Always appreciate you dialed and academic approach to things.

outwest

How did that last run with the white master turn out?

Ogfresh said:

How did that last run with the white master turn out?

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NMEEKS - has not posted here since nov 6 , but he was a perfectionist and all his runs were top notch and educated as he is also a horticulture educated man also ....

Hmm, has it been that long sos? I believe he's still in school but I wouldn't think that would be the cause for an absence of over a month.
Nmeeks if your our there give a shout brother and let us know shits all good!
Again I gotta Thank you for the tremendous amount of help you've been since I've joined the farm!

I'm sure he'll check in before too long. For sure some of the best threads here. Sup nMeeks?

Darth Fader said:

I'm sure he'll check in before too long. For sure some of the best threads here. Sup nMeeks?

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He liked my post either late last night or this morning and i seen him around the web world , he is good - just busy i suppose but

Happy Holidays to all @nMEEKS

Thanks for the show of support, I'm still around the web as Soser said if you ever need my help or just wanna say Hi, or whatever :). I went looking for some harvest photos of the White Master Kush for Ogfresh last night since I can't refuse such a direct request and ended up sorting through over 600 photos taken since my last update! I still haven't written the stuff I want to say about the 100+ photos I narrowed things down to, but be on the look out for a massive update to make up for / partially explain my absence from The Farm recently. (Expect lots of stunning greenhouse and non-cannabis flower photos)

-Meeks :pompus:

It's been a long time since my last photo update Farmers, so pull up the comfy chair and get ready for a great showing of Horticultural beauty! Posts are limited in the number of photos, so I've tried to break things down and sort them into an order than will allow me to better describe what you're seeing without writing a full book.

To kick things off, a BIG shout out to two friends of mine, HigherSolutions from this forum who generously gave me the Shadow Star genetics I am currently flowering, and Dafrhino from another forum for creating some fantastic pieces of art that are his stylistic interpretation of my purple rose forum avatar! I will have a few photos of the Shadow Star during it's life at the tail end of this extended update, and I will kick off the photos here with Dafrhino's art! (This guy also sells colorful pipes with matching color abstract paintings if anyone is interested please message me)


These paintings also have really great texture to the thick paint that unfortunately doesn't come through in the photos.









Now before I start taking you guys on our journey up and down the Central Coast of California, I have just a few choice photos of some aesthetically pleasing crops in production on my schools campus:


Some Poinsettia starting to change color


And some colorful new succulent arrangements in the propagation house



to be continued. . .

looking forward to your another good run.....

What are your plans as far as nutrients this time around, any adjustments you making from the last run?

Nice succulents @nMEEKS . Was at a friend's house the other day who planned giving me a couple of cuts to make the wife happy. Glad to see you around and enjoying life. Have a great rest of the year. Cheers

drknockbootz said:

looking forward to your another good run.....

What are your plans as far as nutrients this time around, any adjustments you making from the last run?

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Next run is already in the flush period. . . it really has been a while since I updated this log! I ran the same nutrient recipe that I've been promoting since the beginning of the year, with the addition of some super treble phosphate incorporated in the the media at planting. There were a few other changes I made, but you'll just have to wait until I get there in this big update to see what they were ;)

justblazen said:

Nice succulents @nMEEKS . Was at a friend's house the other day who planned giving me a couple of cuts to make the wife happy. Glad to see you around and enjoying life. Have a great rest of the year. Cheers

Click to expand...

Thanks JB, right back at you.

Now onto the larger scale operations that will make up the majority of this update! Here's the great view from the car on the way to anywhere:




Not all of these locations were visited in the same day or in this order, but for the sake of this update this will be our first stop. These guys have a huge amount of lower-end greenhouse/cold frame structures, which they have recently upgraded to from what used to be an entirely field grown cut flower operation. Producing mostly oriental and hybrid lilies for wholesale markets, they also had a few other crops such as freesias that I decided not to show. All of the greenhouse operations I will show today are producing for the fresh cut flower market, so to highlight the differences I am going to be focusing on the varying environments being used for production.





