I’m not sure I’d worry 'bout those little marks. Doesn’t look like anything to me I don’t see turds.
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Day 8? Friday night, Veg - Transplant
Oh man was this sort of a shit show, so much to explain/document tmr… oh, and I think those leaf signs are from pests, maybe possibly spider mites as I saw a couple web strands on that male which isn’t that much of a surprised since it was all stressed out…
No chance this could be reveging right?:
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Yeah, get rid of that male. Even if you’re planning on doing some breeding, you don’t wanna use a male that’s that sensitive. Plus, he just looks gnarly. Not a good breeding candidate for sure.
The discoloration on your leaves doesn’t look like any big deal to me. Plants will have a few lighter spots or whatever on their leaves all the time. They’ll grow out of it. However, if you’ve found webs, yeah, it might be spider mites. I’ve never had them, but I believe spider mite damage typically looks like tons of little, tiny bite marks. Think clusters of tiny dots on the leaves. Get a good magnifying glass and look at the underside of the leaves. Pretty sure that’s where they like to hang out.
Regarding what somebody said about organic soil mixes being “impossible to use” in smaller pots: a one gallon pot is almost certainly too small, but I’ve grown in a soil mix very similar to yours in three gallon pots with no issues whatsoever. In fact, I’ve gotten my best yield-to-soil ratios in those three gallon pots. It’s been a few years since I’ve used anything that small (I use seven gallon pots and I’m happy with those), but it can be done. I didn’t do anything any differently than with I do with the bigger pots, either.
Why do you have masking tape all over the outsides of your pots? Or… What is that? Just a bunch of plastic or something? That kind of defeats the purpose of airpots, which is to allow as much oxygen as possible to the soil. It’s why I didn’t buy those Grassroots pots you were talking about. I do use Grassroots pots, but just the “regular” kind. Putting a bunch of plastic into an airpot doesn’t make any sense. You might as well be growing in plastic pots at that point.
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I use the grassroots bags with the liner membrane inside. The liner only extends halfway down the container. It helps keep your humic layer at a consistent moisture level, while still allowing the root system to air prune on the lower half as well as still aerate and not let exudates build up in the container.
Since I switched to them from the OG grassroots containers, I do not have to worry about keeping the humic layer moist without watering the rest of the container. Everything stays consistent.
To compare them to growing in plastic nursery pots isn’t a fair nor logical comparison.
If you are use to growing in the OG grassroots bags, pick up one of the living soil versions and try it next run alongside your OG’s. I bet you change your mind.
Doc
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You got a positive ID on a pest? Frankly I don’t see any bite marks…also where would the spider mites come from? I don’t see any clones for them to come in on.
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Yeah, it will be interesting to see what if any sort of regular feeding schedule I might have to develop to keep plants around in the 1 gallons…
Yeah, the male is already out of the tent, I feel bad for him 
hah
Yeah, I was attempting to make it like those grassroots pots, hopefully I didn’t come down the sides too far with the plastic.
@SubSoilSelections You don’t happen to know anything about soil Horizons do you? Any idea how that might play with the hybrid fabric/plastic pots?
@JoeCrowe so I def can NOT say it is 100% confirmed or anything… I just assumed, but will be on the lookout… I don’t even know if it was 100% strands of spider silk, was hard to see and when I pull it off it didn’t even move a leaf, possible it was a hair, but also when I grabbed it/them, I couldn’t see it between my fingers. 
Not sure where it would come from, but these boxes are in an exposed basement.
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Spider mites can only crawl 90cm without their host plant. Unless you track them into the tent or bring them in on a clone, it’s basically not possible. Spider mites leave a distinctive white dot on the leaf where they sucked out the life. About the size of a pinprick. In my case the “tent” is just a wooden box lined in panda plastic 
kind of like yours.
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Well, I totally just guessed spider “mite” only cause I saw the silk and couldn’t see any bug anywhere, so figured maybe it was a tiny thing… anything else it could be? I guess a regular spider? Lol
Maybe something hitched a ride on an arm or something one time 
Mulch does the same thing. As long as you water every other day, I don’t think anything’s gonna be drying out. I’m quite certain the top layer of my soil isn’t drying out in between waterings.
