Where it's all going down:
Puttin' In Work...10'x15'x8' Sealed Room Within a Room 6000 watts...Times 2.
The lineup:
Most recent villains:
Spider Mites
Thrips
Powdery Mildew
Those guys, however, are being kept out of the picture as much as possible through the use of neem oil, nematodes, and blue sticky traps. No mites or mildew at the moment and I'm ordering the nematodes and traps for the thrips today.
A lil preview of what's to come:
Dabney Blueberry currently at 24 days:
A few more details:
I've recently fallen head-over-heals in love with compost and real, organic, living soil and the idea of feeding the soil instead of the plants. I started using a base mixture of 6 parts re-used PromixBX, 2 parts compost, 2 parts Perlite, and 2 tablespoons of lime for every gallon of base, aka LC's Mix #2. I used to pay $20 for a cubic foot of earthworm castings, but for a project of this size, that cost can start to be rather substantial after EVERY SINGLE RUN. But I've procured a virtually unlimited, FREE supply of very good quality compost from a local Municipal Composting Facility:
I'd say it was an EXCELLENT source, but they pick up leaves and yard waste from the curbs of the residents of the town, and it's inevitable that they pick up an occasional plastic potato chips bag or candy bar wrapper. So every now and again I'll find a little piece of plastic in there. It's no different than some of the crappy PromixBX bales I've broken up.
To that base mix, I've been mixing in blood/bone/kelp meals and Jersey Greensand, as well as some Espoma BioTone Starter Plus, which has a boatload of beneficials and mychorrizae, as well as meals of cocoa/cottonseed/feather and some others. It heats up really nice within 24 hours and is really cooking within 48 hours. After 2 weeks, it's cooled enough transplant the girls into and throw 'em into flowering.
In the near future, I'll be experimenting with different shits, namely shits of seabirds, bats, and elephants. Yes, elephants. I'll admit, I'm a little nervous about handling elephant dung, but I'm looking to get it for free from my city zoo, so I'll get over it if it works out well.
My other newfound discovery/love/obsession are these things:
These things are what is going to enable me to just Set it and Forget it.
Big, bigups to sunnydog, CMoon, and the other ICers that exposed these things. They are a GODSEND. Tropf-Blumat irrigation drippers. It goes like this - water from my spigot, to a rubber garden hose, to the Tropf-Blumat pressure reducer, to the 8mm feeding line to these ceramic sensors that sit in your soil container. After the ceramic sensors have been soaked in water overnight, they are filled to the very top with water so there are no air bubbles inside. You put them in your soil and connect them to the 8mm feeding line. As the soil gradually dries out, the sensor gradually dries out. As this happens, because of the water pressure inside the sensor, a membrane slightly opens a valve on the sensor that allows the tiniest, steadiest drip, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are no pumps. No resevoirs. No picking up the containers to see if they need watering.
There is an excellent video demonstration here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWPLr0Selh8
I bought 12 to see how well they worked and I'm ordering another 250 of them today.
In a side by side comparison, the plants on the drippers are doing much better than the plants being watered by hand in my opinion. The leaves are always pointed upward in that beautiful way when they are perfectly watered. You know what I'm talking about. Here's some Dabney Blueberry on the drippers -
This is when I first hooked them up. The plant was about a week in at 12/12:
A little later on, practically no maintainance aside from the tiniest adjustments, and they were only made because I felt like fucking around and tweaking the drip:
Alright, so that's about it for now. I'll update every once in awhile with flower pictures. I'm shopping around for a new camera, so within a couple weeks I'll be throwing up a bunch, for sure.
Puttin' In Work...10'x15'x8' Sealed Room Within a Room 6000 watts...Times 2.
The lineup:
Most recent villains:
Spider Mites
Thrips
Powdery Mildew
Those guys, however, are being kept out of the picture as much as possible through the use of neem oil, nematodes, and blue sticky traps. No mites or mildew at the moment and I'm ordering the nematodes and traps for the thrips today.
A lil preview of what's to come:
Dabney Blueberry currently at 24 days:
A few more details:
I've recently fallen head-over-heals in love with compost and real, organic, living soil and the idea of feeding the soil instead of the plants. I started using a base mixture of 6 parts re-used PromixBX, 2 parts compost, 2 parts Perlite, and 2 tablespoons of lime for every gallon of base, aka LC's Mix #2. I used to pay $20 for a cubic foot of earthworm castings, but for a project of this size, that cost can start to be rather substantial after EVERY SINGLE RUN. But I've procured a virtually unlimited, FREE supply of very good quality compost from a local Municipal Composting Facility:
I'd say it was an EXCELLENT source, but they pick up leaves and yard waste from the curbs of the residents of the town, and it's inevitable that they pick up an occasional plastic potato chips bag or candy bar wrapper. So every now and again I'll find a little piece of plastic in there. It's no different than some of the crappy PromixBX bales I've broken up.
To that base mix, I've been mixing in blood/bone/kelp meals and Jersey Greensand, as well as some Espoma BioTone Starter Plus, which has a boatload of beneficials and mychorrizae, as well as meals of cocoa/cottonseed/feather and some others. It heats up really nice within 24 hours and is really cooking within 48 hours. After 2 weeks, it's cooled enough transplant the girls into and throw 'em into flowering.
In the near future, I'll be experimenting with different shits, namely shits of seabirds, bats, and elephants. Yes, elephants. I'll admit, I'm a little nervous about handling elephant dung, but I'm looking to get it for free from my city zoo, so I'll get over it if it works out well.
My other newfound discovery/love/obsession are these things:
These things are what is going to enable me to just Set it and Forget it.
Big, bigups to sunnydog, CMoon, and the other ICers that exposed these things. They are a GODSEND. Tropf-Blumat irrigation drippers. It goes like this - water from my spigot, to a rubber garden hose, to the Tropf-Blumat pressure reducer, to the 8mm feeding line to these ceramic sensors that sit in your soil container. After the ceramic sensors have been soaked in water overnight, they are filled to the very top with water so there are no air bubbles inside. You put them in your soil and connect them to the 8mm feeding line. As the soil gradually dries out, the sensor gradually dries out. As this happens, because of the water pressure inside the sensor, a membrane slightly opens a valve on the sensor that allows the tiniest, steadiest drip, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are no pumps. No resevoirs. No picking up the containers to see if they need watering.
There is an excellent video demonstration here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWPLr0Selh8
I bought 12 to see how well they worked and I'm ordering another 250 of them today.
In a side by side comparison, the plants on the drippers are doing much better than the plants being watered by hand in my opinion. The leaves are always pointed upward in that beautiful way when they are perfectly watered. You know what I'm talking about. Here's some Dabney Blueberry on the drippers -
This is when I first hooked them up. The plant was about a week in at 12/12:
A little later on, practically no maintainance aside from the tiniest adjustments, and they were only made because I felt like fucking around and tweaking the drip:
Alright, so that's about it for now. I'll update every once in awhile with flower pictures. I'm shopping around for a new camera, so within a couple weeks I'll be throwing up a bunch, for sure.
. I ain't skeered a nothin' 'cept spiders. Despite that, I'd still never kill one
.
.
. I guess I'm just gonna have to really step up to the plate and hit a few outta here
. Thanks so much for for already finding this friends.
. Make yourself comfortable! That one there folds out into a bed if you wanna take a nap or sleep over 
.
