InTheShed Grows Inside & Out: Jump In Any Time

[InTheShed]

Like in a Charles Dicken's novel, I've left an orphan behind...

That's a "cool" bit of info. for young plants in the sun!

Thanks GDB! Seemed easier than painting the pots white, and this way it adds an air cushion around the pots as well for a bit of extra insulation.

Until i read this i had a WTF look on my face, why is he putting geopots around his plastic pots. Hehe. I actually noticed that happaning in the grow tent too. The outer roots of the solo cups do a similar thing.

I try not to use my dark blue solo cups for that very reason!

 

[Reave]

I try not to use my dark blue solo cups for that very reason!

Learning everyday. Love it.

 

[Tommboy1973]

Monday update and greetings folks! Nothing much to talk about at this stage of the grow, but I thought I would post a picture and talk about our great sponsor Geopot.

I use Geopots for all of my cannabis and a lot of my pineapples as well, and I have quite a number of them in different sizes. They are much better than the felt ones I used to get from Amazon because they are really heavy duty. The fabric is a hell of a lot tougher than the felt ones which rip and tear and wear out from being dragged around when wet. The Geopots wash well and show no signs of getting thinner after many uses.

And another way I use Geopots is to keep the sun off the black plastic pots I use before they get transplanted into their final homes:

20210322_085024 Spring grow.jpg

• InTheShed
• Mar 22, 2021

Spring grow day 38/36

(L to R: Tin Can Kush 1-2-3, Red Dragon, Candida)

I have two sizes of "1 gallon" black plastic pots, and the 2gal. Geopots fit perfectly around the larger of the two. The 1 gal Geopot is on the Candida in the smaller plastic pot.

I have found that the sun on the black plastic will turn the outer roots brown and unhealthy, making new growth take longer upon transplant. A light colored cloth pot works really well at keeping the soil from getting overheated.

That's it for me today! I hope you all had a good weekend and are getting ready to roll up your sleeves. A lot of folks seem to be making up ways to get the vaccine before they're really eligible, but I don't have that subterfuge in my constitution.

and

I just started using cloth pots myself for my dwarf fruit trees last year. I had to go with a larger one than planned for this bare root Honey Babe peach, her main roots were huge!!

Beats digging holes in caliche, here in the desert, lol. Plus I like the idea of air pruning in the roots. I’ll have to try a geopot, they look really sturdy!

 

[Virgin Ground]

Hey y'all.

I heard back from GeoFlora!! Yay!!!

They are going to start a new help thread soon.
I'll place links on the growers journals (like Sheddie's) that are using GeoFlora once it starts.

 

[InTheShed]

I had to go with a larger one than planned for this bare root Honey Babe peach, her main roots were huge!!

Dwarf peach tree...interesting! Is is freestone? I used to have two big beautiful trees in the backyard, but they eventually produced less every year and got sicker and I cut them down. How big does that one get if you let it?

I’ll have to try a geopot, they look really sturdy!

They are great pots, and I used to carry 10gallon pots around soaking wet and they held up better than I did.

Hey y'all.

I heard back from GeoFlora!! Yay!!!
They are going to start a new help thread soon.
I'll place links on the growers journals (like Sheddie's) that are using GeoFlora once it starts.

VG! I'm looking forward to having them available in a single spot here on the site.

 

[HashGirl]

I wish we could get GeoPots in Canada. I really want to get cloth pots with the velcro closure. Does anyone know of any to get in Canada?

 

[dr.h00k]

GrowdaddyCanada ,sells geopots, as well as a few other's...everyone I've seen are black tho', so not sure if they're the real deal...should be able to locate velcro fabric pots on the Zon...cheerz... ...h00k...

...edit...transplant velcro pots are readily available at a number of Canadian online retailers...

 

[HashGirl]

Thanks, h00k, I'll check them out. I haven't had any luck on the Zon.

 

[BakedARea]

Well damn...I am really far behind! I should have got some seeds going indoors at least 4 weeks ago. Great idea on using the fabric pots to protect the roots from getting too hot sitting in the black nursery pots.

 

[InTheShed]

Well damn...I am really far behind! I should have got some seeds going indoors at least 4 weeks ago. Great idea on using the fabric pots to protect the roots from getting too hot sitting in the black nursery pots.

Thanks for visiting Baked! I'm sure the plants would love some relief from the Arizona sun .

