2x2 20 Gallon Living Soil

This will be an ongoing diary of the goings on in my 2x2, 20 gallon living soil tent.

I just chopped these girls, some Spirit Train F2s courtesy newb2.0, Sebring, & Bodhi. Drying now, fantastic variety and aromas - one smells like pickles, another like sweet hard candy. Can’t wait to roll some Js and treat myself to a green Christmas.

The tree trunk in the back is a marigold that is still producing flowers so it gets to stay and help restock the soil buffet. A swath of seeds were planted about 7-10 days ago. I sort of jumped the gun thinking the chop of the Spirit Trains would happen sooner so some of them stretched a bit in the shade. No worries though I may drop some more to ensure density in the canopy and to help maximize the usage of my light. Here’s a list of what was planted:

white yarrow - daisy
scarlet flax - flax
dwarf godetia - evening primrose
dwarf alyssum - brassica
amaranth - amaranthaceae
lady phacelia - borage
blue flax - flax
johnny jump up - violaceae
foxglove - plantain
illinois bundleflower - legume
borage - borage
chicory - daisy
garden sorrel - buckwheat
roman chamomile - daisy
carrot - Umbellifers
radish - brassica
kale - brassica
cabbage - brassica
catnip - mint
verbena - verbena
parsley - umbellifer
oregano - mint
luffa - curcurbit
pole bean - legume
sunflower - daisy
thyme - mint
garlic/chives - amaryllidaceae
cilantro - umbellifer
dill - umbellifer
onion - amaryllidaceae

The Illinois bundleflower is a nod to those who know. If ya didn’t know before, I assume you do now :slight_smile:

This list contains 17 plant families, unless I’ve counted wrong (totally likely). I still have a few grass seed species I’m going to throw down and with the cannabaceae that’s just gone in today the grand total is 19 plant families represented in the soil seed bank. Some will come up sooner than later, that’s fine. I like letting the beans and curcurbits establish some big leaves early and then training & pruning them to the sides as they’ll produce root exudates without necessarily generating shade, AKA free carbon.

Here’s a summary of how I do seeds:

(EDIT: forgot the kelp meal in the original - provides a small amount of food for the soaking microbes and provides biostimulants)

Basically, put a very small amount of vitamin C in some tap water and let it sit for 5 minutes to dechlorinate. Then add a small amount of everything else. Talking about pinch and drop amounts of this stuff being plenty for soaking seeds. Drop the seed in, keep it warm, let it soak until it sinks and then put it into the soil. I pre-wet the spot I’m going to plant with the liquid used for the soak as well to make a very microbe rich and bio-stimulant rich environment for the seeds to start life. The sludge that’s left over can be distributed elsewhere on the soil. Since these never sit for too long, and the quantities of food are quite low, I’m not worried that I’m dumping a bunch of anaerobes in the honey hole. I’ve also spent a fair chunk of time staring at these mixes in the past under a scope to know that I’d be surprised to find a lot of ciliates & rotifers after such a short incubation period. Not to say I shouldn’t look every time, but hey… whaddaya gonna do?

Bang-for-buck, I’ve found treating seeds to be an extremely high value proposition. Developing the rhizosphere immediately at germination protects against infection, but also provides immediate returns as the plant begins its symbiotic relationship and multiplying the microbes. Not to mention it starts getting fed at birth. You can use way less at this stage and get way more in return by leveraging the grow light & plants to generate food for your microbes. The Fish Sh!t I use is their tiny sample bottle of which I use less than 1mL when doing this procedure. That’s not to say I wouldn’t spend money on their product, I think it’s great, I just haven’t found a need to use a lot of it in a living soil system where I am consistently multiplying those microbes for free.

Alright enough babbling. After the long previous cycle, I wanted to go with something faster… a LOT faster. So this round is going to be a 24/0 or 20/0 start to finish starring…

The seed started soaking yesterday after the chop and planted this morning when it had sank. In the meantime, I get to get these Spirit Trains dried up and get the rest of the cover/companion seeds into the soil.

