Weasel Forges Ahead

[Weaselcracker]

... the 15 minutes or so is enough time to drip dry before I trim and manicure. After the trimming is done, all the branches are thoroughly dripped dry,

Oh that’s all? For some reason I figured I had to let it drip dry overnight and get back to it the next day. Making the process a lot more complicated. Maybe hanging it overnight is what I did before.
Cool- well that’s totally possible then.

That's when The Capn turned me onto bennies and I've never had pythium since

Yeah I was really interested in the subject of bennies and Cap’n style around the time I joined. I wandered all over the map researching them and trying stuff. I’ve been kind of lax about using them lately though. Subculture M is what I have left on the shelf now and I’ve been dusting roots with it in the last month - though I worry it’s been sitting there too long. I don’t have any beneficial bacteria products at the moment. Sometimes I brew compost teas- with unclear results.
From what I read- it takes a couple months to get mycorrhizae established and is best done by dusting the roots at first transplant.
I finally located and ordered some Recharge last night. Is that what you’re using? It’s impossible to find in Canada - hopefully it makes it through customs.

Coconut water is good.

Hmmmm... yeah I guess. Funny- I used to live around a lot of coconuts and picked them at all ages over the years. I never located anything inside them that resembles this ‘coconut water’ stuff they sell in the stores.

Drink it

I did try to once.

Aloe is good for cutting ends -

I do have lots of aloe vera growing and this would be a good way to help thin out the babies. I’m going start a new perlite or coco cloning tray today if I get time, and I’ll try a few cuttings with aloe.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Insomnia, my main enabler to the forum, gave me some time in the night to work on the grow a little.
This is the PC that I sprayed with c. silver. Still at the early flowering stage where they look reasonably healthy before they go to shit. At least they look ok from above. Below is a different story.

PC

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 19, 2018

PC

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 19, 2018

PC hermies

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 19, 2018

Hermies all down the side of the area that I sprayed. I went and removed all except the ones at the tip.

PC hermies

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 19, 2018

This is how the PC grows during flowering and one of the reasons it’s such a pain in the ass.

PC

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 19, 2018

Bud sites develop all the way along the branches and basically all the way to the pot. Each limb usually represents at least a 24” length of sticky mistletoe. The growth shown in the picture is just the early start of this- it gets much worse. Most of it is going to be way too shaded and claustrophobic to make any botanical sense.
The sanest options seem to be to either just leave the mess and hope for the best, or lollipop every branch right to the tip- which means removing over 80% of the foliage and feels pretty drastic- for the plant and for myself.
Usually I fall somewhere in between the two sane options and half-heartedly try to thin out the stuff 2 or 3 times during flowering. I haven’t found a way to turn it into a tidy looking plant whatever I do. Under these conditions scrogging it is the best method and that’s usually what I do with the PC.

 

[Weaselcracker]

The variegated plant continues to change and morph. Lately it’s been fond of growing only green or yellow shoots- but none of the half and half kind I need for cloning.

CM3

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 19, 2018

CM3

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 19, 2018

CM3

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 19, 2018

 

[Pennywise]

That's one crazy looking plant!

 

[Weaselcracker]

It has been an entertaining one to grow. I’ll take that as a compliment. Thanks Penny

 

[Pennywise]

Be cool to get your half and half and reproduce it.

 

[Weaselcracker]

I’m definitely working on that.

 

[Pennywise]

I'll be watching, cool project.

 

[nivek]

That verigated has you right where it wants ya now

Its messin with ya

 

[Skybound]

Oh that’s all? For some reason I figured I had to let it drip dry overnight and get back to it the next day. Making the process a lot more complicated. Maybe hanging it overnight is what I did before.
Cool- well that’s totally possible then.



Yeah I was really interested in the subject of bennies and Cap’n style around the time I joined. I wandered all over the map researching them and trying stuff. I’ve been kind of lax about using them lately though. Subculture M is what I have left on the shelf now and I’ve been dusting roots with it in the last month - though I worry it’s been sitting there too long. I don’t have any beneficial bacteria products at the moment. Sometimes I brew compost teas- with unclear results.
From what I read- it takes a couple months to get mycorrhizae established and is best done by dusting the roots at first transplant.
I finally located and ordered some Recharge last night. Is that what you’re using? It’s impossible to find in Canada - hopefully it makes it through customs.

IMO, trim as soon as they stop dripping, but still very wet. The wetter the buds, the less will stick to your shears and gloves, which in turn will allow you to get really anal in your trimming.

