Oregon Organic Guerrilla 2009, with your host BACKCOUNTRY

BACKCOUNTRY said:

On my last visit to the area I spotted(and heard) this guy on the ridge across from me.

I heard him snapping twigs in a way no animal but Bears and humans do(in my hills anyways), I was relieved to see it was not a human. It was small, between 150-200 pounds, one of many Black bears inhabiting my area.

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Awesome man, I do love seeing the animals out and about. Was out camping in Bear country lately, found some scat and a couple tracks, but no bears

I see bears all the time! I had to chase one off my street in the spring he was tearing up my garbage bins..

as far as the oregon medical card goes. its not all about what condition u have or dont have its about how u choose to treat it. I know a guy who got cut on his knee and had to have 7 stitiches, 10 years ago! and he got his card for that.

If you have "constant recurring pain" you can get a card. i blew out both knees and my L1 and L5 vertebrae are out of alignment. so basically i have a choice between eating pain killers to be able to tolerate walking, or smoke blunts all day and skip to my lou.

I even know quite a few women who got their cards for having bad periods.

Is this to say i would classify myself in the same league as someone with cancer hell no. we just both share the same relief that we can legally treat our conditions.

Backcountry, lookin great man!! i got 4 on my back porch in smart pots in the middle of suburbia oregon. and wish i could carry all that shit into the woods and do guerilla growin like i used to

youre the man BACKCOUNTRY !!! Earthole experiment rulezz!

peace

any updates BACKCOUNTRY???

grow on brother!

bb

excellent thread. enjoy your garden!

Greetings BackCountry!!!
I read your thread and joined IC to compliment you on your efforts to document your Earthtainer grow. We are not to far from you in eastern Shasta County (CA) and imagine we have somewhat similar environments...hot and dry. I hope you are able to continue your thread and let us all know...what happened after your last post of Sept 24?
Peace...Burney

Burney said:

Greetings BackCountry!!!
I read your thread and joined IC to compliment you on your efforts to document your Earthtainer grow. We are not to far from you in eastern Shasta County (CA) and imagine we have somewhat similar environments...hot and dry. I hope you are able to continue your thread and let us all know...what happened after your last post of Sept 24?
Peace...Burney

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Probably life and shemu

i hope that all is good bc.

Earthhole test, Sep 21- Sep 27

Daily totals
Sep 21- High 97F, Low 46F, Avg humidity 44%
Sep 22- High 101F, Low 49F, Avg humidity 29%
Sep 23- High 99F, Low 50F, Avg humidity 29%
Sep 24- High 88F, Low 56F, Avg humidity 45%
Sep 25- High 89F, Low 51F, Avg humidity 54%
Sep 26- High 90F, Low 52F, Avg humidity 51%
Sep 27- High 91F, Low 50F, Avg humidity 51%

Week totals
Average high 94F, Average low 51F, Average mean 72F
Average humidity 43%
Total Precipitation: 0.00 in
Water used in this period= 6 gallons in 7 days
This was pretty warm weather for late September in my area.


Earthhole test, Sep 28- Oct 6

Daily totals
Sep 28- High 79F, Low 47F, Avg humidity 47%
Sep 29- High 63F, Low 45F, Avg humidity 61%
Sep 30- High 62F, Low 40F, Avg humidity 65%
Oct 1- High 71F, Low 37F, Avg humidity 56%
Oct 2- High 65F, Low 38F, Avg humidity 61%
Oct 3- High 59F, Low 39F, Avg humidity 58%
Oct 4- High 52F, Low 37F, Avg humidity 78%
Oct 5- High 61F, Low 36F, Avg humidity 66%
Oct 6- High 73F, Low 33F, Avg humidity 58%

Week totals
Average high 65F, Average low 39F, Average mean 52F
Average humidity 61%
Total Precipitation: 0.16 in
Water used in this period= 6 gallons in 9 days(would have been 4.6 gallons for a week
My climate made a big shift from mid-summer type weather to my normal moist/cool fall weather during the last watering period of the season. Water usage also dropped, this time I believe the drop in water usage was just as much due to the plant being finished growing bud, as it was for the shift to cooler weather.

I harvested on Oct 6, this is 5-15 days earlier than I normally harvest OR95, but since lots of activity by outdoorsy folks has been observed(on the land I was growing on), and since the Deer season opened right around that time, I decided to pull them early. By no means was the bud unripe, I tend to let as many as 75-90% of the trichs turn amber(very stony), these were about 33% amber.

I'll continue with more Earth hole reports in the following post.

OR95 "Pitcher" plants

The pitcher plants didn't get the best they could this season, they should have done much better. My intention with these plants was to water them heavy once a week, from a spring a 5 minute walk away. By early July this normally reliable spring had dried to a mud hole with no usable water, this meant that all water needed to be hauled from the next closest spring a 20 minute walk away(under load). I rarely was able to visit more than once a week, so these plants never got to realize even half their potential.

