This week was a rough one. First, I had a rogue slug that I just could not get rid of on my orange sherbets - but I persisted and hunted him down, finding the bugger camping out under one of the bags. I added some diatomaceous earth to try prevent them coming back. Then my plants went from being ahead of schedule to almost dying completely. An extremely hot day caught me off guard and nearly decimated all of them.
They appeared to handle the heat fine during the day, but after I could see that they were hurt pretty bad. I was worried about them being completely stunted, but after a few days they started to continue veg. I think I lost a week maybe of veg maybe which really sucks with autos, so unfortunately I think this will affect the final size of these girls and their yield. But hey, this is nature after all! I gave a good dose of kelp to try and assist with the healing. Started feeds this week. I'm trying a silicon product for the first time, part of my mission to proactively fight powdery mildew, which I get almost every grow.
According to hydroponics.co.za where I bought it:
"Silicon Plus is a soluble silica liquid, fortified with potassium, enhances plant resistance to a biotic stresses such as drought, heat and cold and biotic stresses such as resistance to pests and diseases. Can help with Penicillium digitatum (green mold), Sclerotinia stem rot, Rust, Fusarium wilt, Powdery mildew, Red spider mite, Root knot nematod"
Helps against heat stress too? I should have read that a week ago! π
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