As to bennies, I now make Heisenberg Tea which is a gallon of RO, 5ml Aqua Shield, 3ml unsulfured molasses, 1/4-1/2 cup of Ancient Forest (Alaskan humus) and a little kelp mixed with fulvic and humic and the magic ingredient, Great White Mycorrhizae. Aerate for 36 hours then use. Though TBH, the absolute best result I ever witnessed on a journal was GreenThumb J (also a cannuk I think) who used both of the SubCulture products. His roots were snow white all the way through harvest. I mean I got white roots, but I never got them that white from teas. I used Recharge for about 2 years, but I got better performance from the tea, so I reverted back. Recharge is still a good product, but the included colonies are nowhere near as robust as is in Great White. If memory serves, RC only has Bacilus, but is very lacking in Tricadermal colonies, but maybe the other way around. When used in hydro, the colonies quickly die off for the obvious reasons, but they still get their job done before they die which is to beat the bullshit out of pythium. Bennies work better in organics, but that's not to say that they don't work at all in hydro. I inoculate about twice weekly through week 6 of bloom. At the end of it all though, any source of bennies is better than no source at all. You can use bennies to apologize for stressful events such as removing so much of that over grown PC, or transplanting, or any form of HST and she'll bounce back within hours. FYI, my PCs both survived and are beginning to thrive. Just about ready to shrink the cotys and get to stretchin. I notice their leaves grow much broader than the cheese and I hope to have very Indica phenos. One even has a bit of a duck's foot leaf, though that's probably just an odd abnormality. My Cheese is doing fantastic and I'm happy to have colas again. Just one more shitty Kush harvest and I'm out of the woods. Can't wait to get those PCs into bloom, but that won't be for about 2-3 more months as I need clones of each.

Edit - Recharge says to mix and use right away, but I suggest mixing and aerate for 30 minutes or so before use. When I used RC, I only made a 16oz bottle of water to a very small qty of RC. You only need about 8 ounces per full sized plant, so do your math with that knowledge. You have a larger grow so you might need a full gallon, but if you don't only mix what you need IMO.

 

[Weaselcracker]

That verigated has you right where it wants ya now

Its messin with ya

Sad but true. Apparently all a plant has to do around me is pose a bunch and act special and fancy, and here I come to play nursemaid to its special needs.

IMO, trim as soon as they stop dripping, but still very wet. The wetter the buds, the less will stick to your shears and gloves, which in turn will allow you to get really anal in your trimming.

As to bennies, I now make Heisenberg Tea which is a gallon of RO, 5ml Aqua Shield, 3ml unsulfured molasses, 1/4-1/2 cup of Ancient Forest (Alaskan humus) and a little kelp mixed with fulvic and humic and the magic ingredient, Great White Mycorrhizae. Aerate for 36 hours then use. Though TBH, the absolute best result I ever witnessed on a journal was GreenThumb J (also a cannuk I think) who used both of the SubCulture products. His roots were snow white all the way through harvest. I mean I got white roots, but I never got them that white from teas. I used Recharge for about 2 years, but I got better performance from the tea, so I reverted back. Recharge is still a good product, but the included colonies are nowhere near as robust as is in Great White. If memory serves, RC only has Bacilus, but is very lacking in Tricadermal colonies, but maybe the other way around. When used in hydro, the colonies quickly die off for the obvious reasons, but they still get their job done before they die which is to beat the bullshit out of pythium. Bennies work better in organics, but that's not to say that they don't work at all in hydro. I inoculate about twice weekly through week 6 of bloom. At the end of it all though, any source of bennies is better than no source at all. You can use bennies to apologize for stressful events such as removing so much of that over grown PC, or transplanting, or any form of HST and she'll bounce back within hours. FYI, my PCs both survived and are beginning to thrive. Just about ready to shrink the cotys and get to stretchin. I notice their leaves grow much broader than the cheese and I hope to have very Indica phenos. One even has a bit of a duck's foot leaf, though that's probably just an odd abnormality. My Cheese is doing fantastic and I'm happy to have colas again. Just one more shitty Kush harvest and I'm out of the woods. Can't wait to get those PCs into bloom, but that won't be for about 2-3 more months as I need clones of each.

Edit - Recharge says to mix and use right away, but I suggest mixing and aerate for 30 minutes or so before use. When I used RC, I only made a 16oz bottle of water to a very small qty of RC. You only need about 8 ounces per full sized plant, so do your math with that knowledge. You have a larger grow so you might need a full gallon, but if you don't only mix what you need IMO.

