PeeJay's Neophyte Breeding Adventure

[Lady Cannafan]

It looks possibly like a young Polymerus Basalis:

I'm still trying to find out if it damages plants, but my internet connection today is extremely slow.

 

[B A R]

PeeJay, I'm ready to talk seedlings. Whenever you're ready. Seeds are in and I'm making pots as we speak. I'm not planting until we solve my germination dilemma.

Sue, I did a step by step PICTORIAL on Ranger's old thread demonstrating a germination method I'm nearly at 100% with.

 

[Lady Cannafan]

OR, check Taylorilygus apicalis. It more closely resembles it due to the light color eyes.

I give up trying to find out any more info. The slow connection is going to make me get on the phone and ream a new one to my internet service provider..................

Edit: Pretty sure the above is what you got. It's common name is "broken-back bug".

 

[SweetSue]

Sue, I did a step by step PICTORIAL on Ranger's old thread demonstrating a germination method I'm nearly at 100% with.

That was an excellent tutorial BAR. I should review it. PeeJay wanted to show me how to get a big start with autos, since everything in my tent acts like an auto. I need to save some serious face.

 

[ClosedCircuit]

OR, check Taylorilygus apicalis. It more closely resembles it due to the light color eyes.

I give up trying to find out any more info. The slow connection is going to make me get on the phone and ream a new one to my internet service provider..................

Edit: Pretty sure the above is what you got. It's common name is "broken-back bug".

broke back bug....that could have all sorts of connotations.

 

[PeeJay]

PeeJay, I'm ready to talk seedlings. Whenever you're ready. Seeds are in and I'm making pots as we speak. I'm not planting until we solve my germination dilemma.

Love, love, love the random leaf shots. Healthy leaves make my blood hummmmmm.

You have options, Sue. Your problem, in my opinion, is the CC soil is MUCH to hot for seedlings. Those supercharged LOS no-till soils know no restraint. The same thing happens to LOS folks as bottle folks. The medium is too rich and young plants don't do great. When they are not springing out of the gate then more stuff, coconut water, malted barley, ACTs ( or in the case of bottled nutes, more nutes) etc are ADDED to an already too hefty soil. Ouch!

I expect that if you took the CC soil and added 3 qts more peat and 1 1/2 qts more perlite to it for each quart of CC soil it would do great for the first three weeks in a quart sized container.

Just to reiterate, complete soil strategies can be an overloaded mess. People try to apply field growing organic practices to containers and it just isn't smart. To me "no till" = I'm scared of transplanting. SWICK = I'm afraid to learn how to water my plants properly.

There is a great John Oliver bit about Dr. Oz. Have you seen it? The Oz effect has you adding coconut water, malted barley, and aloe to a soil that was designed to push the maximal limits already. "These wonder additions will make your plants explode!" Not so much.

Coconut water is SO trendy. Why? Because it is a natural mimic for electrolyte replenishment beverages like Gatorade that is lower in sugar ( still has a lot ). Mostly it is a very rich source of potassium. It has lower amounts of sodium than manufactured sports drinks. Many processors add extra salt to coconut water for flavor and better electrolyte replacement properties. Even without the added sodium, coconut water is higher in sodium than most plant foods. Sodium is bad. Potassium is an essential macro nutrient for plants, but it is also problematic. It has the greatest affinity for the active sites on the enzymes that move the cations up the concentration gradient for the plant. In effect, too much potassium prevents the transport of calcium, magnesium, ammonia, and ammonium. The sugar also causes problems...

Malted barley is mostly a sugar source. It is also touted as a "rich source of hormones." Ok, I don't want my milk jacked up with extra hormones, or my chicken... That isn't important though because plants CAN NOT absorb most hormones. Rooting hormone is one exception. A cutting might like a little because the actual plant is not metabolically active enough to make it's own. A healthy plant, however makes the correct amounts of hormones for itself via carefully regulated biochemical pathways. The hormones from the malted barley are just one more thing added to the soil that needs to be broken down by bacteria. The bacteria already have a TON of things to work on breaking down in a complete soil.

So, malted barley is a great sugar source. That's why it is great for making the delicious fizzy beverage I'm drinking right now. What happens to all that sugar from the malted barley and coconut water? It's a fuel feast for bacteria! Good right? Nope. Plants can't absorb sugar from the soil. They make sugar from sun, water, and CO2. In fact, plants exude sugar through the roots into the soil to create beneficial micro environments for the mico herd. When you keep loading up the sugar into the medium the bacteria feast. They have lots of fuel. They also need nitrogen for making amino acids and protein, phosphate, calcium, magnesium. They take these out of the soil and sequester them in their little bodies. While sequestered the plant can't use them. Oh no!

