Click on a thumbnail picture below to see the full size version. 45 Entries. Friday, September 15 View Page I love these grower diaries and find myself often reading as much as I can. Gathering as much info as you can and drawing your own conclusions is the fun part I think and trying to do science to make something truly impressive should be documented. All of the additives and techniques different growers use are truly entertaining to watch. I used to do saltwater reef keeping and coral growing, but now that I have some acreage I am getting into the larger realm of growing things. Right now I am confined to a few standing planters until I can terraform the land properly. My soil is largely Decomposed Granite so I'm sure I will have to do some heavy handed soil amendments for a pumpkin or two. Attached you can see my current mini melons. the larger plant on the left is a "Minnesota Midget" cantaloupe. There are also two Baby Bush watermelons. These particular plants are likely not what most of you are interested in reading about but I find them curious plants and those are the kinds I am most interested in, plus I don't have any cool seeds right now. I'll post some more of my current plants in the following posts   Friday, September 15 View Page Minnesota Midget Melon as a baby. There are 4 on this plant as of today, all self-pollinated.   Friday, September 15 View Page The Baby Bush Watermelon. No Melons yet.   Friday, September 15 View Page Here are my Atomic Grape Tomatoes. They seem to be doing well in our extreme heatwave. I got these in the ground late and they still produced well in the high 90's low 100's. Will likely grow again.   Friday, September 15 View Page This is an "Aunt Ruby's Giant Green Tomato" which has produced a very low volume of fruit in the heat here. additionally, I have a bad problem of some varmint eating them. Hopefully this cage will prevent this one from being eaten. I must have 6 glue boards in there and 4 snap traps and I have bird netting and scare tape up but they are still eating them before I can. I will need to re think the method I use for growing tomatoes next season. I really enjoyed reading about the "Kraken" tomato on this forum, Also congratulations on that Carrot QTip. That is amazing.   Saturday, October 7 View Page Hooray! Good Seeds in the mail! I'm excited.   Monday, October 16 View Page Ripping out some of my tomatoes from last season. This one had a particularly thick trunk but the root system doesn't look like it was as extensive as I would like. I'm excited to try a winter grow this year. At least the deer and the squirrels wont be able to eat everything...little jerks.   Sunday, October 29 View Page Yep, the last of the warm 80 degree days. The chickens are soaking in some rays on the front porch.   Thursday, November 2 View Page I picked one of my fused "Aunt Ruby's German Green Tomatoes" from Baker creek seeds and weighed it just for kicks. it is only .7 of a pound. There was no fertilizing done, no special nutrients, no Mykos. But that will change this season... MUAHAHAHA Also, for the record, today is the first day of real rain that will last for 3 days supposedly. Temp currently 56 and Cloudy. I spent much of last weekend raking oak leaves into a giant pile to help with composting.   Saturday, November 11 View Page Well my Midget Melons were attacked by squash bugs, I think. I didn't want to put any chemicals on the area they were growing so they didn't do very well... but I got one decent sized one.   Saturday, November 11 View Page Wild persimmons are harvested today!   Tuesday, November 14 View Page I've been collecting some nutrients lately, and more are on the way!   Tuesday, November 14 View Page oooooh la la. ROOTSTOCK seeds! going to do experiments with this!   Friday, November 17 View Page Thanks Bob! Early Christmas!   Sunday, November 19 View Page First Brown egg from the chickens today!   Tuesday, November 21 View Page First fog of the season. Need to start my winter tomatoes this Thursday! Supposed to be cloudy all week. Swiss chard crop starting to look less than stellar... but produced for much longer than expected.   Wednesday, November 22 View Page Unlike Pumpkinman Dan's giant behemoth grow tent, what we have here is a 2' w x 2' d x 4' h grow tent and a 450 watt full spectrum LED unit. I'll just have to be more proactive about pruning. :) My tomatoes will achieve greatness, I know it. Plus, I have beginner's luck on my side. I think I will do two 3.75 Bigzarro plants and two 4.05 Borgers plants. stay tuned.   Thursday, November 23 View Page The real issue I am having in my small grow tent is the temperature. I didn't think I would need a fan with LED's but I was wrong. my house was ambient temperature of 66 degrees and it got up to 90 in the tent and 110 on the actual seed starting dome itself. I am waiting on the new 4" exhaust fan with a speed controller on it to arrive, should be here on friday.   Thursday, November 23 View Page First day ever to get all three colors of eggs! The white ones are from my Silver spangled hamburgs, the brown are from the Speckled Sussex and the green are Ameraucana eggs.   