Where’s that reps button...? Thanks a lot for all this info. Super helpful.
Yeah I do remember GreenThumb J, and his Subculture, and his snow white roots.
Maybe I should have stuck with ordering more Subculture. Oh well. Too late now - the piggy bank is empty again. I couldn’t bring myself to order Great White because it’s just under $300 for a little can of it, before tax and shipping. Shipping to here is a wild card. Sometimes it’s reasonable- often it costs as much as the product or even twice as much. .
Ancient forest is going for a couple cents less than $200 on amazon, before tax and shipping, for a 1/2 cubic foot . Shit- I can see Alaska out my window on a clear day. How much more special can dirt from the forest be over there than it is over here?
I ordered some aquashield, so that’s a start. ( shipping doubled the price on that one but the jug was less than $30- cheap ). Also I have a worm bin and compost bin. I think I can get kelp meal from a local store, and can probably scrape together some sort of decent tea. The recharge looks like it’s got all the basic ingredients to make a tea on its own if bubbled for a while.
I’ve been down this road before. Kind of funny what lengths I’ll go to when the clones stop cloning and everything looks like it’s slowly going to crash to a halt.

 

[Skybound]

Try to search "DWC Root Slime" and take the link to RIU and read Heisenberg's pretty lengthy post on the topic. He explains a wide variety of products (not brands) that can be used to make a good tea. Also do a general search for "Aerated Compost Tea" or "ACT" for short. Essentially, a tea is whatever you can find, and wherever you can find it from. Heisenberg tried his best to consider growers in your shoes that have tight shipping restrictions and what not. The kelp is a recent add that I made the executive decision to add in. I was having great results when mixing it in my reservoirs, but it always settled and gunked up my res, so I stopped using it there and just put it in my teas now. Also bookmark "kelp4less". Even if ordering from them is not in your cards, their lengthy list of products will surely give you lots of ideas to try. From them, I got their Fulvic Humic Kelp Blend. I also have Aminos on the wish list as that is a good chelate and will aid in keeping the calcium suspended in the nutes, but generally all the organic acids will aid in performance, just like silica does.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Thanks man. I did go through most of those slime cure threads back in the day.

Heisenberg's pretty lengthy post on the topic.

Ha ha ha. Pretty lengthy is a bit of an understatement from what I remember - but I think most of gets pretty circular after the info in the beginning.

Also bookmark "kelp4less

I’m going to go check that site out now*

Though there’s a little irony in that name because all I have to do is go down to the beach and I can fill my truck right up with kelp in no time. I usually dump a few truckloads on the garden in the spring. It rots down very quickly, making a bit of a stench along the way.
So yeah- I’m not 100% sure what kelp meal even is (I’ll go research that now too) but assuming it’s just dried and powdered kelp- I can get that for less.
I know the gist of it is that teas can be made from all sorts of options- but when I keep seeing the same products touted, ones that I mostly don’t have, it gets tempting to go shopping for the quick fix instead of spending another 10000 hours trying to research the science behind the recipe. And the info-net usually has a way of making it all seem inconclusive no matter how many hours you put in- there’s always someone there saying the opposite.


* Done. Nice.
Classy website. There could be the usual shipping woes- but I’ll investigate that.

 

[Skybound]

IMO, ACTs are comprised of whatever you put in there. I've experimented adding Fish Shit, Mammoth P, double the molasses, double the Hydro Guard (sorry, I always confuse HG with Aqua Shield), but the Humus is the base. That's what is in the Ancient Forest. The kelp from K4L is soluble kelp and that's important for a quick mix tea, otherwise it has to be broken down naturally. TBH, your earth, that you've been dumping the kelp onto all this time is probably good enough to at least experiment with. Shit, looking at the contents of the Recharge, I see it has molasses powder, fulvic, humic and amino acids. I think I'll add a dash of Recharge into my ACT. The more the merrier!

If you want to experiment, I suggest taking a shovel of your good kelp rich dirt, dry it down to medium moist, put a handful into cheese cloth and zip tie, or tie off with something so the dirt is somewhat loose inside. Then fill a container with a gallon of RO, add 3ml of unsulfured molasses, agitate till the molasses is evenly suspended in the water, drop in the cheese cloth sack, add 5ml of Hydro Guard or Aqua Shield and a 1/4 TSP of Recharge and aerate with an air stone for 2 days while also frequently agitating the blend either with a violent stir, or if you have a small pump to spare, plug it in for a minute every now and again. Can't leave the pump on in the water for too long tho or it will add a lot of heat which is bad because bennies need a lot of O2, and colder water holds more. If the 2 day tea smells like worms on pavement after a rain (a jar of hockers/spit) or slightly shitty, it's no good and toss it. But if it smells earthy and sweet, add it to a house plant, or another plant that you know you'll kill anyway. A kill plant would be better because you can inspect the roots after you kill it.

