Which thread? I haven’t yet mastered technology. I probably won’t find it without help LOL
Well, I always plant marigolds in general, but I bought a big pack of seeds this year of a variety called “Guardian” that is supposed to be even better for bad nematodes. Marigolds also stink to most bugs and deters them also attracts spider mites and aphids. Same with nasturtiums. While all the other outdoor growers were fighting off aphid attacks late in flower last year, I had none. I also grow my plants in the middle of my backyard which is a garden so there is a lot of insect diversity. Keeps most bad buds to natural levels, except the caterpillars. I sprayed BT every week and they still got through. Bastards! I’m gonna be even more diligent this year.
As far as the aspirin foliars, this is the only non organic ingredient I use on my plants. To answer your question… Yes! Same as willow and aloe. Just a hell of a lot cheaper for foliars and drenches every 3 weeks. The salicylic acid strengthens bug and disease resistance. I had found like 3 or 4 articles of farmers using aspirin on veggie crops successfully and figured what the hell, I’ll try it on my cannabis. Admittedly, it was most noticeable on my veggie plants they loved it. The cannabis… who knows? but it didn’t hurt them, so I will continue. Aside from the caterpillars, no bug damage and held up really well to molds and mildew so I’m thinking it helped. I crushed up 2 aspirin for 3 gallons and did a foliar every 3 weeks. For my tomatoes and such that don’t like foliars I did soil drenches. I stopped at flower on the cannabis, this year I will continue, but just switch to drenches.
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I’ll give it a shot this year. Good tip. Thanks
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Well, I’m sitting here as the snow falls dreaming of spring. Time to prep the ground for this summer soon. I want to share with you the way I’ve done things for many seasons now to hopefully help you bring in a decent harvest.( meant for you newbs of course)Teaching myself everything with no mentor, I may do things a little bit differently than some folks. Good. Theres a chance you’ll pick up a new tip and learn something, as I have been learning from all of you. To have a good harvest you need, naturally, plants. I may not be the best grower ever, but I don’t lose plants . I’ve gone over issues with slugs, which can rapidly decimate a young crop. How do you deal with animals that can kill or damage plants? Damage happens from plants getting eaten, stepped on , or from frost/ weather. We’ve covered frost pretty well. The copper collars help with slugs and keep the plants from getting stepped on. (I’ve had plenty of animals wander through the patch, but they walk around the collars) Coyotes fear the collars too, and will stay clear. They may dig in the patch a little, but always avoid the copper. Must look like a trap to them. That covers animals walking thru, but how about animals that would like to eat your plants? Theres several ways of stopping this. For rabbits and deer , dried blood meal works great. Smells like a family member died to them. Scatter some around the edges of your patch …maybe a handful or two. You don’t want to put anything like this on or right around your plants. ( fertilizing with stinky amendments is done before planting. If you need to add more nitrogen at some point later on, use something that doesn’t smell, like bat guano) For deer you can also use irish spring soap, cut into chunks around the patch. You can use kitty litter (used ) around ( not in, yuck) yr patch. This is so effective on deer they will move a trail they have used for hundreds of years a full 50 feet or more in some cases when kitty litter is placed in it. Keeps rabbits away too. My guess is that it smells like a bobcat or a mountain lion and the deer and rabbits don’t differentiate between the smells. For any Hunters out there, it’s a good way to move a deer trail a little closer to your treestand. Also, going to the bathroom near your patch keeps at bay many critters. But please, piss near them, not on them lol. Finally, my personal favorite… coyote pee. Blood meal and soap need to be replenished after rains if you are having problems, but a cotton wad soaked in coyote pee can last a long time if it is put in a ziplock bag to keep rain off. Keep the end propped open with a stick. Make sure the stick is long enough to drive it through one side of the baggie into the ground while the other side of the stick is holding the baggie open. A Y shaped stick is primo. Put this near your patch, not in it, ( on the edge is fine)and I usually camouflage it as well a little bit… Coyotes will probably visit and may paw at it. They are easily sketched out so use your imagination and make it look like something that might hurt them if they bother it, or tie it in a bush or tree. A Bottle of coyote pee should last you quite some time, and it makes for a great conversation starter when your wife’s friends find it😬. It can be found in any archery supply shops. Finally, we deal with the weather. Where I am the weather always comes from the West during the summer. I try to have some tall cover in that direction to block the wind. Not so close that it blocks the Sun, but close enough to keep the plants from getting whipped around in a strong thunderstorm. If you are able to plant underneath the canopies of tall trees, that’s the best for cover from the weather, including frost as well. Im at 42 north. Planting time for me, early June, the sun is approaching a vertical(90 degree) position at 23 and a half degrees north latitude. Im 19 degrees north of that. So during the day, shortly after planting, the sun is at 71 degrees,