But hey, someone somewhere said "pour coconut water on the plants." Dr. Oz effect.

My mixes are prudent. I'm more concerned with overdoing it than under doing it. If I under-do it I can add if needed. A little topdress. An occasional kelp foliar. It's damn hard to take things out of the soil if there is too much, and too much can be a real problem. Read about potassium toxicity in humans. I know Dale really had to watch the potassium overload on his renal diet. Cut that CC soil way back with peat and perlite for larger plants, too. Err on the side of caution. You will be pleased. Show some restraint and your plants will be much healthier.

You just need to back way down on the richness of your LOS soil. Start seedlings in a very light soil and let them do a wet dry cycle so their root structure needs to expand to look for goodies. Don't overfeed the kids with either dirt that is too loaded with organic matter, or bottles of stuff. Avoid trendy add-ons. Watch out for Dr. Oz.

 

[Lady Cannafan]

Now that was blog worthy information you gave to Sue, PeeJay.

After reading that, I think I'm going to mix a little more of the peat moss and some black dirt in my seedling mix. Just to be sure it's not too hot for them.

 

[PeeJay]

Thanks Canna. Yeah, the bug has moved on. I don't see any signs of sucking or damage. I have had a few grasshoppers find their way into the greenhouse. They chomp away like crazy. For now that guy is safe from squishing if I see him again.

 

[PeeJay]

Now that was blog worthy information you gave to Sue, PeeJay.

After reading that, I think I'm going to mix a little more of the peat moss and some black dirt in my seedling mix. Just to be sure it's not too hot for them.

LOL Canna. To this day you are the only person around here that has ever had problems from UNDERFEEDING your plants back on your first grow. Way more problems come from trying to fatten up kids like lab rats for an obesity study. It's really as simple as that. Doc's kit is nicely prudent. It would be nice if he printed labels for his new fancy bottles that listed what was in each amendment. He got the stickers for the front. Very classy. But, for some reason he feels the need to keep things shrouded in secrecy. You would figure that the excellent customer support, and the buying in bulk so end users don't have to and repackaging in usable sizes, and trial and error he does would keep folks buying. The "veil of secrecy" is not a smart part of his marketing plan IMO. I find it a huge boner killer.

Oh well. I won't even get into federal labeling laws. The kit works.

 

[Lady Cannafan]

Sue, I did a step by step PICTORIAL on Ranger's old thread demonstrating a germination method I'm nearly at 100% with.

That was blog worthy too.

Thanks!

 

[PeeJay]

Now that was blog worthy information you gave to Sue, PeeJay.

After reading that, I think I'm going to mix a little more of the peat moss and some black dirt in my seedling mix. Just to be sure it's not too hot for them.

Just peat! That black dirt is an amendment, not a base. Thin with neutral base like peat, washed coco coir and/or perlite.

 

[Lady Cannafan]

Just peat! That black dirt is an amendment, not a base. Thin with neutral base like peat, washed coco coir and/or perlite.

Gotcha! Peat alone it is.

 

[Dennise]

Got a question PJ... I kinda mucked up and wasn't thinking... shocking I know... but I potted up 2 of my babies in the veg soil but I potted them in what I had intended on being there final home... a 3 gallon smart pot..... Dah... wasn't thinking about needing the bloom soil... so can I top dress the veg soil somehow... with something.. or do I just need to plan on upsizing to a 7 gallon pot for bloom... which I can do without much problem.... transplanting a 3 gallon smart pot I've not done before but I'm sure I can if it would just be better than trying to amend the veg soil... anyhow sorry for rambling but thanks for the help....

 

[PeeJay]

In 3 gallon smart pots of veg soil, Dennise? Hell. I say we just sit back in a porch rocker and sip sweet tea for a spell. We'll look at 'em in a month or so and decide what to do. Would you care for a macaroon?

 

[PeeJay]

Yup, they are fine for a while, Dennise. No sense worrying about them. Assess their value in a month or so. If things are good you can pot up. If it's weak sauce, top dress it, nute it or whatever where it is. Give 'em some water when they need it.

