Greenbeans

Asking because ignorance , you will use the biochar as a wick, house for the worms and microbial life right?or not so much to wick?
I think the bin is genius, just asking because honestly i dont know, it is sufficient to keep them feed the entire grow? You will need to ammend in the future right?stupid question i guess kkkkk
The pipe in the middle of the bin is for the worms to access it?or something else?
Keep going greenheart

Yes you understand the idea. Char will be for micro life, aeration, and water retention. The piping allows compost to leach out into the bed. It will also allow water dumped into the compost bucket to flood the bottom of the bed and wick thru the coir. Amendments will be put into the bucket with the compost material. The worms will then dig around aerating the soil and pooping fresh plant soluble material behind them.

That is the plan at least.

I'm reconsidering the idea of covering the bed in reflectix. I think I want the top to stay dry. Covering it will have the opposite effect.

Greenheart said:

I'm reconsidering the idea of covering the bed in reflectix. I think I want the top to stay dry. Covering it will have the opposite effect.

Click to expand...

Would it also be better to allow the bed to "breathe" too ?

PCBuds said:

Would it also be better to allow the bed to "breathe" too ?

Click to expand...

It's probably debatable. I can see positive and negatives to both sides. The worms would do well. They would also be crawling all over the underside of the covering and possibly digesting it. Would it put me at increased chance of disease or bad fungal infections? Would it have the opposite effect I was going for and build an environment suitable to Gnats or Aphids?

I think possibly doing a single grow in a wick setup with a sealed surface would do well enough. I just don't think sealing the top with foam rings around the stalks is going to be a healthy thing for a perpetual living soil bed. So yes I agree with you. It is better to allow the bed to breathe.

In this setup the top 4 inches can be bone dry. The water will come from underneath. The only real place that can harbor the flying bombers will be the bucket. I can control that environment pretty well with a lid.

I could be wrong but don't worms live in the top couple inches of the ground/soil? So to have the top 4 inches dry, I dont think your worms will stick around. Again, I could be wrong..

Greenheart said:

Yes you understand the idea. Char will be for micro life, aeration, and water retention. The piping allows compost to leach out into the bed. It will also allow water dumped into the compost bucket to flood the bottom of the bed and wick thru the coir. Amendments will be put into the bucket with the compost material. The worms will then dig around aerating the soil and pooping fresh plant soluble material behind them.

That is the plan at least.

I'm reconsidering the idea of covering the bed in reflectix. I think I want the top to stay dry. Covering it will have the opposite effect.

Click to expand...

Hmm i see, i like the design and idea, pretty clever

About mulching the bed with reflectix, you need the soil to breath and for example in the alaska sip buckets they mulch it with just a plastic cover but they drill holes on the side for oxigenation, maybe linving it open is not a bad idea as you want to do.
About the gnats and the covering, i didnt see any grower with that problem because of mulching, because some bad composts or soils yes, entering the grow yes, but not because of the mulch.

Just one more question, why you dont fill the bed to the top, for the wicking be more efficient in the sides of the pots? Also the soil in the pots its peat for better a better wick or is anything else?maybe you already say it and i didnt see it..

How are the girls green heart?
Peace

Fitzera said:

I could be wrong but don't worms live in the top couple inches of the ground/soil? So to have the top 4 inches dry, I dont think your worms will stick around. Again, I could be wrong..

Click to expand...

In nature worms live in the top 3 feet of soil. Type of worms makes a difference. Red wigglers are hardcore composters. They can survive wetter conditions and are less picky than say a Canadian nightcrawler. Those are the most finicky to try and keep in a bin. In this setup I would expect most of the worms to hang out near the compost bin and piping as well as the moist layer below the dried out top.

@Sampas Sorry if I confused you. The pots are temporary. I will transplant into the bed for bloom. The wicking I spoke of is the bed itself. It is 16" deep. The top 4-5 inches is pure worm castings. I will let that dry out as time progresses.

I do not even know if I have a female yet. For now the only area I have for veg is the room I just built. Veg area is next!!!




YAY! It's finished. I now have a door, intake and exhaust ducting. There is a 4" vtx400 running thru a 14" scrubber for the exhaust setup. Dual 4" intakes at 3' above the top of the bed. The scrubber is in the front by the door and pulls the air across the room. Hygrometer shows 20C and 22%




Let's see if I nuke anything. I just put another 90lbs of worm castings on top of the bed. That makes 120lbs total.

