Team Microbe steps into Guerrilla Country...

[Team Microbe]

The Season Begins!

The Season Begins!

I popped my outdoor beans for this season on 4/20 - these are some freebies I got called Fantasmo Express

Spontanica and KC-36



I prep in 2 gallon pots to provide seedlings enough space to prevent becoming root bound before the month of indoor prep is done. I used 2/3 seedling soil, with 1/3 of living soil on the bottom (to provide some food before transplant outside). Compost, crimson clover cover crop seeds, and straw were laid on top as mulch. My focus for the next 30 days will be inoculating this soil, and building plant health as much as possible before June 1st (transplant day). This means weekly IPM sprays with neem oil, compost tea drenches (just a few), and seed sprout teas will be in store for these. I've got another batch I'm about to germinate as well; I like to do batches of 20 plants every 2 weeks to give myself enough time to transplant and dig for each patch I plant. This is the first round, I'll do a 2nd round of another 20 plants next week, and most likely a 3rd round of 20 autos after that. Exciting times!

 

[Xorc420]

That's the kinda stuff I like! Nice show man, you're preparations are fantastic as usally!

 

[Kygiacomo!!!]

looking forward to those spotnica to see how they pan out. i'll get the kc33 next year for sure. i got a freebie of the fatsoma express as well. its suppose to be the auto version of rare dankness ghost train haze,thats what i was told on autflowering fourm anways. im innoculating my soil with insect frass,plant success and Dem lush roots. insect frass & lush roots is only thing i have put in the soil. i will start with the plant success once i get them to their final spots. i wanted to make sure the roots get infected with the ENDO myco's before i added a Ecto to the crew

 

[gorilla ganja]

watching this one this yr. best of luck, may all your buds be huge

 

[Team Microbe]

looking forward to those spotnica to see how they pan out. i'll get the kc33 next year for sure. i got a freebie of the fatsoma express as well. its suppose to be the auto version of rare dankness ghost train haze,thats what i was told on autflowering fourm anways. im innoculating my soil with insect frass,plant success and Dem lush roots. insect frass & lush roots is only thing i have put in the soil. i will start with the plant success once i get them to their final spots. i wanted to make sure the roots get infected with the ENDO myco's before i added a Ecto to the crew

Well played man

 

[OvergrowDaWorld]

Good Luck this year.

 

[Team Microbe]

Good Luck this year.

You too brother, you starting a new thread for this season??

 

[OvergrowDaWorld]

I dont have a spot just yet. I need to do some hiking and scouting.

 

[Team Microbe]

Same here, this will be a busy few weeks for both of us I'm sure.

How do you like going about your site searching? Do you have any tips or tricks for the rest of us searching this month? I usually use google earth to map out potential spots, but when boots hit the ground sometimes it's a whole different story... I see signs of humans EVERYWHERE it seems. We're def the most invasive species out there.... I'll be deep in the brush hours from suburbia and I'll still find a water bottle or a food wrapper it seems like. How do you find locations that haven't been frequented?

 

[jaytoker]

I love end of april through first half of may. It is still cold/cool weather, (trees barely starting to leaf out) which makes great work/dig/hike weather.

 

[Team Microbe]

It really does, doesn't it Jay? I had a smile on my face pretty much the whole day today when I was out at the breeding patches transplanting seedlings. 65F and sunny... can't beat it!

That's some good motivation to get work done now, I remember last year I almost passed out a few times from heat exhaustion bc I waited til June to dig and fill holes. Never again!!!!

 

[Kygiacomo!!!]

I love end of april through first half of may. It is still cold/cool weather, (trees barely starting to leaf out) which makes great work/dig/hike weather.

what lat u at? the trees are full bloom here in my area. temps in the high 70s to low 80s for daytime.it dont feel to bad though bc the humidity isnt high right now.

 

[Kygiacomo!!!]

It really does, doesn't it Jay? I had a smile on my face pretty much the whole day today when I was out at the breeding patches transplanting seedlings. 65F and sunny... can't beat it!

That's some good motivation to get work done now, I remember last year I almost passed out a few times from heat exhaustion bc I waited til June to dig and fill holes. Never again!!!!

haha me2 man. ive litterly had to lay down before out there cant breath. now i make sure my holes are dug in march or early april instead of mid may bc the damn humidity starts to soar around the end of may

 

[Ourobouros]

Just read through, nice work last season, you should do better this given what you've learned. At times reading it I wanted to tell the screen, "No, no, it's ten times easier if you do 'X' instead", but you are figuring your own stuff out as you go just like I did. Good luck and have fun, it's a adventure. Nothing like it. The volunteer seedlings in the seed patch tell me you've got that site really dialed in, it took me a few years to get to that point. I know it's hard, but try not watering some no matter how dry it gets. You might be surprised to discover your plants have sent roots down far enough following the water table down to still thrive. And a spot that works in a dry year unirrigated is a spot that is likely to produce for years to come without watering. Once the canopy closes over and shades deeply under the plants, the evaporative losses plummet and the ground keeps and holds its moisture.

 

[Team Microbe]

Those are good points man, the canopy shade def does help retain moisture - especially on those hot summer days. I've been adding more organic matter to my mixes and mulch heavier for those dry patches... I'm going to sow a living mulch in the form of clover this year too. That on top of everything else should do well I think.

Dude, please don't hesitate to give constructive criticism!!! Anything that you can improve from what I'm already doing is more than welcome here... I'm not stubborn like some other growers where it's "their way or the highway".... idiots lol

Ky and I were just talking about how much you learn in a single year not a few hours ago... it's amazing. So many lessons are taught in the form of mistakes, that it's hard not to progress almost. One year I was ripped, and that made me move further into the bush. Another year I suffered from plant diseases, which led me to organic soil and building plant immunity in the form of lipids. Last year, I learned a lot about site searching and locations; which work better than others and which environments yield the healthiest plants. I had thought for the past 10 years that the healthiest soil is in the forest, when it's not lol.