On top of the lack of adequate water, OR95 #2 received damage to its main stalk from a Wood rat in Early July, the rat nearly fully ringed and killed the plant, but enough bark was left to allow the plant to survive through the summer and produce a small crop, but the plant looked sickly the whole time.
OR95 #1 also received rat damage in mid-September, also not completely ringed.

OR95#1



This was the medium yielder for this group, maybe 2.5oz total(I didn't weigh up these guys).

OR95#2



This guy was the low yielder, maybe 2oz

OR95#3






This plant did the best of this group, maybe 3oz it looks like. This is odd because this plant had the most shade and used the least water.

The "pitcher" test(terracotta pots)
My original plan for this season was to test several methods of irrigation, including some normal hand watered plants to use as controls for comparison of irrigation techniques. The black bear destroyed my water-timer based drip system test before it was planted, and the rest of my plans fell apart due to the health problems of my youngest child. Only one Earth hole and the "pitcher" test plants got established, the other 3 methods I was going to test never got done.
Since I was not able to care for these pitcher plants correctly, I can not call them a fair test, not by a long shot. But I can say I see lots of promise for terracotta to be used in future systems.

Here are some pictures showing how the roots of the plants covered the surface of the buried terracotta pots.



As I pulled the pot out, some roots remained attached to the pot, but most stayed in the hole, forming a dense mat around the pot.

I see promise for using this idea again in the future, next time I would either use more larger pots(I'm thinking 3 2-gallon pots rather than 2-1gallon pots per plant), or else use terracotta bottles buried near the roots and connected by water lines to external reservoirs. I'll probably experimant with this in one or more ways next year.

Earth hole 2009: Final report!

Earth hole 2009: Final report!

This season I experimented with my twist on the popular Earthbox planter, which I call the Earth hole. I wanted to determine if it would be worth developing into a Guerrilla irrigation system for Guerrilla growers in extremely dry climates.

A important figure in determining the viability of the system is its efficiency in turning water into bud. Water is hard to come by in my backcountry, it either needs to be hauled good distance from the few natural sources, or else be collected and stored during the rainy season, both techniques are costly either in time and labor or cost and time, at any rate water is at a premium.


The knitty-gritty
First I need to tally up the total water used by my Earth hole plant, all the way from planting in late May to harvest in early October.

The total water used by this plant was 86 gallons.

Now lets look at the bud yields. First let me explain how I grade my bud, I have three basic grades:
#1 buds are the best buds, they usually grow on the top part of each major branch of the plant. These buds are very dense, covered in sticky resin, and contain very little leaf/stem. These are buds I could clean up and sell locally for $50-1/8oz.

#2 buds come from further down the branch, they contain more stem/leaf than the #1 buds. I don't mind smoking these buds, but I have the patience to sit and peel the remaining leaf/stem before packing the bowl.

#3 buds are the poorest, these are the same that are often called popcorn by some, and scraggle buds by others. Most large growers put these into the trim for processing into Hash, I often do further cleaning on these buds and use it in large joints.

Normally my guerrilla plants consist of equal parts of each grade, the #1 bud normally coming only from the top part of the largest tops. Also my normal average total yield is 2-3oz per plant, with a couple 4oz plants also coming in during my 2007 season(with most of the #1bud destroyed by mold).

Here are the breakdowns on my 2009 Earth hole plant:

#1 bud: 4.55oz

#2 bud: .63oz

#3 bud: .96oz

Total bud harvest: 6.14oz

The thing that is most noticeable about this plant first is that it is at least double the size of my normal plant, the second thing is that the bud I did get is of much better quality than normal for me. Not only the most light exposed top buds got large, dense, and crusty, most of the secondary buds that would normally be #2 grade were just as dense and yummy!

Part of the increased quality is due to my use of a topped plant that grew into a bush, rather than my normal x-mas tree shaped plants. I was also amazed to see this performance from a plant that was grown under the edge of the forest. By no means was this plant very shaded, but it also didn't get total unblocked sunshine for more than 5 hours of the day. I chalk up the quality and yield of the bud to the fact that plant was not only never thirsty for the water it needed to survive, it basically had all the water she ever wanted all summer long, and it did this in only 10 gallons of very rich organic soil.

But how water efficient was the earth hole?
Well 86 gallons of water divided by 6.14oz of bud = 14 gallons of water per Oz yielded.

How does this compare to my past hand watered plants? In 2007 I had several large plants, the largest yielded about 5oz, and 3 others around 4oz. All these plants had holes lined with plastic to help retain water around the plant roots.

The 5oz plant received about 64 gallons-12.8 gallons per oz.
The 4oz plants got about 55 gallons each 13.75 gallons per oz

Comparing to the 2007 season, the Earth hole seems to be right in there for water efficiency, especially considering a larger percentage of the Earth hole plants bud was high grade dense bud.

