Orange Sherbet Auto - Organic Outdoor

The girls have been doing great this week under CFL's as well as venturing out outside for a few hours each day to harden off. In the previous week I made sure that the medium was well watered with dechlorinated water and microbes, so transplanting should go smoothly. A lot of people say not to transplant autos, that you should start them in their final pots. While I think there's a lot of merit in this thought, I think this advice is better suited to indoors or at least a greenhouse where the plants can be left without fear of nature getting too involved - but when you are dealing with outdoors and need to bring plants in and out in the first weeks, it's just not an option for me to lug around 40L pots. I have grasshoppers, slugs, monkeys, sudden weather changes to deal with - so I need to start off with small pots first and keep them ultra mobile in case. When I transplanted, the medium in the prior pots was still a bit moist and roots were starting to emerge in the drain holes of the small square pots. I put 20g of mycorrhizal fungi in each planting hole and afterwards watered with kelp and trichoderma. The plan at this point is to organically innoculate the plants/soil with beneficial fungi and to build a good root system. I'll start mild nutes next week. The mycorrhizal fungi will help make use of the rock phosphate, even though I'm feeding bloom nutes later, having the rock phosphate is like a nice backup reserve of phosphorous if the plants needs extra. I added a mulch layer of alfalfa hay (lucerne) just on the surface to help keep the soil surface moist, since we get very hot days here. This will also bring some organic material back into the soil over time (but not the primary reason since it will takes ages for the nitrogen to become useful to the plant). I would even go with an inorganic mulch, but alfalfa hay is super cheap and readily available to me. Things to watch with it are mold and other insects it attracts. Peace fellow growers! ✌️🌱