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! βοΈπ±
Thanks for writing so much and I love this style; doing some autos in organic pots myself trying to make them no till. Have you had any success or attempted to cut down cover crop then cover with hay to get a surge of N in the soil?
@Complicate, hey :) I wouldn't really be able to call this no till because I remove the medium after each grow, remove major root mass and mix all the soil together before amending for the next grow. At that point (between seasons) I've tried planting clover, hairy vetch and alfalfa which I let grow, then let decompose into the soil. I like having a diverse plant based source of nutrients slowly breaking down in the soil over time, even though I will feed with much more readily available nutes during the grow. It's the same reason I add some rock phosphate between grows - like a backup insurance policy. I think true no till would need 100L or more of soil to be truly left undisturbed and also accommodate good worm colonies. As far as I've read up, this is difficult to achieve in smaller grow bags. My reasoning for the hay in this grow is purely just a cheap way to prevent the soil from drying up too quickly on our insanely hot days (while adding some organic matter back into the soil slowly over time)
@Shooey, thanks bro - I've since harvested and dried and the one plant came out okay but the one is a leafy larfy mess which will probably be turned into hash or crumble since there's nice trichomes amongst all that leaf. But yes, I think I have conquered powdery mildew to some extent this grow, but the rot was another beast all together...
Beautiful plant, beautiful Bush snake.. Being from London i would have emptied my bowles and ran screaming like a small child if that crawled out of my plant ππ
Good luck for the rest of the grow..
@Theia, haha thanks π. I've grown up with these snakes being common visitors and used to keep them as pets when I was young. My wife on the other hand still screams as if we're under siege ππππ