Nice! I make the same cuts on my cups. Though I use trimming scissors. Quickest way I’ve found and with superior drainage
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Yes! Use what you’re comfortable with. Scissors are perfect for this. I am left handed with scissors and i got sausage fingers… i do not own a pair that wont rub and damage my skin 
Thats a 108 cups, should be enough to sow whats aready germinated for today.
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On to dirt…
Empty bin.
I normally use bcuzz extra perlite dirt and add 40lbs of gaia primal earth per 3.8cu.
Shop is struggling and dont stock all the goodies.
But. A green thumb is a green thumb eh.
Bale of berger m8.
Bag of bs gaia hippy living soil.
1 pound of 4.4.4 gaia
A mixed tub consists of 1/3 of a bale, 1/3 of hippy, 1/5 of gaia 444. Ill add some random brand worm sauce and some rhizotonic in my wata for the roots dynamite.
Dudes are lifting bales trying to fraction it. Just samurai cut the bag. Do you not own a broom lol?
Drop. Mix.
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As for water… go by eye… or about 3 of those usually does it
Mix. Bam. Proper starting medium.
When it comes to filing cups, some just dump dirt on top of trays and scrape the extra soil.
I tried using an 8" cheesecake mold to bulk scoop dirt.
Yeah… its not it lol.
You can fit 21 cups per tray.
Smoke break…
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Setup looks like this. Use what you have or get creative.
Notice im wearing a cheapo knee pad in the pic.
Its used to bang down each cup before putting it in the tray.
Looks like this time were filling one cup at a time.
Process goes like this.
Grab a cup.
Dip/fill it.
Bang on knee pad.
To the tray.
Full tray gets stacked on the right of the empty/being filled ones
Ps: dont worry about soil wetness at this stage. Pre wetting sole purpose is to break peat/sphagnum/coco hydrophobic properties.
Pots still get watered before hitting the shelves.
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For anyone wondering… the tubs with 5" holes im filling trays on is an hydro setup for a 5x5 tent.
Friend dropped by with his girfriend, ill have to pause this for a bit.
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Do you ever grow straight coco?
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Yessir. I ran coco sog for a good bit. With great success i might add. I started growing in hydro long ago… i kept hearing “have a few runs under your belt before attempting hydro”.
I took it as a challenge… grew 15 years indoors before ever bringing a bale of soil in.
Somehow basic simple soil became some mystery substance i had never heard of.
Total disconnect to earth… i picked up soil only recently… and organic chemistry even more recently…
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Soil science for me is a great experience, nature can be a pretty neat. Loved reading about the soil biodiversity.
I just started dabbling in coco, so then do you wet your coco also? And do you wet it with a small amount of salts?
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Coco is great… done properly itll touch much more complex systems production.
Multiple watering/feeds a day until 2 spoons of run off. Once at night. Is the gist of it.
Keep it wet, much easier with automation. Letting coco dry up will cause pockets of salts and ph swings.
Get quality coco, its reusable a few times. Pre charge it before potting
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Be mindfull of your environment using coco…
Hotter rooms may require more frequent waterings so dont forget to lower your baseline ppm etc
See it as a food/day
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And does heat in the rooms mess with the ph in the res?
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Ehh… drain to waste “in the rez” ph should be stable.
Aerators “air” bubbles, can lower ph.
In the pot, heat can make ph fluctuate under specific ratios of minerals but honestly i spent so much time and efforts on keeping rooms cool only to find out heat was never the actual problem.
I run rooms hot proudly
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This is how things went when I first started. Then instead of killing reject plants, I set them aside and let them die from dehydration. It showed how much i was overwatering. Finding a rhythm of wet/dry is the hardest part of coco, but air dry is what I shoot for most the time. Plants will live in wet coco, but you’ll have gnats and slow growers
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This. Soaked is no good. Reduce quantity or/and frequency. Myself 5-8 cycles a day under hps/cmh. Depending on size, stage of growth, temps/rh…
A bunch of “dirt mixes” should actually be treated as hydro.
I rarely if ever get pests. In 25 years i had to defend my garden twice.
Once i brought my outdoors citrus and whatever plants in and got maaddd gnats and “pucerons” thrips i think
Second time i grew with a partner and buddy came back from trimming huge ass cedar or wtf hedges all day straight into the rooms and brought alien mites.
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they kept em wet when I worked 4 months at a puppy mill grow facitily. I wondered how do they not have gnats. Oh they do, despite the poison they use, they persist. a good dry is the only way around that problem, but the roots truly love a full dry down. They LOVE it.
we’re talking about drippers vs, dumping on a pot. not exactly similar. I like to run pots dry, and would never try dripper after seeing that shit.
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Damn you type fast lol
In soil i like to let pots go on the quite dry side… but not in coco.
Im mental about pests, virii, fungi etc i dont welcome lines clones vermins nor humans near anything serious.
Coco is reknowned for gnats but they come from somewhere.
Fruit flies hatch on fruits from the store… bananas etc they dont magically spring to life.
The hplv made it to my parts. Big boys all have it.
This hobby keeps me sane. I have the testosterone of a juiced up marine while sleeping 2hrd a day eating trash.
If it wasnt for plants id have moved deep in the woods eating raw moose or some shit
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I want to get off coco. last couple of batches of brickes are poisonous to plants. They dont react right away, but I wasn’t sure why at first. putting last chance clones into the same trash. I saved everybody. thinking about promix. is that the exact same as coco? i know this isn’t relevant, but i need some a week ago.
typing was one of the only classes I paid attention to. I’m a weird one. I can type faster than I can talk, ace ever test, fail every class.
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Quite honestly, soil is the way.
Ive heard of guys in dirt with proper nerday feeds getting or beating coco on every parameter
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I feel safe in coco. if I mess up, I can flush and try to fix. If I run into a problem in soil, and don’t know what to do, I’m stuck in a space I dont wanna be. When my plants are unhappy, I am a fucking nutjob. They are my babies.