19 degrees less than 90 if you will . Harvest time the sun is vertical at the equator( sept 21),42 degrees away from me. Subtracting that 42 from 90 gives me a 48 degree angle of sun on sept 21. Why does all this mumbo-jumbo matter you might ask? Cover. Put the tallest trees to your North. Trees to the east / west should be the shortest except where prevailing winds come from. Trees in the south should be shorter than the angle of the Sun at Harvest Time, or 48 degrees in my case. Since the sun is overhead at 71 degrees on my longest day, I can have branches of trees creeping out over my patch almost 20 degrees , blocking not only overhead views, but also keeping frost off my ladies later . My plants have survived to 17 degrees because of this. I’m not saying they were happy, but they survived. It’s the reason why putting a bag or newspaper over your buds protects them from the frost. It just keeps the frost off, it doesn’t insulate them. Well thats all for now. Hope some of you get some helpful hints off my rambling. You have all taught me so much already i figured i should at least attempt to return the favor. As always, any helpful hints regarding growing in wet climates, please share.
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I learned a bit from that mate I’m going to try having more tree cover for sure
I’m just going to spout stuff…
So from my most recent experience two of my pots are coco and perlite and two are just coco. the coco ones dry out a lot faster tested when the plants were tiny and ones in perlite were bigger (drink more). the perlite ones dried out slower. So from that my question is do the plants have a higher resistance to rot if they are on the side of over water or under water?
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Is this lactobacillus or LAB as they call it?
Coco doesn’t hold water at all, perlite stores it. So yeah, more watering needed in coco.
To answer your question about over or under watering plants. Both are generally a bad idea and serve to weaken their immune systems so to speak, also if the medium dries out completely in organics it is killing microbes in the soil. Rain can cause mold even in healthy plants if there is no time for the leaves and buds to dry out regularly. Too much and it will soak and penetrate through the bud and not get proper ventilation and sunlight especially in very humid places.
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Good question there. I don't water unless we have had a real dry spell with heat. Also a good drink with rains in the forecast at planting time. I used to follow up the next week to make sure all was well if i could. I saved small plants that way. Now i set bigger plants and skip the extra visit. About your question tho... if you mulch your plants ,The root's will generally always be damp enough.. so you should rarely need to water. As the season progresses and the canopy of the plant expands, you can afford to let the mulch become less and less ( get eaten by microlife)and the ground still stays shaded. If you water heavy now, especially during late budding, you risk additional rain saturating the ground and making a field day for mold. Water only as necessary. At the onset of budding to halfway through, you could water them heavy, and I did back when I could do it (on occasion.) But I would lay off towards the second half of flowering if there's rain in the forecast . The other option is as @OlReynard mentioned. Swampy ground located in Higher Ground. For instance a bench above a creek that has wet ground in it. It's not low enough to be in the frost pocket, but still has the benefits of sub irrigation. (Old beaver dams compost into very large Earth boxes.) I used to bring in a bale of promix bx for 3-5 plants and dump it in the highest spot in a swampy clearing. You could do soil as well but it does weigh more. I would mix the promix with local soil, forest soil or dryish swampy soil if it didn't smell like ass ( anaerobic) and add a couple burlap sacks of composted horse manure to make a mound around 2 feet tall and 5 feet by 3 feet. You could do a variation of this theme with your own soil mix. I highly recommend it. It's like a giant earthbox. You don't have to visit. You don't have to water. You just have to plant them, visit them once or twice and harvest them if you're only dealing with girls. If boys are added it is just one extra visit. Before I hurt my back I had this method perfected . I could pull 1/2 pound to a pound per plant with no maintenance. Tie all the plants out ward in a circle at the start of budding and put a forked branch under them stuck in the muck for support when the buds get heavy. I've even gone the whole entire summer without ever seeing them, and I was always shocked when I got there at how nice they were. Usually towards1/2 pound size and in need of a haircut, but still nice. And did I mention tasty ? I give them a good start but they grow themselves. Smooth smoke indeed. I need not add that mold resistant plants are a must. Have you checked out Friesland? It's from your latitude and the pictures on the Kwik seeds website looked awfully nice. There is also a viking Collective called the derg corra collective that has lots of northern varieties over at seedbay i think. They are worth a look. There's a good chance that somebody here has some of that stuff too.