After just looking at the Recharge tub, I see they have some of both bacilus and tricaderma, just not as much as Great White. That's insane that they charge so much up there for that product. I know Aussies have the same plight. For me, it costs $30 for a pepper shaker half full at the local hydro store. I also add Orca when he has those samples. Rhizo Blast is a good add too. Really anything that is considered Beneficial in the medium will add value to your ACT.

Edit - since you have free access to loads of kelp, maybe add a little into the cheese cloth? I figure the bennies can extract what they can from it and deposit the extracts into the water, and what can't be extracted is still trapped in the cheese cloth. Just an idea.

 

[bobrown14]

Though there’s a little irony in that name because all I have to do is go down to the beach and I can fill my truck right up with kelp in no time.

So yeah- I’m not 100% sure what kelp meal even is (I’ll go research that now too) but assuming it’s just dried and powdered kelp- I can get that for less.

Kelp meal you can find at your local Feed Store. Being out in the sticks there's farms and farmers need kelp meal specially this time of year. The term "meal" should give you a hint.
Yes kelp meal is mixed in with the feed for all animals in the barnyard. It's got everything plants and animals need to live. How farmers keep from having sick critters. Works GREAT as a soil amendment.

If you want to make tea with it great its perfect.

1/2 - 1 cup kelp meal + 1 cup of compost + tbs or 2 of molasses into a bucket of water say 3-4 gal and let sit stir it if you want bubble/aerate it if to want. Wait a day in bubbled or 2 days if stirring every once in a while.

There's your tea. Feel free to strain or not (I dont) and water in.

Cheap and a lot cheaper and better than anything you can buy in a bottle.

Mycos for less... if you are in Canada look up "Mykes" brand. Its a Canadian company (Premier) same company that makes ProMix etc. They are the pioneers in mycos. Been a thing for 20+ years. A LOT less $$ than Great White.

The mycos that I use is from:

Sustainable Agricultural Technologies - Soil Amendments

I get it from A-zon. It aint cheap but you get about 5 times as much or more that Great White and its the mycos that we want for cannabis.

Look around that website - all good info about making ACT - they are professionals at making that stuff.



Kelp from the beach is GREAT - pick up the stuff with the air bladders that the Ascophyllum nodosum (google for pic to identify). Has to come from clean water tho. You need to spread it out and rinse of the salt water then you can compost it and/or let it dry and chop it up (kelp meal).

Kelp meal very very cheap. Kelp mixed with EWC = best top dress you can add to your pot (that and Malted Barley ground to fine powder) those 3 together is the best.

@blewhiller is from Main and he collects kelp where he lives and composts it.

Stink is because it's a green manure when composted. Better than animal feces for compost by a fair amount too.


Mammoth P is ACT... put into a fancy bottle with a fancy price tag to go with. You can make your own easy enough. Dank nugs either way.

I run no-til soil and stopped using ACTs after the 2nd or 3rd run, just add in some mycos when I up-pot to final containers for flowering and add some Kelp meal and EWC and good.

Skybound has some great ideas

If you wanna grow organic you can source everything locally.

I like to do stuff for growing on the cheap so I have money for seeds and lights.

 

[Weaselcracker]

Wow. Thanks so much. I’m really grateful to you guys for the small goldmine of info! Really helpful.

The kelp from K4L is soluble kelp and that's important for a quick mix tea, otherwise it has to be broken down naturally.

I spent a little time this morn trying to figure out ‘what is kelp meal’- and immediately remembered I’ve been down that rabbit hole before, a couple years ago. With similar results - not much real info on the process of how it’s made, except that as you said- it’s soluble kelp. So- it sounds like it’s not just ground up kelp flakes (?) but some sort of extraction.

Kelp meal you can find at your local Feed Store.

Yep, amazingly enough we do have one of those and they do have it

Kelp from the beach is GREAT - pick up the stuff with the air bladders that the Ascophyllum nodosum (google for pic to identify). Has to come from clean water tho. You need to spread it out and rinse of the salt water then you can compost it and/or let it dry and chop it up (kelp meal).

Our waters are very clean. We don’t have that kind of kelp here though. That one looks to be an east coast thing. The most common kinds of kelp to wash up on the beach here, in fall and winter in small mountains, are bull kelp and giant kelp. Nereocystis luetkeana and Macrocystis integrifolia respectively. They’re usually mixed together- with bull kelp being more prevalent. With 15 slimy minutes and a pitchfork you can fill a pickup truck full. I rinse it with the garden hose or leave it in the rain for a day or two before piling it on the garden. It breaks down crazy fast and a 10” deep layer turns into a skiff of slime in a few days. The plants love it.
The truck- not so much. Don’t forget it to rinse that too.

