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🌱 Germination Date 03/30/2023 🌱
I have experienced the joys and back-aching sorrows of mixing my own soil from scratch. A base of 1 part Peat, 1 part aeration (perlite), 1 part compost/worm castings. To that I added the following amendments Karanja Cake, Kelp meal, crab meal, Rock dust mix, oyster shell flour.
Added some red wiggler worms, mulched with straw.
My god, the cover crop made the tent smell amazing. Like warm spices. Decided to chop and drop the cover crop as it was flowering and getting a bit thick. worked it under the straw a bit then added some more on top. Seedlings are looking good and growing at a nice pace. I threw down some more cover crop seeds as it can't hurt to have some more come in by the time flowering starts on the main plants.
After the seedlings get a bit larger I'll setup my blumat system for watering.
temp/humidity is gonna be a challenge as the days start getting hotter here. with the lights on the temps reach 80+, if i turn the exhaust fan on to lower the temp, the humidity plummets. I'll keep tweaking as I go.
Plants are looking good, a little droopy from a bit too much watering. I've held off on setting up the blumats to avoid overwatering them as they require the soil to be wet when you first place them in.
After removing some of the excess straw mulch, it finally dried out enough that the plants started to perk up. Gave them another water and setup the blumats, hopefully they are good to go from now. I'm not sure if my water reservoir is high enough up to have enough pressure from gravity. We will see.
A bit of a humidity issue this week but i bought a ultrasonic fogger that I'm gonna make a stronger humidifier out of. I'm thinking I can either make a separate tub of water for the humidity, or just pop it in the same reservoir i use to water the plants, and just refill it more often. This should get more than enough humidity in there even with the exhaust fan on.
Topped each plant just as the week started. Looks like they're entering flower.
Adjusted the blumat setup a bit more and I think I've got it fixed up, they seem to be drinking quite a bit now and the water flow is much better through the lines. I'd say they've drank somewhere around 8 gallons this week.
Some of the leaf tips are curling and showing some yellowing, I'll keep an eye on it and check my light intensity. If the soil is too hot there's probably not much I can do at the moment.
Week went well. Flower stretch kicked in and the tent is getting pretty full. I'm very happy to see how large they got as I was expecting possibly smaller size with an organic grow. The leaf tips are still curled but not any worse than last week.
Added the scrog net just to help separate the bud sites. I'm going to start progressively defoliating over this following week to expose some more budsites and maybe prune the lower growth.
Week has been good. The fastbuds plants are pretty huge. As you can see in the pictures, leaf tips are clawed, yellowing of the outer tip/edges, and a few brown spots on the leaves. It seems worse closer to the tops of the plants, lower leaves are the least affected.
My thoughts are this: If it's N toxicity, I kind of just have to let it ride out. In case it's wind burn from the fans I made sure they're not pointing directly at the plants, just around them. In case its light burn I decreased the intensity a bit, the DLI is between 35-45 (varies on the height of each plant).
Symptoms could be worsening because of how hot it's getting recently, but there's not a lot I can do for that at the moment.
Deficiencies kept getting worse this week, most likely is a calcium issue. I top dressed the soil with BlackSwallow Bloom mix and some Crab meal. not a ton, maybe like a cup of each. I don't want to blindly throw a bunch of amendments into the soil without a test to know what's going on. I'm debating on if I should send it for a soil test right away or wait for this run to finish.
Was planning on making some compost tea to help them push until harvest and boost some final missing nutrients into them. Had a mishap however where my Air pump fell into the bucket of water/tea while I was asleep 😓. I don't want to risk using a water damaged device so I ordered a new one and just waiting on that. Plants look more sick but so it goes. Hopefully I can learn for the next cycle and get a soil test going. I feel like my main mistake was thinking I wouldn't have to add any amendments the whole run due to the size of the soil bed
Really nice. How many worms did you add? I'm gonna just stick with mega worms. Not mad about anything alive other than my plants.
But they do look real good. Your plants
@gottagrowsometime, hey thanks! I would say probably somewhere around 1/4lb - 1/2lb
I bought 1 pound for my worm compost bin and threw a large handful into the bed
uktuk
