Coco Grow Fed Once. Yes Once

[MindSoup]

On 12/11/2022 at 6:11 AM, blackpoolbouncer said:

Nice result erb! 

 

Is this not just basically the same as osmocote? 

Yes mate, but with nicer packaging, canna specific marketing and a higher price. BUT! It's also free at the moment so... 

 

Think grow dots is a similar idea/product as well. 

 

 

[ratdog]

9 minutes ago, MindSoup said:

Yes mate, but with nicer packaging

 

 

apparently osmocote is made with non-biodegradable pellet coatings, according to beanstalk their's totally biodegrade

[Slippy One]

Ah well, it's a small cabinet, and it's all part of my OCD maintenance growing in coco with salty feeds, I think coco mums are probably different to soil mums. 

 

Back on topic, I wonder what Beanstalk recommend for keeping mums in 90 day food? I know you can top dress with V-Basis, but the only option I can see for long term mothers here is switching to liquid food or replacing mums with new cuttings in freshly V-Basis fed coco.

 

 

[MindSoup]

58 minutes ago, ratdog said:

 

 

apparently osmocote is made with non-biodegradable pellet coatings, according to beanstalk their's totally biodegrade

 

Depends who you ask, some people say osmo is biodegradable and some say it isn't. From my own anecdotal experience I can confirm that osmosocote does at least visually break down but it takes a fair while. I think it might be a case of how you define biodegradable (everything is biodegradable given enough time). From what I gather they're both coated in polymerised linseed oil. 

Edited November 27, 2022 by MindSoup

[ratdog]

i tried posting a reply but i added the amazon links to the products and a review saying there are lots of plastic balls left of the osmocote, but it won't post now.

 

i guess it's best to ask @Owderb did you have anything left in the coco at the end mate?

[MindSoup]

@ratdog From a website called Think Sustainably (I assume their legit). 

 

"Does Osmocote Decompose?

Yes, Osmocote is water-soluble and degrades over time.

 

Remember, moisture is a solvent that dissolves fertilizers, so it hastens the leaching of Osmocote into the soil. 

 

Here’s how Osmocote fertilizer works. You get nutrient pellets that you can apply to your plants. 

 

These pellets are coated with semipermeable soybean, alky, or linseed oil-type resin that allows water to go through them and dissolve the encapsulated nutrients. 

 

The idea behind the use of semipermeable pellets is to allow the controlled dissolution of the nutrients over time. 

 

Although the contents of the pellets easily decompose when subjected to a moisturized environment, the rate of decomposition depends on ambient temperature, the size of the pellets, and the thickness of their coating. 

 

The pellets are not the fertilizer but only a medium for holding nutrients as they dissolve in a controlled manner. 

 

If they are made of linseed oil or soybean instead of microplastic, they will decompose after a few months 

 

Does Osmocote Use Plastic?

Osmocote sometimes uses plastic, but it depends on the manufacturer. 

 

For years now, Osmocote has been among the top Polymer-Coated Controlled-Release Fertilizers (PCRF), meaning it features a plastic coating on the pellets. 

 

This plastic coating is made of polymer resin, a soft liquid plastic that creates a semipermeable membrane between the nutrients and solvent factors such as water, soil, etc. 

 

Since plastics are naturally non-biodegradable, we don’t expect synthetic resins to be biodegradable. 

 

Unfortunately, the polymeric resin coating on Osmocote doesn’t biodegrade and is usually recycled carefully to prevent the release of toxins into the environment.

 

Due to the environmental problem of plastics, some manufacturers consider alternative materials such as soybean and linseed oil for coating Osmocote. 

 

Unlike polymeric resin, soybean and linseed oil are organic and easily decompose."

 

 

 

So it's a yes and a no. I imagine over time it will all become biodegradable, but whatever manufacturer beanstalk are using already only use the natural polymer. 

 

But essentially yes it is rebranded osmocote, so people should be able to save some money once the freebies run out.

Edited November 27, 2022 by MindSoup

[JonDaMon]

@ratdog @Slippy One

 

ive never seen any genetic degradation of clones over time. 
 

 

im a lot like you @Slippy One if I have a plant that I want to keep around I take a cut off it before flowering and keep it ticking over under a small T5. 
 

 

my latest round of 2 plants the cuts were taken back in April and rooted in riot cubes and kept in riot cubes until October when I needed them. 
 

if they outgrew the riot cubes then I cut the roots off and root them again in clean riot cubes. 
 

 

I’ve had friends with clones from over 20 years who choose how they grow out the mums. 
 

 

some people hack up the root ball every few months and others just keep taking a new cut every few months. 
 

some grow them huge, some others keep them trimmed (bonsai style) others have even tried their hand at grafting different genetics to a harvested rootball that they left the stem in the pot. 
 

genetic degradation imo is a myth as I haven’t seen it myself. 