Friday, November 24 View Page Throughout the entire 4 days I had off I couldn't start my seeds. But I did pick up a new puppy. along with some different types of soils and some rock wool cubes to try out. I will get them started this weekend for sure!   Wednesday, November 29 View Page The rest of my nutrients arrived!   Saturday, December 2 View Page Got my 4" inline fan setup on my tent so now the temperatures are more stable. The seeds are sowed!   Saturday, December 2 View Page I planted 9 total. (3) 4.01 Borgers (3) 3.75 Bigzarro (3) DRO141TX F1 I used a 1/2 ml of Rapid Start in the water the rockwool cubes were soaked in and left a half inch of that water in the tray to keep the humidity up.   Wednesday, December 6 View Page temperatures hovering around 76.2 during the lights off period (10 Hours). Colder than I would prefer. staying around 84 Degrees during lights on (14 hours). I ordered a 1000ml polypropylene beaker from Frey scientific on Amazon to make measuring the nutrients easier since everything is in ml/L. No more converting to gallons for me.   Wednesday, December 6 View Page Time since sowing update: 3 days, 18 hours, 23 minutes   Wednesday, December 6 View Page All three of the DRO141TX F1 have sprouted. I see one of the Bigzarro's about to pop up. I only planted one seed per hole, hoping all of the ones Bnot gave me start to come up tomorrow. Fingers crossed. Stay tuned.   Thursday, December 7 View Page Time Since Sowing: 4 days, 16 hours, 56 minutes (112 hours) This morning all 3 of the Bigzarro plants decided to pop up. Nature is amazing. I think it is pretty interesting how each variety pops up at different times under the same conditions. I rotated the seedling tray yesterday 180 degrees.   Thursday, December 7 View Page Today was the first day of frost on the grass on the property. Also, the 4.01 Borgers need to hurry up! hopefully I will see three sprouts tomorrow morning. :)   Saturday, December 9 View Page Some first leaves appearing on the DRO141X plant. The seeds I put in a fairly damp paper towel and placed on the heat mat were not sprouting. I've been advised by Bob (Bnot) that it may be advisable to do an 8-12 hour soak in reverse osmosis water (which is all I am using on my plants).   Monday, December 11 View Page I started 4 more seeds in a separate dome. Two 3.376 RW Cephei seeds & Two 4.38 Borgers seeds These seeds were placed into Root Riot starter plugs. Additionally, I mixed .5ml Voodoo Juice into 1 liter of RO water and mixed thoroughly. Then I lightly moistened each of the four planting holes with about 2ml of the mixed solution. I poured enough solution into the bottom of the tray to let the solutions touch the bottom of the plugs. I let the plugs heat to 84 degrees in the tent and then sowed the seeds and covered the dome. Hopefully they all sprout. If this doesn't work in the next few days, I will try the soaking 8-12 hour method and paper towel method.   Tuesday, December 12 View Page Here is some information on the RW Cephei Tomato. It looks interesting. Also, last Saturday there was supposedly a Barnesville seed auction on here. I checked the message boards where the auctions usually are and I couldn't find it. I was disappointed because I wanted to bid on some of those seeds. Now, I see there are more auctions posted for this upcoming weekend. What am I missing here?   Tuesday, December 12 View Page Garden Rebel: that pest of yours looks like a Brown Marmorated Stink bug, not a squash bug. But it is an agricultural pest.   Tuesday, December 12 View Page Here is another pic to help growers determine if it is a squash bug or a soldier bug. You want to keep the Soldier bugs around to eat all the other little bugs.   Tuesday, December 12 View Page Brief Article from Harvestright.com website. Recently, the head engineer at Harvest Right wondered what would happen if he freeze-dried seeds. Would they germinate? He freeze dried 10 different types of vegetable seeds, started them under grow lights inside his home, then transplanted them in a Garden Right geodesic dome greenhouse. It worked! Every single one of the seeds germinated – but you might be wondering what the practical applications would be. On a micro level, gardeners sometimes struggle to preserve heirloom seeds from one growing season to the next. If you don’t get your seeds absolutely dry or you don’t store them properly, they’ll mold and become unusable. On a macro level, it gets interesting. There are thousands of seed banks around the world. They’re usually built in cold, remote places – like Svalbard. The problem is many of these cold, remote places are also politically or geologically unstable. Svalbard’s seed bank is a pretty safe bet. Even if the ice caps melt, the bank will be above sea level, there’s little chance of an earthquake, and it’s always frozen. Seeds can remain viable in the Svalbard seed bank for hundreds or thousands of years. So, in case there’s a major event and you need