Not sure how far behind you are, but since you saw this morning's post, you're all caught up!

 

[BakedARea]

Not sure how far behind you are, but since you saw this morning's post, you're all caught up!

I'm too far behind to go back and figure out where I left off! Haaa haaaa...I'm trying to be better about checking the forum more often. I get much more satisfaction being connected here versus facebook. I ditched that shit...actually they dumped me! Apparently I'm too much of a weed loving patriot! Who knew that was a bad thing?!!!?

 

[Tommboy1973]

Dwarf peach tree...interesting! Is is freestone? I used to have two big beautiful trees in the backyard, but they eventually produced less every year and got sicker and I cut them down. How big does that one get if you let it?

They are great pots, and I used to carry 10gallon pots around soaking wet and they held up better than I did.

Yes it’s a freestone. I like peach cobbler and freestone is the only way to go! It says they’ll get about 5 feet max. I have a dwarf nectarine also.

 

[BakedARea]

I used to have two big beautiful trees in the backyard, but they eventually produced less every year and got sicker and I cut them down

Not questioning your horticultural capabilities but how old were the trees? How did you prune them? How did you fertilize?

I have roughly 16 fruit trees. Most are stone fruit varieties. I also have some dwarf and super dwarf varieties. I have a super dwarf peach that is in a 5 gallon that gave me a couple dozen full sized fruit last year. That was after thinning it out!

I have a dwarf nectarine also.

I just got my first nectarine tree a couple weeks ago. In full bloom! Put that beauty right next to a load of native pollinator flowers to ensure I get some action on the flowers. So far so good! I wish I could grow my cannabis plants as good as I grow my fruit trees. Haaa haaa haaaa

 

[Tommboy1973]

Not questioning your horticultural capabilities but how old were the trees? How did you prune them? How did you fertilize?

I have roughly 16 fruit trees. Most are stone fruit varieties. I also have some dwarf and super dwarf varieties. I have a super dwarf peach that is in a 5 gallon that gave me a couple dozen full sized fruit last year. That was after thinning it out!

I just got my first nectarine tree a couple weeks ago. In full bloom! Put that beauty right next to a load of native pollinator flowers to ensure I get some action on the flowers. So far so good! I wish I could grow my cannabis plants as good as I grow my fruit trees. Haaa haaa haaaa

Nice! I’m in AZ and my Bok Choy bolted a few weeks ago with our heat waves we keep getting. I let it go to flower and the bees love it. They sure do help to pollinate. I have 15 fruit trees but most are still young. I got apples, apricots, nectarines, Barbados cherry (1, lol) Jamaican cherries and pomegranate fruit last year. Mulberries and figs are fruiting for the first time this year.

What is your super dwarf peach variety?

 

[Tommboy1973]

Nice! I’m in AZ and my Bok Choy bolted a few weeks ago with our heat waves we keep getting. I let it go to flower and the bees love it. They sure do help to pollinate. I have 15 fruit trees but most are still young. I got apples, apricots, nectarines, Barbados cherry (1, lol) Jamaican cherries and pomegranate fruit last year. Mulberries and figs are fruiting for the first time this year.

What is your super dwarf peach variety?

If you’ve never tried a Jamaican cherry it’s very interesting. It taste like captain crunch berries with a Jelly Belly’s buttered popcorn finish, lol.

 

[BakedARea]

What is your super dwarf peach variety?

Uhhh...good question!?! I forgot. I'll go outside and look real quick.

Well shit...apparently I am a stoner and confused most of the time. Not a super dwarf...it's just a dwarf and it is called "Garden Gold".

If you’ve never tried a Jamaican cherry it’s very interesting. It taste like captain crunch berries with a Jelly Belly’s buttered popcorn finish, lol.

What kind of stoner ass bud you were smoking when you came up with that comparison?!

Well whatever it was, apparently I need a Jamaican cherry tree now!

 

[Tommboy1973]

Uhhh...good question!?! I forgot. I'll go outside and look real quick.

Well shit...apparently I am a stoner and confused most of the time. Not a super dwarf...it's just a dwarf and it is called "Garden Gold".

What kind of stoner ass bud you were smoking when you came up with that comparison?!

Well whatever it was, apparently I need a Jamaican cherry tree now!

