Emmie's Vegan Fertilizer, Pineapple Chunk 2020 Celebration: Experimental Soil Grow

[MsBean7175]

@Emilya happy to see you having fun. Enjoy shopping. I'm getting ready to start 3 Auto Lemon Haze Fem. Maybe tonight or tomorrow for sure.

 

[derek910]

Thank you! Tag me if you do a journal so I can follow along.

Will do

 

[Mark Gordan Smith]

My regards to Mum.

 

[Havocsm1]

The seeds are from the UK's SeedSupreme, a gift from @Vulx for running a side by side test of their product. This plant is an interesting cross of an old favorite around here and I am looking forward to seeing how it grows under today's conditions.

The soil will be some of my old worn out organic soil, now a 50 gallon mix of original super soil and all the base soil I have used for the last 6 years. I have totally lost control of this soil as far as being certain what is in it, and short of a soil test and taking the time to re-amend it, I have chosen to go the fertilizer route on this grow. I have been so impressed with the Vulx amendment that I will be using it in all of my soil from start to finish in this grow.

Those who know me are probably quite taken aback by this apparent backwards move by the woman who said that she would never give up organics, but there is an exciting new product out there that I am totally enthused to try. That product is Mega Crop, a totally new way of looking at fertilizer technology.

From their website:
Vegan fertilizers have several advantages over Organic fertilizers.

• Not sourced from animals, so no risk of antibiotics, antibiotic resistant bacteria, pharmaceuticals, hormones or pathogens that are associated with animal based fertilizers
• Far more water soluble and available to the plants, for better absorption, quicker and complete uptake by the plants
• Lower environmental impact
• Not supporting the animal agriculture industry

There are several important things going on here, but the key points that I will start this discussion with are that this fertilizer is much smaller molecularly than traditional fertilizers, therefore it is not only more water soluble, but it is much easier for the plant to uptake. Second, this fertilizer is chelated (held together) with an amino acid bond instead of the traditional salt bond. Salt bonds need to be broken apart in the soil, and the salt remains behind as a waste product. Mega Crop waits till it is inside of the plant before it releases the fertilizer, with the leftover waste product being a very usable amino acid. There is NO waste and NO unusable debris.

It is my belief that we are finally seeing agricultural science making a world changing advance with this new science, and I wish to see what it can do in my garden. I will be pushing these plants hard and I expect to see results not typical of even my minimalist organic grows. I have every belief that I will exceed my expectations, having watched others grow with this stuff and get end product that looks every bit as good as my organically grown pot.

So here we go... I am dunking 5 seeds in water tonight.

Going to play catch up looking forward to reading everything.

 

[Homer Simpson]

 

[Emilya Green]

I will be home again in a couple of days to check on my crop sitting in the fridge, but today I wanted to run some stats on this grow. The numbers are impressive and proof that the COBS, Vulx and MC all came together to produce a very acceptable grow.

Although dry is the standard measurement, I have run the numbers both wet and dry for your perusal:

Wet

total yield	2,295
grams per watt	4.59 g/watt
square area and cubic area	2'x3' = 6' ² & 2'x3'x5' = 30'³
grams per square foot	382.5 gm/ft ²
grams per cubic foot	76.5 gm/ft³
grams per kilowatt hour	6.9 gm/kwh

Dry

total yield	516.375
grams per watt	1.03275 g/w
square area and cubic area	2'x3' = 6' ² & 2'x3'x5' = 30'³
grams per square foot	86.0625 gm/ft ²
grams per cubic foot	17.2125 gm/ft³
grams per kilowatt hour	1.6 gm/kwh

 

[Homer Simpson]

I read through your whole journal and am happy to announce I feel much more confident in my MC strategy thanks to your efforts drilling down into the minutia. I was caught up in the more is better frenzy for a while and couldn't figure out whether I needed more or less MC so this quote was particularly interesting to me. "Too much MC can present as magnesium, iron, and potassium deficiencies, and burned tips. Too little MC can present as magnesium, iron, calcium and potassium deficiencies.” I had already come to the suspicion following directions might be the secret with MC so before I read your journal I was following it on my latest grow and it is quite reassuring you agree.

My plants have been into flower for a few weeks but that is by the standard I am accustomed to of when I flipped the lights so according to your methodology I am probably just starting flowering but well into stretch. Today I added ½ g of both BE and SC with 5.5g/gal MC. My MC seems dialled right in as I have a nice healthy green and in the last few days I haven’t had any lower leaves yellowing.

I also found it interesting that you feel yellowing later in life is not a natural inevitability. I did a lot of reading before I read your journal on the subject and the decision seems pretty much split on the Internet but I do lean your way because in my mind a green plant is a healthy plant that will produce bigger and better buds. In the past just using MC in the last 2 to 3 weeks of flowering I get considerable leaf yellowing mostly fan leaves. Looking at the charts oddly enough it seems like a phosphorus deficiency so I am hoping the BE or SC may compensate for that.

