2.3 x 2.3 SCROG 15G's of Living Soil Under A TS1000

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Mind and body before garden. Getting juiced on C4 before lift tonight, then making the tea I've been talking about later. Last night I got busy doing nothing and never got to it.

 

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It's finally tea time. We like to garden with loud music and the herb to match

 

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Here's my pump. 1110 GPH or 70 liters per minute. I'm just throwing up some pics as I go.

 

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Here's my aerator and tea bag

 

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This is BuildAFlower, which is the compost i'm using in this compost tea. This is a mix of Oly mountain Fish Compost, Worm Castings, Peat Moss, Rock powders, Icelandic Kelp Meal, Karanja Cake, Pre Charged Bio-char that was soaked in beneficials. It's like black gold. Good shit.

I started with 4 Gallons of water that has been sitting out for a couple of days now.

First thing in the tea bag is 2 cups of this stuff.

 

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I don't really know why a person needs this much molasses, but apparently this is how I roll.

If there are any Floridians browsing my thread, that bowl was bought at a head shop in the Daytona area called pumpernickel pops probably around 94. I was definitely under age when I bought it there. Still smoking.

My little crew that I ran with at the time would trip to know that in my 40's I still have that bowl.

 

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Ok here we go. This is the rest of the stuff going in the brew.

On the left is the bloom booster, in the center is a nutrient blend, on the right is some kashi, and in the back ful-power fulvic acid.

 

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And finally we're popping off. I'm going to let this brew for 24 hours or so.

So thanks for checking out my little tea brewing show here. Hopefully this doesn't kill the plant right?

 

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The tea is chugging along. I went out to coffee to chat with friends for 2 hours, and when I came home the air line had blown off the pump. So the tea was possibly sitting for a while, but I really doubt that's a big deal. I fired it right back up and it's doing its thing. I'm doing some math in my head on when I should feed this and my dilution rate and all that.

Where I live 30 minute power outages due to storms are pretty common. I saw this little battery back up / surge protector at Home Depot and it was only $50 bucks so I thought I would give it a shot. If it can keep my lights on for an hour during an outage I would be very happy with it.

I'm cleaning up a lot of old fans that are under the screen tonight. If it's under the screen and it looks like it's not needed I am getting rid of it tonight. Week 4 starts tomorrow with that being the official last week of stretch, but I haven't seen any stretch in close to a week now.

I'll post some canopy and scale shots later. Peace.

 

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Oh! A friend brought me this cool piece back from Belize. Check it. I'm tempted to hit this thing one time at least before I put it on a shelf.

 

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Here's a shot of the tea from a few minutes ago. There's a nice foam on top now. I'm no tea scientist, but I have been told that when you see the foam you have done it right and it's about ready. I'm going to feed this tea a little later tonight.

 

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As I was growing this out and training the screen and defoliating over the later weeks I would try and leave these fans towards the outside of the screen. Later in life though these aren't as important anymore. They aren't getting much light, and are starting to decay. You could maaaaybe see some mold form from this so I'm going to clip them and mulch them as usual. I trash the stems, but feed the leaves back into the soil because I want nutrients back. This will improve airflow as well which is especially important here with a big plant in a small tent.

Here's a before the trim shot. I want to get her cleaned up now as I exit the stretch phase, and not have to mess with her too much once she starts to stack in week 5.

Side Note: Back in the day stoner science dictated that lollypopping these lowers would send signals to the plant that it was time to push energy to the tops. I have no idea if there is any truth to that. This is just one of many growing "facts" I have implanted in my brain from years at OG, Serious, Treating Yourself, IC and others.

One thing you can be assured of reading my threads is I will always tell you when I'm not sure of something. I'm not here to blow smoke up people's assess and cause them to screw up their own plants. I've seen so many people giving bad advice over the years, and I am not that guy.

 

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I let the tea brew about 22 hours. I need to feed before bed time tonight so 22 hours is close enough. Here I'm loading my chapin sprayer, and I'm diluting the tea 1 part to 5 parts de-chlorinated water. I'll water about 10% volume or 1.5 gallons through the plant. I intentionally didn't water the last 2 days to let her get a bit on the dryer side. All i'm looking for here is to water slowly, evenly, and I want a bit run off. I don't care about what's in the run off in organic soil. I just want to see some run off so that I know the pot is properly hydrated with the tea.

 

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Progress pics from the lower cleanup.

I pulled the mulch back here because the first thing you want to do after brewing a compost tea is to top dress the contents of the tea bag. It's full of life and nutes and good crap like that. When I pulled back my mulch there was about 10 worms there. I only put about 15 worms in my soil at the start because they will multiple to a healthy level of worms for the size of the pot. If you put too many in at the start they might not have a healthy balance.

Everything at or below the screen level is gone. I left a few sucker branches that I already know I will end up removing, but this clean up has greatly improved light penetration so I'll give them another week to see if they are going to make a move. If not i'll prune them rather than let the plant waste resources on them.

She's a lot cleaner.

She's breathing easy now.

As always, thanks for checking out my grow.

 

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Here is the top dress in action. Today is the first day of week 4, and week 4 is the last week of stretch. First I top dressed the tea bag, and then I top dressed 2 tablespoons of dry nutes that will be her last dose, and her weekly dose of kashi.

After that I roughed it in a bit and pulled her old mulch back over. Then I top dressed compost over the mulch and I kind of bounce it to make it fall through. This is also the last time I will top dress compost from here out. I will continue to top dress a bit of kashi here and there throughout week 8, but I'm done top dressing nutrient at this point.

Finally I put some fresh barley straw over her, and let the compost tea watering begin.

 

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This is a real bummer, but my chapin has begun leaking really bad from the trigger. First grow with it and having issues sucks. I water for about 2 minutes and then wait about 15 minutes, and this is drip off the trigger while waiting.

 

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Sunrise

 

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Not much to do in the garden today, but watch the grass grow.

 

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Getting started with good quality organic growing gear was not any cheaper than buying AN for hydro I guess. To be fair though, I bought bags and bottles of crap that will last many, many grows for a small time grower like myself. Not to mention that with this style of growing we're building a living soil to be used to long term. It's supposed to just get better over time. So this is really an investment into a medium that I'm going to be using for the foreseeable and I've been told it produces top shelf smoke when done right. I'm also paying for the convenience of someone else putting this together. So I'm all in.

But yeah I ponied up some serious scrolla on some stuff