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I think if you have a good true micro soil that is active you will see a noticeable difference in your plants within hours after transplanting
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Mulch is good. It’s good for retaining moisture but that’s it unless your trying to doctor up an existing medium
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I kept a clone of a male in a small 4” container. Once it got root bound it started to auto flower even though they’re kept under 24hr light. I chopped it back and it grew back ok for a while before I just got rid of him.
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Fair enough. 
I think maybe it’s about not letting the edge dry out as *much for the living micro organisms, there might be some other reasons as well, but apparently a lot of people have had success with it… I know some people will wrap the fabric pots with *Seran wrap as well… so that’s an easy thing to try without having to buy those specific pots if you want to give it a shot for cheap.
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Day 9 Veg Saturday:
Ok guys, this could be a long update that I’ve been putting off and prob have forgotten things unfortunately.
Yesterday, as the plants were showing roots out the bottom, I was a lil stressed to get them in their next pots. Combine that with putting off my random ass soil calculations, and drying out the pots a bit for the transplanting process, starting too late in the day, just poor planning overall, yeah it wasn’t ideal lol
Anyway, I was gonna shoot for three different kinds, and they all have some slight differences, I ended up with two pots having this overly complicated mix, and three of them having a bit more of a simpler mix…
Between the water I mixed them all with or a small spray the day after, they pretty much all got some aloe, yucca, powdered coconut water, fermented grains and Humic…
They also pretty much got three different brands of myco/innoculants in prob slightly different amounts, lost track 
:
So as some of you may have seen, from one of Leighton Morrison’s videos, (@Sebring did a write up on this as well):
So somewhat shooting to emulate that, going with something close to a 1:2:4 ratio of the E:A:O layers. Now I feel like it has also been shown, another version, where the O layer is actually very shallow I believe it would be more where my O layer is maybe more like the A layer and where that is more like the E and the E labeled something else. It was a lil confusing and in the end, I just somewhat emulated him I believe.
Anyway, so I went with an E layer consisting of Pumice, black lava rocks, and sand. I then sprayed some FishShit from here https://fishheadfarms.com/ on that layer hoping that will be my AMOs (I can’t get the brand he’s mentioned before)…
I then put an A layer on there which was quite an ordeal calcuating and figuring out. This put me really behind schedule, making me rush as I started having the dimmest of lights cut into the plant’s night hours (I went so late I had to extend the night hours and shift the scheduling).
Maybe a month ago, when I collected some sand from the beach, I also got two buckets of different dirt, one that resembled more what seemed to be silt and another that was more typical of clay…
Anyway, I sifted them all, and then did the soil tests with mason jars for each of the two topsoils, and another with them combined in 1:1 mix… well, I’ll just say this, I feel like I couldn’t clearly see the different mason jar layers all that well and maybe second guessed my self a few times.
Anyway, I got some measurements, but not super confident in them. I had to then take those and some how get those ratios into this specific ratio that he suggested of 17% clay, 13% Silt, 50% Sand, and 20% organic (or the O layer basically).
Well, doing the 1:1 mix of those gave me approx 18% clay, 48% silt, and 33% sand, but like I said, this could be way off and the only way I’ll know for sure I feel like is from sending it in to a lab.
Anway, to get to where he recommends, without getting too much into the math, what I did was decide to essentially add things that were either known be clay and or minerals. I believe clay and minerals are really up the same alley basically as I’m pretty sure they both come from broken down rock. So, this is where I added a bunch of calcium and in different forms. Here I think I added, if I remember correctly, bentonite, gypsum, dolomite, and vermiculite… I figured, I’d add these till I got approx 17:13 ratio of clay to silt, and whatever sand was apart of that mix, would come out of the total 50% sand that’s recommended if that makes any sense? Well, it might sound simple, but man it made me feel like an idiot with all the math I learned in school and have subsequently forgotten lol
Here you can see the O layer with The A layer in the bottom of the hole (I added a bit of O layer in the hole before transplanting as I figure that A layer may be a bit hard on the roots):
Some of the roots:
Anyway, I really have no idea, but it would be interesting to see if I could send out the finally mix of the A layer to see how close I got it to his recommended ratios… besides that, no idea really if this is going to be way too much of any of those and how they might effect CEC or ph or anything lol
I wish I knew a bit more of anion and cation exchanges, but I think it’s interesting to have a layer that is more alkaline (A layer) and another layer that is more acidic (O layer). Now I haven’t heard of anything specific, although it may have been said, that the layers are supposed to be like that with those respective PHs, but it seems to me that could be a possible likelihood as those minerals are usually alkaline like that and I feel like organics turn to Humates which I believe are acidic?