to grow some food from scratch, just put on your mittens and hike to Svalbard, right? Or…you could just build your own seed bank. Granted we20160418-DSC_0027-cropped haven’t had 25 years to test our seeds to see if they’re still viable after a quarter of a century, but we have no reason to believe they wouldn’t be. With your own seed bank, you could establish or maintain a diverse garden for your family in case of emergency. Or, in case you just want to have your own, healthy, organic seeds. For example, a neighbor mentioned that she’d like to use her freeze dryer to preserve seeds from her flower garden for her granddaughters, who are still small. Imagine as an adult receiving heirloom seeds from your grandmother’s garden that were preserved while you were still a child. What a touching wedding, bridal or housewarming gift. Freeze-dried seeds are easy to store, and easy to share and transport. They take up almost no room in the pantry. We recommend that you store them in Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, just as you would your long-term freeze-dried foods. If you freeze dry seeds, let us know how it goes by sharing with the community on our Facebook page. By Robin Howard (for Humanized) I just finished setting my Freeze dryer up and will be testing out some seeds in it. If there is a general interest in knowing which seeds freeze-dry well and you have some you wish to donate to the cause, let me know. I will be trying it on tomato seeds. It would be interesting to try many kinds of vegetable seeds to see if there are some that work better than others. If you have a ton of seeds to save I may be interested in a trade for seed-drying services. But first I need to experiment on different settings and dry-times etc.   Thursday, December 14 View Page This morning I saw that one of the 5.24 Borgers I put in a damp paper towel in my grow tent had sprouted. I couldn't remember what part of the tomato emerged first. The first thing to emerge is the Radicle which functions as an embryonic root system. So I grabbed that sprout and put it in a rockwool cube radicle side down. It also appeared that one of the RW Cephei plants may have begun sprouting, but I didn't have a lot of time to look at it today. I will need to pot up some seedlings today. The DRO141X and Bigzarro seedlings are now 11days, 18 hours, 23 minutes old (282 hours). Ideally I would have potted up at 10 days.   Thursday, December 14 View Page Roots from my DRO141X were coming out quite far. I have temporarily potted these DRO141X plants into plastic cups with two in Formula 707 potting mix and one in Fox Farms Ocean Forest potting mix.   Thursday, December 14 View Page These are the roots on one of my Bigzarro plants. I temporarily potted these three plants as well. 2 were planted in Fox Farms Ocean Forest mix and one was planted in Formula 707 mix. I have high hopes for these plants; the weirder the better in my opinion!   Thursday, December 14 View Page All 6 potted plants were drenched with roughly 100 ml each of the juice pictured above which consists of: 1 liter RO water .5ml Voodoo Juice .5ml B52 1ml Sensi Grow A 1ml Sensi Grow B 1ml Bushdoctor Kelp Me Kelp You I also dropped a bit of it on the rockwool cube with the Borger 5.24 sprout in it. They were all placed back into the starter dome which is looking crowded. I propped one side of the dome a half inch and fully opened all vents. 4" pots and 6" pots have been ordered as well as a taller humidity dome and additional heat mat.   Monday, December 18 View Page Update photo: 15 days, 17 hours, 53 minutes since sowing seed for these guys. (377 hours) I completely removed the humidity dome for the first time today for these plants. These are going to be ready to graft in a couple of days.   Monday, December 18 View Page I am very pleased with this starting method in the smaller dome. The RW Cephei (farthest Middle row) and two borgers plants (nearest middle row) all sprouted well. I put the other 5.24 borgers plants in there too, to see if they will sprout better. (Both started in a paper towel a bit poorly) Time since sowing: 6 days, 10 hours, 00 minutes   Saturday, December 23 View Page Look at these Incan corn kernels! Pretty impressive!   Saturday, December 23 View Page Got a 6.79 Sutherland tomato seed in the mail!   Saturday, December 23 View Page 6.79 Sutherland @ 30x magnification   Wednesday, December 27 View Page Chop chop! Grafted two of my bigzarro plants onto the Dro141xF1 rootstock. I used the wedge method on one and a single 45 degree slice on the other. I also shoved a leaf node from the bigzarro back into its own rootstock just for fun. They were clipped with grafting clips   Wednesday, December 27 View Page The grafted plants were put into a 1020 tray and fitted with a 7.5” humidity dome. I used an Xacto knife to do the cuts and sterilized it with Purell before each cut. The bottom of the tray was filled to a very shallow level to keep humidity high. I am leaving them on a heat mat out of the light on my kitchen counter for the next 4-5 days.