Plant Alchemy With KNF: Korean Natural Farming And Jadam

Azimuth said:
I like to have as moist as a wrung out sponge which seems to be a good standard for many things organic, and I add water to the pile as I turn it every week or two.

I am getting heat in pockets of the pile, just not very broadly. But it'll get there. There's a whole contingent of composters that prefer cooler longer composting to preserve more of the elements but you don't kill weed seeds and the nasties if done that way, so maybe some combination of the two is what I'll end up with.

But compost happens whether we try to assist or not.
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Azi, I was back-reading your thread and saw this. Compost is about assimilating carbons and nitrogens, and nitrogen assimilation requires larger amounts of water, so if you dampen that compost up a bit, not soggy sopping wet, just damper, like a freshly watered plant at perfect moisture, you will get more heat faster.
 
Gee64 said:
Azi, I was back-reading your thread and saw this. Compost is about assimilating carbons and nitrogens, and nitrogen assimilation requires larger amounts of water, so if you dampen that compost up a bit, not soggy sopping wet, just damper, like a freshly watered plant at perfect moisture, you will get more heat faster.
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Yeah, I think that's what I learned throughout the season. After I started watering it as I turned it I got better action.

I spread it this weekend and was quite pleased with the end product. I screened about 50 gallons for over winter tote storage and the rest covered my various garden beds 3-4 inches deep.

This is the first serious compost application to the gardens so hopefully that will be reflected in next year's harvests.
 
Azimuth said:
Yeah, I think that's what I learned throughout the season. After I started watering it as I turned it I got better action.

I spread it this weekend and was quite pleased with the end product. I screened about 50 gallons for over winter tote storage and the rest covered my various garden beds 3-4 inches deep.

This is the first serious compost application to the gardens so hopefully that will be reflected in next year's harvests.
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Sweet!👍👊
 
One thing I did find interesting when I was screening the pile were a bunch of small, cotton ball type structures, maybe half the size of a cotton ball. Initially I thought they might be spider web cocoons (or whatever they are that one finds underneath outdoor furniture and such) so I tossed them aside.

But after a while I broke one open only to find a perfect little white mushroom encased in a protective film which I now assume was the fruiting body of mycelium. So those all got relocated to the storage totes to go forth and multiply!
 
Highya Azimuth,

I try to get some ocean water and seaweed every year for the garden, when I can think of it! Glad to see he approves! Happy Smokin'
 
Bode said:
Highya Azimuth,

I try to get some ocean water and seaweed every year for the garden, when I can think of it! Glad to see he approves! Happy Smokin'
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It sure is good stuff. I made some seaweed into a JLF and have taken to spritzing cuttings with it to give them some food while they root. I root in perlite and generally keep the clones in it for a month or so, so they need a little sometin' sometin'.
 
I got my seaweed JLF strained out today. Man, that looks like some  really good stuff. It's got a bit of a gelatinous quality to it. A real nice thick watery liquid.

About 6 months ago I took a trip to the ocean and filled a 6 gallon bucket with seaweed, mostly rockweed but also some kelp and a small bit of others, took it home and filled the bucket with rain water and a handful of worm castings. The seaweed wants to float so I set a plastic plate on top and weighed it down with a brick and left it all summer. I checked on it a few times but mostly left it alone.

Today I strained it through a kitchen colander that fits a 5 gallon bucket and got about 4 gallons of liquid and then I put the solids in a container that I'll leave out in the cold all winter with the expectation that as it freezes the cells will break open and the rest of it will process down next season.

At least that's the plan!
 
Wonder what its made of. :hmmmm:

I've made sea salt before which is made from dehydrated sea water, but that just concentrates the salt. That stuff says it takes out the sodium.
 
I'm trying something different with a round of clones, which is a Seaweed KNF sugar extract as a foliar after the first week.

I clone in straight perlite, misting twice a day with tap water and leave them in the container for about a month but they start looking ragged with deficiencies by the end. The best one or two get potted up but they then take some time to green back up with new growth.

So, I'm trying the use of plain water for the first week to encourage root formation but then switching to the Seaweed version at the beginning of week two.

So far looks like it's working pretty well with everything mostly green at week 2.5 and pretty good root development that I can see up against the wall of the clear container.
 
The kelp extract worked incredibly well for that first batch. So well, that I tried it again on another round of two separate strains.

The first grouping of my work horse CBD plant, and the second of the redemption grow plant, the one I droughted too early and too long, effectively killing the plant before the trichomes filled with cannabinoids. 🙄

In the initial round I started with the kelp misting after about 2 weeks which worked really well, so I figured I'd start a week earlier to really get things going. The Rev recommends adding some cal-mag (I believe) to his water based cloner after 5 days I think it is, so the 7 day mark seemed a reasonable place to start.

Survey says!?! Incorrect.

