Date: 1/17/22
Strains - 420 Hindu Kush and White Widow - All fem and photo.
Light used - 400w LED Set at 100% @ 12 inches 65000 Lux
Medium - DWC with Hydroton in 6" netpot in 5gal bucket
Nutrients - AN pH Perfect 3part + Hydroguard, z7, and Terpinator
Water - Carbon-filtered well water (100ppm)
Grow space - 48x48x80 tent in basement
Extraction - 6" Variable Speed Extraction fan
This will be the last entry for my first grow journal. When I started this almost four months ago I really had one goal: harvest something. I knew I was being overly ambitious by starting my first grow with four plants, two different strains, in DWC. My thinking was that I would learn a lot along the way and hopefully I would get at least one plant to the end. I was hoping to harvest something.
And I have learned a lot! It started when I killed two of the first four seeds by rushing them and had to plant two more 6 days later. I had to learn how to mix the nutrients and how to adjust pH & ppm. Then I had the light too close and burned one of the plants. Afraid of too much stretch I kept the lights really close. This caused very short internodal spacing and the plants grew like cabbages. Watching these plants and learning how they grow has all been a learning experience.
Picking through the larf in my first harvest really helped me understand what should be cleaned up in the future. Almost everything in the middle of the plant was pale and fluffy. However, even the underneath sites on the outside that received some light were dark and hard. In the future I will try to make sure all leaves and bud sites are getting light or they will be removed/cleaned up by the 21st day of flower.
Most of what I learned on my first grow, though, came from this fantastic community. I know this harvest would not have been possible without the help and support I received from you all. Thank you all from the bottom of my bowl
A special thanks to:
@Tokin Roll - Thank you for your advice in veg when I was freaking out about my little cabbages. Your advice to let them grow and clean them up later and general help with defoliation was exactly what I needed.
@Rexer - Thank you for checking in every time I had an issue. You helped me get in touch with FelipeBlu when my girls really needed it. I think you may have given me one of the most crucial pieces of advice when I needed it the most: Its about the number of bud sites and how much light you can give them. That was the reason I built stands to keep all the plant canopies as even as possible. I think I owe several grams to that piece of advice alone
@FelipeBlu - The biggest mistake I made on this grow was thinking that I knew enough to specialize my nutrients. For some reason I thought I knew better than the manufacturer and I could just cut down on the GROW portion to reduce the nitrogen during flower. This caused a magnesium deficiency, especially in the white widows. FelipeBlu not only showed me where I went wrong and how to correct it but also took the time to explain why. Not only do I understand where I went wrong, but with his help (and spreadsheets) I understand how to determine what nutrients are being fed to my plants and how to customize it correctly. Thanks FelipeBlu for helping us newbies learn what we didn't even know we needed to learn
@Bill284 - Bill, you are a 420 superhero. Whenever someone needs help there you are! Thank you for your help, encouragement, and for holding me back at the end when I wanted to harvest NOW!!! You are much appreciated.
One of the 'toys' I have is a
tcheck. This device uses light refraction to measure total cannaboids in solution. You measure a set amount of bud (at least .1g), mix it with 10ml 99.9% isopropyl alcohol, and shake for 10 minutes. Then you place about 5-6 filtered drops of the resulting solution into the tcheck and it measures the total cannaboids found in the sample. I am still working on the process and the device is only accurate to within 15% so I plan on doing more readings to confirm. I have measured a sample of a bag I purchased (20%), my dad's first grow that got seeded then struggled to finish (6.9%), and my brother's first grow that was harvested a bit early due to weather & spider mites (7.5%). I believe the device is giving a good baseline. I measured all of the 'top' buds on each plant and the results are below. I plan on doing more measurements but ran out of the 99.9% alcohol and need to get more
I know the lower buds and larf will test lower. I only tested the hang-dried and would like to test the freeze-dried as well to see if there is a difference.
My First Plants:
Kini (Hindu Kush) - Kini was the first to sprout on 9/15/21. She was fimmed first on 9/12 to try to slow her down, and when a branch was accidentally snapped off during LST she ended up giving us three clones. For the first several weeks she was the biggest of the bunch. I think she may have gotton too full, however, and never really stretched after going to flower. She had a LOT of growth and a lot of popcorn and larfy buds, but not many big buds. One of her nicest buds tested at 22.5% TCH.
