ClosetCase420's - RDWC - 600W MH/HPS - Wonder Woman - Grow Journal - 2015

[closetcase420]

Day 69 (21 Days in Flower)

I started seeing buds on the girls about 3 days ago now. Everything is going great as far as I can tell, my main concern is trying to get light on all the buds above the SCROG. The plants grew to about 18 inches above the SCROG so I can't tuck the leaves down as there is nothing to tuck them under. I try to pull them down to the plants sides at least to keep them from hovering over the buds but I really wish I could prune them. Is that where I've been making my mistakes before, I would usually have pruned them to get more light on the buds.

As for feedings and water. Yesterday I added back 5 gallons of water with nutes. For reference my measurements based off of the 5 gallon topping were.
15ml Silica
15ml CalMag
3ml Orca
15ml G-M-B (grow, micro, bloom)
20ml Nectar
20ml Nirvana
1 cap PH-

After the feeding/fillup
PH 6.1
PPM 720

Here are some pictures

 

[closetcase420]

Almost forgot to mention the girls are still drinking about 1 -2 gallons of water a day on most days.

 

[VladimirPutin]

Looking nice for 3 weeks

V

 

[closetcase420]

Day 73 (25 Days in Flower)

Not a whole lot to report.. Any suggestions on how I can get more light to the buds?

 

[Papageno]

RAISE THAT LIGHT!!!!!


You are dangerously close to getting sun burn which at this stage will cause a hermi.


As far as light to the bottom goes... no help there really. Lets not talk about pruning until we have a more consistent grow happening.

This is what I was talking about early on. You have a great box. you need to do a few grows to feel out what is too much for that space. I would grow one plant in there at a time.

 

[closetcase420]

RAISE THAT LIGHT!!!!!

You are dangerously close to getting sun burn which at this stage will cause a hermi.

I raised the light this morning.
What is a hermi?

The light is now 14 inches above the tallest branch.

As far as light to the bottom goes... no help there really. Lets not talk about pruning until we have a more consistent grow happening.

This is what I was talking about early on. You have a great box. you need to do a few grows to feel out what is too much for that space. I would grow one plant in there at a time.

When you say more consistent grow are you referring to my next grow or later during this grow? I'm just trying to picture what I'm going to be doing over the next few weeks.

As for the next grow.. I figure at this time I have about 4 - 5 weeks of flowering left so I'm thinking I might go ahead and start my next seeds. I'm thinking about germinating 2 seeds and then placing them in solo cups under CFL lights 24 hours a day. My issue is how do I move from the solo cups to the RDWC setup. What medium should I use in the solo cups? I'm open to all suggestions, this is uncharted territory for me.

And lastly just a picture without the HPS lighting, love how you can actually see the buds cleaner.

 

[gangadoctor]

Hi closet. Nice updates.

You should invest in a small cheap aeroponic propagator rather than using solo cups. You can then go straight into your rdwc. You can even make one yourself it's that easy and you'll get near on 100% success rate plus very fast rooting. I do anyways

 

[Mrgardengrove]

Hermie means to hermaphrodite, this happens when a plant shows male and female sex and tries to pollinate it self making all your buds seed out, it will mess up your grow really quick. Also if this is your only grow space I would not spend the money on a propagator. If its not broke don't fix it.

 

[skunkpilot]

Try net baskets with coco. The roots will hold to the coco and the net baskets will allow the roots to drop to your RDWC system. Plants still look great.

 

[closetcase420]

That is essentially what I am using in the RDWC, net pots with hydroton (clay pebbles).

Would I be able to just use net pots with the hydroton or do I need something like coco for the roots?
If I used coco would I just drop that net pot into the RDWC set up when its ready or would I have to pull the plant from the net pot and switch to a hydroton pot?

If I used hydroton, do I just manually water the plants daily? I'm so used to just dropping the seeds into my RDWC setup as soon as they've germinated so I'm at a loss here.

