Jeffrey Hickey Writes Blogs

When the temperature is 70 degrees (21.1 C), the humidity is 80% and it’s high noon, I can almost smell the pathogens out there.

Look at the moisture on this leaf. This is three hours after a foliar spray.

It is hand-to-hand combat out there at the moment and I’m battling alone. Bee is down with Covid, as is Ryan, though neither caught it from us. 

When it’s like this outside, with consistent high humidity, any pooled moisture on leaves is a problem. Those leaves should be removed at once. That moisture is a pathogen just waiting to spill and infect other leaves.

In the last blog, I shared a picture of a “limp leaf,” where mold certainly exists. This week, it’s the folded leaf, which is a definite worm sign. If you find a folded leaf during the vegetative stage, it’s a spider, and you should keep them on your plants. They eat the bad bugs. But if it’s during flowering, a folded leaf can only mean moth worms. They must be removed. Moths seal leaves shut, so their babies can be undisturbed. A very good thing to do when a folded leaf is found is to squish the leaf between the thumb and forefinger, in case the baby worm is still in there. They often are. But if they are not, you need to find them, because they are only going to do what they are there to do: Eat trichomes and poop, and the poop will mold. Below, the folded leaf is near the center of the photo, showing its backside.

So you can stop all of that if you find the worm. Sometimes it’s as easy as squishing the leaf and then scraping off the dead worm once you open the leaf. 

Overcast mornings or evenings are the perfect time for pathogenic inspections. The diffuse lighting makes it much easier to spot powdery mildew, or any pathogenic activity. Things like powdery mildew are much more challenging to observe in direct sun.

Meanwhile, it’s a time of abundance in the beds. Cannabis is all flowering and some have been for three weeks as of today. That means two more compost teas for that plant before everything is cut off prior to harvesting. I have only five more compost teas to make this year, and going forward none of them are complex. Only the usual ingredients: Humic Acid, Molasses, and SEA-90. I don’t need any more fertilizer or mycorrhizae. No more extra nitrogen, potassium or phosphorus. Everything the plants need to finish strong is already in the soil.

Meanwhile, other plants are growing and harvest has begun. Our zucchini plant produces three perfect vegetables per week and we are rich in zucchini bread. Cucumbers have exploded again this year, so we are once again producing copious amounts of pickles.

We came out of our sickness with a craving for fresh tomatoes, so we’ve made bruschetta twice in the past week.

We have our first artichokes ever. We are novices with this plant, but we know these grow well in coastal northern California, so we planted two. They are too close together, and we will attempt to move one over the winter and allow the other the full space. But they are both doing well and fruit is now becoming visible.

We’re going to have more tomatillos than we know what to do with. We know salsas are in our future, but we’re still mastering the art of growing the tomatillos, especially knowing when to pick them. One thing is for certain, however, they love growing here.

We learned something interesting about tomatillos by attempting to grow them last year. They are prolific, but they are not self-pollinating. We planted one last year without knowing this, and were surprised when so little fruit was produced. We needed to have a second plant for pollination. So this year, we have four tomatillo plants and honestly, we’re overmatched. I’m laughing a bit as I write this, because we went from one extreme, a huge plant with no fruit, to all plants bursting with fruit.

Obviously, some pruning would have been wise, but when I’m growing cannabis, I honestly lose track of strict vegetable care. I rather enjoy simply letting them grow, once they find the soil to their liking.

Black Krim heirlooms are ripening, too.

Our jalapeno peppers are growing larger. We’re picking shishito peppers once or twice a week. We’ve been eating peas for weeks (one of my favorites to snack on while I prune). Basil, chives, cilantro, oregano are all ready for use. Karen made our first batch of Kale chips a few days ago. There are daily salads to be picked as fresh lettuce is grown, eaten and then planted again. BTW, kale chips are fire.

Of course, I spend most of these blogs talking about cannabis. But long before I started growing maryjuana and hemp, I was growing vegetables. For me, the garden does not feel complete without food growing alongside cannabis.

Though I’ve never seen vegetables listed as companion plants, they are. Tomatoes in particular are one of the greatest companion plants, in addition to being one of the most fun and delicious things to grow.

All flowering vegetables attract pollinators. Absolutely nothing brings hope to the heart like a garden full of bees. You know that you’re going to have a great food year if your garden is full of bees.

An interesting thing I’ve observed about using fertilizers with vegetables. As previously mentioned, cannabis and tomatoes are similar to grow. You can utilize the same techniques for topping and training with tomatoes.

But I discovered a slight drawback to using a little too much flowering formula. Yes, you get more fruit, but the fruit is not the same size. It is usually smaller. For example, I have grown the Czechoslovakian heirloom tomato, Stupice, every year. It grows incredibly well in the Northern California climate. It grows large and produces a huge volume of medium sized tomatoes.

However, if you use too much flowering formula in order to maximize the number of tomatoes, what you’ll get are lots of half sized tomatoes. There have been years where these medium sized Stupice more closely resembled large cherry tomatoes. They still taste the same, but they are not the same size. That may or may not matter to you. It has not mattered to me. It’s mostly a matter of aesthetics.

My own recovery from Covid has been rather exhaustingly slow, but I am much improved. Having fresh food to pick has aided the recovery. For me, there are few joys that can match walking out to the garden to pick dinner.

That said, with the cannabis flowers in full development now (both Fruitcakes are turning purple), the white moths are arriving. Fresh, organic BT just arrived in the mail.

It’s time for the first BT spray.

Next week, 30 auto flower CBG plants will be brought here for inspection, mold removal, washing, drying, testing and processing into medicine. They are arriving a couple of weeks early due to mold problems at the grow site farther north of me. For many growers on the north coast this year, it has been a relentlessly foggy grow, not ideal by any means. I have been fortunate to have the sun break through on my plants, but I know others within my general region where that has not been the case. Two years ago it was like that here, and it’s brutal when you lose the sun for weeks at a time.

So next week, we’ll have good lessons on how to rescue the medicine from plants with mold issues.  

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