Margin's Medical Backyard Beds

[soil margin]

Howdy folks, hope you guys are enjoying your weekend. I've been lurking in other peoples grow threads for years so finally I decided to do a journal for a small medical grow I'm doing in the backyard. The girls are all Blue Dream from clone, the haze pheno if my supplier is to be trusted. I was originally going to do CBD Skunk Haze but the damn customs agents confiscated my seeds in transit. That was 5 weeks of waiting patiently for a total bust. Won't be ordering seeds from across the pond again, live and learn I guess.

They will be growing in two raised beds which are 18cuft each. Approx 140 gallons of soil in each bed. Here's one of the smaller vegetable beds in the process of having the wood finished. This one is only 12cuft and will have arugula and cauliflower growing in it.

Here's the beginning of our soil mix.

Used a pretty simple mix with bagged soil, steer compost, chicken manure, peat moss, EWC, kelp/alfalfa meal, rock dust, sand, gypsum. Nothing too fancy but it's got the essentials and it gets the job done.

This is the backyard that had to be cleared of crab grass and giant chunks of clay filled soil before we placed the raised beds and mulch. Took me 2 days in the hot sun with a shovel, got a nice sunburn to show for that heh.

Here is the beds being placed and getting filled with soil. 500 gallons = oww my back.

This is the girls soaking up some sun and dealing with a hopefully very minor shock from transplanting.

More updates to come.

 

[BetaGrow]

Cool thread, great looking beds! Subbed...

Are you planning on using tomato cages, trellis, etc.? Or how to you plan on training them?

Also, in regards to the native soil in your yard--- that looks like pretty good stuff actually! What I've always done for my veggies (when starting raised beds) is use the native soil to my advantage. There's microbiology in it that interacts with the plants within their unique micro-climate, there's also beneficial worms/pods and other critters, etc.

What you might want to try in the future is to set your beds in place and then take the unwanted soil and grass out in strips...like sod strips. Just cut out checker shapes with a spade. You want to pull out full intact squares. Then as you place them at the very bottom of your bed you flip them upside down, so the grass is buried under the dirt now. This kills the grass at the bottom of your bed, as well as the layer you just threw in upside down. Then on top of that you add your amendments and on top of that your potting soil.

Saves a lot of money in the long run, because as I suspect you will find out at harvest even for 10 ft plants, the roots won't go much further than 18-24" into the bed. So it just saves you a shit ton of time/effort/sun burn/expensive soil/money and doesn't compromise the quality at all. Just my $.02...been growing vegetables since in raised beds since I was 8.

Cheers man and thanks for sharing with us!

 

[soil margin]

I'm probably going to put bamboo poles around the outside of the beds and then place a hortonova cloth type netting over that for them to grow through.

The native soil was pretty decent actually like you said, I've added it to our compost pile and hope it will be usable for growing in a season or two. That's a nice trick about flipping the grass over, I'l have to remember that next time.

 

[soil margin]

Okay time for update #1.

Had a nice weekend outdoors, finished brewing my first batch of compost tea with a new pump and diffuser. Using a pretty simple pvc design with a superluft aquarium pump. It's only 1.34/cfm but seems plenty strong enough for running my 15-20 gallon batches.

We had our last cool night for awhile on friday so decided to get a little fire going and hang out with in the garden with a touch of supplemental lighting for the girls heh.

The weather has been getting crazy here in southern California. 90f+ the past two days. Normally it doesn't get this hot until June/July. The sun has been getting super intense so I layed down another layer of wet mulch on the bed, hopefully that will keep the roots cool and provide a little humidity in this bone dry air. The girls seem to be transitioning to outdoors pretty well though, only one or two crispy leaves on a couple of them. Other than that they are soaking up the sun and looking happy. Peace out mates.

 

[420247]

We had our last cool night for awhile on friday so decided to get a little fire going and hang out with in the garden with a touch of supplemental lighting for the girls heh.

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That looks like a beautiful/peaceful place to be!

Keep up the great work

 

[locoezon]

U have made some nice beds there Margin.
Also the compost tea was a nice idea too.

I was made a tea with Urtica dioica with the same way
for first time and i hope it's gonna be work.

Have a nice season

 

[thaicat]

I can't wait to see this grow. Looks like you're off to an amazing start.

If I had a patio like that, I'd live on it and never leave!

 

[soil margin]

Thanks for the compliments everyone, I am very lucky to have a yard like this in an urban environment. Makes it possible to be a small scale farmer in the middle of the city.

Update #2

Ponolovesyou convinced me to lower the plant count in the beds to one per instead of three. Apparently this strain should easily be able to fill out the 130 gallons of soil in each bed. Now that I'm sure these girls are real blue dream I decided to remove the four plants on the outside of each bed and leave the middle ones as they were the biggest anyways.

I'm giving the smallest one to a friend for a mother plant and I put the other three in a big mound I dug and mixed with leftover soil and amendments. Approx 450gallons of soil, the mound is about 6x5x2ft. There is slightly limited sunlight in this spot so I'm not super worried about them outgrowing the space.

