Localhero's Outdoor cookout 2010

[localhero]

I am curious... do you add your compost tea to your main reservoir or apply individually to each plant? you said something about having 14 gallons total brewing and you have a total of 14 plants? so that would equal about one gallon of compost tea per hundred gallons of soil? sorry I am new to this compost tea and am trying to get away from chemicals as much as I can. I havent seen anything really in the growing large plants thread and saw that you are creating yours now... Your grow is looking good and I am very impressed with the small space. I have something quite smaller going but hopefully I will do alright.

hey right on man, thanks for the encouraging words! start a thread man, i wanna see what you got goin bro.

well for the outdoor ive only been foliar spraying the teas, tomorrow will be the first time i put a concentrated 10 gallon tea into my irrigation.

MAJ- thanks man, welcome aboard!

all i can say about foliar spraying teas is - BOOYAH.

i use the leftover spray on my lime tree, passion fruit and tomatoes. my tomatoes are now far larger than my dads, who had a month head start with larger starts. the passion fruit is just amazing and really really green, flowering all over. my limes are two to three times larger than store bought limes. some look like green oranges. so yeah im stoked on foliar teas.

the 14 gallon brewer is for indoors, its 2 gallons per 7 plants., the pots are about 20 gallons in size so thats a 10% watering and feeding. for some reason though, my indoor is hating life. its killing me. something is up with that room. i flushed the shit out of the pots last night, 2 gallons of tea per plant might have been too much. we'll see. keep in mind the indoor teas are used for fertilization too, so they have guanos. no guanos in the foliar teas.

hope that helps!

 

[crossouttheiis]

I am trying to stay rather low key, I will post some pictures soon in the growing large plants thread. I have 12 plants in 40 gallon holes with some good surrounding soil and about five foot centers. I am foliar feeding as well with brix mix as well as a calmag foliar spray alternating every other week. Back to your grow though... how many plants do you have I could only count 14? So you are roughly feeding your plants 3/4 a gallon of your compost tea per 100 gallons of soil? Sorry if im not making a whole lot of sense.. you are the only one that had really gone into depth of the process you are going to use.

 

[localhero]

no worries, theres 20 there.

teas are not an exact science. my impression of teas is that its alot like backgammon. you can win with pure luck, but you will win alot more by having a strategy and knowing your odds.

with that analogy id say im a mediocre tea maker at best. i know theyre working, and i have a strategy, but i dont have a scope and im still learning what amounts to use per plant etc.

it all sounds too easy to just break it down like- each plant is getting 3/4 a gallon. the reality is alot more complex. all plants are not created equal, even clones. a million different variables. you have larger plants than others, in soil that is for some reason better built in some pots than in others, even though they all started in the same soil mix, more sunlight getting to some plants and less to others. some plants will get more breeze than others.

i think this is where the fabled, green thumb comes in. another analogy - shooting. when i was a kid my buddy and i used to shoot compound bows out in the wilderness behind his house. he had a scope and all this fancy shit that i couldnt afford. even with his superior technology, i was still a better shot than him. that really pissed him off.

reading and studying how to grow plants will get you good results. however, its that flexibility of thought and process that im trying to relearn and apply to growing. whenever i try to put a one size fits all application to my growing, the plants remind me that it isnt that simple.

i think thats what the green thumb is: anticipating, predicting and reacting on a per plant basis while not getting caught up completely with what the book tells you.

i really dont know how much tea to brew for my backyard. i mean im making the 10 gallon tea alot more concentrated than i usually would for that amount of water. so really i dont know what that would be the equivalent to.

i didnt put in any guanos or molasses though. i didnt wanna have to guess when the bacteria have eaten up all the molasses. my fear would be that i water in too much molasses and it reactivates the "cook" you get when you first mix your manure into your soil.

mainly this irrigation tea is to get triacontinol to the roots via alfalfa meal, if any benificial fungus comes along for the ride - stoked.

omg that was a long ramble lol hope that helped.

 

[crossouttheiis]

Thanks a lot again. I understand what you mean. I know patience is key and these things take time to gain a better understanding. I have been trying to break the habbit of the one size fits all as well. I am just so used to certain amounts of chemicals to be added at certain times for different effects. This is my first season running an outdoor crop as well as foliar feeding and running anything larger than a 10 gallon pot. A lot of firsts so far and things have been looking really good. Next year I want to have a lot more planning done as well as research and a new space. Mine are a lot smaller since I got to thinking about doing outdoors a little bit late. I really like your set up and how everything is going. I am jealous

 

[nomaad]

any chance you're going to hit us with a photo update soon?

 

[localhero]

someone say, pics?

 

[localhero]

oh yeah, and here is one of my limes, as mentioned earlier.

 

[haxi]

Nice plants man ... ! They Look so good !!
Can't wait to see their maximum potential

Keep up the good work!

Peace

 

[nomaad]

zesty! things are looking good. ever had a sour mandarin? I have a bunch of those in El Honduragua amongst 4 or 5 other kinds of citrus trees. its less of a tree and more like a fruit bearing brush. Its skin is green and later orange, just like a satsuma tangerine and the flesh is bright ornage like a tangerine as well.... but by the time its skin is orange, its so sour it makes your face implode like a cartoon. So very tasty... its the standard sour citrus for everything from seafood, lemonade, tequila shots. The familiar yellow lemon and green lime have their place, but if I had only one sour citrus tree on a deserted island, I'd pick the mandarina acida any day.

 

[localhero]

thanks haxi!

