Turning the lights back on

[oldfogey8]

I had some iced coffee at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Woo years back where that was their secret ingredient so I am guessing they go the same route. They also have the greasiest(read delicious) breakfast sandwiches ever with real eggs and a good Portuguese roll...

 

[stinkyattic]

My favorite food spot in the Woo is that little Ghanaian place you can see from 290 but can't GET to, nor park at after shift change at the hospital, half the customers show up in scrubs for takeaway, fresh off work. Anokye krom. Try the Tilapia with kenkey and blow your mind spicy sh*to sauce. Mmmm. Gotta love Worcester, roads laid out like a sadistic joke played on innocent commuters...

 

[oldfogey8]

Kelley Square is under major construction for a new PawSox stadium so traffic will be more infuriating for the foreseeable future. Whether or not it gets fixed remains to be seen.

 

[stinkyattic]

Well, it's been a quiet week in lake wobegon...
Seedlings at this age are pretty boring. The little palm trees are on their second set of true leaves, and there are roots poking out some cells. This is cool; it doesn't bother me to see the green part just chilling if I know a good solid rootball is forming under that dirt. I'm not getting any bolting. The tallest is about an inch and a half, and the internodal distance above the seed leaves is... nonexistent.
The seed leaves are starting to yellow, as they are pulling stored nutrients back for recycling, so I'm going to give them their first light feeding.

 

[stinkyattic]

Ok. I'm going through this step by step of how I make a feeding solution, with pics of each step.
I'm using botanicare power flower for this stage. Whaaaat?! But it's a flower fert! Yup it sure is, but there's no better way to scorch seedlings than to give them a big blast of nitrogen in their first meal. The roots and immune defenses need phosphorous and potassium right now, and this is a low nitrogen urea free fertilizer. Urea is the stuff in superthrive and I've seen countless rookies kill their young plants with it. Its VERY available. Be warned.
I'm mixing it at a quarter strength, pH adjusting it to 6.8, and watering to runoff for the first time.
Step 1, checking my tap water. It's holding at 100ppm so I'm not adding minerals. It's fine. And I checked my meter first. It could use a calibration but it's less than 10% off and takes a wonky cal solution that I haven't made yet so screw it. My truncheons are reading even worse. Ugh.
Step 2, adding my 2ml/L. Party trick: write down the dilutions in whatever units you're going to use right on the bottle. Saves a trip to the calculator. Yay, metric.
Step 3, check the pH. Oops it's low, let's bring it up. That's better.
Step 4, water, check fans, distance to light, put your hand at the plants' level for a heat check, take a bedtime puff, and tuck them in for the night.

 

[oldfogey8]

I like the party trick. Good tip I will put in my bag o’tricks. I use 2 liter bottles for water storage because I filter and find myself doing math too early in the morning frequently converting tbsps/gal to ml/liter and multiplying by 2 unless I am using my sprayer which has gallon markings. The struggle is real. Thx.

 

[stinkyattic]

"In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go feck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities." -josh bazell

Words to live by : )

 

[umbra]

LOL

 

[oldfogey8]

Kind of analogous to roads in New England cities like Boston compared to say Phoenix. The metric system was devised to make different measurement systems work together. Our hodge-lodge English system is a rats nest of snarled doo doo. I drove around for close to an hour trying to get to the Orpheum in the 80’s when I could see it but all the roads were one way and led away from it(because roads were old ox cart paths paved over) but Phoenix is a grid system designed by planners.

 

[Devile]

These girls are too small to be seen clearly, keep updated , good luck

 

[stinkyattic]

I can see them just fine lol. Is your screen resolution ok? Here, I got you a new computer. You're welcome : )

Also they are not feminized seeds so we won't know for another month or two. I'll certainly try to remember yo add some grow updates in between our delightful tangents ...

 

[oldfogey8]

I have 2 of those in my attic. I hear folks make hipster fish tanks out of them now...