I read that you are getting a MegaLight from Nextlight and I know you will be thrilled with it because I was fortunate enough to be gifted one with my Journal of the month prize. Being legally limited to four plants I am only ever flowering two plants at a time so my grow area is 3’ x 3’ which is pretty much the dimensions of the light so my plants are bathed in a beautiful even glorious light. That unit will take a little over 600 W I believe but I was also given the dimmer that goes with it and actually only use 200 W of power and keep my plants 24 inches away. So I would highly recommend the dimmer and I am looking forward to your review because I know you will get the best use out of it.

That is the dimmer. Very simple to wire in with just a screwdriver and schematic is online.

 

[Emilya Green]

Thank you Homer! I am glad that you are getting some good out of my work. I strongly believe that the other guys are giving bad advice, and hope to prove over and over again in my threads that going over 6g/g is a quick way to set up the K deficiencies that you have been seeing at the end. Thanks for seriously considering my words and my scientific method in figuring out this product that we all are basically on our own to figure out, and I hope that by using my minimalist methods you will be able to get the high quality, live and healthy until chop, grows that I am getting. In time, I hope to prove that there IS a better way to run MC and that my experimental results do indeed show that excesses of MC cause lockouts exactly because of the resulting excesses in N, Ca and Mg. The other guys don't agree with me, and that is fine. Let our results be the determining factor!

Thank you too on the comments about the NLM dimmer. You are right... I should send off for one.

 

[Deketx]

Emily if you would take a look at this plant. She fought through the lockout better than the rest, but now she is yellowing quickly over the past few days? It's about a week or week and a half from finishing. The first pic was taken 2 days ago, the rest were from tonight.

 

[ChefDGreen]

Well Emilya,
I don’t really have a horse in the MC race. This I do know, I fed my NL 8.5-9g/gal from start to finish in flower. She was the heaviest plant I ever grew. She didn’t ever show an excess of N. She did have a full 5 gallon fabric pot of roots. My theory is that for her size, she needed the electrical current. She never showed anything but great leaf lift during flower. She willingly cut her leaves loose before I could even tell anything was wrong more than a slight overall yellowing, just trimming her own fat.
My cookies and chem, I fed that hard a time or two and they nearly-instantly told me it was too much N. I backed them down to just over 7g/gal. Biggest plant should be ~3.5oz in a 3 gallon fabric.
I don’t know exactly where my experience lies on the scale of things. I guess more in the other camp, but I definitely took my own approach using what I know about my waters base ppm. Also I was quite familiar with the cultivars. I think using this product is really just about knowing your medium and your methodology. You, Emilya, are using already fertilized soil with a product meant to unlock efficiency and optimize usage. Of course you’re plants wont need as much as mine, you’re just supplementing truthfully. I’m growing in promix, with extra perlite. Its nearly hydro with soil pH ranges. I can push way way harder on the daily feed, cause that’s all they get.
I guess my opinion is, “just up the dosage a bit” is probably a bad blanket statement. A case by case decision really needs to be made.

 

[shottafire]

Well Emilya,
I don’t really have a horse in the MC race. This I do know, I fed my NL 8.5-9g/gal from start to finish in flower. She was the heaviest plant I ever grew. She didn’t ever show an excess of N. She did have a full 5 gallon fabric pot of roots. My theory is that for her size, she needed the electrical current. She never showed anything but great leaf lift during flower. She willingly cut her leaves loose before I could even tell anything was wrong more than a slight overall yellowing, just trimming her own fat.
My cookies and chem, I fed that hard a time or two and they nearly-instantly told me it was too much N. I backed them down to just over 7g/gal. Biggest plant should be ~3.5oz in a 3 gallon fabric.
I don’t know exactly where my experience lies on the scale of things. I guess more in the other camp, but I definitely took my own approach using what I know about my waters base ppm. Also I was quite familiar with the cultivars. I think using this product is really just about knowing your medium and your methodology. You, Emilya, are using already fertilized soil with a product meant to unlock efficiency and optimize usage. Of course you’re plants wont need as much as mine, you’re just supplementing truthfully. I’m growing in promix, with extra perlite. Its nearly hydro with soil pH ranges. I can push way way harder on the daily feed, cause that’s all they get.
I guess my opinion is, “just up the dosage a bit” is probably a bad blanket statement. A case by case decision really needs to be made.

Well said. No two grows are the same and no two environments are the same. Emilya did a great job with her flower without a doubt. But there’s a million ways to skin a cat.

