Big Difference Without My Fish Compost & Other Ramblings With Flytier

flytier

Well-Known Member
I never thought that the salmon compost we make at work would have as much influence on soil quality as it does. I was wrong.

We add the peat moss and dead fish, and the flies, beetles and microbes et al do everything else. I ran out of fish compost a few weeks ago, but I still had bags of sheep and cow manure composts so I figured that they would kinda pick up the slack of the missing good stuff, fill its niche, however you want to put it. Nope.

The plants that are in the fish compost are doing amazing WRT nutrients. I never had any issues with leaves turning colour except for my biggest one in the five-gallon bucket starting the other day, when the lower leaves started yellowing for want of nitrogen. At least nitrogen is what I suspect. The plants without it, they kinda sorta somewhat didn't take off like the others and were never really deep green, so I had to buy some blood meal this morning and spread it on the soil of all the pots. I never had any at the time when some these girls were transplanted and overlooked it when I had The Big Calcium Crisis of '17. But I digress...

Bear in mind that the only difference in soil these plants are in - to the best of my knowledge - is that of my own compost chowder. What I'm showing you here is what I think it might be, so if anyone here can point me in the right direction it would, of course, be appreciated.

Now there's a whole lot of nitrogen in fish compost; every time I lift the lid I have to put up with the reek of ammonia, which is a bigtime product in fish decomp, whereupon the nitrifying bacteria take over and convert the highly toxic ammonia first to slightly less toxic nitrites, and then to the much less toxic nitrates - at least that's the chemical process in an aquaculture biofilter. And now this stuff I'm using is well-seasoned since it's last year's pile, and not sterilized, which keeps the biological processes going using the other soil media to sorta "dilute" it and give it more space to colonize.

Here is my White Widow. It was put into this 5-gallon bucket back when I had plenty of salmon compost. It was transplanted in early June and given next to no other nutrients. The yellowing in the leaves is just recent.
nit_def_WW.jpg

Now here are four CBDreams that came from the same pack of seeds. The one in the lower right has no fish compost in her soil. I ran out while in the process of transplanting them as seedlings. Hmmmm..... This plant was the last one to be germinated in the pack, but it was in the same size range as the others in the starter pots. Since it was the last to get repotted, it didn't get the good stuff.
nit_def_CBDrm.jpg


And this is my Short Ryder, the only one of these planted at present. Also planted after I ran out. I'm hoping my application of blood meal today will give her a little kick in the proverbial arse. Cool plant though; I still have a full pack of similar ones for indoors over the winter.
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But anyway, I got on here originally (after having a hearty helping of MJ butter) to gripe about my soil for a couple of paragraphs, but that was a few hours ago now and instead I ended up with a biology presentation. Went out and took these pictures, Photoshopped them up and stuff. Good a way as any to pass some time, although this morning I was getting acupunctured up, which is actually pretty relaxing, after making sure that I had some magic butter awhile beforehand, which is actually even more pretty relaxing.

I have my B.Sc. in Environmental Biology and I've studied a bit of botany, ecology, soils and things like that and now I'm playing with some more of the stuff that I've always found interesting. Welcome to my rant, I guess.

:thumb: :morenutes:
 
So I brought home a 5-gallon bucket of fish compost today. And as a little bonus it seems somebody recently fired a bit of old salmon feed in with it. The plants that go into this load will have it pretty good.

First day back to work in over a week. Back to walking on the concrete floor with my arthritic hands in cold water. But if all goes the way it appears to be, I'll be getting my MMJ prescription next month. Woo-hoo! Goodbye, black market, I ain't gonna miss ya.
 
And I just finished putting some recently rooted WW clones into 12/12 just to see how they will bud. They are probably 7" tall or so, and one of them has a slight mutation whereby instead of having a pair of leaves opposite each other at the node it has three whorled leaves at 120 degrees to each other. I'm hoping it's going to make a nice dense bud.

I have a White Widow that's grown almost up to the top of the lattice on the front deck. The wife is starting to get nervous. She don't want me to get put away and she don't want me to lose my plants. I'll have to move the tallest one out around the corner of the porch and hope she starts budding soon. The CBDreams will be able to stay on the deck longer because I'm training them to stay a little lower, for the most part.

The days are starting to get shorter so I'm getting impatient to see some buds. This is my first year growing and I still have to see what happens when. Having some fun at it, though.

These are the outdoor girls. Some are doing wicked, but some didn't really take off, either from being planted too late or the lack of fresh fish compost in the soil mixture. That stuff makes all the difference for my purposes.
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Here's my only one outdoors that's blooming, but she's a Short Ryder auto. Cool little plant to grow. They should go good in my growspace.
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Yeah, i guess i did kind of trail off there. The compost did a wonderful job growing the plants, which came out quite tasty, considering it was nuke dried. My plan for next year is to use it again along with some trials with fish waste. Looking forward to it.
 
In your buckets, I see wood chips in there. Are you using that for top dress or is that worked into the soil?

Wood chips take a long while to decompose.
It's a bit worked into the soil and on top. The fungi like that area from what I've read.
 
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