In this case, since the crop being produced falls in the mid price range for cut flowers, the growers have chosen to invest in the crop's atmosphere security by growing under covered, mostly heated, greenhouse structures. But, since lilies are not the top tier in value, some economic compromises must be made and these growers have saved money by continuing to produce in the ground soil they have been working (and amending) for the last few decades. As you will see later, some crops justify the added costs of hydroponic production with their higher value and increased growing sensitivity.

Here is a step by step of them taking a ground bed from prep to finish (this is not time lapse, these guys just have such a beautiful perpetual grow going that I was able to capture a photo of every stage all while walking around the property):
Most cut flower growers use a combo SoG + ScrOG method :D


Selective Harvest^

Strip Harvest:

And here they are after being bunched in the cooler for storage until shipping. Lilies are harvested at what growers call the "puffy bud" stage, to prevent petal damage in shipping on open flowers.




To be continued . . .

Our Next stop is Sunshine Floral LLC., also producing a range of crops, but their focus right now is on Gerbera, and secondarily Chrysanthemums. Gerbera (Transvaal Daisy) are top tier value crops and therefor justify the better greenhouses seen on this property. It also justifies the added management and material costs that are part of hydroponic production.



The hydroponic media of choice by this grower is coco coir, which they order from a distributer who ships them individual pot sized compressed discs which makes setting up new plants super easy, just drop in a disc and hydrate until it fills the pot volume.









One of the upsides/downsides to growing hydroponic drain to waste systems like this coco coir setup is that the EPA doesn't look to kindly on dumping thousands of gallons of high nutrient content runoff water everyday, since that has negative impacts on the natural balance of things in our ecosystems. To avoid polluting the ground water and surrounding property hydroponic growers must find something to do with their runoff water. This grower has decided to use it to fertilize a fairly tolerant, much lower value Chrysanthemum crop that lives in neighboring greenhouses to the Gerbera.



Because Chrysanthemums are so simple to produce and relatively low value, a huge majority of its production has had to move to cheaper labor parts of the world. Even when this grower is getting his nutrients and part of his water free from the runoff of his primary crop, he still has to make major spacing decisions to justify the use of greenhouse space for production since imported mums dominate the wholesale market. To get the most out of every inch of ground, there are no aisles between the crop for workers to move, which has lead to this very funny piece of equipment:

Over-crop Bicycle!


They also had an employee out on what looked like an Over-crop Massage table on a motorized track, which might have been a bit more comfortable :)



To be continued . . .

At this next stop, a father-son grower team also do Gerbera production on the scale just seen, but we decided to focus on their cold frame field cut flower production while visiting. The first photo shows what a different lily growers field can look like (very very similar even to the trained eye).



This second photo is of some nice looking Liatris, which have a very similar inflorescence to cannabis, opening flowers from the top down once the spike is developed.


And this last photo of orange celosia has a sort of depressing story to illustrate. This photo was taken on the Monday before Thanksgiving, which means that the seasonal colors desired by retail florists were fast changing from orange, bronze, and other fall colors, over to Red, White, and Green for Christmas. Because this crop bloomed a few days late due to some improper temperature management of the schedule, these orange celosia would cost more to harvest, package, and ship than their value, now that orange was out of season. The celosia in this entire block of greenhouses (about 4x more than you see here) was plowed into the ground shortly after this photo was taken! This would never be justified with a heated greenhouse crop, but because of the low input cost of growing in the ground with cold frames it makes economic sense when there is no market for your crop.





To be continued . . .

Now we have arrived at my personal favorite stop, Ever-Bloom! The grower and co-owner for this company is Fast Eddie, a very friendly, classically pragmatic Dutchman. His operation and quality of Gerbera production is the gold standard for the industry, as competitors are often heard saying, "my Gerbera are just as good as an Ever-Bloom"! He is such a respected grower for his insanely green thumb that competitors will actually pay him to grow their plants up to a certain size before moving them to their own facility, since the early stages of growth with a tissue cultured Gerbera plant can be difficult.