Hahaha!! Don’t feel bad, after mixing up the dwarf bananas that I was sure I would remember who was who, I tag all my trees with homemade tags made from pop cans so I don’t forget what they are.
Not sure what the climate is where you are, I saw from one of your posts that your 9B same as me, but that only denotes average lows in the zone. Our average summertime high here runs around 110-115 and the Jamaican Cherry loves it! Fruits all summer. Takes a lot of water tho, way more than even my mulberries. It is VERY cold sensitive, I frost cloth around the trunk and use old fashioned C9 Christmas bulbs under there, turned on anytime it gets below 40.

 

[The Celt]

So much of smoking is subjective that going based on taste is a really iffy method of evaluation. That's what made "when do I start flushing to get rid of nute taste" a thing for so long. But as I mentioned, there are inherent advantages to the plant with LOS. But I still believe that an ion is an ion, as long as we're doing the plants right as we grow them.

Damn, I missed a lot.

I just wanted to weigh in on this bit Shed, particularly the bit I underlined.

I will not get into the debate about which is better to me that is personal preference anyway.

But there are major differences in HOW plants uptake nutrients between LOS and fertilizer based grows, here are some posts I had made on other threads concerning this:


Well, not sure if the OP was referring to growing in organics or salt based fertilizers, and this makes a big difference.

If salt based, then osmotic pressure plays a role but you are not apt to find a “perfect” ppm point that could be used start to finish. Air temperature and rH would also play a role in the uptake along with the water.

As for high P in bottled nutes, it is likely high because it is a nutrient that, when in excess, aid/increases the uptake of other nutes.

If the OP is growing in LOS, or thinking along organic lines, osmotic pressures play a minor (maybe not at all) role in how the plants uptake nutrients. Water is needed for transporting the nutrients through the plant, but is not involved in the absorption of nutrients by the roots. In the case of N, bacteria are absorbed into the root where enzymes break down its protective shell which is high in N, then the bacteria are expelled back into the soil where they feed on organic matter, rebuilding their shells and the cycle repeats.

It took me a long time to stop myself from treating LOS soils by hydro standards, they play by entirely different rules

——-
I don’t know what products you are speaking of specifically, I make all my own mixes, but I tend to agree with your statement @MackMurder. Chances are that any bottled “tea” or “recharge” is more of a money grab than anything.

Now if we consider home made AACTs, then that if a different bird all together. Contrary to opinions stated here a number of years back, ACCTs do NOT feed the soil, they feed the plant. Soils (or other mediums) do NOT eat. When you make an ACT, the microbes are digesting the amendments you put in, same as happens in a compost heap, just at an accelerated rate. When you water with the ACT, those microbes then feed the plant.

In an organic system, nitrogen uptake by the plant is NOT in the form of ammonia, not nitrites, not nitrates, not any form of NOx, but by ingesting bacteria at the roots. The shells of these bacteria are high in nitrogen and it is striped from them, in the root, before they are expelled back into the soil to digest more raw material and repeating the cycle. Other microbes preform similar functions for other nutrients.

———

So just to summarize, in LOS, there are no ions being absorbed by the plant. It is an entirely different beast and osmotic pressures and ions do not play a role in LOS.

It took me along time to figure out why I couldn’t apply “hydro” rules to my grows, but it’s like comparing apples to oranges even though we are working with the same plant species.

The nutrient densities I use in my soils would fry a plant if I used the same ratios using a salt based fertilizer, and I add nothing but water from seed to harvest.

As for Cannabinoid levels, I rarely concern myself with them, have no way to test them, and have no idea which method produces more. As for terpenes, and until further research happens, I still think it’s subjective at this point, but I do see a difference between my LOS Blue Dream and the Blue Dream I grew with Mega Crop.

One last word, there has been research that suggests organically grown crops (not cannabis specific) keep better and retain colours, flavours, etc longer than salt based grown crops.

 

[InTheShed]

Yes it’s a freestone. I like peach cobbler and freestone is the only way to go! It says they’ll get about 5 feet max. I have a dwarf nectarine also.

I'm going to have to look that one up and see if it's available locally. I miss having fresh peaches, and so do the local squirrels and rats.

Not questioning your horticultural capabilities but how old were the trees? How did you prune them? How did you fertilize?

LOL...question away Baked! They were planted as whips and not allowed to fruit for the first two years. After that they were painstakingly pruned every winter (to open up the branches and promote new growth) and thinned in spring to no more than one flower every 8". Squirrels were trapped using peanut butter on bread and relocated 7+miles away.