On some beaches people mostly gather bladderwort to use in the garden. In springtime in other spots, mostly beaches next to shallow bays, we fill up on something we call ‘black gold’ - mainly composted eelgrass that gets mounded up on the forest/beach edge.
It all depends which beach you live on.

A popular thing to do here is fill a large barrel or garbage can full of kelp and let it rot into slime for the future of the garden. The smell is horrific. Usually nobody wants to deal with the garbage can experiment after it’s underway and it tends to become a thorn in the side of the to-do list.
I think I’ll start one up and see if I can render down some sort of composted kelp slime into something solid.

Been a little busy but I’ll take some pics whenever I next get out seaweed gathering.

 

[SamSmith]

The amount of resourcefulness that you employ up there with not much to work with impresses me. It goes to show that most of us over complicate growing.

 

[Skybound]

I wish there was a way for computers to translate the smells across the interwebs, but I'll just rely on imagination to fill in the blanks as to what kinds of funk you'll be enduring in your garbage can experiment. I also have something called soluble seaweed, which I assume is a little different than kelp, but damn, after about 2 days it smells like a rotten egg that ate other rotten eggs and got gassy ass farts. I've read to mix the SW with my fulvic/humic/kelp 2:5, but the result is just not bearable.

I tried tracking down some info I read on OverGrow last year, but was only able to track down the user so far, but the grower (Lotus710) is a no till master and grows all of his own amendments and makes his own mycos with rice hulls or something to that nature. He suggested I get 2 books about microbes and bacteria, but I never followed up on it. But the end result is a totally self sustained natural garden with homemade bennies. I'll revistit my search tonight or tomorrow and PM you links. I'd share them here, but they will def get moderated due to being on another forum. It's good intel for sure though.

Happy Thanksgiving bro, and Happy Thanksgiving to your subbers too!

 

[Weaselcracker]

The amount of resourcefulness that you employ up there with not much to work with impresses me. It goes to show that most of us over complicate growing.

Thanks Sam . It is still a bit complicated sometimes. Ha ha. But I have found that they also usually do quite well without me around at all. Often better. It’s getting info and supplies that is a real issue here- everything seems to come down some sort of long dark tube from far far away. It costs lots of money and time to get it to my end of the tube

it smells like a rotten egg that ate other rotten eggs and got gassy ass farts.

Yeah it is really amazing how a mere plant can make such a foul odour.

I'll revistit my search tonight or tomorrow and PM you links.

Thanks!

Happy Thanksgiving bro, and Happy Thanksgiving to your subbers too!

Thanks bro and Happy Thanksgiving to you too, and everyone else out there who is celebrating it.
Carnival

Up here we have our thanksgiving thing in mid October- which makes a lot more sense in terms of having harvests to be thankful for. By the time the only month with ‘no’ in its name gets entrenched here*, we’re in danger of becoming unthankful again!

A dark and stormy day- went and grabbed some kelp off the beach to get out of the cabin. The Giant Kelp variety seems to be the flavour of the month right now- only a little bull kelp, dulse, eelgrass, and a bit of everything else mixed in.
Sometimes after big storms the kelp will pile up in massive amounts and mounds almost as high as the truck- and if you’re in a 4x4ing/stupid/drunk mood you can try to drive over them. Wheeee.
It wasn’t like that today, but still plentiful, and a short slimefest was all we needed to fill the truck.
Normally I leave the kelp gathering till spring- but the subject is on my mind so I thought I’d drag some home.

Kelp

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 22, 2018

Kelp

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 22, 2018

Kelp

• Weaselcracker
• Nov 22, 2018

* November- Tom Waits.

No shadow
No stars
No moon
No care

November

It only believes
in a pile of dead leaves
And a moon
That's the color of bone

No prayers for November
To linger longer
Stick your spoon in the wall
We'll slaughter them all

November has tied me
To an old dead tree
Get word to April
To rescue me

November's cold chain
Made of wet boots and rain
And shiny black ravens
On chimney smoke lanes

November seems odd
You're my firing squad
November

With my hair slicked back
With carrion shellac
With the blood from a pheasant
And the bone from a hare

Tied to the branches
Of a roebuck stag
Left to wave in the timber
Like a buck shot flag

Go away you rainsnout

Go away, blow your brains out

November

 

[Tead]

Note for Tead... don't hitch while Weas is on the road.... you might have to ride in back.

everything seems to come down some sort of long dark tube from far far away

Must be strange. Diametrically opposed worlds we live in. Fun stuff.