Midnight Mass

love_2_grow The first week passed without many issues. As usual, the main event of this first week was planting into the pot. I like to start my grows using peat plugs as I find it easier to germinate that way. However, the plants quickly outgrow the plugs, so I want to get them transplanted into their final pot within a few days. I started by preparing the pots with soil. In this grow, I’m using 50-liter AutoPot XXL fabric pots, to which I added a stripe of plastic foil to reduce evaporation. It’s my first time running with the XXL system, and I’m excited to see how well it performs. The soil I’m using is living soil according to my own recipe. It contains various ingredients, including wood fiber, coco coir, worm castings, insect frass, pumice, rice hulls, basalt, rock dust, kelp meal, alfalfa meal, neem seed meal, soft rock phosphate, malted barley, biochar, gypsum, lime, and a few other odds and ends. After filling the pots, I transplanted the peat plug, using plenty of myco/kelp powder to cover the plug and the planting hole. Finally, I added a small humidity dome over each plant to ensure a moist environment until I get the humidifier installed. The next day, I added a bunch of straw as mulch. I like to do a round of preventative IPM with nematodes when I start a grow. To ensure any critters are held in check. After all, it’s easier to prevent problems in the first place than to have to battle an infestation later. The soil had been resting in a massive bag for a few months, so I decided to make a quick compost tea to boost the overall microbial activity in the soil. Yesterday, I started to brew a mix of worm castings, insect frass, basalt, kelp meal, malted barley, and molasses. It’s essentially a blend of compost tea and sprouted seed tea, providing the soil with microbes, nutrients, enzymes, auxins, and hormones. Today, I added the nematodes after the brew was finished and then fed the entire mixture to the plants. The DLI is around 20-22, which is relatively high this early in the grow.