The CBD cuttings' leaves edges darkened to black quite quickly and that batch of 10 or so was a complete loss.

The redemption grow cuttings were limited to 3. Two smallish and one larger. One of the smaller ones succumbed to the black leaf issue the CBD cuttings did and was culled at the 2 week mark.

And then, at the three week mark, all of a sudden the larger cuttings leaves drooped overnight! I thought it might be that the perlite had dried out so I flushed the container with tap water to see if that would help. It didn't.

Based on my previously successful round I figured I had adequate roots but that maybe the water in the base of the container had gone funky so I decided to pot up a week earlier than I normally do.

When I dumped the container I was surprised to see no roots on the small one and only the very start of a root on the larger one.

So, not knowing what issue I'm dealing with, I replanted the smaller one back in the perlite and put the one with the start of a root into old soil that I hydrated with both LAB and aloe water. I also trimmed off several of the drooping leaves to give it its best chance of survival.

I'm pretty bummed since the redemption grow plant cuttings were the last in the line, so if neither takes I'd have to start over with new seeds. AND, to top it all off, apparently I over droughted my latest CBD plant and the recovery watering I gave it failed to rehydrate the tissue (I got 50% humidity readings in my sweat box after harvest).

So overall, a pretty discouraging week in Aziland. :(

But, there are lessons to be learned. First, I'm going to skip the droughting phase for the next harvest or two, and second I'm going to wait on the kelp misting until at least 14 days in. @Gee64 has said that feeding cuttings too early retards rooting so maybe that's the issue here since I'm 3 weeks in and nary a root to be seen.

Since that's the only change I made from the highly successful prior round, I'm going to start there in making adjustments.

Oh, well. Next!
 
Azimuth said:
The kelp extract worked incredibly well for that first batch. So well, that I tried it again on another round of two separate strains.

The first grouping of my work horse CBD plant, and the second of the redemption grow plant, the one I droughted too early and too long, effectively killing the plant before the trichomes filled with cannabinoids. 🙄

In the initial round I started with the kelp misting after about 2 weeks which worked really well, so I figured I'd start a week earlier to really get things going. The Rev recommends adding some cal-mag (I believe) to his water based cloner after 5 days I think it is, so the 7 day mark seemed a reasonable place to start.

Survey says!?! Incorrect.

The CBD cuttings' leaves edges darkened to black quite quickly and that batch of 10 or so was a complete loss.

The redemption grow cuttings were limited to 3. Two smallish and one larger. One of the smaller ones succumbed to the black leaf issue the CBD cuttings did and was culled at the 2 week mark.

And then, at the three week mark, all of a sudden the larger cuttings leaves drooped overnight! I thought it might be that the perlite had dried out so I flushed the container with tap water to see if that would help. It didn't.

Based on my previously successful round I figured I had adequate roots but that maybe the water in the base of the container had gone funky so I decided to pot up a week earlier than I normally do.

When I dumped the container I was surprised to see no roots on the small one and only the very start of a root on the larger one.

So, not knowing what issue I'm dealing with, I replanted the smaller one back in the perlite and put the one with the start of a root into old soil that I hydrated with both LAB and aloe water. I also trimmed off several of the drooping leaves to give it its best chance of survival.

I'm pretty bummed since the redemption grow plant cuttings were the last in the line, so if neither takes I'd have to start over with new seeds. AND, to top it all off, apparently I over droughted my latest CBD plant and the recovery watering I gave it failed to rehydrate the tissue (I got 50% humidity readings in my sweat box after harvest).

So overall, a pretty discouraging week in Aziland. :(

But, there are lessons to be learned. First, I'm going to skip the droughting phase for the next harvest or two, and second I'm going to wait on the kelp misting until at least 14 days in. @Gee64 has said that feeding cuttings too early retards rooting so maybe that's the issue here since I'm 3 weeks in and nary a root to be seen.

Since that's the only change I made from the highly successful prior round, I'm going to start there in making adjustments.

Oh, well. Next!
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If you feed cuttings anything it has to be ph'd perfectly. I don't like to do it at all. It trains them to be hydroponic. It works great for synthetic growers tho. And never feed before you have roots.

If all a cutting gets is RO water it is forced to make it's own food and will choose root production over veg growth so it can aquire food again.

If you foliar feed she gets confused, and if you ph a feed that gets eaten thru the cut end, you negate the need for roots. It can slow things down enough that her leaves will run low.

But once you have roots you can feed however you like, just ph it.
 
The kelp is only given via foliar, only tap water in the perlite. I suppose the tap water has dissolved minerals so when the perlite gets moistened there is some of that. But there's no standing water in this process.

Does your pH comment apply to foliar or just via the roots?

And it does seem that this rounds results confirm your thought of not feeding the cutting until it has roots since it will delay onset. Time of starting the foliar was the only difference between the last quite successful round and this one.
 
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