BluePhoric's In Between Grows Journal

[BluePhoric]

While I decide when to start a new grow, and what to do...

I'll post here if needed, instead of polluting my first grow journal (soon to be moved to completed journals) with things unrelated to that first grow.

Next grow : I will either start growing 1 seed (Euphoria) soon, or wait until next summer and grow 2... Not sure about the strains.

THANKS !

 

[Pennywise]

I couldnt wait until next summer .

 

[BluePhoric]

I'm pasting my last post from the old journal here...

Blueberry Canuk & Euphoria Royal Queen - Organic Soil - CFL Only - First Grow :

The factual/tech stuff :

Strains : Blueberry (Canuk) / Euphoria (Royal Queen Seeds), the two are mostly Indica.

Lights : Philips 23W CFLs, 100% Daylight (6500K) during veg, mixed with 50% x 2700Ks for flowering.

Soil for seedlings in solo cups, for the first 10 days:
- Berger BM custom ( similar to Pro-Mix) / 15% additional perlite

Soil in 3-Gal Smart-pots, from day 11 until the end:
- 50% Berger BM custom (similar to Pro-Mix) / 30% Perlite / 20% Shrimp compost (NPK : 1-1-1)

Light schedule : Veg 20/4, Flowering 12/12

Veg / Flowering days : 30 days veg, started 12/12 on day 31, Flowering lasted 76 days (56/63 days advertised)

Harvest : 139 grams for the 2 plants.


The details:

Light fixture :
I used simple rails that held all the power-bars and lights at the same height. It was a challenge when both plants weren’t the same height. Adjustments took too long too.

Nutrients (EarthJuice Grow / Catalyst / Bloom) :
I started feeding Grow nutrients on day 23. I started feeding bloom nutrients on day 45-47 (2 weeks after switching to 12/12); It was too soon, I should have waited at least another week (Maybe I was afraid of too much Nitrogen and too much stretching). Leaves soon started yellowing at a steady pace until the end of the grow, even if I re-introduced some Grow nutrients (more N) several times in various amounts to control the yellowing, to no avail.

Pests (Spider mites):
Spider mites invited themselves at the very beginning. I had started some Freedom dream seeds just to try (2 weeks before Blueberry and Euphoria), and they quickly got attacked by spider mites while Blue and Phoria were germinating elsewhere. After treating with a soap solution, the 6 plants looked really bad (I hated that Safer’s spray). I threw away sickest/infested plants. I manually removed eggs and spiders, I put companion plants (cilantro and dill), used a Neem oil solution (hard to find in Canada, but available thru DIY cosmetics shops), diatomaceous earth, perlite, etc. As soon as I saw new Spider mites, I sacrificed the attacked plant (usually found on the ugliest plant, 1-3 mites that already laid eggs). After that, my darlings (Euphoria and Blueberry) were growing alongside, and the spider-mites seemed gone, but the 2 remaining Freedom dream plants, aside from being unhealthy from the treatments, showed their true genetics: Auto-flowering and hermaphrodite. I discarded the last two FD plants in the trash, after 29 days. Blue and Phoria were 15 days old. No more mites were seen after that day. Victory !

Pests (Fungus gnats) :
I saw one or two little flies once in a while, but also all sorts of occasional weird bugs, even wasps, so I was not alerted, also because there were fruit-flies upstairs, I thought it must have been fruit flies. On day 43… full infestation it seemed. I purchased large sheets of yellow sticky tape (works like a charm to kill the adults) and added an inch of sand mixed with perlite on top of the soil (it’s a painfully long mess to water after that. Hated the sand.). Mosquito dunks have not done anything much I think, except maybe mess with the PH. Evidently, I didn’t catch the adults on time, they lay eggs as soon as they appear, and I had to wait for the next wave, which happened 21 days later. (Adults lay eggs, after 4-6 days larvae feeds in soil for 2 weeks, then Pupae for 3-4 days, adults emerge, breed, lay eggs.) I was ready; The sand was there and there was yellow sticky tape everywhere, on the side of the pots, underneath the pots, on the soil. I caught all or most of the adults, they did not procreate, and they were gone for the rest of the grow. Victory !

