2023 "Field of Dreams"

[shag]

Some of the info listed in the link above was done by a chemist/phamacist friend of mine.

His take was don’t waste your money on high priced silicon.
It was a professional write up and is respected by folks at custom hydro nutrients, KIS organics, microbeman and some other big names in the industry.

Maybe give it a good read, it is a bit technical but filled with real world science.
Oh, and did I mention my friend OO is a bit of a genius too.
You could say the paper was peer reviewed but not officially.

Do plants need silicon? How is it used by plants? Can we make our own silicon products at home?

A big thanks to my old buddy Only Onamental for help with all the technical stuff. [image] [image] SILICON NUTRITION IN PLANTS The element silicon (Si) comprises one of the most abundant minerals on earth. Sand, quartz, and silica are all synonyms for the same basic mineral. Until the last decade, very little attention was paid to silicon in regard to plant nutrition, except for certain algae (diatoms) and the common scouring rushes (horsetails), which conta…

[FieldEffect]

@ColeLennon

Nice brother. I am doing some training and topping starting tomorrow when it cools. I will be removing some shoots that are coming in towards the platform and topping. Going to split each plant topping over a couple of days to limit the stress. I use my Solo sprayer last night with double-strength Monterey. Bad Bugs are out this year. Got to stay on top of these fuckers. Your plants are moving now.

I’m getting in on the same thing, but it ain’t cooling down anytime soon. The 907 is already an imposing monster of a woman - just trying to prune her up a little last night was a challenge. DENSE structure like a hedge. I think I’m going to have a hard time doing anything but trimming up the bottom and pruning off some scragglers, I’ll direct a few of the side shoots way off sideways for seedmaking. I think I’ll attach some bamboos across the cage to extend it out wider to anchor some of the limbs better. Same with Panalawi, I think the IBG is going to be only manageable one of the bunch.

Gotta get 'em bent before the silica hits

I’m thanking my lucky stars I didn’t leave all three in each pot.

QUESTION ABOUT MY BALLS:

How long before I need to watch for pollen? I read around 3 weeks from spotting balls. I wanna clip 'em before they spray so I don’t get random seeds in preflowers - I want to know what is what if I can help it.

For the record this will be week 4 of flower, I sprayed STS 3 times starting 4 weeks ago, every Friday. When it gets close, I’ll take pics everyday and try to pluck em the day before they blow, take them inside and either let them pop in a glass of water or cut the individual flowers out and let em dry. Open to suggestions, there seem to be lots of viable techniques. Then into a tupperware with dessicant, I’ll check on em and make sure I don’t over dry. Then vacuum pack and into the fridge until Miss IBG is ready.

On the topic of Silica:
@TopShelfTrees1 that GG stuff looks good. I’ll let you know if I need to get a hold of that Zumsil, thank you for the offer in any case. Still deciding. The Rhino I think will get me through the season and then I’ll need more for next season. It did seem to work just fine last year, and was the only AN product I got other than some Cal Mag I got to help with early seedling Ca deficiciency. I’ve read that silica should mostly be used during veg rather than flower, especially late flower. Probably in that thread I linked. I’d be super interested in your experimental results and apply them to my own grow next run.

@MissinBissin @shag
It’s really a fantastic series of articles. I greatly appreciated reading them and want more people to be exposed to that level of knowledge and fidelity. I’m not a chemist so some of it is “less than intuitive” to me, but it’s all starting to click as I get familiar with the basics over the last several months. It’s been a crash course as @MissinBissin @noknees @Dirt_Wizard and @ColeLennon know I about lost my 2 remaining brain cells trying to figure out soil ammendments

Cheers guys, I love all your input and the back-n-forth about topics that go beyond what I can find anywhere else - in person or on the internet. Fantastic.

[ColeLennon]

@FieldEffect

QUESTION ABOUT MY BALLS:

That’s above my pay grade. I don’t know anything about silica other than it helps with cell structure. I use heavy duty cages and zip ties for this.

[blowdout2269]

Full disclosure, I’m no expert here.
But, from my recent experience, the sacs will have a dark line at their seams. When the line begins to fade, they’re about to pop. It is also possible that the plant does not produce pollen/collectable pollen. Again, this is information from my first reversals(this run). I’m on week ten with this auto and am still collecting pollen.
PS. Make sure the pollen is left out to dry before going in a container with desiccant and into the freezer.