I didn't fertilize them as I recall, but over time there were spots on the bark that would ooze sap from wounds that I assumed were from some sort of insect. I never treated them for that as I recall that it would have involved systemic pesticide that I wasn't willing to use (and still won't given the number of fruit trees sharing my yard). I decided I would get fruit from them for as long as I could, and then cut them down when they died. I'd say they lived about 10 years or so, and I eventually cut them down.

In the dirt I currently have 2 pomegranate trees, a satsuma tree, and 3 lemon trees all grown from seed. I also have 3 other lemon trees in huge pots and 2 more in smaller pots. All my lemon trees are offspring of a lemon tree growing behind my first apartment in Los Angeles that had sprouted seeds in its lemons. That would have been in 1988.

I have roughly 16 fruit trees. Most are stone fruit varieties. I also have some dwarf and super dwarf varieties. I have a super dwarf peach that is in a 5 gallon that gave me a couple dozen full sized fruit last year. That was after thinning it out!

Excellent return on a 5 gallon pot!

If you’ve never tried a Jamaican cherry it’s very interesting. It taste like captain crunch berries with a Jelly Belly’s buttered popcorn finish, lol.

I was going to ask if it required freezing in winter as many cherries do, but then you said this:

It is VERY cold sensitive

So I'm guessing the answer is "no"!

But there are major differences in HOW plants uptake nutrients between LOS and fertilizer based grows,

for taking the time to pull that all together Celt! I was going to try to respond to some of this individually, but instead I'd like to post this quote and have folks interested read the rest article on osmotic pressure and fertilizers:

"Regulating the Nutrient Level Around Plants
One of the challenges for us as gardeners is to regulate the nutrient level around our plants. Plants can cope with considerable variation in the level of nutrients around the roots, but they do better if the level is more stable. That's why the comment is made that it is better to fertilize more often with very weak fertilizer than it is to use stronger fertilizer occasionally.

Let's look a bit at ways in which nutrient levels can be stabilized around plants. The key here is that nutrients are available to plants and affect the osmotic pressure only if they are in solution. Nutrients not in solution are completely inert as far as the plant is concerned. You know, what would be really nice would be to have some mechanism which stored nutrients in the soil in an insoluble form and slowly converted them to a soluble form at a rate which keeps a constant level around the plant. You often hear comments that organic fertilizers - compost, manures, etc. - are far better than chemical fertilizers. Environmentalists and "greenies" often wax so lyrical it seems as though the nutrients from organic fertilizers are good and healthy while the nutrients in chemical fertilizers are evil and poisonous. That of course is utter rubbish; a potassium ion is a potassium ion whatever the source. Organic fertilizers do, however, have a major advantage. The nutrients in chemical fertilizers are in a readily soluble form. Very shortly after the fertilizer is applied to the soil, the nutrients dissolve, raising the nutrient level and osmotic pressure. The nutrients in organic fertilizers, however, are often locked up in complex organic compounds and do not dissolve readily. When they are applied to the soil it requires the action of microbes in the soil to break down these organic compounds and thereby release the nutrients to dissolve in the soil water. Thus organic fertilizers provide a slow steady nutrient release." [Bold mine, obviously!]

The source is posted by Virginia Tech from an article from our friends down in Australia. It's an interesting read, and they go on to recommend Osmocote as a way to mimic the slow release of nutrients similar to an organic grow! I do that when I hand off clones to folks not interested in doing anything but watering.

And the basic takeaway is that the advantage to organic grows is not the nutrients themselves, but how evenly the plants can use nutrients from organic soil. It puts the roots in a more balanced state of osmotic pressure compared to synthetic nutrients. But so will watering more often with diluted synthetic nutes (another reason to use fast-draining substrates).

Whether organic soils create more terpenes/cannabinoids is something only a lab can tell us over the course of an actual scientific study.

If you have the interest, time, and space to grow in LOS, great! For those who don't/can't, that's fine too. Find what works for you and grow the best plants you can.

 

[The Celt]

Not to quibble, but that article is 20 years old, back when it was still believed plants, whether salt fed or organic, up took nutrients in ionic form. They do when using fertilizers, but recent studies have shown that in organic systems, the nutrients are gained through the intake of microbes not ions.

Here is the Paper explaining in detail the process. There is also a cool electron microscope video of the process in action if I can find it again, I will post it here.

Note To Self...remember to bookmark research papers like that Instead of reading and moving on to the next