[PaulieWaulie]

That explains why my corn plants were yellow this year in the garden when everything else was lush green for 3 years straight. THX!

[IntotheGreen]

Thanks for the info, PakSam! Being that I live in a small apt in a major urban center with no car compost is tough to come by, that's why I started my base mix off with 3 diff types of bag potting mix, to get at least some blend of composted materials and ewc.
Specifically I used:

40L bag of MG Organic Nature's Care Garden Soil (.12-.10-.12) derived from poultry litter, alfalfa meal, bone meal, kelp meal, and EWC; also composed of "(one or more of the following: processed forest products, peat, and/or compost), sphagnum peat moss, and coir"

8.8L bag of Epsoma Organic Potting Mix: 45-55% sphagnum peat moss, peat humus, perlite, EWC, and limestone, plus ecto- and endomycorrhizal fungi

2 x 22L bags of PremierTech Potting Soil (very basic mix with just perlite and limestone)

To those bag mixes I added additional perlite and dolomite lime, and that blend serves as my unammended mix that the seedlings are now growing in.

To the total dry base mix (~4.3 cu ft) I added:

1.5 cups blood meal (12-0-0)
4 cups bone meal (6-8-0)
3 cups Dr. Earth (4-6-3)
2 applications of 1 gallon of water w/ 1 tsp molasses and 1 capful Neptune's 0-0-1 Seaweed

That is the full mix that is "cooking."

It's been roughly 48 hrs since feeding with the tea of half-strength Dr. Earth and molasses. Before application I did add about 1/4 teaspoon of blood meal and a capful of seaweed, and shook it vigorously for about 5 min. The blood meal showed no signs of dissolving, however, as I could see all the granules settling to the bottom of the jug. I did mulch the remaining solids from the Dr. Earth and blood meal as a top dress. At this point the seedlings are definitely slightly improved, but most of them still look pretty deficient. I'm thinking I will either attempt to powderize a little bit of additional blood meal to sprinkle on top, or more likely just top dress with a bit of the amended mix and water in.

There is one other thing that I have noticed with these seedlings that is quite interesting. I have 3 different strains going, so I would expect to see some differences in growth from one to the next, but even among my Cinderella plants themselves (which tend to be pretty uniform at this stage) there is significant difference. But all the plants have been growing under identical conditions - light, medium, water, temp, etc. There is only one independent variable I can think of... When they were only about 3 or 4 days old, my g/f was really drunk and poured beer into several of the seedlings' cups, lol. Angry Orchard to be exact. Whether she was pissed at me or just thought they looked thirsty I'm not sure, as she claims to not recall said incident hahaha. Anyway, I had just watered them earlier that day, so initially the affected cups were a bit oversaturated, and additionally I was concerned that the acidity or what have you from the beer might kill the baby seedlings. Once they recovered from the overwatering though, they didn't seem to be adversely affected. Fast-forward to two days ago, when I first posted about them looking yellow and wanting to feed them, and now I can notice a pretty big discrepancy between about 6 or 7 of the plants that look pretty green and are growing faster, and the rest that look kind of deficient.

You can see in this photo from 2 days ago, the back two rows are Cinderella, 3rd row Red Congolese x F13, and front row Sweet Jack x Blueberry:

The plants that are noticeably greener and bigger just happen to actually be the ones that my g/f soaked in Angry Orchard! Just in case I was remembering it inaccurately to find an explanation for the difference, my suspicions were confirmed by the sticky residue under those cups, and the fact that I can still smell the beer through the holes in the bottom of those exact cups. Notice specifically the plant in the back row, 2nd from right. It was looking like a dud/runt from the start. It was the last or second to last seed to germinate, the last one to emerge from the ground, and at the time of the beer incident, while all the others were at least an inch tall, it was barely above the surface, bent over at 90° and the cotyledon leaves hadn't even really separated. I thought it was pretty much dead. It remained that way for another few days, as it presumably recovered from the overwatering, and then literally grew an inch and had two sets of leaves within like 12 hrs. By the time of the above photo it had now surpassed many of the other seedlings.

While I cannot 100% discount the possibility that these differences are owing to chance genetic variation, even though this "experiment" was accidental, given the relatively good control of all the other major variables it does seem a pretty strong correlation.

So, organic peeps - what specifically about the beer application do you think could account for this observed better growth? Acidity? Sugars? Yeast? Some other nutrient? And did I just accidentally make an amazing scientific discovery in the field of cannabis horticulture lol?

[PakSamGyiShing]

Originally Posted by PaulieWaulie

That explains why my corn plants were yellow this year in the garden when everything else was lush green for 3 years straight. THX!

