Journal October 15, 2012

The growing tip has been removed from the Burpee Super Beefsteak plant.  My original plan was to remove the tip after the first truss set, however I since decided to let more trusses form, as the plants are doing great under the large LED.  At this point, the plant has three trusses with fruit set.

That said, I removed the first two large fruit that had set on this plant as they were completely deformed, to the point of being ugly.  It seems the first large bud on each truss is setting a malformed fruit, however, as to why, I am clueless.

As a comparison, the Trust hybrid has one truss with fruit set, one truss with open flowers and one truss forming.  All of the fruit on this plant are normal and perfectly shaped.  

As Ava is in school now, and I am getting bored not having her around everyday, I thought I would make a more serious attempt at time lapse photography. 

Using an adapter, I converted a mogul based grow light to a standard base compact fluorescent to light this experiment.  The bulb is a standard 23 watt daylight compact fluorescent straight from Home Depot.  There is a single cucumber seed planted in the self watering  container, and the camera is taking a photo every six minutes in an attempt to capture the germination process as a time lapse video.  The light is on 24/7 and I have no idea of the effect this is having on the emerging seedling.  It should be interesting in any event.