Good Morning
I made the mistake of starting early this year, the weather and my soil mix wasn't up for it. In mid February I had a volunteer sprout in one of my pepper plants. I stuck it in a pot and ran it in and out every night. This worked okay until a had a headache on the night it frosted. Didn't bring it in and it got frost shock. Over the next couple weeks it weakened and died. I made the mistake of blaming the frost instead of the dirt. Here's what it looked like before it expired.
Sad stuff. The first week of March I started my first seedling batch. I had a low germination rate which I blamed on the cool weather. The plants that did sprout started out okay but over the next couple weeks dampened off. By the time I figured out that it was the soil mix that was the culprit it was too late. Wasted 50 seeds and a couple weeks. Another factor was keeping them indoors at room temperatures instead of moving them outside where the cool temperatures would have kept the fungus that causes dampening off under control. Rookie mistake and I was pissed. It didn't help that I wasn't feeling good, I've noticed whenever health or relationship problems or life problems surface the plants take a hit. Here's a Sholgar Afghan seedling I was excited about. It's still alive somehow but doesn't have a root system. I could lift the dampened off seedlings out of the soil without pulling, the tap roots were dead. It can fool you, the seedlings look healthy but they have no roots. After a couple weeks you notice something is amiss when they haven't grown.
One takeaway I've gotten from this disaster is that I can't trust the organic soil at the stores anymore. They've started loading it with wood chips. The organic matter creates perfect conditions for the dampening off. It also encourages soil gnats. I should have screened it very fine to get rid of all the wood.
For the next batch I went back to the basics, got a bag of seedling mix instead. I got my usual 90% plus germination rate on my heat mat, even from seeds 8 years old. My second and third batches are doing great, the weather has been sunny and cool. Quite a few nights I've had to pull them back into the house because of frost. Here's a picture of some Mandelbrot Royal Kush. I really like the Royal Kush for this latitude, it finishes by the end of September and has decent mold resistance. I've got Royal Kush hybrids but I thought I'd get the original inbred line since it's available. I'll be doing lots of breeding with it hopefully.
And here's a picture of Grape Ape x Bubblegum, really like the looks of it. Already looks like it'll have wide leaves.
Blue sky here, right now, without "Sahariana haze" or "calima":
Anyone grow gg4 outdoors full term? When did it finish for you? I'm at 43 lat in mass and considering on throwing a big mom plant out in early June. I'm worried it won't finish in time though.
GG four will definitely finish for you
非常感谢你,欢迎你好工作,好分享
I have roughly the same cut off date give a week or two depending on the season ...you should be OKbtw Mendo Breath Performs really really wellWhen did it finish in your area? Good mold resistance? I can go until about October 10th before it starts raining every day and the cold sets in.
Things have officially started for me today.
I got some new pots, some coco/perlite, and some simple amendment blend with alfalfa/kelp/fish bone meal/potassium sulfate.
I got some new fabric pots since my old ones were starting to tear apart and two of them had big holes on the bottom from gophers. I got two to three full years out of them at least, they've been outdoors for several years in pretty harsh heat/sunlight.
I've been using the same soil in those pots for nearly 4 years now and it has become a bit compacted, so I got some coco/perlite mix to fluff up & aerate things a bit. The past few years basically all I've done is top dressed with various organic amendments a few times through out the year, and some botanical & bacterial teas. Other than that only water has poured through it. I feel it has become some great soil, just a bit too compacted at this point, I want a lot more drainage through out and hoping the addition of more coco & perlite does the trick. Plus the soil is going to be dumped out and re-potted so that alone will help loosen it up a bit.
My method of mixing up soil is dumping the soil out onto a large tarp, then adding whatever I'm going to add, them pulling each corner of the tarp across to the opposite corner and doing that a few times at each corner (if that makes sense lol)....Easy way to mix things up pretty evenly and can get a somewhat large volume of soil mixed up quickly.
Once I have all the new pots filled I'll top dress them with a nice thick layer of clippings/mulch from the yard (mix of nettles, grasses, mallow, chickweed, and other nutritious "weeds") and add a handful of worms from my yard (tons of worms in the native soil in my yard).
It's looking like I will be moving sometime this summer otherwise I'd have some seed grown plants already going for sure. Since I'll likely be moving I'm planning on doing autos only this time around since they should be all done by July.
I really REALLY want to grow some big photo-period plants in the ground though, and there are some clones I'd love to grow to, definitely going to miss that this time around.
I'm actually kinda excited to grow some autos for my first time though. I feel like they'll turn out fantastic in my climate with the amount of sunshine and warmth my yard receives.
.