PW

One of the icons of the organic market gardening movement, Eliot Coleman, leads the crop rotation on his farm with corn because it's so hungry. He'll basically start the rotation off with a load of manure spread out for his corn, which is the only thing that can really thrive with that sort of treatment, and then the next year plant squash in that section, and then on down the list for a total of something like 8 years ending with potatoes before being ready to begin again with corn. Corn is the most tolerant of manure, and potatoes the least so it works out well hahaha

At the other extreme, the pre-contact peoples of the area around the Valley of Mexico would plant fields of corn in fresh battlefields as it thrived off of all the blood and gore. This lent a great deal to their mythologies, especially regarding corn, and sacred dishes like pozole - what exactly was in it before they had pork I wonder? =OOO

[PakSamGyiShing]

IntoTheGreen

They certainly look like they need a pick-me-up =O When you started saying that your girlfriend poured cider on them I was all ready to attribute that to your problem since alcohol is deadly to plants' roots. You saying that some of the ones that got ciderred are doing better than the rest is now throwing me off quite a bit. However if you think most of them got the alcohol treatment then that could be the root of your problem, with the other plants being outliers.

Your base mix is pretty nutrient poor, which could be some of your issue. It would have almost been better to just use the MG Organic + drainage as your seed starter mix =O If your seedlings are dry enough to water again it may be good to steep another batch of the Dr Earth tea and maybe add an appropriate amount of your Neptune's Harvest before application. If you can't get access to EWC, or compost, locally you could maybe order some online which would at least be helpful for situations like these =O

[IntotheGreen]

Yeah it is certainly weird/not what I would have expected but the plants that were doing better were pretty much exactly the only ones that got cidered. The only explanations I can come up with are that 1) the sugar in the cider served as food for the microbes from the Epsoma mix that allowed the seedlings to access the small amount of organic nutrients contained in the MG mix, as the other plants had only received plain distilled water up until the tea I fed them 4 days ago; or 2) less likely but given the fact that roughly half of my base mix had some pre-added limestone and I then added more dolomite lime, possibly the mix was a little closer to pH of 7 than ideal, and the acidity of the cider lowered it to a level more conducive to uptake. Given the way organics works and the fact that I think "don't worry about pH" has been written in this thread probably 50+ times (not to mention I used the pelletized version at slightly less than the prescribed amount), this explanation seems pretty unlikely. So from the data I have observed I am provisionally going to attribute the difference in growth to the sugars that the cidered cups received. I think an interesting future experiment would be to have three groups of seedlings in a similar mix, one getting the cider treatment, one getting our typical molasses, and the control getting just plain distilled water, maybe running a concurrent comparison of the three conditions in a purely inert base mix, devoid of any organic nutrients and/or microbial life. The results of that comparison would go a long way toward confirming or disconfirming my hypothesis.

At any rate, though they were a little slower to respond than I thought they would be, now 4 days after the half-strength Dr. Earth tea there is significant improvement in color and growth on all plants:


The seedlings are due for another watering today, and though the tea was definitely effective, I am having fun experimenting so I think I'm going to try out the top dress of some amended mix idea. I have already mulched the leftover solids from the previous tea on top, so I'll spread a little of the moist mix over that and water it in with the molasses + Neptune's.

[wasgedn]

i transplant cups after 2 weeks.... so topping on cups makes no sense for me...

my seedlings get only ewc,rockdusts ,lightmix,little bokashi bunker on bottom,vermiculite,perlit,sili cia dust ultra fine and some bacto and fungi...... and mostly water or microbe water
you do overdoing on seedlings i got the feeling...

[GratefulDank]

Is there another way to measure out the bkood/bone/kelp meal other then going off of 1 cubic foot of LCs mix #2? I currently have a plastic bin with LCs mix #2 cooking. Just wondering if there's another way to measure the bone/blood/kelp meal into LCs mix #2 or do i need to get a cubic foot of the mix and go off that?

[PaulieWaulie]

a Cubic Foot is 7 Gallons roughly so just divide the cup into ML and figure out the per gallon ratio. But I just do everything in multiples of cubic feet so either mix up 7G,14G,21G,28G, my mix works out to a gallon of total ammendments per 21G base mix

[PaulieWaulie]

Here is a batch I just mixed up


3 CUBIC FOOT BASE MIX (21G)
[x] 13 PARTS PRO MIX HP (30% Perlite)
[x] 3 PARTS WORM CASTINGS
[x] 2 PARTS COMPOST
[x] 3 PARTS PERLITE

43% PEAT 9G
24% EWC/COMPOST 5G
33% PERLITE 7G


AMMENDMENTS

[x] 1 CUP BONE MEAL
[x] 1 CUP GLACIAL ROCK DUST
[x] 1/2 CUP KELP MEAL
[x] 1/2 CUP OYSTER SHELL
[x] 1/2 CUP DEHYDRATED MOLLASSES
[x] 1/2 CUP AZOMITE
[x] 1/4 CUP BLOOD MEAL
[x] 1/4 CUP ALFALFA MEAL

[GratefulDank]

Thanks PW. Went back and noticed b1 had mentioned that in beginning of this thread.. whoops. Do you water only with that mix you put together? I know recipe #1 calls for water only but I'm wondering if i can incorporate compost teas as well.