First Greenhouse 2019

~Update 5/16/19~ -Transplanting Day!- Finally I have seen good root growth coming from every pot, now they are going into 12L fabric pots with a mixture of Coco coir and Worm Castings at a ration of (5) parts and (1) part respectively or 83% Coco Coir and 17% Worm Castings. To most of this mix was added Great White dry mycorrhizae at 1ml/L, unfortunately on the 3rd and final batch this was accidentally omitted, luckily I have my Tea Brews so hopefully in the end this won't be an issue. The pots used were purchased online and you can see the brand in the picture, I wanted white pots so I went with a brand I am not used to, and that will likely turn out to be a mistake. The pots fabric is decent quality and thick but the stitching is absolutely terrible and sloppy, it also seems very low strength, I doubt these will last more then 1 or 2 uses and I definitely do not think they could be machine washed before the next run. I put slits on the sides of each Peat Pot, the reason for this is I have found the claim of roots being able to easily penetrate this pots to be total bullshit. I have pulled up too many plants in my soil bed SOG grows wondering why they didn't do as well as they plant next to them just to find out that for some reason that plant kept ~80%-90% of the roots still restricted within the peat pot. I am looking forward to using fabric nursery pots that will be removed next time around. I added 1.25ml/L of Roots Organic Nitro Bat Guano (9-3-1) to each planting hole and mixed it in to the surrounding layer as a booster nutrient. Finally, each Peat Pot, after being slit, were soaked in a solution of 100% Xtreme Tea that has bubbled for 24 hours with Malt Extract to boost the microbial population, and 5ml/L each of Great White Mycorrhizae and Xtreme Mykos to heavily inoculate the root zones. -The Avocados- Last week I was doing so research and ran across an interesting idea about worms and avocados. The worms are apparently extremely attracted to the fats in the avocado and congregated heavily in that area which leads to an increase in breeding, so more worms, if you look at the picture above you will see that this is pretty damn true. The method for this is to get over ripe avocados, cut an X into the side and give a gentle squeeze to break it open and place X side down into the soil, the worms will find it and do their thing. In my area Avocados are cheap, basically free actually, so this is a huge win for me when it comes to growing a healthy worm population for cheaper than purchasing thousands of worms. -Bacterial Analysis- So far this is not up and running yet, I got busy and didn't get my graphs prepared for this week, next week I will not be able to start this either, and to top it off my pH pen I purchased died on me. So look forward to this still coming around week 7 or 8, at that point I should have everything in place to start my trials and see how much bacterial biomass I can create in a Worm Casting Tea situation and hopefully I will also be able to do some soil samples to get an overall idea of what effect these teas may be having on the soil. And finally a plant update. -Chernobyl OG- Middle of the pack is the best way to describe these, not the rockstars of my garden this week but some real potential, I have noticed (1) plant in particular that has a slight purpling on the new growth, nothing nutrient wise I am worried about so I think this may be genetic. -Dreamband- These are my pride and joys at the moment, the growth is explosive and beautiful, much like the Chernobyl OG I have one plant in particular where the new growth is purple, but it is far more beautiful and prevalent that that on the Chernobyl OG. You can see this in an above picture, I have never encountered this but it seems to fluctuate with Temps not nutrients so again I am thinking this may be genetic. -GSC- Sad, very sad...new seeds are in the ground, that's all I've got for now. -Orange Daiquiri- This plant has recovered well from its nutrient deficiency early on, one notable feature of this is the very short and fat indica leaves it is throwing out, I expect this to be a stocky little beast when its all done. -Sundae Driver- The leaves on this one are a bit chewed up, not sure what has happened but I will be spraying at the end of the day, always good to spray during transplant in my opinion. Other than that it appears healthy and has impressive roots for its size, I think I'm going to be happy with this one. -Wedding Cake- Same story as the Orange Daiquiri, it has recovered from its nutrient deficiency early on and is growing healthy. It is slightly faster than the Orange Daiquiri but neither are going to win any awards for explosive growth. ~Update 5/13/19~ Ok so week 5, I've been a bit behind on updating so there has been a lot of growth progress since my last post. To start out you'll notice I have shifted my nutrient scheme pretty hard, I know have the Terp Tea I was intending to use along with my dry malt extract to feed the microbes, I'll go into detail further down. Since changing to the new nutrient scheme my plants have responded very well, I have seen an overall increase in vigor to every plant in my greenhouse I have feed with this. Temperatures locally are warming up which is also helping. - Aerated worm casting tea When I began this journal I intended to use an RO, aerated, worm casting tea blended inline with my carbon filtered tap water to give me a nice beneficial "water-only" source that also had benefits. the aeration was to be done by a large non-diffused air bubble source to avoid micro-bubbles that could cleave and destroying moulds that would form along side the aerobic bacterias I hoped to raise. Then once a week I was to add the Terp tea to brew for 24 hours and water that solution straight. Growth of extra bacteria and moulds would be aided by Brewers Malt extract, which in my opinion is the best possible source for bacteria grow nutrition as it contains everything from Free Amino Nitrogen (FAN) and sucrose/glucose for the quick bacterial and simple mould growth to larger proteins and Maltose for the slower growing moulds and bacterias that can actually break these larger molecules down. As a major side benefit Brewers Malt extract also contains a ton of micro nutrients, here is a link for anyone who is interested in knowing the breakdown of barley malts nutrient values https://www.muntonsmalt.com/products/nutritional-data-sheet/. I feed the malt extract at a ration of 1g/L once per day to achieve a 0.1 degree plato solution, this is a method called Batch Feeding and is generally considered to be to best way to grow and maintain yeast colonies, seems like a good option for any tea brewer. As of today this theory is just that as I am a bit nervous that my solution is going to become anaerobic and possible breed the wrong microbial life, so to address this I picked up a few of my toys from the lab and will now be monitoring my dissolved oxygen levels in mg/L to make sure that I am getting enough aeration and the population of bacteria is not overwhelming the system. I also grabbed my microscope and will be doing cell counts and maybe look into special identifications or groupings, although this may be difficult as I'm rusty with my microscope at the moment. Hopefully I will be able to get some data and make a decent study out of this, in the mean time expect some cool pictures in the coming days. - New Nutrients (Terp Tea) I've had my eyes on this since it was released, I just haven't had the right system to run it. I now have that system, my goal here is to take advantage of good quality rich, organic-microbiologicaly driven soil with this nutrient to drive home the ultimate and purest "organic-flavor" that each strain has to offer. So far the growth I have seen with this stuff is great, my plants responded to it within the week and perked up with much more vigors growth, this wasn't limited to my cannabis plants either, this was every plant in my greenhouse just suddenly seemed to wake up and grow at much faster rates. So far I'm very very pleased with this product. -The bad news So as everything else was going well and times were cheery, the Girl Scout Cookies are still not growing, the deformed one has put out some new twisted and ugly growth, at this point I am pretty sure it has a genetic defect. the second one has literally not grown in 3 week. So I put my last 2 seeds into a paper towel and will restart this whole thing again with them, I am definitely disappointed in these seeds as of today but the other seeds from this breeder are good, very good actually.