I had originally thought of using the soil I transplanted too. It was preloaded with mycorrhizae and heavy in perlite. In the end I went with the castings. It will be better for the worms and less particulates in the air. That micro greens mix will fly everywhere if it is dry and you even cough on it.



Hooked the bloom chamber up to the Kil a watt. It's definitely efficient. I picked up a 3rd drop cord so now I am up to 3 bulbs. One balance grow spectrum. One flower grow spectrum. One 50k.

When I get the veg area built I will likely pull the 50k for it and add a second flowering spectrum to the bloom chamber. I think 3 of these will be enough. They say to keep them 24" from the plant and 22" apart. I likely could get away with only 2. We know how MJ loves her light. I think 3 will be the sweet spot!



K, promise not to laugh? They look pretty F'd up I'll have to agree. Fine go ahead and laugh your bum off. I can't blame you a bit.

If I didn't know these beans and the genetics I would swear it was all my fault from light burn, soggy soil, and cold temps.

I can assure you they are some special plants. I've seen a lot of mutants from these beans. Even ol' half leaf up there is likely from genetics. Last time I was pheno hunting thru them I found one that skipped every other node site and just put out a second fan leaf instead of a runner. She quite literally jumped quick for the light and didn't waste any time on lower growth. Tasted pretty fruity as well.

I'm betting half leaf is the star female of this group. I pegged it early as a possible BB pheno. It is showing some classic signs as well. Picky about watering. Slower starter. Darker leaf tones. Leather like leaves. Purple stems can be from cold but I'm betting that one will have them even in normal temps.

I top dressed with a light layer of castings and misted them with a spray bottle just before the pics. This morning there was much healthier looking color to them.


Sorry the pic is so small. It got resized when I uploaded. I tried to put them all into one shot so I didn't have to upload and post 9 separate pics

Here is the 3 stars of my show atm.

Half leaf, Tricot, and Shooter.

Half leaf is showing the classic traits of the DJS bb side of the genetics. I really hope it's a girl! Some of it might have been from light damage but I already see some signs.


Tricot is looking pretty normal really. Now that we have a better setup I'm sure it will come out of the funk soon enough. The new soil is definitely helping since it isn't waterlogged.


Shooter is likely a male. It is showing very robust growth and much taller than the rest. It might be a Widow or Heavy Duty Blue Heaven (HDBH) dominant female but in the past I noticed my boys tended to be the "healthier" looking plants on the growth side of things.

A mutant seedling usually become normal after 2 or 3 nodes (not the tricot)...so don't throw them away!
Also some tricot can yield as much as a normal plant.

I'm very interseted in the outcome.

Thank you for the encouragement.

I plan on growing the females out. I've played with them before so I knew what to expect. I should have titled my post magic beans. lol.

If tricot is a male I have a friend that will take it. When I first started growing he was breeding. I had a trifoliate bloom out of the seeds someone told me were BubbaKush. He wanted her bad so I gave her to him. It finished at 5' tall and 10' in diameter. He bred her and has been working on increasing the trait. He has gotten it up to about 10% now. I have no doubts about how much an extra growth at each node can yield.

I have some squestion for you micro growers following the thread. One of the reasons I popped over to that forum was to help plan the veg room.

Space leftover for veg room 16"Wx24"Lx80"H (in cm 40.6 x60.9 x203.2)

I have to keep 8 plants under 12" diameter and one mother. That will put me 1 plant below my 16 plant limit. I get 8 mature and 8 seedlings. Mom is one of the mature plants and then there is 6 running in bloom at all times.

I'm thinking on a framework of 12" square cube minicabs lit with candelabra 5w led bulbs at 500 lumens each. Seedlings will require much less intense light. Do you think those will be enough? Too much? The candelabras also can be put on dimmer switches to avoid any further leaf burning. I can do a drop cord for momma to help keep her nodes tight.

There is a narrow crawlspace I will need access to at times to change intake filtration and such. If I stack 6 cabs on one side and make the last 2 movable with mum hanging out on top of them it should work out well enough.

I'm a little rusty on my lighting requirements. If needed I can always run a second string of lights. It's just easier to do it the first time if you follow me. Cost is about $3 a socket and $1 per bulb. New dimmers would be about $10 per switch. I might check salvage for those. I have some new wire already.

I still haven't quite decided how I'm going to root them. In the past I used an aero cloner then put them into pots when they showed roots.