Anyway, the interesting part to me is that with them being in layers like that, I wonder if that almost works in some sort of energy transfer type capacity, like a battery with its two different poles.
Ok, I’ve been rambling on again way too much, got too high +adhd, now to the next layer(O):
My simpler mix which I mostly got from speaking with Todd over at Organics Alive(O.A)basically consisted of 85% of the BuildaSoil’s(B.A.S.) Light Recipe, 15% of O.A.’s Premium Mix which is worm castings, pure vegetable compost, fossilized kelp kelzyme and powdered volcanic rock mineral. Besides that, with the SS pot I added 1.5gms of granular slow release NPK from O.A. but the rest I didn’t.
Now, the more complicated, overkill, overthought mix, which sort of came to be from watching Leighton do his O mix where he went with more of a 1:1 mix of everything(think four main things).
I used 25% B.A.S. Light somewhat as my compost, 10% chicken composted chicken manure(I’m a bit concerned about this bag, smells a lil like ammonia tho I know it has nitrogen so that could be normal) and 15% premium mix (ewc is a form of manure I believe), 17.5% Composted Wood and bark mulch and 7.5% Charged Bio-Char , and finally 25% coco coir. I also threw in a random amount more of Pumice(already some in the B.A.S. Light) but not too much, maybe 10%?
Also threw in dashes of the O.A. NPK slow release, alfalfa meal, azomite, and diatomaceous earth.
Mixing both of these with the aloe,coconut, yucca, fermented grains and Humic with about 5-10% water of the soil amount.
For reference, the BB and the UK got the complicated mix, and the SS, BB2 & UK2 got the conservative mix, as well as the catnips.
Besides that, I went with one pot having long barley straw and the rest having cut up barley straw which just seemed easier to work with tho I have know idea if they’ll perform differently at all.
So yeah, there was so much going on mixed with being behind the ball and hands getting down and dirty all the time and some things switching on the fly, it was hard to document everything as I went along and then further difficult to recall everything by memory unfortunately. I think now that I have a better handle on it, next times with be a lil bit smoother.
For the most part I have been a lil surprised not to see really much of any transplant shock to my knowledge, but this BB is having some issues on the lower leaves, I’ll have to try and look up what’s going on unless someone knows?:
That’s about it for now, contemplating sowing a few more seeds but have to make the room with more boxes.
I want some Sativa’s (which will be interesting to me as a micro-ish grow) and out of what I have, am thinking either Canadian Lemon Aid, Critical Amnesia, and/or Mango Widow if anyone has any thoughts on that?
Besides that, maybe a fun lil poll of some predictions?
Success predictions
- Simple mix succeeds more
- Complex mix succeeds more
- Both succeed mix results
- Both mostly fail lol
0
voters
And last but not least, might have to add another exhaust fan and boy was it humid the dirt night with it on full blast.
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lol I can grow some cannabis plants in this shit soil clay we have over here… Oh crap I forgot I’m counting on the bugs to do the heavy lifting. You should see transplanting season here, the smell of moist soil is drifting around the house heh heh and that’s with a 600cfm fan
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Day 10 Veg Sunday
Not too much to report, may be lil signs of things going on here and there, but I think I’m really going to try to LIFTA for a week or so… the only thing I’m adjusting right now is increase the flow to the cap mat as it seems a lil dry.
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That’s the number I am happy at. I check every day or two on seedlings, as they can really turn fast, but the bigger plants just once a week. They do at least as well if not better than when I obsessed over them.
As to the layers in the soil… who knows. Worms are drawn to the surface of the ground when a current is applied. I think it was in Peru? They found very layered super soil.
But I think in the end, these plants are in so much of a hurry to reproduce and die, they don’t care much. Simple will likely win because you’re most likely to do simple right, but I’d estimate if you gave equal care to a complex soil and a simple soil they’d be about the same. The complex one will be stronger, more shock absorbent, but only if you nail it.
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What I ended up with was sort of a result of circumstances… using what I have bought before I knew better basically… ideally I would like to use a pure spagnum peat moss and get some really nice compost, maybe cow manure next time and some pure ewc or my own vermicompost… essentially build the whole thing instead of using things already blended together where I know exactly what’s in it and how much.
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