cool beans
Registered on
Jul-08-2004
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Message #84500 posted by cool beans (Info) May 02, 2008 20:07:59 ET
In Reply to: Re: advice on small outdoor setup posted by yummie (Info) May 02, 2008 09:22:58 ET
Hey RED, heres one of my cheap and brilliant ideas from way back in the beginner days that might get you a laugh. There was no internet forums like now, and all our info came from a book or two.
Being poor, me and a girlfriend decided to fill twenty, 5gal buckets with our own mix of homemade "supersoil". The idea was to use a spare bedroom in the mobile home we were renting as the growroom.
I went and bought a half pickup load of topsoil from a landscape place.
Went to walmart and bought a BUNCH of bags of Perlite {dont remember how many}, and a 10 pound bag of dolomite limestone. Then went to my uncles farm and shoveled five buckets of cowshit.
Brought it all home and shoveled it all out onto a big blue tarp. It was a tough job getting that all mixed together and it took a full day of shoveling,mixing,shoveling,mixing.
At that time the smelt were spawning in Michigan, so we put the grow project on hold and went smelt dipping. Got a BUNCH of smelt {a barrell full} and cleaned smelt for many, many hrs after getting back home. All that time while sitting there cleaning fish got me thinking about the several places in the grow book that had mentioned that fish emulsion, and even a buried fish under the plants were going to add extra nutrients to the plants.
I decided it would be a great idea to fill our grow buckets with 8" of our mixed up soil...then add 2" of smelt guts and heads, and another 4" of soil on top.
All was fine for a week. The seedlings we transplanted seemed to do real well, and we were quite proud of all the effort it took to get to that point.
The weather got real hot then, so we decided to spend the weekend camping at a local lake, so we packed up, locked and closed up the mobile home, and left for three days.
It stayed real hot the whole weekend, and when we got back home from the lake, the house was real warm inside. I went around and started opening windows and doors inside and when i got to the growrooms door, i heard a strange noise. Opened the door, and there literally were MILLIONS of house flys filling the room. In my eyes,nose,ears, couldnt even take a breath without eating flys. Of coures, when i opened the door, they swarmed out to fill the house too.
Looked at the buckets, and millions of maggots were swarming in the buckets. Maggots all over the floor and dripping sheets of maggots down the outside of the buckets. I looked closer and the top 4" of soil was actually moving, and the 2" of buried fishguts had turned into a solid layer of maggots under the soil.
There was an outside door to that room, so i backed the pickup up to the door, and started hauling buckets of supersoil and maggots to dump into the truck. Didnt take but a few minutes to get 2 days of hard work, and all 20 nice seedlings dumped, but it took several more hrs to clean up the maggots and shoo out most of the flys. It wasnt too funny at the time, but its a good memory now. Good growing
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