Being a stereo-typical dutchman, Ed grows hydroponically in rockwool cubes, stacked on rockwool slabs. He says he has tried coco, and ended up coming back to rockwool because of his better results. I also asked him if the algae was ever a concern for him since Gerbera can remain in production for a couple years, to which he said it was not at all a problem.


Just like the other hydroponic Gerbera operations, Ed was stuck with the dilemma of disposing of his potentially-polluting runoff water. He does not have a secondary, lower value, crop to dump the waste nutrients on and so for many years he was actually paying the electric bill to pump all his runoff across the road to his neighbor's avocado orchard, free of charge to the neighbor. Eventually his production space expanded so much that his runoff would have caused flood conditions in the neighbors orchard and he had to come up with a better solution.

He experimented with heat treatment of the runoff to make it suitable (pathogen free) for recirculation in the Gerbera system, but settled on a fancy chlorination and evaporation system in the end, which he says he is very happy with and paid for itself ($250,000) in less than a year in saved nutrient costs.

Speaking of nutrients, this guy had just a few 50lb bags of fertilizer salts on hand :D









Really. . . just a few bags. . . :eek:

^the potassium nitrate stash :cigar:




But where do the beautifully grown flowers go after they get harvested?



When you have 10's of acres of high value cut flower production, you need a smart post harvest system for getting the product to the end customer in good shape. Keeping the flowers cold, as well as clean, dry and undamaged takes careful consideration, and Ever-Bloom has things really mastered!


From custom holding troughs, to custom packaging and even custom water buckets, these guys focus on every detail of quality and quality control.


I think you can see why Ed captured my attention and respect during the tour!




To be continued . . .

My next two stops on that day unfortunately go mostly undocumented by photos, since I was so busy taking photos and videos at Ever-Bloom :rolleyes:, but here are just a few shots that might help me explain a little about them.

Not every grower focuses on one or two main crops. In this case, these growers saw the value-added when flowers were sold as a completed bouquet, rather than a wholesale bunch, and decided to orient their production around providing a range of plant materials for bouquets, which they assemble on site before wholesaling them. The company pictured has the start-to-finish approach to bouquet assembly, where each employee is building the entire bouquet before putting it on the the conveyor line for packaging. Unfortunately, I did not get any photos of the other operation that had a more Henry Ford approach, where each employee was adding a piece to the bouquet as it moved down the assembly line. Both these companies however were in the peak season of their year, each currently making over 15,000 holiday bouquets a day!






To be continued . . .

Now we are moving out of the greenhouse world for a couple stops, but still on the horticulture track. First up, a quick visit to SimPlot, a large scale fertilizer distribution company. I could show you guys the pictures of mountains of different fertilizers, but they basically all just look like big sand piles from a distance so I decided to skip that. The importance of this visit is really just to mention where some larger growers get their nutrients, since there are always lots of businesses behind/supporting the greenhouse business. Also, to show off these crazy big 30,000 gallon concentrated liquid fertilizer tanks :eek:






Moving onto SunGro Horticulture, a name many of you have likely seen printed on your bags of potting media. These guys buy in massive bulk substrate ingredients like coco coir, peat moss, fir bark, sand, pearlite, etc. and mix up commercial and custom recipes for wholesale grower and retail market customers.

Let's go on a step-by-step journey of their process :)



^Compressed coco coir shipped in as slabs on pallets, this will expand to 5x its current volume when hydrated, as seen below.




Once the base ingredients are prep'd, they get loaded into individual hoppers that feed onto a wide conveyor belt.

One of the hoppers contributing to this assembly line ^ is actually 8 mini-hoppers with higher sensitivity, meant for adding the fertilizer blend of choice into the substrate at this time also.


Once all the ingredients are layered on the conveyor belt they get tumbled together in a series of rotating drums to ensure very uniform mixing and then get loaded into bags or trucks for shipment.

^Not your average 50L bag of media :D




To be continued . . .

Thank you. Awesome. Good to see you posting.