 

[skunkpilot]

Ya, I forgot you are RDWC, I water from the top so my roots always have H2o. I don't want to suggest anything else due to too many parts, always breaks three. I think you could use the Hydroton through out. It should hold the roots well enough. If you do add a pump and water from the top until the roots reach the DWC level, be sure you add a timer and watch the length and times you water. Too much floods, too little, crispy plants. YMMV

 

[Papageno]

I think you got the important questions answered... Thanks guys!


Those plants are looking great. they may soon start to need less nutes. I may have posted the chart below before but look at it again. You might actually in in the time where the nitrogen already needs to come down. I might be seeing a bit of nitrogen toxicity. In late bloom people get confused because it is natural and almost important for the plant to steal nitrogen from lower leaves . People tend to up the nitrogan to compensate and that causes toxicity which can cause a host of issues. It doesn't look bad and I may be wrong but you are close to the time where we mare going to want to start backing off.


All I meant by more consistency is this grow you made a few decisions we have talked a lot about that were a bit aggressive. I am betting even if I say nothing your next grow will be different. You will back off a few things I don't need to reiterate on. So your next grow will be different. Probably better. maybe not... You said you had done some grows before but were not really happy with them. I don't know how this compares but you are on a solid track now. I suspect in the next 2-6 grows you will make more improvements and in about 2 years you will have a very nice operation there with very consistent and predictable growth. At that time when you have a solid foundation and know what you can get from this box..then you can try something a bit more advanced that is controversial and probably not a great idea for you to try in such a small space. But I wouldn't recommend doing things like that until the difference in the final product is something you can attribute to these advanced techniques.

Specifically (I see this all the time)...People make a change in their grow and see improved results. they think the change they made is the reason for the improved results, not the 20 things they didn't mess up this time they messed up last time. people focus on the things they "changed" not the things they changed by not screwing up something.

So for example lets say next grow you did 1 plant and did the SCROG differently. That is apples to oranges comparison to this grow for final yield. If you get more final weight it may not have anything to do with the fact that you went to one plant. If you have less yield it may not have anything to do with the change to 1 plant. it could be that you are growing in you garage and ambient temps in the exterior grow space are better and the plant grew healthier and has nearly nothing to do with what you did.


When you have this box nailed and have a consistent grow and are very very Extremely confident that you know what you can do and are happy with your method and can accurately predict you final dry weight...then lets talk about some advanced pruning technique that may increase yield when done right but ALSO increases time to harvest and in the end after a 6 grow period even though you get 15% more per grow (for a total of 90% more weight) you could have done 8 grows in that time (for a net loss of 110%). If you are growing faster than you can consume you may enjoy pruning. If you prune correctly you may get a good substantial yield improvement. But none of that is accurately understood and measurable until you got your situation under control.

 

[Mrgardengrove]

I just want to be clear are you not taking clones in this garden or are you pheno hunting for good strains, because cloning is really the way to go if you love the plant your growing and is much easy faster and cheeper then buying new seeds for every grow. For you question about coco and hydroton, start seedlings in cups with coco when those seelings roots begin to overgrow the cups take the whole plant out coco and all an place into a net pot then fill the rest of the net pot with hydroton. I've done this many times once I over veged a plant in a 5 Inch net pot and decided to place it in a bucket top lid so I just put the whole 5inch net pot directly in the bucket top net pot and filled it with hydroton and it worked out fine.

 

[closetcase420]

Day 76 (28 Days in Flower)

Before I go any further I just want to say thanks to everyone who has participated in this thread to date, everyone has been very helpful.

So where to start...

This is the half way point for flowering based on an 8 week flowering period, YAY!

Mrgardengrove.. no I am not taking clones. I have never taken any clones before as I was either too lazy or just not prepared. This times I specifically decided not to because I wanted to try a different strain for my next grow.

As for starting the next seeds. I think I am going to try and throw together a mini dwc using a 2-3 gallon bucket and lid. I'll drop two seeds into a rapid rooters in the 5" net pots with hydroton. I cant think of any reason to go from coco in solo cups to hydroton in net pots if I can just start it in the same net pots that I'm going to move to the 15 gallon reservoir. Specifically I am thinking of using one of my small water pumps and the drip manifold to keep the rapid rooters moist. I can then just throw a couple CFLs with reflectors over the top of the lid. Sound feasible?

