Run one, week two: twelve plants, one bed, no till

Welcome to the Scrolls. This is where we log every run in the Dojo, our grow room: what we did, what went wrong, and what the room was actually doing while it happened. No highlight reel. Read to the end and this scroll is yours.

First up, where Run One stands two weeks after the plants went in.

Bed 1 at a glance

One bed, 8 feet by 4, built right on the ground and filled with living soil. Twelve plants in two rows of six, all transplanted on October 2. Under the plants is a cover crop, so the soil is never bare and the soil life never goes hungry.

The lineup, by spot in the bed:

Row A: Strawberry Patch 5, Strawberry Patch 5, Toad Venom, Strawberry Patch 6, Pineapple Candy, Super Sour Diesel.

Row B: Donny Burger, Strawberry Patch 5, Toad Venom, Blue Dream, Gorilla Patch 13, Gorilla Patch 13.

A bed that waters itself

On day one we spot-watered by hand: the topsoil, the cover crop and each transplant, to settle everything in. After that the Blumats took over.

A Blumat is a ceramic spike pushed into the soil, fed by a drip line. As the soil around it dries, the ceramic pulls water through and opens the valve; when the soil is wet again, it closes. The bed gets watered by how dry it actually is, not by a timer. We set ours one and a half turns past the point where they start to drip.

The runts

Not everything came in even. Both Toad Venom plants arrived small, about half to three-quarters the height of everything else. B3 is the runt of the room, and A3 isn't far behind; it's been lagging on growth since transplant.

So on October 8 we did the opposite of waiting for them to catch up: we trained every other plant down under the first trellis to match the runts' height.

The room, live

Our grow room reports its temperature and humidity to us around the clock, so instead of telling you the room was fine, here's the data. Hover over it, or touch it on your phone, to read any hour.

Across these three days the room averaged about 73°F and 64% humidity, and VPD averaged just under 1.0 kPa. VPD sat between 0.8 and 1.2 kPa for about 88% of the hours, a comfortable range for plants in veg: humid enough for young roots, dry enough that the plants keep drinking.

The swings are what we keep an eye on. The warm peaks near 80°F push VPD up toward 1.4, and the cool dips near 67°F pull it down to 0.6. Smoothing those out is next on the list.

What's next

The plants keep growing under the trellis while we keep the canopy level, and we'll see whether the Toad Venoms close the gap. Next scroll: how the runts are doing, and the first look at the cover crop filling in.

Got a question about any of this, or your own bed? Drop it in Ask the Ninjas below. The best ones get answered here.

No till. No shortcuts. Microbatch. Living soil.