[MindSoup]

I can't remember where I saw it (may have been here) but I was watching/reading something about this recently. 

 

Apparently it is a thing, but its not generic drift. It's more to do with various viruses etc that build up in a plant over time. That's massively over simplify things, I'll see if I can find what I was looking at it was very informative. 

[JonDaMon]

Just now, MindSoup said:

I can't remember where I saw it (may have been here) but I was watching/reading something about this recently. 

 

Apparently it is a thing, but its not generic drift. It's more to do with various viruses etc that build up in a plant over time. That's massively over simplify things, I'll see if I can find what I was looking at it was very informative. 

 

fully agree. Usually caused by unsanitary methods. 

[Owderb]

1 hour ago, ratdog said:

did you have anything left in the coco at the end mate?

 

I didn't look but I rip all my root balls up and I never noticed anything. I think if there would have been balls in there I would have noticed them I'd have thought 

 

Owd

[MindSoup]

@JonDaMon It's not quite as simple as the plant just getting sick. It's to do with mutated cells that occur naturally and through infections and then build up over time.

 

Say you take a cut that has some mutated DNA in it, as that cut grows it will replicate that mutation, so the next cut has the chance of having more of that mutation and then the cut you take off that etc. That's kind of the jist of it but of course something is missing because what I'm saying doesn't really make sense  .

 

Totally drawing a blank on where I saw it but I'll keep looking it was really interesting stuff. 

 

So essentially it is happening and it is a thing but we as canna growers (as usual) use the wrong terminology to describe it. From my understanding genetics drift is actually a term to describe stuff that happens whith breeding as apposed to cloning. 

 

E2A a bit more about what genetic drift actually means. Excerpted from Kahn Academy.

 

"Key points

Genetic drift is a mechanism of evolution in which allele frequencies of a population change over generations due to chance (sampling error).

Genetic drift occurs in all populations of non-infinite size, but its effects are strongest in small populations.

Genetic drift may result in the loss of some alleles (including beneficial ones) and the fixation, or rise to 100\%100%100, percent frequency, of other alleles.

Genetic drift can have major effects when a population is sharply reduced in size by a natural disaster (bottleneck effect) or when a small group splits off from the main population to found a colony (founder effect" 

Edited November 27, 2022 by MindSoup

[MindSoup]

Not the source I was originally refering to but a bit more detail from the Cannabis industry institute website. It's a bit old so things may have moved on a bit by now. 

 

Unlocking The Mysteries Of ‘Genetic Drift’

October 26, 2016

Remember playing with the copy machine as a kid? You’d make one copy, copy that copy, and so on—until you ended up with a completely faded image. (Assuming you even had an image left at all.)

 

You’ll often hear among some cannabis breeders the so-called “genetic drift” myth. They’ll claim that if you keep taking clone cuts from certain strains, those clones will eventually degrade in quality—just like making copies of the copies. But that’s not really what genetic drift is.

 

The history of genetic drift

The true concept of genetic drift started in the 1920s. This was several decades after Charles Darwin had already revolutionized biology with his theory of evolution, but scientists still didn’t know how certain traits were passed on. We had some clues from Gregor Mendel’s pea studies, but Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution hadn’t been combined yet. In the ’20s, biologists recognized that certain genes and traits changed in a population without any adaptive or environmental pressures.

 

For example, let’s say there are two types of the same bird species on an island: some with silver feathers and some with gold feathers. The color of their feathers confers no special survival advantages, and the colors don’t harm the birds, either. So, these colors are “neutral mutations.” After studying these birds for several years, we notice that the ratio of silver-feathered birds to gold-feathered birds is changing. There used to be a ratio of 1 silver to 1 gold, but now it’s 10 silvers to 1 gold. Nothing happened on our island that should have selected one color of bird over the other. It just happened randomly; this is what is known as genetic drift.

 

Today, population geneticists refer to genetic drift as a “sampling error.” This is something that happens with real-world populations. No sampling is ever perfect, and that’s what we’re seeing with genetic drift. The sampling error happens over and over again, until it’s amplified and becomes the most prevalent (or, in some cases, the only) gene.

 

What’s genetic drift have to do with cloning? Probably nothing. Genetic drift applies only to populations of organisms that reproduce sexually. When we’re talking about cloning cannabis, we’re dealing with only one organism. Of course, we may produce thousands of copies of that individual plant, but it’s still only one plant. There’s (hopefully) no pollination going on, so genetic drift does not apply.