Training :
LST pretty much all the time until flowering, and even then a little bit. Couldn’t leave them alone.

Topping/fimming:
I completely missed my attempt to FIMming ;-) One plant was topped, it was fine and recovered rapidly. The fimmed one (Blueberry) grew a weird bunch of leaves and gave me problems, and I finally re-topped her the conventional way. I’ll never try to FIM again, it’s too unpredictable, just for the sake of trying to get 3-4 tops instead of 2, D’OH!

PH management:
Until I started feeding EJ nutes, I used plain water. Lowering the PH with PH-acid. Worked fine. When later using EJ nutes, the PH dropped lower than my kit could measure, at PH 4.5 or lower. I tried to PH+up with dolomite lime. It raises the ph all-right, but it’s very hard to manage, and it continues to raise the ph for a long time. But in the end, feeding straight EJ nutes mix, the soil seemed to buffer ok and runoff water was in the correct ph range for a while. It all went south with EJ bloom nutes; For some reason, my ph in soil was high (7+), maybe because of some accumulation of dolomite lime, but I think the EJ Bloom is just no-good, because several other growers had similar issues, like premature yellowing progressing to all fan leaves.

Grams per watt… per what ?
Using up to 9 and 10 x 23W bulbs respectively for the two plants plant during the grow, I calculated an average of 180+198 (378) watts for both plants.

My harvest gave 139 grams (62+77) of buds, so it scored around 0.37 or 3/8 gram per watt. It’s fine I think for a short veg-time of 30 days. A 60 days veg would probably have produced twice as much, or more. Some say you double your yield with an additional 2 weeks in veg (like 44 days instead of only 30).

I was MORE interested in calculating the KiloWatt-hours consumption, because it says so much more, taking the TIME factor into account. Whether you do a short 2 weeks veg or a long 12 weeks veg, use an 18/6 or 24/0 light schedule, a gram per watt doesn’t say much. Kilowatt-hours show EXACTLY how much light energy was spent on the grow. I wish it was the standard comparison for everyone. Let’s face it… I think some guys wouldn’t like it as much.

I did the math, with respect to how many days with how many bulbs, for how many hours, which are detailed in my personal grow-spreadsheet. The consumption was 508 kWh for two plants, (263 + 245 kWh respectively) for the entire grow. I’m charged 8.92 cents (0.089$) per kWh, so my total cost for the lights is less than 50$. Here’s a snapshot for one plant:

My grams per kilowatt hours score : 139gr / 508kWh = 0.27 gr/kWh.

Just for fun, let’s suppose I vegged another month and had tripled the yield… I estimate the total kWhs would be around 770 kWh and use 400 Watts on average. The yield, theoretically 417 grams. In grams per watt… this would surpass to the mythical 1 gr/w, but in gr/kWh… it would be only 0.54 Gr/kWh.

In gr/Watt it would imply an almost 3X better performance (0.37 vs 1.04).
In gr/kWh… It’s a more realistic 2X better performance (0.27 vs 0.54).

If veg time was even longer… like 2.5 months or more, there could be diminishing returns kWh-wise, but the gr/Watt equation would show an illusionary increased performance.

Then… there’s another factor that is important for some people… How many grows they can do in a year and yearly yield. If, for example, an additional 30 days veg means ~2x performance for just ¼ more total grow time… Like 3 longer grows vs 4 shorter grows, the math seems simple, the ratio would be 6 to 4. Plainly, If you obtain a better gr/kWh score, you get a bigger annual yield AND are more efficient.


Lessons learned, in no particular order :

-Writing a journal takes a lot of time ! More so when you speak French and try to write in English. I use way too many words, being too concerned with expressing things correctly, re-phrasing stuff 3 times, etc.

-Neem oil is really good and effective. It helped getting rid of spider mites.

-LST is difficult when the diameter of the pot is small and the plant is several inches larger.

