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The beauty of automation in my garden is that I can have a couple of days where I’m unavailable, and the plants still get what they need. Having my outdoor lights on timers makes me happy. I love knowing that the lights are already on and the girls are waking up by the time they see me. 

Had a problem with one of the timers that I couldn’t figure out. I was having to manually turn them on at 5:30 and off at 7:30. Unplugged the light and replugged them several times and that didn’t help. Double checked that the times for starting and stopping the program were correct, and they were. Still wouldn’t go on automatically. Timer did not come with instructions (fairly typical), but I have long learned to try the simplest possible explanation and see if that works. 

Can you tell this timer was once near the compost tea brew?

In this case, I unplugged everything and reset the timer from scratch. Then, I turned the timer to the Auto setting before plugging in the lights, and this did the trick. The next morning, they came on and went off exactly on time and have done so since. 

The garden is now starting to produce at a high level. Vegetables are forming and ripening. In fact, I’m having to make two separate teas, one for the vegetatively growing cannabis, and the other for all the flowering plants, including one cannabis plant, two hemp plants, and a bunch of vegetables. 

Here come some sweet peppers.

We’re about a month away from having food to pick virtually every day. It’s almost like that with zucchini now. Tomatoes, eggplants and many different peppers are now in full development. 

Here’s your weekly borage news: I absolutely love how these plants seed themselves in the ground between beds. This is a perfect spot for them. They do their jobs and not crowd any vegetable plants growing. By sprouting here, they also cannot possibly drain any nitrogen from growing beds. They flower and seed constantly, and because their roots are shallow, you can easily pull up each of these plants with one hand at the end of harvest.

This week marked the return of my fan leaves becoming napping areas for bumble bees. This will increase through the rest of the grow, as all bees, and yellow jackets, take siestas on my plants. There’s no trichomes on these leaves yet, but they do love to nap on flowering plants. I have no evidence that they are affected by cannabis, only that they are drawn to it. Interestingly, however, the yellow jackets never try to sting me. Outside my beds, they’re a damn nuisance. But in my beds, they are as chill as anything could be. So maybe they are getting a little something, because their behavior is different. It is not common for yellow jackets to have docile behavior. Sure seems like they’re baking to me.

This was the amount of fresh guano only one hour after I collected a huge batch. Quite a party.

I mentioned recently that we had a heat wave with triple digits three straight days on the north coast, which is unusual. We were concerned about our bats. They don’t do well in the heat. Turns out, they know what to do, anyway. They relocated to another bat house on our property that has afternoon shade. Oh my goodness, what a smart move! Probably saved a bunch of lives and a real mess for us. So they moved from the large, upstairs abode, to this smaller box on the shady side of the house. It’s obviously crowded there. When I collect guano, there’s a lot of squeaking and rustling about.

We also found them inside our deck umbrella, where it was apparently a bit cooler:

In any case, there was a sudden and dramatic shift in where I’m collecting guano. The next photo shows how much I collected in only 24 hours: 

This would probably be enough guano for about two weeks of compost teas.

That’s a lot of guano for one day. It’s all going into the cottage to be dried of any moisture or live bacteria, before we store it in a quart sized mason jar. Won’t be using any of this until next year.

I mentioned earlier that we do have three flowering plants out of the 14 we’re growing. We had another plant attempt to flower in our aviary and I turned her back to vegetative growing.

But I am not attempting to change the course for the three plants flowering now. Two are White CBG hemp plants and the other is the much anticipated Hawaiian Dream. She is still early in the flowering process, but they are developing:

This plant flowering early is a disappointment. I had hoped for this plant to grow very large, but it’s not to be . . . this year. We may grow her again, but that will largely depend on what we find out from the few flowers we’ll grow this year. We’ll send them in for testing, and we’ll also probably have a small sampling party when these buds are dried. There’s a bunch of folks we know who are very curious about this cultivar. 12%-16% CBD and 4%-8% of 100% sativa is what we’re expecting to find from test results. At that point, we’ll decide whether we want to grow her again. I have to be honest here and say that I have not been impressed with the seeds that came for this cultivar. Shared a couple with another grower, who is also not impressed with what she’s growing so far. 

So there’s some skepticism about this cultivar at the moment, but we’ll wait and see how she tests and go from there.

Her early flowering could be a result of root stress during the transplanting. It could also be a response to the other two feminized plants that chose to flower almost immediately, the two White CBG plants.

The White CBG, also early in flowering.

Interesting thing I’ve observed about feminized plants: If a flowering plant is close by, they are liable to make other nearby feminized plants flower. Nothing has ever been proven (to my knowledge) about pheromones drifting from one plant to the next, instructing them to flower. But we’ve had some experience with this.

One year, we grew auto flowers and they were all flowering while the rest of my garden was in vegetative state. The regular seed plants I was growing were not impacted, but all of the feminized CBD plants I was growing started flowering in June, when they were clearly getting enough light to remain vegetative. 

So I was not terribly surprised when the White CBG decided to flower, she was relatively close to Hawaiian Dream, who also had a difficult transplant. Within days, I could see the Hawaiian Dream was starting to flower.  This concerned me greatly, not for that plant, but for all the others in the beds that are feminized. 

Thankfully, early flowering has been confined to those three plants. Everything else is still vegging out to the max. We’re not far from the transition to flowering, but it has not happened yet. 

Very basic, inner pruning began this week. As you know, we’re big proponents of getting inner flowers to grow larger through training. But there is a lot of small, inner growth that has to go for the real flowers to fully emerge. 

When pruning, remember to prune mindfully. Every cut you make on a plant is a potential entrance point for pathogens to impact your plant. This is where the organic honey comes into play as you dab the wound and seal it. It’s also where rubbing alcohol should be in proximity, in case there is mold. Applied carefully with a Q-tip, or gloved fingertip, this stops mold. Caution must be used, because alcohol also kills trichomes.

Good pruning will lead to less crowding, and that leads to less pathogenic difficulties and bigger, healthier flowers. 

I bring this up, because I’m growing several plants this year that are smaller in stature and more crowded. Hindu Kush, for example, is legendary for how crowded she can get.

Hindu Kush is starting to crowd up, so we are slowly taking off insignificant inside growth and identifying all the branches with the greatest potential for flowers. 

Funny thing about having flowering plants nearby, even if it’s early–it really makes me want to reach for the flowering formula and start pumping the soil with phosphorus and potassium. 

Patience, grasshopper. Two more vegetative teas to come for the cannabis, before we commit to a fully flowering garden. Everything is exactly as it should be and on time.

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