Plant the Moon with Team Rainbird! EP 7
Welcome back! This week we finally got some space tomatoes!
We also lost a plant, S_MFKI1. It was one of the plants that struggled to get out of its seed casing and hadn’t grown for several weeks. When we pulled the plant up, you can see there’s only a few meager, hair-thin roots too. It was never doing well.
However, it was a good reason to pull out the soil test kit and test the soil’s nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium (I did these tests off camera, it was mostly just me shaking test tubes which isn’t interesting to see). Our generic garden soil plants are pale and a little stunted, so we should investigate why.
A nutrient deficiency is unlikely: the LHS (moon dirt) soil is basically devoid of nutrition and the LHS plants are getting along fine with the small amount of compost we’ve added. The pH of our generic garden soil is 6.5 which is great for tomatoes, and I’ve used this mix in the past for seed starts with no problems (in fact, I’m currently using it for the audio plants… they’re doing great too). But, the soil test shows that our macronutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium) are all high or off the charts. So, what gives?
I suspect that the issue is that the garden soil plants in the grow tent have one major difference: they aren’t getting watered as frequently. See, the grow tent is very humid which is slowing down evaporation, and soil moisture is carefully monitored. The other plants I’m a little less careful about watering, so I think that’s the big difference: the grow tent plants don’t have water flushing away excess nutrients! I’ve flushed the plants with distilled water, so we’ll see if this improves their condition. Let me know if you’d like to see an NPK video, or if you want more information about the kit I use.
We also now have several tomatoes growing, and it’s a race against time to have them ripen before the end of the experiment. Since we have to report our results by April 30th, if our tomatoes aren’t near ripe by that point I may not be able to do some seed saving. Fingers crossed
Finally, there’s a little important note in here about eye protection and greenhouses. Make sure you’re getting appropriate eyewear! I have some with 100% UVA, UVB, and UVC blocking as well as being very dark. What you see in the videos is actually a sight I rarely get to see now, because everything is tinted bright green for me. It’s important to be careful out there.
Also, STILL no fungus gnats
If you want to name one of the plants, leave a comment with the name below and we’ll assign it to one!
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Preparing for this experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W0csI-fUn4
Check out our Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/rainbirddelalune/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RainbirdTeam
Buy us a coffee! (small payments in support of the project): https://www.buymeacoffee.com/rainbird
We also lost a plant, S_MFKI1. It was one of the plants that struggled to get out of its seed casing and hadn’t grown for several weeks. When we pulled the plant up, you can see there’s only a few meager, hair-thin roots too. It was never doing well.
However, it was a good reason to pull out the soil test kit and test the soil’s nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium (I did these tests off camera, it was mostly just me shaking test tubes which isn’t interesting to see). Our generic garden soil plants are pale and a little stunted, so we should investigate why.
A nutrient deficiency is unlikely: the LHS (moon dirt) soil is basically devoid of nutrition and the LHS plants are getting along fine with the small amount of compost we’ve added. The pH of our generic garden soil is 6.5 which is great for tomatoes, and I’ve used this mix in the past for seed starts with no problems (in fact, I’m currently using it for the audio plants… they’re doing great too). But, the soil test shows that our macronutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium) are all high or off the charts. So, what gives?
I suspect that the issue is that the garden soil plants in the grow tent have one major difference: they aren’t getting watered as frequently. See, the grow tent is very humid which is slowing down evaporation, and soil moisture is carefully monitored. The other plants I’m a little less careful about watering, so I think that’s the big difference: the grow tent plants don’t have water flushing away excess nutrients! I’ve flushed the plants with distilled water, so we’ll see if this improves their condition. Let me know if you’d like to see an NPK video, or if you want more information about the kit I use.
We also now have several tomatoes growing, and it’s a race against time to have them ripen before the end of the experiment. Since we have to report our results by April 30th, if our tomatoes aren’t near ripe by that point I may not be able to do some seed saving. Fingers crossed
Finally, there’s a little important note in here about eye protection and greenhouses. Make sure you’re getting appropriate eyewear! I have some with 100% UVA, UVB, and UVC blocking as well as being very dark. What you see in the videos is actually a sight I rarely get to see now, because everything is tinted bright green for me. It’s important to be careful out there.
Also, STILL no fungus gnats
If you want to name one of the plants, leave a comment with the name below and we’ll assign it to one!
-----
Preparing for this experiment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W0csI-fUn4
Check out our Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/rainbirddelalune/
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RainbirdTeam
Buy us a coffee! (small payments in support of the project): https://www.buymeacoffee.com/rainbird