field, the pots washed and re-used, and the greenhouse is reusable, so materials wise, not a huge deal. Kick in the gut to spend all that time on the project and not see any return though (not to mention, a lot of that labor was from employees who were compensated for their time; and the seed harvest itself was a cost I'm still bearing, as even counting / sorting / packing what little we got still costs me hourly). Exactly $106 in sell-able product from the first 32 varieties I've inventoried. I spent more than that in labor just on counting and packing this week.
 
With time being such a critical factor last year, it's a kick in the gut to look back and realize that a lot of it was wasted. I should have pulled the plug on the project when I saw the flower drop happening, but I'm stubborn.
 
Trent, I dont think i ever commented on your Glog last year, but i read through a lot of it.
 
 Your Glog's are always so informative, and inspirational 
even showing the failures along with the successes is a huge bonus to the reader as well  :clap:
 We all have successes and failures within our grow, but to see it on the scale like you grow is very informative, and your organizational skills, i could go on an on...
i hope you have more local success at market this year, as well as online sales 
:cheers: 
G.I.P.
 
Your glog has been very informative to me and the scale on which you do things is massive.  Keep it up man.  Good luck to you in 2020.  
 
Inoks said:
I was just thinking about your glog earlier today, was about to Ask at 2019 thread.

Nice going!
 
We're relocated to "growing other" this season, but I'm going to cover all of our activities, not just peppers. Glad to have you back for another season. :)
 
PaulG said:
Hey, Trent! Good to see you actually have
time to start another grow log.
 
Your weed looks great! When do you start
planting the outdoor crop? The buds look
just deadly! Are those the CBD plants?
 
Good luck getting your dual farms underway.
I was sick when I saw how flooded out you
were last year! That was just cruel and unusual
punishment.
 
:cheers: for a great 2020 season!
 
 
Yes these are CBD / industrial hemp. We will be applying for a recreational grow license this year IF our county zoning will sign off on a marijuana grow license application. One of the requirements for a craft grow application is local zoning has  to sign off on the application to approve your site *before* the application is submitted. So we wait to see if county will allow it; and if they will get off their asses and vote in time to submit the application before the deadline.
 
m1hagen said:
Hope this year goes much better for you Trent!  Good luck man, you deserve it.
 
Thank you, hopefully it will go better. It certainly couldn't go any fucking worse. :)
 
Mr.joe said:
Glad to see you around for 2020. I have planted some of your seeds this month. All the Chinese varieties had excellent germination. Planted some jalapenos and others from you last night I suspect they will do just as well. Now I just gotta keep them alive.
I'll follow along this year as well. Your glogs are always full of great reading material and pictures.
 
That's good to hear. We dropped the ball on a couple of orders around Thanksgiving but got that sorted out, hopefully we didn't delay anyone too badly. 
 
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