 

New clones, new traits

The question of why all of plant’s clones aren’t 100 percent the same isn’t easy to answer, mainly because we haven’t studied cannabis as much as we’d like, especially in large-scale grows. Most of the research was performed in labs on lower potency plants and small sample sizes. However, we have a ton of research on other plants.

 

It’s possible that clones are themselves producing new genes or deleting old ones. Back in 2011, a study from Oxford University showed that no clone was a perfect copy. Genetic analysis showed that when genes regenerated new tissue, they tended to spontaneously create new genes. It hasn’t been confirmed whether or not cannabis does this, but it’s possible.

 

The Oxford study called the phenomenon “regenerative mutation.” Some genes would be duplicated in the process, while other genes were deleted from the new clone altogether. However, this study looked at the thale cress plant. And as similar as regenerative mutation and genetic drift may seem, they’re still not the same thing.

 

Epigenetics and stress

Another reason we may see changes in some clones is stress. Stress doesn’t change the genetic makeup of a clone, but it can change how its genes are expressed through a process called epigenetics, a relatively new field of biology. Over the last few decades, we realized that DNA and genetic expression are not set in stone. The experiences of a parent can change the way their DNA is expressed, and they can pass those changes on to their offspring.

 

Epigenetics may explain why people who experience severe trauma (such as war) might beget children who are more prone to disease and mental illness. The stress changed the way the parents’ genes were expressed, and those changes were passed on to their children. Again, the DNA itself didn’t change, but little control mechanisms (such as chemicals) produced by the body changed whether those genes were turned on, off or set to overdrive.

 

What are these stress culprits in our cannabis plants? Sometimes a mother plant just gets old. Sometimes her feeding cycle is changed, or she gets sick or injured or both. Some growers suspect the heavy use of synthetic fertilizers or hormones may epigenetically alter their mothers, causing the clones to lose some desired trait.

 

When it comes to making clones, remember this: The act of cloning is a stressful act. You’re damaging tissue by severing part of the plant from itself. Clones also get transplanted and transported all over the place, which can also induce stress. Once this happens dozens, if not hundreds, of times to a series of clones, we may end up with different qualities in our clones than what we started with.

 

What can be done?

If clones lose their vigor over time, there’s really not much anyone can do. Some growers may be able to recover the missing traits from a mother plant, or by back-crossing a particular clone. But usually once a mother stops producing the desired traits in her clones, it’s probably time to pollinate her and let nature take its course.

 

Fortunately, most strains produce fairly stable clones. As long as you take extra good care of the mother plant, and you baby the clones, you should get pretty consistent results no matter how often you clone.

[JonDaMon]

@MindSoup

 

Kind of like the missing eyebrows and finger nails of some of those USA folks that like to “keep it in the family”   

[Slippy One]

I've taken clones to actually save one of my plants, so I would say the process of cloning isn't necessarily a stressful time for plants. 

 

Cloning on commercial scales would almost certainly reproduce the same genetic pathogens the plant picks up in the offspring. And like humans, there's 100's of nasties for plants to slowly die from. 

 

I suffer mites occasionally, and taking cuttings for 2 weeks in high humidity means the new mums are mite free, as a nice little bonus, mites are dry weather insects!!

 

Anyway, I'll let you all know once the next batch have rooted and started the V-Basis Bonsai challenge! 

 

Clean res forever here we come!!

 

 

 

 

[GSZZ]

2 minutes ago, Slippy One said:

I've taken clones to actually save one of my plants, so I would say the process of cloning isn't necessarily a stressful time for plants. 

 

The issue is somaclonal variation occuring, which can cause changes in the genotype and ultimately the phenotype which as you can imagine is a problem for cannabis as we keep a plant around for its phenotype. I mean, it could lead to perceived positive changes but I think if time has taught us anything regarding this issue is that cannabis stock degrades over time, and gets tired, not better. How surprising, for an obligate outcrossing annual crop  

 

The way I perceive it is everytime you take a cut you run the risk of there being some kind of genetic mutation or otherwise that causes the variation. The "photocopy of a photocopy" analogy isn't entirely true as its entirely within the realm of possibility to serial clone a plant for years and never see a perceived change, but it stresses the same importance of keeping your original stock as long as possible, in as good as health as possible, as its the act of propagating plants from that plant that causes the drift (this is without taking into consideration the phenotype of the stock plant changing due to the genotype interacting with the environment and/or stressors over a period of years) 

 

It makes sense in my head that the more often you refresh your stock, the greater chance of variation occurring in the line. The quickest it happens IMO is when a grower serial clones a plant, ie taking cuts just before flowering, vegging those up while the donor plants finish flowering, and then repeating the process.. and its not the kind of thing that happens after an "event" and then on the clone line has gone to shit, its a slow barely perceivable change, until its not anymore