Hey yall! Another week down. A lot has happened.
To start, we up-potted from the red solos into my living soil blend that I have been working on for almost a year. It's so full on living creatures and beneficials. I used to have fungus gnats a lot when working with living soil, it's almost impossible to avoid. .. Then enters beneficials; we have black soldier Flys, persimillis predatory mites, definitely earth worms, most likely a mix of night crawlers.
No more fungus gnats, I highly recommend using beneficial nematodes, cucumeris and persimillis predatory mites are excellent (swirski predatory mites are expensive). Just look at the Soil Food Web and identify what pest you have, then purchase their predators from a trusted insectary.
Anyways I added another 200watt LED and spread out the plants in a 2' X 4' tent. It's extremely dry in my location and having the heat on makes the air even drier. So getting my VPD stable has been an immense challenge. Right now
Also we need to be able to add VPD or at least GD needs a built in calculator to help folks with VPD, Vapor Pressure Deficite.
As of right now I am sitting at 0.85 VPD, so pretty good for today. I have 4 humidifiers and have had to hang moistened towels on the doors of the room I am growing in. It literally has been a huge challenge to keep the humidity high enough for my VPD to be in range for the young plants I have now.
Good thing is my current humidity without running any humidifiers is perfect for the flowering stage, so I can't wait to move this along.
As for topping and training; like I said I really want to move these ladies into flowering sooner than later. I have several reasons to do limited training so I can limit my veg time, also getting this crop done as fast as possible is best for my set up. Until I can get a larger house 🏠 😩 because we got a baby on the way 👶 so need to make space.
I have made compost tea twice this past week, wetting the soil and also spraying the leaves. My sprayer broke so I ended up pouring the tea on the plants gently, I got worm castings on the leaves lol. Gently rubbing that off once they dried. Also I applied the tea at night.
My tea recipe:
Reverse Osmosis water, 2 to 4 gallons
I bubble that with added minerals for a day
Add 2-3 cups of Activated worm castings (To activate the castings I added about 3 gallons of high quality castings with what I consider to be nutrient amendments, SO I add = kelp meal, neem cake, organic coconut flour, organic corn meal, organic wheat flour, and organic cold milled flax seeds and let that sit for a week then add about 2 to 3 cups of that mix to the tea)
I also add biology from about a cup of 2 different soil mixes I have around my compost bin, just trying to get a more diverse biology by adding those two different soil sources. And mind you the grow beds I took the soil from has been organic for many years and has a large amount of beneficials and tons of excellent biology.
Other than that I bubble that for 12 to 24 hours, with as much air as I can get. I use air stones but you really need to clean them off once you are done brewing. I also have an Air Lift with a large air pump that really works great, K.I.S. Organics sells one that works great or you can build one easily with with PVC pipe and a few adapters from any Home Depot or Lowes.
Also I do add DynoMyco to my roots when up-potting. They are an amazing brand that has backed up research, I think they have more propagules per gram of two strains they identified to work great with cannabis. Now having said that, each individual phenotype out of each individual and specific strain/cultivar is going to have different bacteria/fungal strains that it prefers and by growing the same strain, hopefully the same exact cut, and grow 3 to 4 cycles before you truly have the mycelium networks built and fully functional.
What I am saying is stop throwing out "used" soil and go over 7 gallons, bigger the better for biodiversity. Stop buying "new" soil, amend your previous beds and pots. You will see a huge difference. Hopefully I can show you all of this with my Grow.
Anyways please feel free to ask away any questions! This grow is about saving money 💰 🤑 and growing the best clean medicine as possible.