[blowdout2269]

Oh yeah, and my pile of busted ballz!

[FieldEffect]

How’d you get so many balls? How many STS sprays?

[blowdout2269]

I treated the whole plant! Lol
Figured if I was gonna have pollen in my cabs, I was gonna do it big. Should have plenty of Scarlet Grape S1 and F2’s, as well as Emerald Fire OG S1 and F5’s to hold me over for life. And to share with y’all of course!
Five treatments each, five days apart.

[noknees]

@FieldEffect

I wanna clip 'em before they spray so I don’t get random seeds in preflowers - I want to know what is what if I can help it.

yeah…that would be annoying to get seeds all mixed together. are you going to let the auto finish, or grab pollen and chop? can’t imagine you’re concerned with the flower yield from the auto?

@FieldEffect

I about lost my 2 remaining brain cells trying to figure out soil ammendments

proof is in the pudding, sir. you did okay

@blowdout2269

Emerald Fire OG S1 and F5’s to hold me over for life. And to share with y’all of course!

haven’t had anything Fire OG-ish in a long time. that stuff hits

[FieldEffect]

Went out this morning and gave the plants a good dose of goodies in their morning watering because today is going to be the only day in the forseeable future under 100F. They dried back quite a bit yesterday/last night so they really sucked it in. Aloe, kelp, Mycrobe Complete, and a dash of GEM fish hydrolysate. Did some more trimming as well.

Also planted some chile pepper seedlings because I had some daughter-induced (she pulled them up or stepped on them) fatalities early-season. Figured I’d buy some starts from the hardware store, didn’t have any, long story short I’m way late on some of them but hopefully get enough peppers for hot sauce until the 2024 season rolls around.

Lots of worms in my front bed. The pumpkins are growing FAST now. I’ve never seen all this life in the beds. Living soil indeed. Hopefully next season goes a little smoother with all this work already done. Again, I’ll remind you what 2021 gardening looked like:

I need to post an entire garden update for my own logging, will do that tomorrow. There is no resemblance to the above picture. Been trying to keep that on a monthly interval, dropped the ball last weekend. I have a grass yard now, surprisingly.

@blowdout2269

I treated the whole plant! Lol

Gotcha. May do that on my Fastberry (Blueberry Auto). I had planned to:

1. Have 3 autos of each desired cultivar
2. Top them all, reverse only one side of each
3. After the female sides finish select which will be my pollen donor since I was worried the terps I was after were fairly rare

Unfortunately, 2/3 of my autos, both the Fastberry and Bubblegum, have died. So there’s no such thing as options anymore, but I do like having the female half to monitor. I lucked out with the Bubblegum smelling like IBG, not as strong but similar enough.

Hopefully, the result of these auto fem pollen projects are some reasonably reliable Blueberry and IBG fem fast progeny. At the end of the day, I’ll probably reverse the entire Fastberry and freeze some of the pollen for future projects.

@blowdout2269

Five treatments each, five days apart.

Just ran out and sprayed lightly again before it gets hot out. Makes it 4 treatments in a similar interval. I don’t have nearly the density of male flowers.

@noknees

yeah…that would be annoying to get seeds all mixed together. are you going to let the auto finish, or grab pollen and chop? can’t imagine you’re concerned with the flower yield from the auto?

I’m not worried about the bud from the auto, no. I just retained the un-reversed half to test my method of selection after pollen collection based on how the female side finishes out.

@noknees

proof is in the pudding, sir. you did okay

Thank you! The pudding isn’t done yet

[ColeLennon]

@FieldEffect

Wow, you have made leaps and bounds. Props.

[ColeLennon]

@FieldEffect

Bubblegum smelling like IBG

I didn’t get that massive bazooka scent of my flowers until weeks 8-10. I’m positive that is why my cut said it was a 10 week minimum flower.

[FieldEffect]

Good to hear, excited I can already pick up notes of similarity on both the auto and photo. Hopefully if the seeds are viable that’ll be a consistent trait.