-Soil mix : You just don’t need some fancy soil mix with 56 different ingredients expertly mixed and costing a fortune. Some seedling medium, perlite and compost worked great for me. Ah, you probably can squeeze more performance out of the plants with a plethora of amendments… but so many other things can go wrong. I almost never got into growing, because I was intimidated by all the stuff I read that I should do perfectly right… I’m glad I still went ahead and did things my own way.

-Watering too often / too much: The fungus gnats proved me wrong, I WAS watering too much. Maybe I was watering ok, but at some point the plants needed less, and I didn’t pay enough attention. Realizing that, I pushed the plants to the limit of dryness, to see exactly how dry I could get away with, and it was more than I suspected. The thing is, when the plants are young and small, they dry out fast and quickly wilt to show their annoyance. When they get bigger, have bigger pots, they are more robust and can endure much more. Now I truly know how to check for dry/wet, and re-evaluate during the grow.

-Light spectrum (2700K vs 6500K) : I finally understood why I should add/mix some 2700K (red-ish) CFLs with my 6500K CFLs for the flowering stage. IT IS NOT that the 2700K have more reds (they pretty much don't). It is that the 2700K HAVE LESS of the BLUE spectrum. I understand now that the blue color inhibits the AUXINS in the plant, which inhibits elongation, which is good in GROW. During the first 2 weeks of flowering, a high ratio of blue may still be useful to limit the "stretch" in that phase of the grow (i.e. for sativas). Afterwards... the plants will not want to grow tall as much... but they NEED a lot of AUXINS to produce big/fat/dense buds. Giving LESS blue at that time helps the plant produce more auxins. I ended up with only a 50/50 ratio of 2700k/6500k lights, because I was lazy and tried to spend less money on this grow. I’ll probably have a bigger ratio of 2700ks next time.

-Sand on the soil : Erk, I hated that inch of sand. It made watering a p.i.t.a. Maybe it helped with the gnats, I’m not sure. I’ll never do that again unless I’m des-pe-rate.

-Soft pots (smart pots) : Well, it grows mighty fine. I like the air pruning principle, and it works. But it’s soft, it’s not really practical when doing LST, and as it bends there’s a gap on the side that lets the bugs in easily. For the next grow, I’ll use some diy-home-made-super-lst-friendly-air-pruning-holy-buckets, which are mentioned /built/completed on pages 16 to 19 of my journal. I wouldn’t use the commercial Air-Pots because they let bugs in thru the holes on the side.


Things I’ll do different or try:
- More 2700K
- Longer veg time (=>2 months prob.)
- Do more toppings and some super cropping / NO FIMming
- No dolomite lime
- No sand/perlite on top of the soil
- No EJ Bloom, but I’ll happily use the remainder of my EJ Grow and Catalyst. Botanicare's pure blend bloom ?
- Air pruning buckets instead of smart pots (Not Air-Pots… homemade air-pruning buckets)
- Use a better light setup, each plant with its own set of lights, independently adjusted. See page 15.
- Be more aggressive with training, keep the plants shorter if possible, to get a better light penetration.
- Use the dehumidifier less often if possible, on a timer, at night only, maybe.


Final words…

I would probably have never started if I hadn’t found 420Mag, its community, and the inspiration it shares. I would not have enjoyed the grow as much if I hadn’t found 420Mag and started this journal. Growing is a solitary and slow process… documenting and sharing it makes for a completely different and more exciting experience.

Thanks to all who watched and read my long posts. Special thanks to those who helped, there are several, and extra special thanks to those who actively participated almost on a daily basis or at first sign of distress, like Pennywise and MotaFina, both who joined on the first page of my journal and stayed close until the conclusion.

I’ll be doing it again, maybe soon…

 

[Pennywise]

Good job Blue, cheers!

 

[MotaFina]

Great synopsis of your grow. On your point of your ratio of 6500/2700 CFLs....I wonder if using 100% 2700s in late flower would have shortened up your ripening period?

 

[BluePhoric]

On your point of your ratio of 6500/2700 CFLs....I wonder if using 100% 2700s in late flower would have shortened up your ripening period?

