You don't wanna know! Got a spare sandwich? Actually its only 4 pots and it only takes an hour every ten days.
Gorgeous grow
@Gee64, it makes my head spin. So I have a few lab questions today.
- I understand what senescence is, and I understand that you know when to expect it. What I don’t quite get is, what is the advantage of knowing that? Other than to signal X number of days to go or whatever? Do you change your additives or top dressings or discontinue something at that point?
Plants have 4 main stages. Seedling, Veg, flower, and senescence.
Senescence is when a plant stops growing flowers, and goes into ripening mode. Leaves start to show fall colors.
All its life it has stored the best nutes it processed in its leaves. The minerals. So when ripening starts the plant will still drink, but it, for the most part, stops eating and starts to pull from the leaves.
The better you grew the plant up to this point, the better the ripening. This is what most growers seem to miss, or at the very least, not talk about. It's why I try to save every leaf. Most pluck those leaves, curbing photosynthesis, and then toss the leaves that the plant really wants to keep.
So if you have no deficiencies up to senescence, you have done your part.
Now its a water only grow as the plant shifts gears, and myco knows whats happening so it puts the rootball to bed.
Microbes go dormant, then fungii spore out, and winter sets in. The plant is an annual so to it, this is very important for next year.
For me, it means I made it, and the soil is being prepped for recycling. I consider senescence the finish line. On some phenos it starts as much as 3 weeks from harvest. On most its the last 2 weeks.
- How long does it take to make a big batch of your own soil from scratch, say 40 gallons or something, and if it’s your own, that means no FFOF base, right? So is the soil entirely made from whatever you toss in the bin to mulch? Like any food scraps or whatever? All harvested pot plant leftovers? Even the stems? And what’s good to NOT toss in? I’m thinking of stuff like orange peels, or leftover macaroni noodles that got tossed. Do I need to have a dedicated second trash can in the kitchen so that good stuff goes there and the rest in the other bin? And if that’s it, at that rate it’ll take forever to get volume. There must be a base? Or is FFOF the base for the long term soil bin too?
I start with a bag of Bluesky Organics Supersoil. It's a craft cannabis mix very similar to Rev's ingredient list, and if you add spikes and top dressing you can grow really nice weed with it.
After using it I let the pots sit for 2 months in the dark to dry out, go dormant, and spore out
Then I do this:
20 gals recycled soil
2 gals coco
7 cups prilled dolomite or 3.5 cups powdered
1 cup blood meal
.5 cup bat guano
.5 cup glacial rock dust or .5c rock phos
3 cups feather meal
3 cups bone meal
1.5 cups greensand
.3 cups SRP
2 cups organic basmati
.75 cups gypsum
3 cups kelp meal
2 cups alfalfa meal
2.5 cup oyster shell flour
Worm farm amendments
kitchen scraps/coffee grounds per 4 gallon tray.
2 oz cannabis bud
2 oz cannabis leaf
2 tablespoons kelp meal
2 tablespoons alfalfa meal
1 tablespoon greensand
1 tablespoon rock phosphate
1 teaspoon SRP
1 tablespoons oyster flour
1 tablespoon glacial rock dust
2 gals coco or 2 gals used soil alternating between trays
1 gal perlite
Spikes - 4 per pot, 1/4 cup each spike
1 part feathermeal
1 part bat guano
1 part bone meal
.5 part kelp meal
.5 part alfalfa meal
(Hmm, more questions than I thought. Thanks so much. I don’t know how you even find time to post. What if there’s a half centimeter gap of something somewhere? Lmao!!!)
You mean like the gap between my ears?
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And then there is the age old golden rule of gardening....
If it goes south you blame Azi, curse his name 3 times while you pat your head and rub your tummy, and move on....