Click on a thumbnail picture below to see the full size version. 7 Entries. Sunday, January 1 View Page Giant Tomato Growing, Season 3 Primary Goal: New Personal Best, >5.48 lbs Secondary Goal: New CA Record, >6.20 lbs Stretch Goal: >7 lbs   Wednesday, January 18 View Page Ended up shutting down my indoor tomato grow experiment. Plant looked sickly and the blossom's keep aborting after dropping pollen. Still not quite sure what the cause was as I *thought* I was pretty meticulous. Very humbling experience. Nonetheless, it'll be nice to take a forced breather while awaiting the new season.   Sunday, February 26 View Page The gnarly SoCal storm finally cleared out. Had a sunny, warmish afternoon. Choose today to apply amendments according to the Langley calculator, after weeks of playing with the #s. Primary goal is to begin the process of lowering my soil pH (currently 7.9) which will likely be a multi-year process and along with tuning the elemental ratios. Gotta be very precise as many of these elements are toxic, even in small quantities. Hope i don't screw things up. Note to self, next time wear rubber gloves when applying elemental sulfur. I can't seem to wash that rotten egg stink off, yuck. Will be an interesting day in the office tomorrow, lol. Slowly narrow down my tomato seed starting line-up. Great options this year.   Wednesday, March 1 View Page About a month away from the official start of the my grow season. Testing out and tuning my upgraded germ chamber setup along with checking the viability of tomato seeds I harvest last season. Still pretty cold in the garage, 40s at night. Added an extra heat mat and a heating element to increase the ambient air temp to mid-70s.   Wednesday, March 8 View Page Small sample sized, but had 100% germ rate. So far I'm loving the new LED grow light. Last year my seedling were pretty leggy, these are looking much healthier. I exercised extreme patience and left the front right sprout alone while it struggled to break free of the seed coat which held together the cotyledons. Wile Coyote taught me to be patient with the process. Oh how badly I wanted to intervene. Just potted up the test seedlings to straight 707 soil, true leaves are just showing. No amendments yet except for some microbes that have trace NPK. Will introduce them to a diluted NPK solution in a few days when the true leaves get a bit bigger.   Saturday, March 25 View Page Transplanted and moved my test seedlings outside yesterday. Still pretty chilly here, daytime highs in the 60, nighttime lows in the 40s-50s. Put the seedlings into 5-gallons of my "Langley" adjusted soil. Kinda doin' a canary in the coal mine test. Thank you to Materdoc and Joe Ailts for the amendment advice. If they survive this next phase of testing AND get T1 megas, they could become default candidates for the 5-gallon challenge. I think I've got my upgraded germ/seedling chamber dialed in now. Happy with the results except for the purple hue on the leaf undersides. I'm told its a pretty common occurrence. Ready to start my competition seeds next week.   Thursday, March 30 View Page A wake up call cocktail for a few older VIPs and the WR.