Depending on the container or tray that will affect how close they sit to the bulbs in the cabs. Any thoughts on containers? I think I want something about 4" deep and 10" square. That would put the plant about 6" from the bulb to start. I don't think it will be a problem if they grow right up into them.

Maybe coir basket liners with some soil on top and a tray to slide them in and out with? Those would break down in the bed pretty quickly right? There would be no need to take them out of their original planting container. With good soil I could likely root them right in it under dimmed light and turn bulbs up as they get older.

I can not help with the sils, never use them for growing sorry.
I use a quantum board.
But i can give you an idea for the garden spaces.

Here you are:

Seedling garden 19.5"W x 15.5"L x 15.5"H, quantum board at 8 watts, 24 hours on, 3/4" between plants and lamp

8 pepper seedlings (6 in 2.5oz seedling tray, 2 in 17oz pots)
1 onion (2.5oz)
1 garlic (2.5oz)
1 canna clone (24oz pot)
5 canna seedlings 15 days old (24oz pots)
1 runt seedling from a very old seed (24oz)



The seedlings pots:
On left 24oz 2.75"x 2.75" x 7"H
On right 17oz 3.5"x 3.5" x4"H



My mother Marra Jones #5 at the first reveg after i take from her flowering mother outdoor (one of the seedlings in the first photo), she is in the 17oz pot (sorry for the 90° photo)



Her after i flowered indoor and reveg another time (in the 17oz pot).
Repot in a 81oz 5.5"x 5.5" x 7"H pot.
I have repot her in this big pot because i want a "k.i.s.s. fire and forget" plant but you can use a smaller pot.



Her 21 days later (today).
27 branches + 5 suckers branches
If you take 27 clones at once you have the 5 suckers that become new main branches.
From the cab soil to highest node 14"H
8"W x 8"L.
The lamp is raised at 19.5" (its cold on night so i have put the q.b. lamp at 18.5w for the heat).

Veg

Veg

Sorry for the double post....

Here Marra Jones #3 clone, sister of the #5 and same treatment, the only difference is that i repot her in a 7" x 7" x 8"H 1.75 (american) gallons pot for flowering (another time).



Her 24 days later (today)
13"H from cab soil to highest node
5"H from pot surface
12"W x 12"L



Sorry the cab is 19.5x15.5x15.5

Caio you are welcome to all the posting you want here.


You are a wealth of knowledge. You have some excellent plants too. It is not so easy to recover a plant after harvest. I love the way they burst back. As you say the lower shoots make great new branches when you remove the rest.

You also make it look easy to keep plants healthy in the small containers. The root bind always made things difficult for me. My best attempt was a 2 gallon bonzai mum in a fabric smartpot. I grafted other strains to her and kept her trimmed as tight as I could.

Once I get my plants known I will make a new mum. I plan on using the longest finishing plant for the base. I will graft the other females to her. Every so often I will start a new mum with my 16th plant and bloom the old mother when she is getting too tall for the space.

I want to run a perpetual grow. The eight minicabs will be each in different stages. I plan on putting one in and taking one out about every 10 days. The sizing will also help me stay within legal limits for my area. When it hits the edges it needs to be trimmed, tucked, or bloomed if the slot it open.

What I really need help with is determining the lighting requirement for a 0.3048M box. (1ft cube) I will not be blooming in it just vegging. 500 lumens I believe is 1640 lux? How much lux do you think I need to veg and maintain a 12" bush over 11 weeks?

My plan is to put the bulb a the rear of the box in the top and the plant in the front of the box on a tray. I will train the plant to grow towards the bulb keeping the back half stripped. Once the box if full it would be time to put it into the bloom room.

I was thinking that lining a tray with a coco mat and some soil would help build a large shallow root mass that will be able to be transplanted directly into the bed and decompose without much shock in the transplanting.

Edit: Should I put the bulbs on slide rails to help reduce stretch?

Greenheart said:

What I really need help with is determining the lighting requirement for a 0.3048M box. (1ft cube) I will not be blooming in it just vegging. 500 lumens I believe is 1640 lux? How much lux do you think I need to veg and maintain a 12" bush over 11 weeks?

Click to expand...

Misuration taked with my phone:
Lamps 24 hours on

300 lux for rooting clones
7000/20000 lux for seedlings and young rooted clones
15000/20000 lux for sufficent vegetative growth
25000/30000 lux for an optimal vegetative

Greenheart said:

The root bind always made things difficult for me.