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friesland does look really nice but I’ll be trying a few other photo strains that I got this year, I would very much be interested in trading but my local post office is closed and I’m not going into town. So can’t any time soon unfortunately.
Those viking collective seeds look like they would do real well for sure but costs and all make it difficult
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Do you have to spray the slugs? Or the ground? I found their pellets but not the spray. $ 60 or so for a gallon of pellets. A gallon used to last me a month . Once the plants were big enough i stopped use for the season. Copper collars last a lifetime…much easier too… but if you don’t know someone in the trades you probably wouldn’t get it free…sheet copper is expensive new! In a pinch I’ve used the copper mesh intended for distilling liquor. Inferior. Rains beat it down nearly flat and dirt/ mud can acually begin to bury it…
A garden variety is available too, but the same things happen.
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Which ones? I would like this post to be edited, and any strain someone has grown in a wet humid climate successfully with little or no mold to be added here. I really can’t contribute to this part very much because of my limited experience growing much beyond my own stock. But I’ll get it started. Let us not forget those killer West Coast varieties like I saw in California. I saw plants in Petrolia take a nearly 2 week pounding of hard rain and hardly any mold formed. The plants had been picked twice already but were still as large as any I’ve seen. IMPRESSIVE work those breeders did! I’ll start off now. 1) purple malawi by Ace seeds did very well 2) three kings 3) bubba kush ( surprised me) 4) casey jones 5) green crack 6) frisian Dew 7 ) blue dream
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So far on my list for sure to go out is
1 peyote critical
Gelato bagseed (got lots so its a fun test)
3 frisian dew
6 gaz’s 29 mix (semi autos correct me if im wrong)
20 seedstockers auto random mix (all may not go out)
Ones to consider are
Cookies kush
Cookies kush x blue dream
Photos i have tried all have had a touch of mould except the odd plants so i cannot say any one strain is better
Anything that performs well i will clone for inside incase they dont finish.
Edit: ill happily do a stress test of any strains people want to send me 
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I added Frisian Dew and blue dream to the above list. I still remember Dutch Passions description of the Frisian Dew from High Times years ago. Let the Dew fall where it may! Frisian Dew is impervious to mold… that one should perform well for you if it finishes on time. The seeds of my go-to strain have gotten very very old. I’m slightly ashamed it’s come to this. More recent seeds I’ve made of this variety were stolen, leaving me with 10 year old seeds. I’ve definitely saved my strawberry phenotype lineage of this variety, and it’s extremely mold proof, but the potency isn’t what it used to be. I was forced to narrow the gene pool with only two breeding parents a couple years in a row. I’ll be going back through all my old seeds this season with the new information I’ve learned from you guys. If I’m able to get some of these to grow, I will be passing out some seeds when i make more. For now I only have the strawberry pheno( which I want to personally go through,)and a hybrid of my two strains which I need to work myself as well to get my old strain back if seeds dont pop.
I’m not sure I wrote that badly or if you grew those before too, the ones I put under ones to consider are ones for me to consider using as they may not work. None of my current seeds are tested by me except the gelato and that was inside.
But Yeah for sure if the Frisian dew works out I’ll have a clone to try seed.
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You just jogged my memory. Those are two i would have added anyway. Thanks. You should do well with the frisian dew. BUT… i have not grown it. It was known to be very resistant to mold back in the day.
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You can allow others to add or edit your original post by making it a wiki
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So I was introduced to vpd graphs yesterday and they are calculated with the plant being 100% leaf humidity (properly watered not relative humidity) Surely running the plant at a lower humidity for example 95% would enable it to endure a more humid environment. I hope this makes sense.
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How do i do that? ( wiki) that would be great. I dont want people to have to read the whole thread to find all strains mentioned as very/ extremely mold resistant. I also just read your excellent response about adequate moisture/ coco/ perlite. I’m not sure how I missed that one.
What does VPB stand for?
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Vpd, vapour pressure deficiency not sure why it’s deficiency though. People use it to make a chart like this
The green is the optimum zone
There are in general three charts, one for each stage of growth. But there’s variance in charts much like different nutrient brands because different people did calculations with slightly differing results but it’s a half deacent ballpark guide.
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