Niwas and a jump to living soil in the new year.

[UndergroundFarmer]

It's never been the same grow twice since I had to abandon hydro last year! That's mostly good because I've been able to transition to more and more organic means of cultivation. I've had to learn a few hard lessons along the way and the latest has been that you can't afford to grow in two and three gallon pots when you're not feeding bottle nutes twice a week. I tried using just coco, perlite, worm castings and dry organic amendments then hit a wall with the small pot sizes. It seems that organically grown weed grows larger root systems and becomes very unhappy when they get rootbound. But that was a whole other thread.

Part of my panic over shriveling growth nodes was blaming my issues on low RH (a legit concern, though). I bought a Niwa controller for each of my two 4x4 tents and finally got them dialed in for winter growing over the last few weeks. My biggest issues getting them lined out was finding "dumb" heaters for inside the tents that wouldn't push me over 15 amps total. I have each of them controlling my light cycles now instead of the old light timers on the first outlet. The second outlets control exhaust fans to push out humidity and bring in dryer air only when needed. The third outlets control a couple of Amazon Essentials personal heaters. I chose them because they have no thermostat of their own, they blow hot air when on and do so until the power is cut and come back on when power is supplied again. The first ones I tried had thermostats that would zoom up to 90F all by themselves and had to be turned on manually after being unpowered by the Niwa. The dumber the better with anything you connect to these things! I may try to find a few small and "dumb" humidifiers for more precise control of RH but for now the Niwas are doing a remarkable job of keeping things steady with just a fan and a heater. I do run a humidifier in the lung room just to keep things reasonable.

I was forced to do some PDQ transplants to get ahead of vegging plants going rootbound so I had to get into my living soil mix a few weeks sooner than planned. I've seen no ill effects after two days. Better still, I invested in a worm bin a few months back and it is paying off! I was able to mix in a little fresh worm compost and 3 or 4 worms per five gallon pot to make sure the soil stays alive. I used dead leaves and stems from the plants that didn't make it as mulch and will probably need to shred a DTE box or two for more mulch soon.

The Alien Rock Candy freebie stopped shriveling after the transplant and is putting out new growth on top of the bad stuff. Time will snitch but even if I need to remove the damaged upper nodes, there are plenty of good lower branches that look fine.

Here's the veg tent now:

Alien Rock Candy is at right rear. The "dumb" heater sits in front of the floor fan to keep the heat distributed evenly. The Niwa sensor is visible just above the Accu-rite above the gnat trap.

The whiteboard after a major updating:

The flower tent contains some burned but still trying to flower plants which I may just have to trash to make way for the larger ones in veg soon.

Here's a bit of a freak in the nursery:

A Banana Blaze seedling came up with no cotyledons! It is growing slowly but still seems to be alive for now.
(Sadly, the mutant didn't make it. 1/31/22)

Any advice on programming the Niwas is welcome. I just have the "recipes" set to keep things steady and will play with them a bit for biomimicry's sake later on.

[JohnEmad]

That's what it's all about UGF. Trying new things and sticking with what works for you. Have done a little hydro and mainly coco but soil will be the way I grow in the future.

[SoOrbudgal]

Yes it's difficult for me to change my ways from soil. I'm pretty simple with any of my garden grows when it comes to soil mixes and compared to others i use less grow ferts/additives but i'm like i said, a simple home grower who grows for only myself an sharing with friends. When i have perpetual grows going back to back i then use it as bartering for around the house stuff i can't do by myself. I'm gonna get back to you UndergroundFarmer once i get settled in a new place and know my growing area, i got seeds to trade in the future.

[UndergroundFarmer]

Cool! I'll be going back into seed production when warmer weather arrives. I'll be using up what's left of the quasi-organic bottle nutes for those projects. Kali Mist, Golden Tiger, and almost certainly Mother's Finest will happen this summer.

[UndergroundFarmer]

I invested in eight "patio pickers" (Lowe's version of a city picker which is a larger earth box made by the same company) and moved out of the five gallon pots trying to fix what's been ailing the girls.



Not long after the move, I found that my real issue was not environmental but pestilence! The Alien Rock Candy in the second pic on the upper right had the damaged foliage removed and put outside to freeze the mites and everybody is getting washed down every day for a week whether they need it or not. I started going through my grow books cover-to-cover looking for clues and I found it. The damage was caused by an infestation of hemp russet mites! I'm relieved that I can now move on and grow, especially now that they are in living soil in a controlled environment. I had to trash five plants in flower. I did find a very late-germinating Purple Kush seedling among them and I saved her. She is now growing in the lower left picker in the first pic and you probably will need to zoom in to see her.