Nomaad,

no man ive never had mandarina acida, sounds awesome though. i miss unconventional fruits from the jungle. ive always wanted to go to south and central america. was so close to just working my way from la with some friends as far south as we could go. i will head down there, its been waiting for me, like a long unopened gift.

you know eventually i want to have enough land that i can grow fields of bamboo. running bamboo, phyllostachys nigra or something. just let it go wild. ive always wanted to be in a bamboo forest. i'll rewind kung fu movies just to see the bamboo scenes. too bad we dont have the humidity here for it to flourish. maybe im wrong?

fun fact: the bamboo at warner bros studios was all planted by david carradine while he was shooting the kung fu series.


anyways back to the main plant in my life: cannibus

WARNING: do not put your teas into your irrigation without a very hard core screening!

i thought screening with burlap would be enough to get any harmful pieces out. WRONG. the shit clogged my disc filters so badly that i almost ruined a pump. i took out the filters judging that the particles in the disc filter would be small enough to not clog my sprayers. WRONG again.

some fungal tea squirted in my face and got in my eye while i was replacing and cleaning the sprinkler nozzles. will i lose an eye?

lots of time spent trying to figure all this out today. learn from my mistakes.

 

[TheGreenReaper]

...start shopping online now for eye patches before it goes necrotic and you lose your depth perception.

Man, I hate days like that...and those are the days I learn the most because I HATE IT so fucking much, that I make myself learn whatever I have to do to make sure some of that bullshit doesnt happen again...know what I mean?

So my hat is off to you as a man in the trenches actually getting his hands dirty. In two years your shit will look like TG's or HL's, etc. The reason why it will only be two years is because your are hands on and learning from the best here.

I think your garden looks great and I love the time stamped shots of the plants exploding in under two weeks as the roots take off in the bigger pots. I hope you have a great season.

 

[nomaad]

you know eventually i want to have enough land that i can grow fields of bamboo. running bamboo, phyllostachys nigra or something. just let it go wild. ive always wanted to be in a bamboo forest. i'll rewind kung fu movies just to see the bamboo scenes. too bad we dont have the humidity here for it to flourish. maybe im wrong?

lol. i am a great lover of all things bamboo.

The runner of which you speak is phyllostachys aurea... and its pretty sick... it runs and it runs and it runs. I hope that Nigra is not as aggressive a runner... I have some planted right in front of my house in E.H. Its very beautiful and can be used to make bicycles. One of the coolest things about returning to my place there is to see the progress that the caña has made in my absence. The nigra and multiplex are all I have by way of smaller, ornamental bamboo... though I have arranged about 17 new species to be planted when I next go south... the rest of the species growing at our place are giants. Dendrocalymus Asper, Guadua Angustofolia, Buddah Belly, a Black Japanese whose name escapes me, Pseudoarandinasia Gigantocloa... I cannot wait to get more into the ground.

man... you have me daydreaming... back to work.

I will work you up a list of bamboo species suitable for socal when things mellow out.

 

[localhero]

TGR: thanks man! no eyepatch, i figure i'll just paint an eyeball on my reading glasses. even though days like today happen, i do like solving problems. so it pays for itself in the end. learning from the best here is fucking priceless. a total gift.

Nomaad: oh man hell yeah, a bamboo list for cali. id love to have that iron bamboo (the one you can pound a nail in without it splitting), the indonesian giant black (i think thats the dendrocalamus asper you have), the japanese bamboo used to make the japanese flute (shakuhachi) , and basically anything very large.

one day.

 

[nomaad]

flute bamboo is sick. i know where there is a huge stand of that stuff. dunno if its the same as the japanese one of which you speak. the internode spacing is so long... beautiful weeping clump... its like walking around the center of a giant flower.

 

[#1cheesebuds]

so so so so so so verry jealous of ur garden. and D doggy looken cute too. I love doggys.

 

[nomaad]

Did your garden get obliterated by a meteor from outer space? If not, how bout a photo update? Shit... if it did, I want to see pics of that, too.

 

[Trinity Gold]

No you wont lose an eye bro. I had a bamboo stake go through my eye once..I have pretty bad vision in that eye now..Bent over right in to that fucker..pierced my eye lid and splintered off ...sucked. I wore an eye patch for months.

You're doing really well bro keep up the good work. Also when you suck your tea out of your brewer you should set it up a few inches from the bottom, that way you wont suck in any crap and also be pulling in the most microbe rich part of the juice

 

[localhero]

bamboo to the eye, that sounds like torture. ive nearly done that a couple times while de-bad-leafing. looking past the bamboo stakes at something inside the plant and then haphazardly bending down to get the leaf. that gave me the chills.

i appreciate all the good words on the yard guys!

the plan is to get the branches as wide as i can to encourage as much side branching as possible and as many tops as possible. although there will be a point to when i stop bending em down and start wrapping em in hortonova. im not sure if i want to put out more cages and go for another round of "push the branches through the holes" though.

without further delay, here we have the 6-27-10 pictorial update (no meteor damage yet)


Bullrider og

Banana Kush completely grown out of its cage

Hindu Kush uncomfortably close to the tomatoes

silver buddah

and this is whats making me rethink keeping the tomatoes around, anyone know what that is?:

 

[Trinity Gold]

Looks like scales.. Hit them with Calcium 25 ...follow up with Vitamin C / Brix Mix ...followed by micronized sulfur

 

[localhero]

thanks man, will do. ill grab up some sulfur today.