We all have stories. I have a corner in my basement full of old lamp reflectors and ballasts, to mention a few. But I’m talking the one thing that stands out in your mind instantly when you think of the mistakes you made? The one that makes you cringe…
Come on newbies, you can get in on this.
Mine was drilling 75+ pots
This is only what I still have. I garbage canned quite a few of them several months after they had been drilled, mostly because I had 22 different types and shape of pots and I wanted to cleanup my pot storage area. Most were small garbage cans bought at different dollar stores. I thinned it down to 4 different sizes and 5 different shapes.
Here is a shot of 2 of the commonly drilled pots:
I drilled all these pots in November of 2016. I was growing in soil at the time.
I did this because everything I read about fungus gnats (that’s what I thought my thrip infestation was at first) herein the GrowFAQ. Most of what I was reading referred to having to add extra drainage hole. Almost every says something like this or exactly this: “I guarantee you don’t have enough drainage in your pots, there is never enough”.
I decided that if there are never enough holes, I’m going to turn my pots into nets. I measured, layed out and drilled each pot one at a time, every single pot I owned plus and additional 40 new one from Menards. The smallest, the 5" squares, have over 150 holes. Some have as many as 224 holes each. I know I at least 75 pots. My records weren’t very thorough at the time, so I don’t actually know how many I had then.
This was exhausting and tedious. And totally NOT WORTH IT! It took me much too long to realize that the little flyin’ fuckers loved them. Once again I had misread the white crud surrounding many of the vent holes. I assumed it was nutrients leaching out. I was by now using coco as a substrate and the instructions I was following for my first coco grow came from the company that I bought the coco from. These instructions said to feed with every watering and feed until 20% run-off. So it was very conceivable that the residue was feed.
It was in fact thrip crap or what ever their slime is. Although at the time I had determined this, I thought it was gnat shit.
The end result: I thought that drilling was going to turn out to be the end all solution to my problem. Made sense on paper. It actually compounded my problem!! I spent all of the rest of 2017 and even up until today, getting rid of the thrip civilization inhabiting my home. I ended up buying 16 each of these pots to fix my fix:
That’s my story, anyone else got one?
C50
I was trying to use mother plants (again) in my grow. They were the first re-potted in the stuff and the first infested. I didn’t know what it was at the time. Looking back, if I’d have realized the white crud at the bottom of my plants all these years was a sign of pests, in this case, thrips. This is what caused me to move to coco. I did this to avoid possible hitchhikers on my substrate. I still get the flyin’ fuckers but the infestation is low enough that I get plants out with some lost yield.
, I may give perlite a try in the near future.