I hope you all enjoyed seeing the trips I've been on recently, now there are still some things to catch up on, but they're all back at my (seemingly very small) grow room.:peeking:



First up, I put together a new set of irrigation manifolds for the flowering and mother spaces, and took a few photos to help me share a brief DIY with you all here on The Farm. Even though I already had functional manifolds for the flowering and veg'ing areas, I thought it was time for a revised system that used less PVC pipe length and therefore required less muscle from my pumps to pressurize the manifold fully. The result, I'm very proud (and probably a bit lucky) to say, is a very functional, completely automated system that requires nothing more than refilling the tank when it gets empty, which is about every 6 days. . . allowing me to take the perfect length Thanksgiving holiday, without even hiring a plant sitter!

Let's begin with the material required for this style manifold. Needless to say there are many other options for functional materials and designs, I will just be highlighting one here that I learned to build from a very generous member of The Farm (leadsled) who used to have a DIY thread on it (lost with time).

-PVC piping, I used 1/2" pipe this time around, which just happen to also be the diameter of my pump output ;)
-You will also want to consider any bends or turns in your design, make sure you have any needed 90° or 'T' pieces, along with getting an end cap(s) for where needed.
-In addition to these necessities, I chose to use a couple threaded connectors throughout my manifolds at certain points (like the connection to the pump) incase I ever want to swap out parts of the manifold in the future and I also incorporated a flexible 18" PVC connector to add some mobility to my manifold/pump for when I need to empty the reservoirs for cleaning.

-And don't forget the PVC primer + glue!



The next two supplies/tools can really jack up the project budget if you don't already have them on hand, but that's what neighbors are for, right?
-You will need a power drill with a 9.5mm (3/8") drill bit and a PVC cutter


And these last crucial supplies can likely be found at your local hydro store, if not readily available at the hardware store you have already ventured to for the PVC.
-1/4" drip tubing
-Botanicare Top Hat rubber gromets (9.5mm outside diameter)
-Button drip emitters (I chose 1/2 GPH Pressure Compensating emitters) and dripper stakes


-Now all you need is a pump (preferably with some kind of intake filter) and a reservoir of your choosing. I went with 500GPM Magdrive pumps and 20 gallon reservoirs.


Putting the system together is as simple as playing with K'nex or even legos, just bridge the distance from your pump in the reservoir and the location of your growing plants.

Let's build one! (remember to put everything together loosely without glue until it has been cut and drilled in the perfect spots)

^Already got the water path up and out of the reservoir


^And with the use of the flexible 18" piece and a 90° piece I ran the PVC water path all the way to the other end of my growing tray! (Don't forget to cap it)


Got the 3/8" holes drilled in proximity to my plant pots, where I want them.


^and shoved those rubber top hat grommets into their new home.


Which should allow the 1/4" drip tubing to fit snuggly in afterward, creating a water tight seal without any glue. Now cut the tubing to the appropriate length to reach each plant.


Pop the button emitter on the other end and use the stake to secure it above your media, near but not touching the base of your plant. Now just glue the PVC together and you should be ready to run!

Wasn't that easy?! :D




To be continued . . .

Why use a drip irrigation system? Besides the fact that plants have been proven to prefer the less disruptive irrigation, the ability to plug your pump into an outlet timer for simple and complete irrigation automation, and the precise control over when and how much your plants get irrigated. . . there is also the fact that you get massive, thriving root systems like this one that could only be supported by frequent irrigation that just isn't possible with hand watering by the end of flowering:








And yes, we have finally gotten to the White Master Kush update, since you were just looking at the final root ball of one healthy WMK plant a couple days after harvest!

I took a photo of each plant, in its entirety, after being trimmed and sitting fanned out in a 2'x2' box for transport to the drying tent. Check these long legged ladies out:




And I didn't have the patients to do the same thing with the Alien Grenades plants, but here is a partial stack of those very tasty buds after mostly drying and on their way into brown bags:

^ Any other chess players around? I love to test how stoned I am with a game against friends.



And of course, can't forget about the trim, which became a few ounces of very enjoyable dabs!

Cheers Farmers :cigar:






To be continued . . .