I probably would have had superior results with 2700s, and maybe sooner harvest, but i was lazy and also it seemed difficult to do a partial 6500/2770. I pretty much had 1 bulb over every top. At a 50/50 ratio, every top was exposed to the two spectrums. The obvious solution was to go full 2700 but i was meh...

Maybe Ill experiment with all 2700s in mid flowering on the next grow!

 

[MotaFina]

Interesting article related to the subject:

High Times article - Grow Hack: Does Switching from Metal Halides to HPS for Flowering Work?

I would think switching from 6500K to 2700K CFLs would be close to the same as switching MH to HPS. The article seems to say that using the HPS (more red spectrum - i.e. 2700K) throughout the grow would be better than using MH (more blue). I know the spectrum produced by CFLs is not exactly the same though, so might not be relevant. But some good food for thought.

 

[BluePhoric]

Interesting article related to the subject:

High Times article - Grow Hack: Does Switching from Metal Halides to HPS for Flowering Work?

I would think switching from 6500K to 2700K CFLs would be close to the same as switching MH to HPS. The article seems to say that using the HPS (more red spectrum - i.e. 2700K) throughout the grow would be better than using MH (more blue). I know the spectrum produced by CFLs is not exactly the same though, so might not be relevant. But some good food for thought.

Yeah, MH and HPS have their own particular spectrum (MH lacks reds / HPS lacks blues) that is why they complement each other.
Daylight CFLs are "wide spectrum" lights, containing blues, greens, reds, etc, it's why they work so well. They can be used throughout the grow and it seems to make not such a big difference. Lack of enough lumens is more dramatic than ratio of red spectrum CFLs. Anyway, like I discovered... having too much blue spectrum in flowering is what causes inhibition of auxins and could result in smaller stretch / smaller bud development. But the daylight CFLs have plenty or reds, contrary to MH lights, that's why they still can be used throughout. Switching from Daylight 6500K to 2700Ks just removes the over-abundant blue spectrum, keeps the rest of the colors.

As for the absolute best 6500/2700 ratio, I'm not sure any serious experiment has been done, and all we read is pretty much intuition, hearsay and urban myths. Since LEDs are the big thing, I guess we'll never get to see any "CFL grow Bible" ;-)

I'm not sure I'd use only HPS throughout, fearing more elongated stretchy plants (less auxin inhibition), but I'm sure otherwise it grows fine. And I absolutely would not veg with 2700K cfls ;-)

I too cut-and-paste in case of "token expired"...

 

[BluePhoric]

Grow space update :

Cleaned up the grow area and created more space.

Tested new light setup : 10 recessed CFLs (fixed) with flat white background "reflector" and adjustable "reflector" sides. Not that there is very good reflection, but it will be better than before, when I used none.

The rig is held by small chains and will be VERY easily and quickly adjusted with S links.

I will later add a black background (black velvet fabric probably) to hide the ugly walls and get better photos ;-)

 

[BluePhoric]

Oh, and I thought of trying to use a plastic saucer with a hole and a hose to remove runoff water...

I'm not sure if it will work. I have a feeling that some water will always remain at the bottom and not all go thru the hose.
Will see, not tested yet...

 

[Pennywise]

You're good as long as you keep your bucket above the saucer like it is. .

 

[BluePhoric]

Heyhey...

Couldn't wait anymore... Here's NewPhoria, an only child for this grow. She went into a solo-cup last night, and here she is this morning :

Wow, I really like having a black background !

I'll start a new journal soon... ;-)

 

[BluePhoric]

Here's my new journal : Euphoria (RQS) - CFL - SOIL - Second Grow

 

[Amadeus Forzin]

Hope all is well in your world.

Thanks for sharing this grow with us.

Please head over to the 420 Strain Reviews forum and post your smoke report there too.

I'm moving this to Completed Journals now.

You can use the Report Post feature found at the bottom left of every post and we'll move it for you right away.

Sending you lots of love and positive energy.