The advantage of the increased bud quality would be enough for me to switch totally over to the Earth hole, but the fact that I can build the reservoir to be larger on future Earth holes and therefor extend visits to several weeks rather than weekly further sweetens the deal. In short.............

Earth hole experiment 2009 is a success!!

I want to point out that I never had:
Drowned roots
PH problems
Problems due to stagnant water(75% of the water I used was stinky crap)
Any sickness/stunting, at all!

I'm already forming plans for next season, for Earth holes that will go 3-5 weeks between visits, and even possibly for a Earth hole that will go nearly the whole season with out refill.

Here are some pics of the recovered root ball, I had intended to bring the rootball home and wash it for a good look at the complete root system. But the process of hauling it out of the hills broke many of the smaller roots.

There were many predictions that the roots would grow down the wick and fill the reservoir, but as you can see in this pic pretty much none grew out of the wick into the rez.


In this pic you can see the core of the wick removed from the bucket, many roots grew down the side of the wick, but fewer were found inside the wick itself. The low number of roots in the wick tells me that the plant received most of its moisture through the capillary action through the wick to the soil, rather than straight from the rez, allowing the plant to use the nutrients incorporated into the soil. NOTE: The wick is upsidedown in this pic-


Here is the original garbage bag I used to contain the 10 gallons of soil of the grow, inside is the rootball of the plant.


Through the bulk of the soil, many smaller roots snaked everywhere, no roots over the thickness of spaghetti was found very far from the main rootball.


This was the main root ball, in the center of the ball of smaller roots is one large "carrot", along with a handfull of smaller "carrots" wrapping around it.



I can't think of anything else to say here, I'll be back to start working on Earth hole prototypes for 2010!

Congratulations on your safe and successful season. Considering how hot and lengthy the summer was this year, it is surprising your water usage wasn't greater as a percentage compared to 2007. Your terra cotta/earth hole/ ambient watering system is efficient.

Wow, pretty cool thread!

What I'm thinking now is Earth holes where a rubbermade tote serves as the reservoir, and possibly another smaller rubbermade tote serves as the planter(soil holder).

Locally I can buy fairly sturdy 18 gallon totes for $4 and even sturdier 35 gallon totes for $7. A 18 gallon tote should sustain a plant in my climate for about 3 weeks, a 35 gallon for a bit over 5 weeks(during the hottest weather).

If I used one 35 gallon tote as the Earth hole rez, and also used another 35 gallon and a 18 gallon as storage rez, thats 88 gallons of water storage(2 gallons more than my plant used this year) for $20(add in a 10 gallon tote for the soil for $2). In exchange for the twenty dollars, some organic ferts(mostly cheap chicken manure), and a bit of work in the winter off season, I grow around 5oz of good outdoor. While I am growing the bud I can extend time between trips to 4-5 weeks, allowing me to visit on my schedule, not the latest heatwaves timetable. On the market this bud would go for $500-2000, so its quite a savings and worth it to grow my own.

One thing to remember is that this summer had much more overall heat than usual. Not every summer will be this harsh, but they will still be warm and dry. This was a great season to test the new idea, summer at its worse.

I've been waiting for this man. I was wondering what had happened and why you weren't posting lately. I won't ask for details if you don't want to share and it's OK if you chose not to. I'm just glad you're OK.

The EarthHole performed incredibly well. Much better than I had initially thought it would. I thought it would keep on drinking and growing like hydro plants do, but i thought that the root system would be larger. But now your results show that in this system the plant doesn't need that big of a root system because food and water are readily available.
I'm using metrics so I'm not used to the whole gallon and oz measuring system; and then i calculated and figured out that you used, just for this plant, 325 liters of water to grow 174 grams of bud...and even though that is A LOT of water and work...you also got a lot of bud for your work.
Can't wait for the EH2.
Later BC

enjoy your garden!

Gantz- You know, I was wondering this summer if I could get away with a lower soil capacity. The plants rate of growth through June/July made me afraid that the plant may end up very root-bound by summers end. But as the plant continued growing fast through July and into the blooming season, it became clear that this plant was no where near root-bound, evaluation of the root system has now confirmed this.
I've been playing around with the idea of trying some in 5 gallon(19 liters) containers next year, to see if it makes a difference in yield, I also have a feeling that the nature of this Earthbox/Earthhole type system allows larger plants to sustain without huge root systems.

congrats on your successful grow. and thanks for the thread. so much to be learned here. i will be waiting for your 2010 thread and the new innovations to your system.

nice harvest bc,my lil experiment with the water collar last year had shown similar results,a small root system with a healthy looking plant.

"I'm thinking 3 2-gallon pots" - maybe u can cover half or more of the pot surface with an aquarium silicone in order to make a similar watering surface as a 1 gal pot with a larger water capacity.