 

[derek910]

@Emilya I haven’t gotten through your whole journal yet but I do remember the part where you mention fading towards the end. I remember reading online that towards the end of the plant’s life it’s uptake from the roots slows and the plant uses the leaves to finish “autumning off” and since my plants uptake is slowing down from 2 days to drink the pot to almost 3 I’ve always assumed that was correct. I keep my soil fed all the way to the end and don’t bother with the bro science flushing. Should I up the P and K for the last few weeks? It’s too late to do anything for my oldest grow because they only have 7 days left or so, but I do have a clone that has about 6 weeks left. Here’s a few pics of my Fat Purple 2 plant and her daughter. Journal in my signature if you want to check it out although it’s not as detailed as yours.

 

[Emilya Green]

Yes, good points, all of you.
First, lets examine my environment. I have a highly mineralized soil, but it is not a fertilized soil. My soil can not support the plants by itself and if I had stopped giving MC, my plants likely would have died. Without living microbes working furiously in my soil to break down the raw minerals, there is very little nutrient in an available form in there for the plants. I do however have the soil enhanced with Vulx. Read what Vulx brings to the table... an extremely high cation exchange rate. Vulx predicts that we will need less water and that there will be less need for nutes, and that is exactly what was seen in my grow where 4.75g was the correct dosage of MC. Without the Vulx, I probably would have needed 6g or even more if I was growing a very heavy feeder, such as the NL just mentioned, and what we are seeing in Deketex's grow.

So yes, every environment and every plant is different, and when using MC we need to be able to correctly read the plants, taking that environment into mind. It makes sense that hydro based systems would need more MC than a soil grow, because there is no additional ability in a water based system to hold the ions of nutrients to be available to the roots such as soil is able to afford us... in hydro it all must be in the mix, so naturally the mix must be stronger.

@Deketx , you have yellowing mostly in the upper part of your plant, indicating a non mobile deficiency, and it sure looks to be calcium that is lacking. It seems to me that this plant is telling you that it needs more MC.

@derek910 , I do not believe the bro science of a necessary fade at the end for all varieties. Typically when you are seeing a slow down in water uptake prematurely, it is caused by a late season salt or nute lockout in the soil, that can be solved with a flush and to reduce the fade, an increase in PK. In an organic grow, indications such as this usually indicate that the soil has run out of a nutrient and that the grow is having trouble. In a MC grow, I am sorry, but I can not yet explain what would cause a premature slow down of water usage... surely there would be other factors in play.

Just as there are a million ways to skin a cat, there are also a million different kinds of cats, each requiring a slightly different method of skinning. Read your plants. GLN gave us the instructions on how to fine tune... it is up to us to correctly read the plants while also considering the special environment that we may be in. There is no one right answer for how much MC to give... and every factor needs to be considered.

 

[Zooie]

Great job @Emilya and excellent journal..............

 

[derek910]

@derek910 , I do not believe the bro science of a necessary fade at the end for all varieties. Typically when you are seeing a slow down in water uptake prematurely, it is caused by a late season salt or nute lockout in the soil, that can be solved with a flush and to reduce the fade, an increase in PK. In an organic grow, indications such as this usually indicate that the soil has run out of a nutrient and that the grow is having trouble. In a MC grow, I am sorry, but I can not yet explain what would cause a premature slow down of water usage... surely there would be other factors in play

Would the middle of week 7 of an 8 week strain be considered premature? Today is the 2nd day of week 8. One plant just started slowing down a few days ago. The other one is still drinking up the pot in 48 hours. I already figured that one is a week behind based on calyx swell and trichomes. I just watered them yesterday but I could top dress and double up the URB and see if the uptake increases on the next watering? Or would that be a waste at this point in the grow?

 

[MrSauga]

So far so good Em. The plants are looking nice and healthy. If you're going to have issues they'll show up soon. The darkening of the leaves as you know could be the beginning of K issues so just work with that in the back of your mind.

Yep, keeping a close eye, but I would not consider this to be too green... more like the perfect MC green, whereas on the last watering I thought the new growth particularly looked a little light, but being new growth,

Everyone is looking amazing today and I think at this point we can safely assume that BE is NOT a problem in this MegaCrop grow and it seems obvious that they have tolerated the increase to 5.5g/g MC just fine.

Although it is a great additive during veg, I will be discontinuing the use of Sea-K from now on as we go into stretch... the extra N is no longer needed or appreciated by the plant. I believe that by eliminating this secondary source of N coming in, the plants will stabilize on the next watering. I will also be increasing the MC up to 6g/g.

Hiya Em,
now I agree with the K def not making sense because of the amount you are feeding it. Here's the issue that you and most others are experiencing with the added K. There is no extra N loaded with the SK, since it has no N content at 0-0-15 so that can't be the problem. The problem is the high levels of P from the BE that is causing the decreased availability of K. My suggestion at this point is to stop altogether with the SC and BE until you have a handle on the issue.
I hope that helps a bit.