Here's one of the transplants into the mound, this girl is about 16-18inches.

This is shots of the veggie beds, everything is doing great except the brussels and broccoli which have been suffering because of three solid days of mid 90's and super dry air. Got a couple of em wilting over but those that survived will bounce back and taste just fine heh.

Cauliflower and arugula in this one, neither of them seem to mind the heat or dryness at all.

That's all for now, will make sure to update pics of the main girls once they get some serious growth. Peace out mates.

 

[Jetlife]

awesome set up, those raised beds are niiiice

 

[theJointedOne]

I hope your runnning supplemental every night over each of the girls, otherwise they are already in flowering mode and will become stunted revegged plants in about 4-6 weeks or so.

Clones put out this early flower right away w/o supp lighting. Seed does not.

Good luck

 

[soil margin]

I hope your runnning supplemental every night over each of the girls, otherwise they are already in flowering mode and will become stunted revegged plants in about 4-6 weeks or so.

Clones put out this early flower right away w/o supp lighting. Seed does not.

Thanks for trying to apply your experiences to mine but you do realize this varies drastically based upon strain, latitude, conditions, amount of indirect and direct light hitting the plant, the lighting schedule the clones were on before being placed outside, the weather, etc? I know you norcal guys have trouble with plants going into flower early but we have 95% nonstop sunny days here and that's just not a concern in this geographic region whatsoever.

 

[theJointedOne]

right on, have fun.

 

[420247]

I know you norcal guys have trouble with plants going into flower early but we have 95% nonstop sunny days here and that's just not a concern in this geographic region whatsoever.

I grow here in So. Cal and what theJointedOne said is 100% correct.

Just as you are when you said "lighting schedule the clones were on before being placed outside"

I hope you used a 13 on 11 off veg schedule

 

[soil margin]

Decided it was a good time for a quick update. Was doing a little tree trimming this week. Trying to clear out more unobstructed sightline for the girls on the upper half of the yard in the mounds. The ones in the beds already have horizon to horizon sun. These are my preferred tools of the trade heh.

Made a nice little addition to the compost pile.

This is a pic of my biggest girl atm, just about 2ft.

Here's the veggie beds, everything except the brussel sprouts are doing badass. Can't wait to start macking some homegrown veggies in the next week or two.

 

[soil margin]

Last update of the month guys:

Have had some decent weather here lately in so-cal. A few cloudy days unfortunately though. It's supposed to be warming up into the 90's later this week so the girls should be loving that. I'm currently working on getting a second grow location set up with hopefully 12-18 plants or so each in 100gallon pots if I can manage it, just need my partner to take care of all the needed supplies. Will probably just use one of my current blue dream as a mother plant and take cuttings in the EZ cloner if we end up working that out.

The girls seem to be stretching like crazy and have been doing very well with the calcium foliar spray and compost tea applications, this is the best CT brewer I've ever used and it was cheap as hell to put together, love ghetto engineering.

Here's a couple recent pics of the girls from the last couple days. The shorter ones are around 2ft. and the two biggest are about 28-30 inches. Take care and GL this summer my fellow outdoor icmagers.

 

[soil margin]

First pics of May and they are some HOTTT ones. We've had 95f+ temps every day this week so far with some days approaching 100, 20mph+ winds and close to 0% humidity. If socal wasn't a desert before, it sure is now. Been working hard to keep the girls happy with foliar sprays, compost tea and thick mulch, they don't seem to be minding the sun at all though despite the heat. The veggie beds are doing awesome as well, the broccoli especially has started exploding.

Two of the girls are really starting to shoot up, one has broken the 3ft mark already and the others are approaching. The branching is really phenomenal on the big ones as well, you can tell they are loving all the root space in the large raised beds. My three girls in mounds are growing a bit more slowly, they are probably 5-6 inches behind the girls in the raised beds who are getting full sunlight. Seem to be just as healthy otherwise though in the shade.

Some of these shots are already a few days old because I haven't been at the garden recently to take new ones, I'l get new pics of everything uploaded later this weekend or something. Enjoy:

 

[420247]

They seem to love the heat dont they? I feel like I'm having heat stroke! lol

 

[HillBilly1]

The lady's are sure happy And healthy lookin , very nice beds
Also

 

[OvergrowDaWorld]

Beautiful boxes. Hope you get the meds you need this season.

 

[soil margin]

They seem to love the heat dont they? I feel like I'm having heat stroke! lol

Yeah I have to say I'm pretty impressed with my first time growing Blue Dream outdoors. I've never seen a strain before that could go multiple days in a row 95-100f all day and not show even the slightest sign of wilting,yellowing,burn,etc. Maybe the high winds helped too but either way, real great genetics.



Thanks og and billy, appreciate the support. Gonna try and make sure I put all of the knowledge I've learned here to use this year and grow some outdoor that makes icmag proud.