Demeter (White Widow) - Demeter sprouted the day after Kini on 9/16/21. She had her shell stuck to one cotyledon and had to have it manually removed. She got burnt early when I sprayed her under a light that was too close. She did recover although ended up being the smallest of the four. She also was a bit too full and did not quite get stretched out enough. She did have a few buds that stretched well, and is very sticky and stinky. She had some really nice buds to go with all of the larf. I tested her at 31%. Didn't believe it, calibrated the machine and re-tested at 26.3%. Not sure why she tested so high, but I will retest when I get more supplies.
Alice (White Widow) - Alice was the last to sprout on 9/23/21. When I flipped to flower I cleaned her up the most, lollipopping several branches. Therefore, she had less larf and popcorn buds than Demeter, but still ended up yielding a bit more. And she was a LOT easier to harvest/clean. I will definitely be cleaning up a bit more of the lower stuff going forward. I tested Alice first, and broke up the bud before testing. That means I lost tricomes. I changed the process after testing Alice, but she still tested at 17.5%.
Lorraine (Hindu Kush) - Lorraine sprouted on 9/22/21. She grew about the same as the other until the flip to flower. I think I did a better job of LST, defoliation, and spacing out the buds on her. She stretched the most and her buds were fat and dense. In the last couple of days she even put on a little bit of purple. Unfortunately, I was too busy trying to keep warm at that point to get many pictures
She tested at 21.5% TCH.
So we ended up harvesting on Wednesday, 1/5/22 on day 76 of flower and after 36 hours of darkness. My plan was to hang some buds to dry, put some in a mason jar for the lotus cure, and freeze-dry some. Well without power the lotus cure was out this time. We ended up washing and hanging everything we could. All of the larf and smaller buds went into a mesh drying rack. The larger buds were hung from coat hangers using binder clips. Everything was hung in the 4x4 tent in the basement @ 60f&60%.
The next day (Thursday), we took a mix of popcorn and hanging buds from each plant to my dad's to freeze-dry. Friday morning they were ready. I put some fresh stems in each bag to re-hydrate afterward and may have left them in too long. Humidity got up to 68% when I took them out. By the next day all of the bags were holding at around 62% in their Grove bags. The buds looked and smelled like they did when they went into the freeze dryer. They are a bit fluffy, almost like styrofoam. The freeze dryer removes the moisture without shrinking the buds so they are less dense. They smoke really well either way. The taste is fantastic, just like they smelled the last couple of weeks in the tent. Three days after harvest and already some of the smoothest, best weed I had ever smoked! In the bud pictures above, the freeze-dried buds are on the left. They are bigger and greener.
I moved all of the other buds up to a spare closet when the power came back on. I tried to keep it at 60f & 60% and was mostly successful. The whole house now smells like weed
On the last day the humidity went down and they felt ready. I jarred up the loose buds from the drying rack on day# 7, 1/12/22. I jarred up the hanging buds on day# 8, 1/13/22, after taking all of the buds off the stems. Right now they are all in a Grove bag holding at 58-64% humidity.
So, I finally have a dry weight for my first grow and.... just over 1 pound dried!
WOW! That is 1.19 grams/watt and 29.8 grams/sqft. Over a pound of up to 25-30% bud. This far exceeded my expectations. And I still have 5 1-gallon storage bags full of material in the freezer to make hash out of! At $200-$300/ounce this more than pays for everything I have spent so far. It will also last me quite a while
And it is already the best smoke I have had in my recent memory and possibly ever. We have not even tried the non freeze-dried yet as is is still curing.
I am going to wait until the buds in the Grove bag have a chance to cure before any smoke reports so that I can compare freeze-dried vs. hang dried. For my next grow I already moved the three soil plants from the veg tent into this flower tent. I will be flipping them in a week or two. After that I plan on going back to hydro with four mainlined purple haze clones. After that I have so many plans. I found that I really love growing these plants, not just the results. So many ways to grow, strains, nutes, lights... on to the next grow
Happy Growing.