It’s SO unique I couldn’t even believe it when I popped open the sample you sent. I need to smoke some of that this weekend, been on a sativa kick for the 4th pretending to be social. It’s been all Hella Jelly and Hawaiian Snow, and by the end of the days I just crashed naturally

IBG tonight for movie time, and pray I’ve got something similar coming in October

[blowdout2269]

Did you make your Silver Thiosulfate?

[FieldEffect]

No, it was a mix I purchased and added distilled water to. I’ll try to find out where I got it from old emails

[blowdout2269]

I did the @sebring method.
You can purchase some sodium thiosulfate, silver nitrate anhydrous, and distilled water for less than 50 bucks. About half of those raw materials will make over 500ml of STS Stock solution. To put that into perspective, 50ml of that makes 500ml of finished solution for applications. And it definitely works!
I have enough to last a lifetime.

Making STS with Sebring

[MissinBissin]

Thanks @shag for sharing that article

[FieldEffect]

GARDEN UPDATE July 8

Things are generally good in the FieldEffect yard.

Inspired by a post from @ColeLennon’s thread showing a month of growth, here’s my own progress pics.

More generally, I’ll follow the format I used in the last update June 6 so it’s easy to do comparisons.

Front Veggie Bed:
Installed a shade cloth about a week ago and have been ammending similar to the cannabis (primarily N) as the soil testing has shown a dominant, lingering deficiency. I’m assuming the N is being used for both the plants and decomposition of the compost. Planted some new chiles yesterday, late but I think they’ll still party hardy. Pumpkins and zucchini killing it, Luffa gourd doing well, watermelons beginning takeoff, tomatoes starting to fly. Volunteer determinate tomatos are interesting, fruits look like Romas but they have the physical structure of one of the hybrid bush tomatoes I ran last year. Must be an inadvertent hybrid, but I like it. Hopefully they taste good.

Back Veggie Bed:
Tomatoes and peppers (ghost and jalapeno), volunteer tobacco coming up over there in the right-hand corner.

“Yard”:
Holy shit this actually worked. I assume it will continue to fill in, and I’m going to shop for an electric mower. Been ammending with the Moorganite (high-N organic yard fertilizer) and gypsum as there exist similar nutritional issues between the compost and alkaline native soil as the beds and containers do. Accidentally weed-wacked some mushrooms this morning, went ahead and tossed them into the cannabis pots to get some mushies going. Not sure what they were, I didn’t take a pic.

Blueberries/Strawberries:
These were doing better than ever 10 days ago, the heat over 100F the last week or so is really killing their buzz. Feeding them aloe, compost tea like the other stuff hopefully giving them the best shot they can have. The decorative pots aren’t helping with the heat situation, but they are visible on the patio so they can’t look like spaceships (like my weed containers).

The “FIELD OF DREAMS”:
The chair over there is becoming my favorite spot to smoke a cigar or doob. The tree is providing more shade, and I can chill with the plants. They seem to be doing well, they’ve been getting trimmed up a bit because we’re about to enter early flower/stretch and need to get them under control ASAP.

Thanks for the video @blowdout2269! I’ll do that next season

[ColeLennon]

That is monster growth in a month. Veggies gardens look great. OMG you have a lawn. Props.

@FieldEffect

[blowdout2269]

Of course bud.
Great looking garden/yard. I’m currently working in my veggie garden right now. Trying to get all 30 pepper plants weeded today. Been on my hands and knees for about two hours, lol. Twelve down so far! It so therapeutic though. Except it’s getting fricken hot. So I just set up a canopy.
If you run out of STS and you’re in the states, I’d be happy to send ya some stock solution. Like I said, I’ve got more than I could use in a lifetime.

Ok, back to it!

[noknees]

@FieldEffect

They seem to be doing well, they’ve been getting trimmed up a bit because we’re about to enter early flower/stretch and need to get them under control ASAP.

the tribe spoke, and chose the biggest/most vigorous plants. even with that in mind, it’s wild to me that the IBG and 907 are keeping up with the panalawi…in 100*++ desert conditions. the 907 is a conspicuously impressive plant.

you’re done topping, right? just keeping 'em tidy now? plants are nicely sized and shaped