 

[stinkyattic]

I hear folks made hipster bongs out of them in the 00s... : )
I miss Dark Castles... that was a great game. Yeah I hit all the big ones: iic, iie (I miss green screens), se, classic, g4 (a beast for the time) 5300cs laptop (utter brick. Still works). Then i adulted. Now that i have to buy my own decks, its last-season clearance toshibas at the wholesale club, and my prized thrift store eeebook that I had to put one of the mini Linux os on so it could handle more than 16b encryption with its tiny brain lol

 

[oldfogey8]

geek...

 

[stinkyattic]

Lol
Still have a chest cold, clearly need more fishy spicy sauce on my eggs this morning, clear out some boogers. Why does my autocorrect want to change that to 'gophers ' or 'bloggers'? Though I suppose the latter is actually synonymous in many cases...

 

[stinkyattic]

Doing something a little different from last germimation. Popping beans exactly the same, but instead of light warrior, I'm going with canna bio terra, which is a fibrous mix of coco, white peat, and lime plus mycos. The bag I ripped open had a big white lump of the good soil fungus, the dirt equivalent to sourdough starter. Nice!
I crumbled it up as best I could, seeds in same as before, light cover with media, heat mat, water in, blah blah. I have a humidity dome (read: cheap takeaway container) propped slightly open over the tray. There's a fan running nearby this time for the seedlings that are already going. And the 'heat mat' is actually the top surface of my t5 fixture. Pleasantly warm, just like beans like it.
These are some bagseeds I was given a few years ago with the promise of dankness. I consider all claims of DUDE THIS WAS THE BEST GRASS EVER AND OMG THERE WAS A SEED IN IT TREAT IT LIKE DAENARYS' FECKIN DRAGON EGGS with a grain of skepticism. No clue what they are, but I feel better about testing out my favorite media as starting mix, which is a new use for me, using less valuable beans.

 

[Rosebud]

Hi Stinky, just getting caught up... love thai ice tea, but i never get it. Maybe i will next time I go. I try to eat thai weekly.
Sounds like a good plan on trying it out on unknown seeds. Mojo.

 

[stinkyattic]

It's my guilty pleasure that I justify by telling myself I'll need to to counteract the hot curry! Painfully delicious, and the iced tea is the elixir. Worth a try for sure !

 

[stinkyattic]

Happy to report that the two bagseeds I planted in the canna dirt have already broken ground and the moisture level is holding much MUCH better than the foxfarm. A third showed a tail while I was at work, so it got a new home too.
I already like this media for sprouts. No water worries. Can't believe it's been right under my nose all this time lol. I think we may have a winner.
Let's see what the critical first week of [artificial] sunshine brings.

 

[stinkyattic]

Welp, what do ya do whilst waiting for the grass to grow?
BAKE ALL THE THINGS!!!
Maximus the zucchini turned into a metric ton of loafs.
I baked my beloved work bff a 65th birthday cake that is not a cheesecake for a change because he was supposed to retire this year and nope the CEO won't let him go without a fight so how about a heart healthy apple cake. Because we care. I mean, want to keep him around for another decade. Or something. Anyway, insert quip about an apple a day here. Seriously this dude is an engineer without a degree who was trained as a mechanic and then somehow became a wise old anodizer and has forgotten more about plating than most of us could hope to ever know. He's an absolute treasure, and the best guy I know to raise a martini with. So yeah, birthday cake is going special delivery to his new lab in our sister plant by company van tomorrow in a cardboard box marked fragile, urgent, do not top load, all of it. Shhh. Abuse of company resources n all that, shut up.
Yay baked goods. Remind me to tell you about the Great Accidental Sicilian Ricotta Souffle Fiasco of 2018 sometime. Still cleaning residue off the oven roof. It was supposed to be just a cheesecake. Dare to dream...
Also. Those adorably self absorbed food blogger Instagram nutcakes are collectively snorting pixie stix if I am not mistaken; a 40 minute bake time for a standard springform pan packed with 50%v/v raw apples and wet dough does NOT bake to a clean toothpick in 40 minutes. Sorry, try harder. 1:20 and I got to wet crumb and said screw it.