I watched a documentary called "Symphony of the Soil" and learned that most of the organic matter is in the foliage in a forest - not the soil. I couldn't believe it, but they say Grasslands have the most productive soil because of all of the biomass per square ft. that's constantly breaking down and recycling back into the earth. Who would've thought? The only problem is camouflaging vibrant green plants in a yellow prairie

 

[Team Microbe]

April 29th - Day 1 of the 2015 season

April 29th - Day 1 of the 2015 season

Well, I've gone back out to the Holy Rhodi breeding patch and all of the seedlings were pluggin along nicely. I was afraid the cold weather would stunt them on me, but this wasn't the case thankfully

The patch itself had about 60 that popped up, and since that bed is only 12'x12' I decided to transplant half of them to another location nearby.

I mulched with native grass that's died back from the winter, and once the plants are more established I'll plant some crimson clover to fix nitrogen since I didn't re-amend the soil this year. Some clover, and a few compost teas is all I'll need to carry these babies through to harvest

I'm curious as to how big these will get since they popped up 2 months before schedule, while we were still getting only 14 hours of sunlight. As May progresses, it'll increase from 14 hours to 15 hours (by May 29th). It's to my knowledge that plants begin flowering when they see less than 14.5 hours of light, so this should be interesting to see play out this year. I'm hoping that they're too young to have the <14.5 hr light schedule affect them too much, but what do I know?

 

[Ourobouros]

Having a seed/nursery plot is a great plan. I used to just let one or two selected males at the far end of a larger planting finish to get seed. This will give you plenty of seed for next year or longer. The males were selected essentially by pre Mendelian farmer's method: observing traits in the male you want passed along. Progeny testing isn't accounted but you get a similar selective pressure by repeating the process iteratively over a period of years. For me the selection criteria were, in descending weight: vigor, early flowering, structure, interesting smells/obvious trichomes. When you are killing say 49 males to pick one you can be pretty choosy. After a few cycles doing this it becomes clear how far the pollen typically is distributed from a male. Most of the fertilization occurs within 5-10 feet (sorry for the Imperial units) of the male. At 20 feet distance the females are perhaps a quarter and fifty feet away the plants would only have a sparse few (often huge) seeds etc. The fertilization rate seems to taper off at roughly the inverse square of the distance. You can grow sinsemilla in a separate plot as little as 100 feet away from the seed plot in my experience. Now these plots were generally carved out of thick, lush growth, so there were pretty effective physical barriers separating the plots. If the setting is more open, the separation distances might need to be larger. The selection process was helped enormously because the line was a farmer's cultivar brought back in the form of a few thousand seeds someone put in an envelope and mailed home as a lark from Afghanistan doing the "Hippy Trail" in the seventies. A cultivar that had obviously been bred and didn't show a lot of phenotypical variation, and a cultivar that happened to love clearings in the lowland forests of the PNW and would reliably produce big burly girls with lots of impressively mold resistant skunky buds that people would come back for.

Find something that doesn't display undesirable phenotypes, obviously loves your grow environment, --and volunteer seedlings are an excellent indicator--and suits your needs and patiently apply some selective pressure over time.

 

[Ourobouros]

The only problem is camouflaging vibrant green plants in a yellow prairie

Scout spots in the fall and favor spots that remain green in dry spells and late in the season. For more reasons than just concealment.

 

[gorilla ganja]

Having a seed/nursery plot is a great plan. I used to just let one or two selected males at the far end of a larger planting finish to get seed. This will give you plenty of seed for next year or longer. The males were selected essentially by pre Mendelian farmer's method: observing traits in the male you want passed along. Progeny testing isn't accounted but you get a similar selective pressure by repeating the process iteratively over a period of years. For me the selection criteria were, in descending weight: vigor, early flowering, structure, interesting smells/obvious trichomes. When you are killing say 49 males to pick one you can be pretty choosy. After a few cycles doing this it becomes clear how far the pollen typically is distributed from a male. Most of the fertilization occurs within 5-10 feet (sorry for the Imperial units) of the male. At 20 feet distance the females are perhaps a quarter and fifty feet away the plants would only have a sparse few (often huge) seeds etc. The fertilization rate seems to taper off at roughly the inverse square of the distance. You can grow sinsemilla in a separate plot as little as 100 feet away from the seed plot in my experience. Now these plots were generally carved out of thick, lush growth, so there were pretty effective physical barriers separating the plots. If the setting is more open, the separation distances might need to be larger. The selection process was helped enormously because the line was a farmer's cultivar brought back in the form of a few thousand seeds someone put in an envelope and mailed home as a lark from Afghanistan doing the "Hippy Trail" in the seventies. A cultivar that had obviously been bred and didn't show a lot of phenotypical variation, and a cultivar that happened to love clearings in the lowland forests of the PNW and would reliably produce big burly girls with lots of impressively mold resistant skunky buds that people would come back for.

Find something that doesn't display undesirable phenotypes, obviously loves your grow environment, --and volunteer seedlings are an excellent indicator--and suits your needs and patiently apply some selective pressure over time.

Great info Ourobouros. I was just wondering this today how far away my males needed to be kept. Thanks

 

[Ourobouros]

One cool things about males is that you can simply grab a shovel, dig them up with a half assed root ball and move them next to a hole next to your select girl just close enough so a few leaftips are touching and plug it in. They don't care, you don't need to use any care at all, they'll just keep on flowering and shedding pollen for a couple of weeks no problem.