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 TheFish
Shakedown Street
Registered: 10/07/03
Posts: 432
Last seen: 7 months, 21 days
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 Grow Log - Cased Dixies - Coir/Verm 
#5680587 - 05/27/06 01:15 PM (6 years, 2 days ago) |
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Forgive me if this seems to stretch in length as I begin to type. I would like to share this story with new hands in hopes of providing better insight to where they might be in their grow, or what they might hope to achieve. I hope you old hands enjoy it as well.
I found this board four years ago while I sat in a hazy cloud of smoke in my small apartment. Being as young as I was, I was determined to try all aspects of "substance" after listening to hours of The Grateful Dead and being surrounded by good company and friends that spoke of this 'magical mushroom'. I am very subjective as to what I allow my mind to experience and the purity that's presented with each substance, so I decided that I would only take part in this quoted spiritual journey by ingesting fruits from my own hand.
My first take was with BRF and vermiculite back in 93. I want to say that I started simple, but I remember trying to build automated fruiting chambers with bubble wands, lava-rock, geolite, and even perlite! B+ was said to be a forgiving strain so I ended up fruiting from B+ cakes over perlite in a fishtank and I was happy with my small successes and giant failures. I laugh aloud as I remember my automated attempts, ruined cakes, and my fear that I had grown infected mushrooms whereas the caps had just opened their veils and I had yet to learn that these deadly infections were merely spores. If there's one fact that I am most grateful for from the experience, it would lie in a single word. Simplicity. The art of keeping things simple will aide the experience into great success.
So I find myself three years older, in a new apartment, with a new experience.
I decided that I needed to start stronger and to have more faith in myself, so I purchased an All American 921 pressure cooker. I used rye grains, coir, and vermiculite (Thanks mycosupply). For me, tapered jars are the way to go with colonized cakes, so I simply followed Magash's tek (Thanks!) and used two 1/2 pint jars per casing. I also liked the look of the Martha, so I invested, built, and luckily had it fit in the closet with a half an inch on either side:
Incubator sits on the floor to the left:
In the beginning, I had heat issues to deal with, so I added a small box fan and a purifier to help in air movement.
If there's one thing I learned from growing in such a small space, it's that I could obtain the exact temperature I needed just by testing different wattage light bulbs over 12 hour periods. This helped tremendously as I learned that my roomate is a temperature freak, so any room with a vent would fluctuate + - 15 degrees on any given day. My incubating temps were around 84-86, and I fruited at 76 degrees. My first casings were multispore, and the second set were made from an LC (Thanks Agar!). I noted a timespan difference of around 12-14 days between the two groups from inoculation to harvest.
But with every new venture comes failure:
Eeek! Trich stuck me in a heartbeat. Deadfast to save anything I could, I very carefuly used a q-tip to poke around at every casings, and isolated infected from non-infected. This was a devastating point in the grow for me because I knew that my sterilizations were perfect for both the jars and casing materials. By the grace of Jerry Garcia from above, I was granted to have some of my children.
First flush - Dixielands:
Second flush - Same casing - Dunked for 12 hours post-harvest.
The first flush blew me away! 28 dry grams was the exact weight. More than all of my cakes from years ago.
The second flush was still pretty friendly - Wet weight:
But even with this one successful casing, I couldn't help but ponder what I could have harvested if I hadn't had such a bad Trich problem. All in all, I had a total of 16 casings that were prepared in two sets of eight at different dates. My second set of casings were prepared in different containers with a thicker substrate layer prior to casing:
My best pinset to date:
After the Trich appeared, I liberally sprayed the hell out of my Martha with a diluted bleach solution and did the most meticulous cleaning of my life, but these new casings still show early signs of Trich.
I concluded that the sterilization of my casing material was opening my fruits to contams. My infections never began inside of the substrate, but rather on the surface of the casing material. So my only question is this: How the hell do I fix this problem? Pasturize? If so, shoot me a tek because I am having prolific pinsets, but upon the pinset itself, I become infected.
In closing, I would highly refer any new grower to the Dixieland strain. My second casings were B+, and in a side by side incubation and fruiting processes, the Dixies colonized and fruited faster than the B+ at a rate of 1.50 - 1. Plus they were just a beautiful fruit, so thanks goes out to Sporelab and Capt. Max!
I look forward to your criticism of my grow, and remember.
Keep it simple.
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"Comes a time when the blind man takes your hand,
Says, 'Don't you see?'
Gotta make it somehow on the dreams you still believe.
Don't give it up.
You got an empty cup only love can fill."
Jerry Garcia
Edited by TheFish (05/27/06 01:19 PM)
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 Easy_Cheese
Cheese in a can
Registered: 05/12/06
Posts: 62
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 Re: Grow Log - Cased Dixies - Coir/Verm [Re: TheFish]
#5680704 - 05/27/06 02:08 PM (6 years, 2 days ago) |
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Wow good job.thats a nice harvest and a very good strain.I have also had some heavy and suprising harvests with dixielands.
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 ....Said the can of Cheese! 
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TheFish
Shakedown Street
Registered: 10/07/03
Posts: 432
Last seen: 7 months, 21 days
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Re: Grow Log - Cased Dixies - Coir/Verm [Re: Easy_Cheese]
#5682118 - 05/27/06 10:52 PM (6 years, 2 days ago) |
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To the top one more time.
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"Comes a time when the blind man takes your hand,
Says, 'Don't you see?'
Gotta make it somehow on the dreams you still believe.
Don't give it up.
You got an empty cup only love can fill."
Jerry Garcia
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monstermitch
Growing in Bags Doesn't Work
Registered: 02/10/06
Posts: 3,910
Loc: Arizona Bay 
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Re: Grow Log - Cased Dixies - Coir/Verm [Re: TheFish]
#5682133 - 05/27/06 10:57 PM (6 years, 2 days ago) |
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Trich, huh. Sorry.
Great looking flushes.
FAE is quite possibly your answer.
Not enough FAE in a Martha can allow the trich to take hold.
Leave it open. Alot.
Give the Martha as much FAE as your RH will allow it too.
good luck and keep up the good results.
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I have a new attitude, a new life, a new perspective, but I'm still pumping out tons of joy
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TheFish
Shakedown Street
Registered: 10/07/03
Posts: 432
Last seen: 7 months, 21 days
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Re: Grow Log - Cased Dixies - Coir/Verm [Re: monstermitch]
#5682913 - 05/28/06 08:30 AM (6 years, 1 day ago) |
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I would naturally presume that allowing the Martha to be open more often would invite more contams into the area itself? All the FAE being pumped into the martha is filtered by the coolmist. Maybe I'm just nutty.
--------------------
"Comes a time when the blind man takes your hand,
Says, 'Don't you see?'
Gotta make it somehow on the dreams you still believe.
Don't give it up.
You got an empty cup only love can fill."
Jerry Garcia
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