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I love me some little tents! I run several for moms and for doing off projects in. Glad to see I’m not the only one lol

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I’ll come back and chat with ya later when I’m not at work. But I like what your doing :smirk:

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nice jungle. get some red wigglers

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Yezzur. Unfortunately for me, this is all the space I have currently, so I’m trying to scratch all the itches… the itch for jars full of all the flavors, the itch to be a seed hoarder (of all types), and the itch to grow tons of shit. Also the itch to be lazy (thanks blumats!)

Come for the bants, stay for the budshots :slight_smile:

Thanks! This bed is loaded with red wigglers & euro nightcrawlers. Wasn’t sure who would enjoy it more so I figure, give em both a go and let the populations fall where they may. With how many seeds I plant in here & the use of expanded shale for aeration, I’m not too worried about it turning straight worm bin on me but maybe that’s naive.

I went through some of my seed mixes and picked out a few species to increase total diversity as well as fill the gaps in some missing plant families. Missing families were: poesy (grass) & mallow. I added some more marigolds, safflower, cowpeas, sunn hemp, mung beans, golden flax (now have red, blue and golden), cornflowers, pearl millet, sorghum, okra, buckwheat, a different variety of sunflower, and of course some mystery seeds because variety is the spice of life. Un-pictured are some gourd seeds I added as well. Those are some shade making mofos but their leaves are amazing fodder for the soil life. Very tight C:N ratios. Total plant family count is now 20, unless my fingers and toes are broken.

Here’s some of the seedlings that went Stretch Armstrong on me after sprouting in the shade. Gives me something to watch while my Sour Crack takes its sweet ass time animating. I’m still learning to identify these things in seedling form. Also, as the heavy rooting/tuber type stuff starts coming up, I need to remember to kill back anything by the blumat sensors. Totally forgot about that when I was throwing seeds down and left unchecked, they could cause issues with the sensors.

These things just keep coming, really adding some flair to our abode. :smiley:

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This is a really cool setup! I’d like to pull up a chair and join in for the fun

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Blumats :white_check_mark:, notill :white_check_mark:, companion crops :white_check_mark:. This thread checks all the boxes for me. :grin:

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Very cool grow you got going. Loveing the diversity here, your gonna grow some amazing budz …

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Very nice! Thanks for sharing!

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Loving the mulch shot. No till living soil for the win :+1:

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Welcome to Day Zero. When I peeked in, there were a few bugs running around scouring the husk looking for snacks. Saw a mite, one of these guys and something else. Welcome to the circus :+1:

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Little update. The carbon pump is revving up! You can see the lanky boys and girls that came up before the Spirit Trains got chopped have started to put out some true leaves now that they’re getting light. Good amount of diversity is already showing up which is good news for everyone in the soil. I’m seeing buckwheat, borage, carrots, dill, amaranth, beets, beans, radish, cabbage, flax, sorghum, onion and a few that I’m not entirely sure yet (likely chamomile, oregano, and various other spices). Going to continue planting spots that are bare to see just how much leaf coverage I can get.

Of all the stuff in here, some of the residents found the Sour Crack seedling to be the most appetizing and chewed through a decent chunk of the first true leaves. Getting a defense response this early in growth excites me - should be a strong little bugger. The tap root is likely still adventuring to the bottom of the pot; once that happens I expect to see the growth take off. Marigolds keep churning out of the tent as well :smiley:

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Yooooooo! This got me so amped!
I’ve been vacillating between a super detailed synthetic coco grow, and a 65 gallon pot of living soil; I had pretty much already decided to do the latter, but seeing this has made me absolutely certain!
I love the extreme biodiversity you’ve got, and I hadn’t yet seen this variety of cover crops/co-planting.
I’m following this one close!