All of the transplantees took right to their new homes and by next week I will be doing more topping and defoliation now that I have things under control once more. Once I get some hay I will mulch them and mix in some ground gnarly barley for the worms and then the cover crop I planted yesterday should start to germinate within a few more days. No two of these are the same variety. I've been trying to grow out my stash of feminized seed to find out what's any good among the indica-dominant stuff.

Now I need to really update my signature line!

[UndergroundFarmer]

Another week gone (as well as a bunch of mites!). The girls were looking well enough to attack with the fiskars, so everyone got a haircut. All of the trimmings were left on the top of the soil for worm food. I also top dressed all eight pickers with more worm castings.



This is just after they had their appointment with the stylist. Later that same day, I picked up hay for a real mulch layer as Jeremy from BaS insists is necessary. You can see the cover crops starting to get established. The beany ones are easiest to spot without zooming in.



Now, it seriously smells like a farm down here! It's timothy hay and comes complete with seed heads so I'll have to keep an eye out for grassy competition.

The Niwas are keeping VPD steady as a rock until I open the tents. I may have to invest in one more for the now-empty 3x3 which will take whatever seedlings from the nursery decide to thrive. So far, Purple Urkle and Alien Technology are looking good. Banana Blaze is looking iffy and I'm waiting for Sweet Zombie to rise from the coco.

[Cali]

UndergroundFarmer Nice. I’m getting ready to harvest some castings myself tomorrow and I will top dress my city picker.

[UndergroundFarmer]

Now this is more like it! The mites are surely gone and the girls are starting to grow much faster. I'm back to normal defoliation and LST - all that good stuff you do in veg in a normal grow. I've been stuck in crisis mode for so long that I am reluctant to relax about the grow. My only plant stressing now is the Purple Kush that hatched way late. The tent with the bigger ones will likely get a scrog net by this weekend. It's going that normally now.



Here's that Purple Kush



I raised the lights a bit to see if it helps. I expect her to get going soon.

[UndergroundFarmer]

I finally got to the point where I can go back to normal grow stuff like defoliation! Everybody including me got a haircut this weekend.

This one's an after.




And this one is a before I forgot to shoot an "after" for. I took down the would-be beanstalks.

My replacement Purple Urkle before moving to a 5 gallon pot with living soil, worms, etc.



I also got a shipment of two AC Infinity fans to replace the weak booster fans that have been feebly blowing out excess humidity. I hoped they could run without the speed controller and they in fact, will do that and at full speed. What used to take 15 minutes now takes about 15 seconds! As soon as I can afford another, I will get a third Niwa for the 3x3 but for now, it isn't too bad off in there. Everybody else in the pickers is sucking up the water with their accelerated growth of late - I had six of eight dry at the bottom this afternoon.

More pics to follow after I get my shtuff together. I'm a little distracted by world events today. Good thing I've got weed to get through this.

[Cali]

Nice the ladies are looking good. The next couple weeks they are going to fill those tents with no problem. I noticed they (city pickers) really do a great job at keeping optimum moisture levels, the plants grow fast. I’m growing the same on my other tent but I noticed the stretch in the ladies on my city pickers was faster and taller. I’m really thinking about going full citypickers and putting away the 5 gallons. A lot of work dealing with small pots. Keep the updates coming UndergroundFarmer.

[UndergroundFarmer]

Thanks. The only thing I'll miss about all the individual pots is portability, especially when I need to shuffle a few plants around. I may not be completely rid of the mites. I'm charging my long-since-abandoned USB microscope to check out a sample leaf. Otherwise, yeah - this is getting much easier. Sunday is reamend day and the week after that I may be able to flip the bigger ones to 12/12.

[UndergroundFarmer]

No photos at the moment 'cause Apple. New photos are saved in a different filetype that isn't compatible here. Maybe later after I feel like converting them.

I have been picking off damaged leaves and checking them out every day under the microscope. The mites were back, all right. I attacked with various cocktails of LCPT and Dr. Bronner's and even with iso alcohol mixed in. I finally hit them with neem oil Sunday night after not quite killing them all off. Today's peek at an afflicted leaf showed a lot of dead mites. I could find a few moving still but in a halting jerky way. No spray tonight. Tomorrow I will look again and see if any are left alive. Too bad if they are because I've still got a half-gallon of neem oil spray ready to go.