 

[SweetSue]

LOL Canna. To this day you are the only person around here that has ever had problems from UNDERFEEDING your plants back on your first grow. Way more problems come from trying to fatten up kids like lab rats for an obesity study. It's really as simple as that. Doc's kit is nicely prudent. It would be nice if he printed labels for his new fancy bottles that listed what was in each amendment. He got the stickers for the front. Very classy. But, for some reason he feels the need to keep things shrouded in secrecy. You would figure that the excellent customer support, and the buying in bulk so end users don't have to and repackaging in usable sizes, and trial and error he does would keep folks buying. The "veil of secrecy" is not a smart part of his marketing plan IMO. I find it a huge boner killer.

Oh well. I won't even get into federal labeling laws. The kit works.

I once got obnoxious about this very thing. It was what brought Doc to my journal the first time. So he explained it.

I'd still like to know what's in that High Brix kit.

All you have to do is ask!

First of all, I'm not in any way, nor are my products in any way affiliated with "HiBrix" from Australia. I use no chelating agents of any kind, all of my products are GMO free, all the way down the food chain.

So, here's what in the kit:

Amendment: Carbonized Limestone, Soft Rock Phosphate, Organic fertilizer ( yeast based), bio-char, mycorhyzae, ammonium phosphate, copper sulfate, iron sulfate, kelp meal, some salt of molybdenum, zinc and 20 mule team borax.

Recharge: very similar to the Amendment but with a tad of magnesium added.

Tea: Liquid Humic acid with beneficials

Roots!: various rock powders, mainly limestone, gypsum and soft rock phosphate, with biochar, trace minerals a mycorhyzae that have been born and bred on the rock powders.

Growth Energy: Liquid calcium nitrate derived from naturally occuring chilean nitrate. Trace minerals.
Transplant: Cold water fish hydrolysate, chilean nitrate.
Cat Drench: fish hydrolysate from cold water fish, ammonium phosphate, ammonium sulfate
Brix foliar: fish hydrolysate, calcium phosphate, phosphoric acid, dextrose, kelp based natural plant growth regulators (PGR's...auxins, kinens, etc.)
DeStress Foliar: Kelp, phosphoric acid, PGR's, dextrose.

I think I got every ingredient. Essentially, it's just rocks, naturally occuring salts, fish juice, microbes, small amount of carbon and organic matter.

The soil is very much alive....which is the entire point of High Brix growing.

My system is designed with a post-prohibition mentality and all of these products are good to go right out of the bag/bottle with sprayers, broadcast spreaders, fertigation and all manner of greenhouse Dosatrons and related products.

But they can also be adapted to small hobby grows, just as easily.

So, you LOS/TLO folks are like our favorite cousins. We're about the same things, we just have a different style and understanding. I'd like to grow by the Hectare....but I'd also like quality to be BETTER than what I now grow AND I can't spend all day brewing AACT in a swimming pool to food everything!

So, products designed for farming and market gardens appeal to me. No bugs, high quality every time, flexibility, consistency.

But please don't say I'm using chemicals or chelation! That's not me, that's someone else from Australia!

 

[SweetSue]

I'm going to have to read this a few more times to get it to all sink in.

"I expect that if you took the CC soil and added 3 qts more peat and 1 1/2 qts more perlite to it for each quart of CC soil it would do great for the first three weeks in a quart sized container."

I can do this. That's an excellent starting point.

"Just to reiterate, complete soil strategies can be an overloaded mess. People try to apply field growing organic practices to containers and it just isn't smart. To me "no till" = I'm scared of transplanting. SWICK = I'm afraid to learn how to water my plants properly."

This made me smile, actually it made me laugh right out loud, because, truth be told, you're more right than I was comfortable with admitting. I've already determined that I need to master wet/dry cycling. The SWICK I'm still trying to figure out. It's obviously beneficial once the plants are chugging along, but it also appears that the plants do best off the SWICK until they have hearty roots. I didn't introduce the SWICK to my first grow until they were over a month old, I believe.

The idea behind no-till was to keep the matrix undisturbed, thus protecting the biota from disruption. There are some very serious no-tills running that are performing at incredible levels PeeJay. They're hard to discount. There's a large and active community of them on another site that grow some of the most stunning plants you will see. We have some here in our own community that are doing the same.

Having said that, I seriously doubt many of them understand soil the way you do. So let's get serious here. I'm going to follow your guidelines for putting together a seedling mix. The 7 gallon LOS pots are already established. You suggest I cut way back on the amendments ( which I'd already lightened) and let the soil run on it's own for a while?

The cycle I'm getting ready to start next won't go onto a SWICK tray until the last month or so. That's one big change I've already decided on. My plan is to start the seeds in small cups and transplant into the pots I'm fabricating now, which hold less than a gallon of soil each. There will be 6 pots per cycle, with a new set introduced every month. Three of those pots will be Doc's kit soil and the other three will be LOS.