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MAN… I dream of when I can expand to something like 65 gallons! And yes, the diversity is a super fun part of growing this way. I got really into the JENA experiments a while back and decided I wanted to max out on diversity to see what would happen. I could still put more in here too!

edit: I really wish I had saved the pictures from the Bud app before I rage quit that platform. A few honest users, the rest just there to shitpost and troll each other. I wiped all my data before deleting my account and the app forever. Had some cool shots of the round prior to this one bringing the soil to life with a fairly diverse cover mix, but not as extreme as this one. I think I got the total plant families to 8 or 9 at the peak then it started drawing down as the cannabis took over. I had five Spirit Trains going at the peak though so I plan to keep higher diversity this round all the way through flower if possible. That said, Mephisto Genetics don’t fuck around so this Sour Crack may have other plans in store for me.

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Little update before leaving town for the holidays. First? My harvest of the Spirit Train F2s:



The aromas while trimming this were intense! Had a test smoke and I’m looking forward to getting into these when I come back to town or maybe a bit after. Concerts coming up early in the new year as well if Omicron doesn’t infect the planet before then.

Small update from the tent:



Was trying to get the Sour Crack in focus but I’m clearly not good at taking the picture I think I’m taking :laughing: Oh well! Things are coming along nicely. After harvesting the Spirit Trains I turned the stalks and trich-less leaves into mulch to hit some bare spots. Been seeing a lot of mites running around eating larvae so :+1: I always love these before and after leaving town moments as I’m usually seeing such incremental progress in the garden. Happy holidays everyone!

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Lol, that sour crack is camouflaged up real good!

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Back from out of town and the autopilot seemed to do OK, but I will say I didn’t crank down the light strength nearly enough. Going from 12/12 to 24/0 on young plants I should have gone more conservative but I was trying to avoid stretching while out of town. Turns out the DLI is a bit more than these guys can eat in a day. Dialed it back a touch, no big deal. The brassicas are struggling which is to be expected in highly fungal soil. Check this out:

There’s a few patches like this around the soil, always cool to see :+1:t4:.

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Having a cold snap around here. Temps have been consistently in the low to mid 60s. Put the light driver back in the tent so hopefully that helps raise temps a little bit. Growth is definitely more sluggish with the cold temps so hopefully it doesn’t get any colder.

Everybody got a foliar spray. The nice thing about a 2x2 is that 16oz is more than enough with plenty extra for houseplants. I might even be able to go down to 8oz but the issue with that is measuring accurately enough to dispense. Stuff like TM-7 I may just need to mix a stock solution then use that by the mL for small doses. Foliar was a mixture of distilled water, thermx-70, purecrop1, tm-7, hydrolyzed whey protein, & fish sh!t. I’ll come back and do a worm castings/compost extract based foliar soon.

As you can see, the basic strategy is to continually push everything that isn’t cannabis toward the outside of the tent. I’ll selectively trim at this stage if any leaves get greedy with the light.

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The temps kept dropping not long after my last post so I added another heat mat and adjusted the exhaust settings to allow some heat to build up in the tent. It’s supposed to get real cold this weekend so I guess we’ll see… still been seeing some high 60s even with the extra heat mat. This place is so poorly insulated…

That said, the Sour Crack has stuck through it all like a champ, though she definitely isn’t a fan of the temp swings. Every time I see the temps crawl up to the high 70s the growth really starts up and the tent looks happy. Some of the other plants are also putting out flowers, very fun to see :slight_smile:

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Still in the dark but seeing the light of your living soil. This is awesome. really I’m curious what is it a nod to? I grew up in Indiana.

Illinois Bundleflower (Desmanthus Illinoensis) - Here is an interesting flower that you can grow from Illinois Bundleflower seed. It is actually considered to be a legume so it fixates nitrogen and improves the soil. It is a deep-rooted perennial that is a native throughout the plains and prairies of the United States. Illinois Bundleflower plants grow 24 - 48 inches tall, has attractive, fern-like foliage and the flowers are round, puffy and white. It late summer, brown bundles of seed pods, 20 - 30, curve around each other to form a cluster or a bundle. Illinois Bundleflower seed pods are easy to identify and add interest to a landscape.

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