Click to expand...

Rootbound is a state of mind. Trim 1/3 of the root ball when they have filled the container, put new soil, and rootbound is no more.

Greenheart said:

Every so often I will start a new mum with my 16th plant and bloom the old mother when she is getting too tall for the space.

Click to expand...

There are bonsai 12" in height over 300 years old.
Tie from the begining the plant that you wanna as mother graft. And continue to tie after you grafted.
A little bit every day.

Greenheart said:

want to run a perpetual grow. The eight minicabs will be each in different stages. I plan on putting one in and taking one out about every 10 days.

Click to expand...

If you have 6 plants in flowering you need 6 plants in vegetative(?)
6 plants in veg + 1 mother = 7 plants
Or there is something that i don't understand

Greenheart said:

My plan is to put the bulb a the rear of the box in the top and the plant in the front of the box on a tray. I will train the plant to grow towards the bulb keeping the back half stripped. Once the box if full it would be time to put it into the bloom room.

Click to expand...

I don't understand how you wanna grow them
Can you post a draw?

Greenheart said:

I was thinking that lining a tray with a coco mat and some soil would help build a large shallow root mass that will be able to be transplanted directly into the bed and decompose without much shock in the transplanting.

Click to expand...

Transplant shock is another state of mind. When you do this the soil has to be bone dry.
Than transplant IN THE SAME soil she grow with, water WITHOUT ferilizer, put her under LOW LIGHT for the first day only.

Thank you again for taking time to reply Caio

It looks like I will have to play around with some bulbs. LED seems like a different animal. The closer the plant gets to the bulb the more intense the lux. If I used that 5k lumen bulb to get 15k lux in 1ft cube something bad will happen.

It might take an 9-11w sil. I'm thinking I might get away with a 5w. I'm not that good of an artist so it might be better if I just try to build a prototype cab to better exemplify what I'm going for.

The plant numbers.

I can have 8 mature plants (anything over 12" or in flowering)
I can have 8 seedlings (under 12" no flowers)

Atm I do have 9 plants. My total allowance is 16.

My goal is to keep minimum of 6 in flower at all times. This leaves 2 more mature plants. 1 is the mother. 1 will be the next in line.

Now the need for 8 cabs instead of 6. More of a failsafe to ensure I always have one ready go into bloom. I'm allowed to have 8 seedlings. If they are all self contained I could even try a little bloom experiment in a 1ft cube since I will have that 8th mature plant allowance. All in all I plan on staying 1 below my limit. This will allow me to play with seeds or breeding if I like at some point.

Now the bloom room explained. I do not know how long it will take to flower any of the strains. The DJS mom was a quick finisher at around 65 days. The HDBH was around 75 days. Most of my plants finished by 80 days. The longest I ever bloomed was 120 days.

I'm planning on a 70 day harvest window. That means every 11.6 days one goes in and one comes out. The plants themselves will be doing a lot of the deciding as well. It will be different not looking for the amber to let me know when it's time if LED rumors hold true.

My life is already pretty busy. I am going for a more hands off growing style. I know there is work involved but I want to let the plants and soil do the growing while I sit back and tell it which direction to head.

On mum. I did pretty good on her last time. I think it might be nice to bloom a larger plant with multiple flavors every so often to help keep variety in my life this round. Little plants and harvest are good when you don't want to do a lot of trimming. Bigger ones are nice when you are out of bud! I'm going to see if I can avoid running out but at the same time not spend both my days off every week trimming.

Update time:

So I think I'm encountering an Iron Deficiency. I've never really had issues like this before. I'm sure it is all due to human error. I got back into it like I knew what I was doing without rereading any of my info. I was stoned and excited. I mixed way too many amendments into a brick of coir and shoved the seeds into starter cups and flooded the mixture.

Now I'm paying the price. So we have random handfuls of neem meal, azomite, kelp, oyster shell, crab meal, greensand, langbeinite, and bentonite mixed in with one brick of coir, rice hulls, and playground sand.

Once I got the room for them I transplanted into some Roots Organics Micro Greens premix in 2 gallon smart pots.
Ingredients.

Sphagnum Peat Moss, Perlite, Coco Fiber, Hypnum Peat Moss, Leonardite, Dolomite (pH adjuster), Feather Meal, Non-GMO Soybean Meal, Volcanic Rock Dust, Fish Meal, Bat Guano, Volcanic Ash, Greensand, Yucca Powder (Yucca schidigera), and Kelp Meal. Also contains beneficial mycorrhizal fungi: Funneliformis mosseae, Rhizophagus intraradices, Septoglomus desertícola

I recently did a foliar feed & soil drench with some Liquid Iron+ They appear to have responded well to this.

