Nurse Ratched

It's been a good week, all seeds germinated, are upright and at attention!🙌 They went into the soil on the 4/22, under the humidity dome and on the heat mat at 78F. They started pushing up on 4/24 and then got their legs on 4/25. It was nice and sunny on the morning of 4/27 so I took them off of the heat mat and put them in front of a south facing window for the morning. I then rigged up 3 Litever 24V grow light strips, and took away the humidity dome because the seedlings were right up against it. In the afternoon they went under the grow lights and stayed there the next day as well. 4/28 was another beautiful day, 60F and sunny so I put them out in the South flower bed in front of my house and they enjoyed most of the day out there. While they were out enjoying the sun, I was out weeding the sorrel bed in the garden. I had a nice tub of invasive grasses, burdock, thistle and dandelion, so I made Weed tea. The weeds I pull out of the soil are chock full of nutrients, especially in the plump roots of burdock and dandelion. I also had a couple heads of clover that had Nitrogen nodules on them they sequestered. Dandelions are rich in Calcium, Iron and Magnesium, while thistle is rich in Phosphorus and trace elements, so it gives a nice balance to have several different weed species in your tea. I took the weeds and placed them in a mesh bag that previously held 10#'s of local mussels, but any good size porous bag will do. I'm hoping that when corn is ready this summer I can get one of the huge mesh bags those come in from my local store and brew a really big batch in one of my 50 gallon bait barrels. But for now the weed bag went into a 5 gallon bucket that I filled to the brim and put lid on because you want to make sure the bag is submerged. Ideally the container should be 2/3-3/4 full, with the bag weighed down with a brick or rock, but I can't sacrifice my larger muck buckets, and the lid on the 5 Gallon bucket has a spout on it for pouring out the contents so I'm leaving that open and I'll stir it at least once a week to aerate it. Then over the next 2-4 weeks the weeds will ferment and release those precious nutrients into the tea that I can then water my plants with. Glorious! They didn't really need any nutes this week but they'll get some Fish fertilizer soon. See you all next week👋 and happy growing😉