In-trap VFT fertilization with nutricote provides an insane growth boost

For the past couple of months I have been experimenting with fertilizing VFTs with nutricote time release fertilizer (18-6-8, with micronutrients) in their traps. I mix with some rehydrated black soldier fly fish food so that it is not rejected by the plant, and massage the trap for ~20s to stimulate the struggle response. Maybe 1/20 pellets is defective and nukes the leaf. The OTHER ones, however, provide a sustained flow of nutrients straight into the plant, I imagine it's like taking steroids right to the blood. A single nutricote pellet is probably 5-10x the nutrient density of a bug, especially for P and K, which are quite low in meat relative to N.

How's it going? Well, check this example out. There are only 9 days separating these two images, growth conditions aren't outstanding either, there's only ~40w of light above this tray (3 42w barrina lights per four 1020 trays), about 6" from the plant tops. ~80f roots, growing in pure peat. Nothing fancy, and in fact, kinda cheap.

I am getting biomass doubling times on the order of maybe 2.5 weeks or so. I am able to take plants to flower in ~8 months from seed. It's kind of absurd. It basically removes nutrient limitation entirely and allows them to luxury feed. The only downside is…it's time consuming and does not scale well once you have thousands of plants, which is pretty easy to do once you can grow them so fast.

ps- osmocote will nuke 95% of your traps…I don't recommend it