[McDanger]

Originally Posted by SilverSurfer_OG

Yeah those photos show my new, slightly improved biobox. I have raised the overflow by about 3 inches and only used one larger flexible airstone and plugged up one end.

I have taken apart my old box and had a good look inside. The airstone was a ok and all the roots in the hydroton had already been eaten up. I would recommend the flexi airstones they seem quite durable but i have only used em for 1 run so far.

I am working on a much smaller biobox to use for cloning at the mo.

I would be very interested in how you would clone using these.
I am still waiting on 1 plant to mature before I move all 3 to the bud room.
https://www.icmag.com/ic/attachment.p...1&d=1253634036
I think this girl will be huge.

And the other 2...

[LadyLargely]

Things are coming along nicely in my current Bio Box grow:



In this situation the wonderful flexibility of Bio Box starts to really shine through.

These are ScrOG plants, obviously. And this is real ScrOG; not, as FeezerBoy puts it, 'a plant with a screen in the middle'. The colas are truly woven into the screen, resulting in horizontal colas.

Plants sexed a while ago and pistils have started to wad up nicely. Thing is, because the plants where quite small and young when I went to 12/12 the growth on them isn't very even. Some of the tops have matured completely and are budding up rapidly, where other tops are still very young, some of them tiny. Thing is though these tops have the same access to light and therefore the same potential for final yield. Look:



Those two images are of the same plant on the same day. On parts of the plant the colas are getting quite mature and advanced, almost ready now to initiate budswell. Whereas other tops are only sporting a tiny set of pistils and have yet to really bud at all.

Normally, if growing with mineral nutrients this would put me between a rock and a hard place. I want my small tops to grow and stretch out to accomidate new bud. That means keeping lots of nitrogen in the mix. But with my much more mature colas I want to keep low nitrogen and lots of phosphorus so that the buds will fatten up.

This means I would have to choose between more bud locations, or more bud mass on older buds.

Happily, with Bio Box I don't have to choose!



This is because nutrient delivery is handled by mycorhizae fungus instead of osmosis. The plants are not 100% subject to the nutrient ratios present in my teas. Young sprouts will get all the nitrogen they need for maximum stretch without it impeding the swelling of more established buds. The older, 'outside' buds continue to grow by the day while the smaller offshoots play catch-up.

This way, its perfectly workable to have this:



And this:



Attached to the same plant. Nutritional needs will continue to be met and automatically balanced. Quantity of nutes provided will continue to smoothly scale up as the plant demands more. 'stretch' and 'budswell' are able to occur simultaneously

And none of this flexibility will subtract from final yield. Indeed the yielding capability of 100% organically grown plants, especially flowered under floros, would not be ranked high by most gardeners. With the power of Bio Box I will continue to show that strong, efficient yields can be had from any well-sorted garden.

[LadyLargely]

Along with pictures of Bio Box grows and explination of techniques, it recently occured to me that this thread should be a repository for something else:

Reference Material

Proposed Entry Number One:


https://www.saviskyproturf.com/doc/mycorrhiza.pdf

This extreemly well-referenced material oozes hard data. The author works very hard to give the reader a well-rounded perception about Mycorrhiza fungus and its benefits to terrestrial plants. From the early geniology explaining how this symbiotic relationship came to be, to hard examples of practical experiments demonstrating it's benefits for modern commercial enterprise.

But! You must keep in mind that Doctor Ted St. John Ph.D does such a fabulous job of explaining all of this because he is selling it to you. In the later bits of his paper he gets a little over-specific with how the benefits of Mycorrhiza may be obtained. This is because after he wins you over with the very real facts concerning the benefits of this fungus, the rest of the paper concerns viability in the market.

This limits the scope of the work somewhat, but overall its an excellent piece. The conclusions that summarize the hard data are great, I love this one:

"Seedlings that germinate on soil with an existing mycorrhizal
network can very quickly become mycorrhizal.
Seedlings that germinate on soil without a mycorrhizal
network become colonized much more slowly."

Its always been an instinctual tactic for me to place seedlings as young as possible into an active Bio Box. Always thought it was a vague benefit but it seems the practice is fact.

Among many other things, coincidentally, that are well-provided for by Bio Box tactics. On the tail-end of the paper Dr. St. John goes in depth about techniques to make soil more accommodating to Mycorrhiza fungus. Most of it involves broadcasting dormant spores and then providing aeration through various methods of super-low-impact non-tilling.

One can't help but think that constantly forcing oxygen around and through the Mucorrhiza inoculet is lower-impact yet higher-performance than these solutions.

Food for thought anyway my fellow gardeners. Its nice to see that there is a good bit of hard science out there that seems concerned with the same things we are. Hopefully lower-impact means of extracting high-performance plant growth grows as an investigated trend.

[rrog]

Very excellent reference. Thanks for that. I'll get into reading it. The practicality of larger scale aeration (fields of commercial crops) is interesting.

[rrog]

Some Fungus porn. This is 48 hours after starting the buckets:


See the fuzzy stuff in the middle

[LadyLargely]

Woohoo!! rrog's first fungus porn!!

You have officially started down the path to the dark side young grass-smoker. Lets see it all turn green!

[rrog]

Darth Lady

[magiccannabus]

I really love this idea. I have been dreaming about auto-watering pots for years, but I was going to use a wick. This idea is so much more simple!

[rrog]

MagicC, it really is a simple method at it's core. You can make more complex with the 3-4 times a week SCROG training, foliar feeds, etc, but the basic core package is elegant genius in its simplicity and comprehensive utilization of pro-biotics and hormones. A get more amazed and enthused every day.

I have really enjoyed the feminization discussions using Ethylene, Cytokinin and Kinetin. I'm all for growing females as well as femanized. I just want the quality bud.

Though this system would undoubtedly give any other grow technique a run for it's money, it's the quality that I'm after. This all organic bio-assisted system I believe will produce the healthiest high THC bud possible.

[magiccannabus]

A scrog would not be beneficial in my current setup, but the bio-box itself is lovely. I'd like to come up with some ideas for it though, it would be nice if I could engineer an auto-filling system from a central reservoir. That would give me a nice supply of chlorine-free water to draw from, and save me lots of work. Maybe if my next crop turns out I can afford to try this out.