Right there is why you are the boss. Thank you. I made an assumption about the SK and was totally wrong. Looking back at Mulder, yours is the only possible explanation.

Speaking of nutes, today following the good advice of @MrSauga I have given only MegaCrop this time at the full 6g/g, with no additional supplements. The aforementioned potassium lockout has not gotten any worse, so the plants must have been able to get what they needed, and this watering is going to be attempting to use up the excess P that has been building up in the soil by using the BE. With clearer sight it is obvious that for a while now I have been giving BE, yet it wasn't until right now that the plant could use such large amounts of P, so of course it built up in the soil.

I strongly believe that the other guys are giving bad advice, and hope to prove over and over again in my threads that going over 6g/g is a quick way to set up the K deficiencies that you have been seeing at the end.

Of course we are giving bad advice yet everything you learned was info that I gave you. Don't lump me in your erroneous statements.
You're very good at learning from others and taking credit for their work... another

 

[Emilya Green]

Sauga, you are right. Several times in this grow I learned from things you said, and then went beyond those words to figure out what the mechanisms were behind the results we were seeing. I made no claims to know MegaCrop when I started this, and you were my initial guide, and indeed some of the things you said along the way did instruct me. Where we parted ways was when you insisted on more MC always being the answer to any problems or that the mechanism causing lockouts (which you did not accept) could not be caused by Ca and Mg and N overload working together to cause lockouts. This is my theory alone, and one you do not prescribe to. Please do not come in here all high and mighty now trying to sound like it was you leading the way all the way... it was not. I broke away from your group's advice to keep using more MC halfway through my grow, and I never have prescribed to the belief that there is a need to give additional outside supplements. I also have insisted that the GLN's supplements can be safely used at the proper times, and I worked on finding those proper amounts and timing without getting any additional clues from you other than you had indeed used some of them but were still advising your followers not to use them. I also neatly explained the lockouts we were all seeing and all you all could do was say that I was making things up and being unscientific. Learning from you? Not anymore my friend... we stopped doing that long ago.

We also parted ways when you decided to attack me over and over again, just as you have here, by throwing my mistakes while learning this system at me, desperately trying to make yourself look better, as well as ridiculing me and calling me names in other threads. I have never called you names, I have just disagreed with you. The last straw was when you repeatedly tell me that I am putting out erroneous advice and again, and I ask you again here to show us what you mean.

You seem to have made this into a contest as to who the alpha dog is is here, when instead we all should be working with and learning from each other. Just yesterday thanks to comments from my friends, we learned a little more about the use of Vulx and Megacrop together. Just imagine what we could have learned already if you were working with me, rather than being so concerned that I not spread my beliefs or take credit for what I have learned, outside of this thread.

 

[Emilya Green]

Would the middle of week 7 of an 8 week strain be considered premature? Today is the 2nd day of week 8. One plant just started slowing down a few days ago. The other one is still drinking up the pot in 48 hours. I already figured that one is a week behind based on calyx swell and trichomes. I just watered them yesterday but I could top dress and double up the URB and see if the uptake increases on the next watering? Or would that be a waste at this point in the grow?

I would think that the reaction you are seeing this late is actually the plant finishing out. It sounds like that it is about time, and I wonder if you were completely accurate when counting the first day of flower. Could they be done?

 

[derek910]

I would think that the reaction you are seeing this late is actually the plant finishing out. It sounds like that it is about time, and I wonder if you were completely accurate when counting the first day of flower. Could they be done?

I gave both plants 14 transition days once I flipped to 12/12 and then started counting them as flowering. Based on the trichomes I don’t think they’re quite done yet. I’ll post them below and you tell me what you think. These were taken Thursday. I was planning on checking them again this coming Wednesday. I’m still seeing quite a bit of clear and I’ve never really been confident on the right time to harvest.

 

[Emilya Green]

I gave both plants 14 transition days once I flipped to 12/12 and then started counting them as flowering. Based on the trichomes I don’t think they’re quite done yet. I’ll post them below and you tell me what you think. These were taken Thursday. I was planning on checking them again this coming Wednesday. I’m still seeing quite a bit of clear and I’ve never really been confident on the right time to harvest.

Yep, you most likely have not rushed the harvest date then with a 14 day transition. I do see some amber in your trichome shots... not much, but it is there... but yes, I see the large numbers of clear trichome tops and the cloudy stems... maybe this is a trick of the lighting? Maybe in this strain, partially cloudy is ok? You are very close, that is for sure. I would tend to do what you are proposing... give more microbes and try one more watering to watch for further developments.