I have a tote of LOS in the kitchen. There's a 7 gal pot in the tent that's in a holding pattern and could be tossed back into the tote and remixed. If this tote of soil were in your charge, what would you do to lighten it? It's about a cubic foot of soil, without the 7 gal pot added to it.

Gee PeeJay, it appears I would have been smarter to listen to my first instinct and follow you. I came that close to going with a soil you only needed to water. Here I am, sitting at your feet again. Help me save this grow.

 

[PeeJay]

That list from Doc is fun. Thanks for that Sue. It confirms what I already knew intuitively - the kit is not overloaded with organic matter. Late in the cycle I tend to do three different things give the plants a little something extra. I top dress on occasion with a little yum yum mixed with castings ( a good source of nitrogen bound up in the various nitrogenous salts ~ energy.) I will on occasion give them some drench with Bio Marine cold processed squid 2-3-1. Cat drench is the same thing but with a little more nitrogen from the ammonias. I also do an occasional foliar with Sea Com PGR, a concentrated North Atlantic kelp juice 0-4-4 ~ stress. I don't obsess about these little extras, rather they each happen a couple of times a cycle when I get the feeling things could use a little kick. I've also done well with not using any extras. Mostly I just water.

One thing that is impossible to get around in "complete" soils is that the plants are all individuals. They have individual needs based on genotype and phenotype. In an overloaded soil there is little room for individual adjustments.

I know that some people have good luck with the very stout no-till soils, but my experience reading journals ( and I read a lot ) is that many people also DO NOT have great results and there is a compulsion to add more and more things to the system. Yes, stop adding extras for the sake of adding extras. Let the plants go on just clean water and see how they do. If you are going to do more LOS pots try backing way down on the strength of the soil by cutting it with peat and perlite, or better yet pro-mix HP or Sunshine #4 (yellow label.) These later two are buffered and less likely to lead to an acididc pH although peat would be fine since there is already a ton of buffering capacity in the soil.

There is nothing bad in the CC soil mix. I just think there is TOO much in there. Start with a very light seedling mix. Transplant into LOS pots after the first three weeks but thin out the LOS with more neutral base. Try it half strength or thereabouts for older plants and 1/4 strength or even a little less for seedlings. The worse case scenario is that when you watch the plants you might see some indicators that there is a deficiency down the road and would have to splash on some fishy ferts, do a little topdress or something - but I kinda doubt that will happen. There is a ton of juice in that soil and you are not growing huge plants.

It is much easier to start with less complex and add complexity to the soil than it is to back away from over-doing it. Very few pot plants suffer from being underfed. Problems are more frequently from over feeding and over watering. It makes no difference if it is bottled nutrients or a complete soil. If you watch you will see that people who struggle at first with Doc's kit tend to be the ones who are excessive or obsessive with the drenches and foliars.

You don't have to do much to get things really kicking, Sue. You just need to back off on the inputs and lighten that LOS soil. With the kit, go easy on the drenches and folliars. It is fun to think that doing more and more will make the plants grow more and more but it doesn't work like that.

 

[PeeJay]

I have a tote of LOS in the kitchen. There's a 7 gal pot in the tent that's in a holding pattern and could be tossed back into the tote and remixed. If this tote of soil were in your charge, what would you do to lighten it? It's about a cubic foot of soil, without the 7 gal pot added to it.

I would dump the 7 gallon pot into the tote. Then I would eyeball the total amount of dirt in the bin and add a mixture of peat and perlite (like 70% peat and 30% perlite to almost double the original volume - resulting in "half strength" CC soil. Run some plants in it and see how well they do compared to the overloaded mix.

 

[SweetSue]

I think Doc recommends something like 8% organic matter. I need to try to figure out what percentage of my mix is organic matter and then lighten from there. That's going to be a challenge, but I'll see if I can work out at least a best guess ratio as it stands now.

I read that over a couple times and it's making more sense every passing. Another time through and my blonde part of my brain might just get it. Often she's the one calling the shots, so I have to get her on board. You know, I never considered the sugar overload to the soil. It surprised me to realize that.

I need to be fair to myself here. Dale was dying the entire time I've been growing with this community. I need to stop holding myself to an impossible standard and let myself be as human as I tolerate in others.

Did you hear that Susan? Lighten the hell up already.

Thanks PeeJay.

We were posting at the same time. Ok. I hear you. I'll do that today.

Thanks again. I really appreciate it.