It's hot. Damn hot! Real hot! Hottest thing is my cabinet. I could cook things in there.
So the starter cabinet isn't performing as expected…The main problem is temperature which with all the pots in it soared from 29 to 34 deg C.
Why?
I ran all the lights and fans after building it and it topped out at 29C, I can only guess that the compost is absorbing the light more than the empty cabinet (though my rudimentary physics would have suggested that all those photons would get converted to heat at some point within the cabinet anyway – and that any evaporation from the soil would have reduced temps as energy was used-up for evaporation, and there's a lot of that going on as I have small trays with capillary matting which are just acting as evaporators trying to keep up the relative humidity - they \are going thru about a litre of water per day just to hold RH at about 30-35%.
Hey ho, so it's not quite working out as planned and I've had to switch off one of the 125W CFLs to keep the temps down to a more comfortable 28-29C. This has cut the available illuminated space in half. So the cabinet at the moment is running 1x125W and 3x30W cool spectrum bulbs which have two pots under them (these are the Mephisto's which were intended to be my indoor grow anyway).
So no space at the moment for my outdoor babies
Back to what I usually do for the outdoor's and that's plant pots on a south facing windowsill before they go out to the coldframe (lets just prey for lots of nice sunny weather).
The growbox is getting upgrades to fans and lighting which should shave a bit off the temps while increasing the lumen's (swapping out the CFLs for LEDs). We live and learn as they say. I'll post an updated link to the cabinet grow once I've switched from the CFLs to LEDs for anyone that's interested but this grow-log is really about the outdoors grow and at the moment I'm not sure if they will be returning to the cabinet or not.
Failures and....
I had my doubts due to the small size of the seeds but the first of the Duurty Magic from Dragon Meds Team failed to germinate, well that's not strictly true – having done an exploration of the Jiffy Plug the seed cracked and produced a 1mm tail before stalling. I've covered it back over but expect nothing more from this one. I still have two more Duurty Magic's (both equally small), and have put one of these into soak for 24hrs to see if it cracks.
The Duurty Magic compared to some other beans.
... Footballing Casualties
While potting up the Super Stinky I dropped the plug, which sods law in a fumbled attempt to catch it (we've all done this before but probably not with a canna seedling) – almost caught it in one hand – then almost in the other – will try and break it's fall with my foot - oops kicked it across the room where it bounced across the floor ripping it out of the compost and snapping the tap root (sigh).
So the current line-up now looks like :
- Toof Decay – Mephisto - OK (indoor grow)
- Sour Hound – Mephisto - OK (indoor grow)
- 1 Duurty Magic - Dragon Meds Team - Germinated but not broken soil… FAIL?
- 1 Dark Devil - Sweet Seeds OK
- 1 Jock Horror - Nirvana OK
- 1 Super Stinky - Short Stuff X – killed in action scoring an epic own goal
- 1Himalya Blue Diesel - Short Stuff OK
- 1 Quick One - Royal Queen Seeds OK
So have put another Stinky Stuff and a White Widow in to the cabinet to germ as replacements (I'm really not holding out on the Duurty Magic's but will give it my best shot).
Replacements/additions :
- 1x White Widow - Jiffy Plug
- 1x Super Stinky – Jiffy Plug
- 1x Duurty Magic (currently soaking in water)
So that's where we're at. The weather this week was unseasonably kind - so I even managed to get a lot of my compost sorted out for the garden site (that's where these babies will be headed). Will post more on that later.
