Spring-Summer Grow -- Maria among the Hazes!
Day 105
Kind of a short update, even though I spent a lot of time on site.
It's been a hot week, no rain, and next week is forecast for the same.
Temps up around 35C during the day, maybe 28C or so at night.
More importantly, humidity quite low for around here, like less than 70%.
This is the hottest and maybe the driest time of the year.
Between two very wet periods, the next of which will kick in soon.
That means the girls are going to be thirsty.
Five days since last visit, but when I arrived, they were wilting a fair bit.
Not happy girls, but it wasn't as bad as that time a couple of weeks ago.
I already knew this, and have been thinking how to solve the watering problem.
And the next couple of weeks my site access may be reduced.
Quite a big problem!!
I don't want to use drip trays.
I want to reduce to an absolute minimum bringing things to the site, for security.
And anything hard that may leave finger prints, I don't want to use.
Was thinking about using plastic bags, partly rolled down, on the base of the pots.
Then watering to run-off, leaving some in the plastic bag.
Not ideal, but it will leave them with something to last another day or two.
Then I thought about possibly adding more medium to the bags.
But again, getting large amounts of medium to the site isn't easy.
Could use dry coco coir and hydrate it on site.
In the end, badly organized, I only arrived on the site with one decent plastic bag.
Thought I'd use it on the Grail girl, as her pot is the smallest, and most prone to drying.
Had a little fright when I saw how thirsty they were.
Not good.
Not good.
(This is after they had perked up a lot after watering.)
I explored around the general area, looking into some other buildings.
A couple of doors down, there were a few large polystyrene boxes.
Just big enough to fill the pots in.
(Sometimes I see locals using polystyrene boxes for container gardening!)
I grabbed three of them, two just big enough, and a large one.
Took them to the site, and put in a few holes on the side with my pocket knife.
The holes are on the sides, about 2.5 cm (1") high from the inside bottom.
Kind of like a hempy bucket, allowing some watering to just sit in the bottom.
I figure a little sitting water for a short time is better than no water at all.
It looked good. At least, better than before.
The girls were starting to pick up a bit from their watering.
The white polystyrene will also keep them from heating up too much, I think.
But I thought, this really isn't enough.
So I went looking for something to fill the rest of the space of the boxes with.
Maybe some leaves or something?
Well, I struck gold!
At the back of these apartments, on the northern shady side, there is black gold.
Must be 10+ years of naturally breaking down leaves, sticks, and stuff.
The bottom inch or two are just beautiful, with a few partially decomposed leaves and sticks on top.
Didn't have any tools, so scraped it off the concrete with my shoes,
and stuffed it into my plastic bag to take back upstairs.
This is some of the nicest, darkest, richest compost I have ever seen!!
I took about 6 bagfuls in the end, maybe 5 liters each time.
And put it all inside the polystyrene boxes, packing it around the original cloth pots.
Then watered it on down...
You can see the extra volume in the seed-plant pot.
Helping the Grail girl find some more moisture and root-space!
So happy!
Those boxes are now pretty heavy when they are fully watered.
The biggest box was for the big Grail x ThaiFrican and L'n'L girls.
Could barely lift that box back to its sunny spot, from the work area.
Filled with water again, until the water ran out the holes in the boxes.
Since they're in cloth pots, I've now almost effectively doubled their potential root space.
As the roots can grow through the cloth into the compost in the boxes.
The revegged Grail girl volume is now maybe 30 liters (about 8 gals).
The revegged SSSTN girls volume is maybe 40 liters (about 10 gals).
The seed crop Grail x ThaiFrican and L'n'L girls are now in about ... maybe 60 liters (16 gal).
Next visit, I will further top up that black gold compost.
I'm guessing it will settle down a bit, and it was only about 80% full when I left them.
Should also mean less need to top dress.
Let those roots just grow right on through the cloth pots into the boxes.
Peace and Love,
~MJS