Atm I'm torn between pulling them and washing away the concentrated mix I made in the root plugs or letting them continue on as they are until they come out of it. I'm going to lose time with both options.

Here is some pics of the situation. You can start to see it in the previous weeks update with "tricot"



after foliar feed and soil drench




after

The bin itself is doing better. I now have some Hypoaspis Miles running around.



The worms are also starting to inhabit the composter area of the bin and I'm seeing fresh poop and holes on top of the soil. They seem to be inhabiting the areas under the pots and the layer where worm castings meets over amended soil. I've not dug down any deeper to see if they are on the bottom layer and in the piping. I'm pretty confident they will be. I'm hoping in about 3 months when I toss plants in I won't see too many problems like I am currently experiencing. I guess we will find out.

Right now I'm reconsidering the veg setup. I was thinking I need 8 individual boxes. I really don't. Thanks Caio for your input. It might even be more of an advantage to have a few different size options.

Low height dimly lit shelf for plants establishing a root base. (10"H x12"D x 24"W) Keeping 4 plants 8" or less here.

Then I need 2 boxes with better lighting for veg plants starting to show more intensive vegetative growth. (16"H x 12"D x 12"W) 1 plant in each. When a plant reaches 12" in height move it to the final veg cab.

Last cab (36"h x 16"D x 16"w) This will allow me to veg a plant almost 3' in height if needed before it goes into the bloom chamber.

This setup should easily allow me to veg 7-8 plants of different sizes over an 11 week period and provide a separate chamber to bloom any breeding or single plant experiments.

For now mum will stay outside on her own private pedestal while I decide how I want to keep her.

It might be a stipule but I think I got my first pistil!



This next one I'm confused about. 4 of the 9 plants are showing some of it. Only 1 is showing it in such concentration. At first glance it looked like trichome coverage. Then again it could just be salts from the recent foliar feeding. Anyone know?

Hi green heart

With my limited knowledge about the subject, as you know, i left you this post



Hope it will help you on finding the amount of lighting for the different stages.

Also, some guys noticed that the plants seems to need a bit more of mg when growing with white lights.
Some guys notice that when they added red and blue diodes to their grows the plants grow normal again and even show nute toxicity after adding them due to the compensation of nutes.

See ya

I saw that in your thread. It said penetration but I wasn't sure how that is measured. DLI, lux,ppfd?

The bulbs I went with for my micro cabs are 5W Dicuno ProOE candelabra style bulbs.



At 12" they are 650 lux. At 6" they are 1600 lux. Touching the bulb they are maxed at 50k lux. I was able to get a few higher readings by touching one spot on the phone and placing the bulb sideways getting the base a bit closer to the sensor. I maxed at 100k lux.

I have not enclosed them in a cube yet. They just arrived and I was testing them. The nice part will be the spectrum and low heat output. I think 2 of them will be fine for a 12" veg cab. If I were to try blooming I think I would want to double that. I will update more when I get a cab built and some fixed numbers from an enclosed space. I think I can get pretty much right to the tip of these without worrying of light or heat burn. The real question will become how many I need per cab.

I'm following how the lux requirements work. With led I find that it isn't quite the same. Just a few inches can be big differences in lux readings. If I have a 4" plant in 3" of soil and these are 5" from the top then the plant is getting almost 1800 lux from 5 watts. When it grows 2" more then it is then it is getting 3600 lux from the same 5 watts. 2 inches after that it is at 10k lux. I don't know how big of a spread that is so I might need 2 or 3 bulbs.

On paper at 450 lumen per bulb it doesn't sound right that I would be meeting the lux requirements of a 1 ft cube with only 900 lumens. That is the equivalent of 2700 lux on a calculator.


EDIT:

This morning I experimented with a 5 gallon pickle bucket lined with reflectix and topped with the reflector from a standard brooding clamp lamp. 2 bulbs were able to achieve 8k lux at the bottom of the bucket. The bucket is 14" tall with a 12" diameter. The clamp lamp reflector containing the bulbs was above this height putting the tip of the bulbs at about 14". A single bulb measured 4800 lux. It seems angle and spacing positions will be an important factor in maximizing the lux efficiency.