Hey everyone...Yesterday I did my 3rd video for my grow log/journal. Check it out on youtube...lemme know what you think....The music in the background is some of my old music...
YouTube - Weed 5 Veg, ICEMUD's SCROG, 400w MH & 600W HPS, Organic, first grow‏
Anyways...
Today May 21st was a busy day for me and the ladies. I decided that it was time to give them more growing room and re-pot them. I measured my pot's and they were only 8" x 8 " round which I thought was a 3 gallon, I think only was a 1 1/2 gallon. Anyways, went to the hydro store today and picked up some 5 gallon pots. They were about 2" taller than my previous pots and much wider, prob by 4-6" wider so my ladies will be very happy. I also bought a 61 spot cloning tray, dome, heat pad, and rapid rooters and some clonex gel which all came for around 30$. Since I have checked around with the 3 strains I have, seems that not many have these strains so I wanted to hopefully clone them and have them available for my next round, or even to trade with others for some new strains. Anyways for the cloning equip and the new pots and trays, spent about 65$ which wasn't bad.
Re-Potting:
So I watched some youtube videos, read a bunch about re-potting and seems to be pretty easy. I got a large Rubbermaid container, mixed up my bloom mix of soil. This time I used 3 parts happy frog potting soil, 1 part organic compost, 1 part per-lite, 1 part worm casings, and I added in a good 1/10 or more of Peruvian seabird guano...(mostly for the pre-flower/veg), 1/6 parts Jamaican bat guano( 1-10-.2), and 1/6 part Indonesian bat guano (.5-12-.2).
I took each plant one by one and tried the method of just grabbing the stalk/stem and giving the pots a tap around the edges but the pots didn't fall off as easily as most of the videos and material I read. What i found to work was taking a long butter knife and slowly running it around the edges of the pot to loosen up the root ball from the pot. I was able to use my thumb and push upwards thru the drain holes on the root ball to loosen it up even more. Finally with a very light pull by the stem, I was able to pull out the entire root ball.
Now before removing the pot. I had already set my 5 gallon pots out and filled the bottom of them with my new soil mixture about 1/4 the way. At this time I grabbed each plant by the lower stem (right by the soil) and picked up the entire root ball and plant in one hand, and with the other hand while holding the plant over my Rubbermaid of soil, I gently "combed" out the circular roots from the bottom and sides of the root ball. The goal of doing this is to break the circular roots cycle of "thinking" they are at the edge of the container, and making them want to sprawl out into the new soil medium. After gently loosening the bottom soil on the root ball and the sides gently, I placed it in the middle of my 5 gallon pot, making sure that it sat about 2-3 inches from the top of the new pot. 2 reasons I did this, first, to make sure the plants were at the same level as before (would be more difficult to work them in the SCROG 2" higher. The 2nd reason is that one of my knowledgeable grow friends told me to keep about 1" from top of pot to top of soil. This way when watering, you can fill it up to the top with water, and know that it soaked the dirt evenly.
After placing the plant in the new pot, I filled in the gap between the root ball and new soil, pushing it down firmly but not packing it in, you don't want to squeeze the oxygen out of the soil by compacting it too much. (your micro herds love it).. I also have extra soil left over from the re-potting so I saved it and will use it to fill in the pots after watering has brought down the soil levels.
After letting the ladies sit in there new soil for about 5 hours, I mixed up a very light batch of 2 gallons of distilled water, 15ml of humic acid, 20ml of EJ grow, a drop of superthrive, 2 tbsp of molasses and also added 1tsp of a MYCO mix that was given to me by the hydro shop...Not sure what brand cause it was unlabeled but was really happy because this stuff is not cheap. I also was told this small packet was good for up to 200gallons, so will be plenty for this grow and prob my next 2. I bubbled the mix for about 2 hours and ph balanced it to 6.2 and fed my babies.
After about 9 hours since re-potting, the ladies look happy as ever and there are no signs of shock or anything bad which I like!!!!
Cloning:
Today as mentioned earlier I bought everything I need to clone my ladies and keep them around for future grows. I got a 7" humidity dome, 61 spot tray with rapid rooters, some clonex gel came with it, and a heating pad. After reading about cloning it didn't seem to hard and decided to give it a go. What I needed were sharp scissors, a cup of distilled water to get started. I chose 4 clones off each lady (a total of 12) and chose lower branches because I read these have more rooting hormones and stronger growth hormones than the top branches. I also made sure I didn't cut any main stems or shoots and chose smaller side ones, with a large fan leave and good top growth. I cut each clone about 4" below where the large fan leaf was attached at a strait angle and immediately put the cutting in the cup of distilled water. After taking my cuttings I took a large flat pan, poured distilled water in it, and took each cutting, gave it a 45 degree cut at the bottom of the clone (underwater), also slicing 2 cuts above the 45 degree cut, just to increase rooting areas, and then dipped it immediately into the clonex cloning gel, and then into the middle of the rapid rooter peat pellet. I repeated this step for all 12 clones. Next step was to cut 1/2 of all the lower fan leaves off. This causes the plant to focus less on transpiration and more on rooting, but still leaving green leaf to aid in photosynthesis. After chopping the fan leaves I gave the ladies a good misting of distilled water with 1/4oz of olivia's cloning solution. I then covered the dome with the 7" lid and put a 23w (i think) cfl light on top and plugged in the heating pad. From what I read you want to keep clones at a very high humidity because then the leaves wont have to work so hard at providing nutrients and moisture, because at this point, there is no roots to suck up moisture and they will die. We will see what happens but I have high hopes, it doesn't look too hard.