Still, this picker/living soil experiment is going well and would be easy street if not for the mites. I reamended all the pickers Sunday morning with ground gnarly barley then a mix of kelp, neem seed meal and crab meal plus some Big 6 micronutrients followed by a good watering-in. Some of these girls seem much more resistant to the unwelcome guests such as Northern Lights and even Peyote Z---z. Mites think Alien Rock Candy, Chocolate Mint OG and Jack Herer are delicious unfortunately.

I transplanted my last two seedlings, Alien Technology and Sweet Zombie Sunday morning too. I foolishly saved cuttings from the bigger tents to try to root directly in living soil, just because I hate to throw 'em out. If it works and say MAC-1 is all it's cracked up to be, it may pay off.

[UndergroundFarmer]

Week one of flower is here at last!

The crashing mite population and the living soil getting broken-in has brought rapid growth in the heathiest of the girls, so the decision had to be made. I blasted both tents hard until all 2/3 gallon of the neem oil mix was exhausted. I've examined leaves pulled from several plants and found no living russet mites. I have seen a smaller type of mite carrying dead russet mites on a few leaves so I possibly now have a population of neem-tolerant predator mites.

Here are the two picker tents:



Obviously more defoliation will be needed this week after I've done some tying down of the larger plants. I broke a stem on Alien Rock Candy and split the main stem on Larry's Lemon OG:



I even was able to top Purple Urkle in the 3x3.



I'm trying to limit most of the girls in this grow to four main colas. In future grows I will probably return to manifolding but with only one plant per picker. I've changed the settings on the Niwas to reflect a bit more realistic solar day with temps at 75F with lights on then down to 69F after lights off then 67F after midnight until lights on. I'm hoping for more fall colors this way. Watering is getting simple enough. I'm now just dumping a quart in each picker per day. Five of the cuttings survive and it looks like the MAC-1s and the Larry's Lemon OG clones will all make it if they root in the next day or so.

[UndergroundFarmer]

Photos from the digital microscope:



The first one is from earlier this week after the first shot of neem oil. You can see older mites are more amber colored and juveniles are white. The second is the top of a petiole from a Blueberry fan showing a bit of color and dead mites turned opaque white. The third is from the underside where I usually find survivors if any. Keeping the scope on any mites seen will eventually cause live ones to try to crawl away because they don't care for such intense direct light.

[UndergroundFarmer]

Going into the second week of flower, I'm having to hit them hard with the neem spray. The close-ups of the bugs will have to be in another post because of size limits.

Here's the picker tents before defoliation:


And after:



[whew!]

The fans I took off all went into plastic bags to contain the bugs until I could dry them out in the oven to kill them. The crumbled leaves will go back on top for worm food. Check the next post for a few pictures of the little snots.

Here's the girls in the 3x3 plus a Larry's Lemon OG cutting that was becoming rootbound:



I think the remaining three cuttings may have already rooted since I'm seeing some darker green up top. They'll probably have to live in the nursery tent until I get more space. I may just keep a LLOG and a MAC-1 as moms if the flower is outstanding.

Jeez, if it weren't for bugs I'd have this pretty much nailed. And now for the bugs...

[UndergroundFarmer]

Here's a shot of the bugs on a big fan before defoliation and neem bombing:



Here's more still hanging out after that bombing:



I hope to never see these little devils again after this run is history. Luckily spring is almost here and I can catch some ladybugs and lacewings in my back yard.

[UndergroundFarmer]

Week 3 is almost over and I'm just getting around to posting after a weird work week. I've gotten some impressive stretching and bud formation already. The pics I've got from Sunday are so out of date because of all the growth. I reamended with DTE Rose and Flower plus some more ground gnarly barley and watered it all in with come coconut water.

Here's the 4x4s:



Here's the 3x3 with bushiness that will be tamed this weekend:


The small one is a Larry's Lemon OG clone - the first time I've successfully rooted straight into soil. The rest are [clockwise] Purple Urkle, Sweet Zombie and Alien Technology.

Here's three more in the nursery(2 MAC-1 & 1 LLOG). They are probably getting potted this weekend:



The two MAC-1s are definitely rooted, the LLOG, maybe.