First Grow - CA Balcony, Organic Soil.

So, after the white soil mold popped up last week (forgot to take pics), I got a bit concerned and started to read up. It seemed there's some division on whether the stuff is actually harmful. In any case, I decided to try and get rid of it - I scooped off any obviously infected bits from the top 2" or so of the pots, tossed it into my compost bins (dunno if that's alright for the compost, but I guess we'll find out!). After digging into the soil a bit, as mentioned in the previous week's post, I found that the original potting soil (which had been FFOF with maybe 30% EWC added and nothing else) was super compact and not well aerated at all - I knew this at the time of planting, but didn't have time to go out and get perlite, figured I'd just throw the seedlings in and see what came of it. Anyways, while digging up around what I thought would be the "root ball", I found out that my roots hadn't extended out AT ALL for either plant! I'm assuming it's because the soil mix was just way too thick for the roots to penetrate? Maybe because of the cold? Maybe because of the Jiffy pellet netting that I hadn't removed?! (Do you even have to remove that stuff? I thought you weren't supposed to have to?) So, I decided to take several actions: 1) Removed the netting from the Jiffy Pellet, which had literally 0 roots coming out of it 2) Set the seedlings aside, I scooped out about 3/5ths of the soil from one of the 5gal pots and added about an equal part of perlite and mixed it with the soiling remaining in the pot 3) Added some perlite to the soil I'd removed from the pot until it felt like it was properly aerated 4) Refilled the pot with this nice, much looser mixture up to about 2/3rds, then for the last third, added my FFOF/Light Warrior mix 5) Watered lightly and repotted the plant 6) Repeated the same for #2, which showed basically the same issues - no root ball to speak of, and couldn't see any roots coming out of the Jiffy pellet (weird, isnt it???) Anywho, all this was done around day 50 or so, and the photos for this week are from today, about a week after the incident. It seems like both girls are recovering well enough, especially #1 - I think they might even be in a better spot than they were, since the soil was probably inhibiting their growth pretty severely. I'm impatient, so I started another couple seeds with the new soil that I mixed, and will be starting another couple journals. They'll be an indoor/outdoor mixed grow - hoping that starting them inside will help them get established before they have to suffer through the cold. Please check 'em out if you have the chance!