VI.. how would I know if there is nitrogen toxicity? The nitrogen is in the Flora Gro and Flora Micro.. Right now I'm feeding them at 3ml per gallon, you suggest back that down?

And the chart..
If I am reading correct at week 4 I should be around 5.8 PH and 1.2 EC which is 600 at 0.5 conversion. Add in my base tap water and that'd be around 700 so I'm not far off as I'm generally in the mid 700s.

Lastly.. comparison to my previous grows.
So far this is looking promising.
I have never had a level canopy like this before and the buds are all starting to swell up. It's really awesome watching the day to day changes.
On my previous grows the plants were never drinking water like these are. I would only have to change out the water and/or refill maybe 2-3 times the whole grow whereas with this grow I've had to add back 5 gallons every 3-4 days. Also on my previous grows I had the light way to close and the plants were burned pretty bad. Generally I was doing a lot of things wrong. So far with this grow, I'm happy.

 

[Papageno]

I don't think you have it yet but you definitely are to the point where you don't want to correct it. there is just a few things I am seeing that are making my spidey senses tingle.

I will post a few images of some mid stage problems. But first off Nitrogen toxicity will slow growth. it is natural and helpful for the plants to start showing Nitrogen deficiency near the end of bloom. you may have seen many plants on here tha have yellowing leaves near the end of bloom and that is what is happening and it is actually good for the plant. Don't go in and mess it up by trying to add nitrogen. This is the main reason for bloom nutes vs. veg nutes. the nitrogen which is used for growth needs to go away because you are not growing anymore just filling out flowers which need Potassium and Phosphorus to grow.

Now the first sign is a deep green color. Cannabis is not a dark green plant. Dark green is a problem. Cannabis is a vibrant bright green.

The second sign is plants start to have clawing of the leaves.

The third sign... and this is where you really are starting to get bad is leaf tip dropping

After that you will start to see leaf tip edges turn yellow like this guy.
Help - Weird browning and yellow spotting on bud leaves towards the end of flowering

At which point you have a catastrophe on your hands.

Nitrogen toxicity does not heal in the leaves that have it. So that guys plant is screwed and may hermi under the stress.

So if you grabbed that MOAB stuff I recommended you could probably back off to using a light dose of that from here on. Maybe go a few more weeks. That chart is an ideal chart from a high end hydro product and everything is perfect including using CO2. So like we talked about a few times you let the res tell you but you probably don't have totally ideal situation so you can't go full 100%.

That is also a 3 month chart. It is a good one and a great rule of thumb. But by no means is there a one rule fits all here.

You have done a great job listening to the res so far so I son't want to tell you what to do. I just see in that last photo...Deep green, minor clawing and what might be some leaf tip drooping.




A healthy flower has leaves perk and up like this.

 

[Papageno]

Maybe I am just itchy because i have run into 5 of these in the past 2 days and it is like a curse running around here right now.

Zombie Kush Help

Funky Growth?

but it is one of the most common things to do wrong...

 

[Papageno]

I was just asked to look into someones journal...someone who has been checking this one out (probably because I told them to)...and they have massive Nitrogen toxicity. Man this is a heck of a week for that. I mentioned it like twice in the past 6 months and this week it is inside every link.

 

[closetcase420]

Now you've got me worried.. I took a bunch of pictures so you can get a better look.

The one thing to keep in mind is the pictures where the plants look darker were taken with the light off and with a flash. I believe that is why they appear darker.

These two photos are not under flash, true color.

These three photos are under flash.

And a couple close shots of the buds.

 

[Papageno]

I think you are alright just let make sure we are not pushing nitrogen anymore. There is enough stored up in the leaves to make it through the grow at this point. Make sure the Ferts you are using from here on are bloom nutes will very little nitrogen.

The plant goes through various stages. You are at the stage where it stops building fan leaves and starts filling out flowers. So your Nute profile is at its peak and the next things we change is to bring it down. The Nute concentration, as we have talked about, is to support photosynthesis. Now that the fan leaves are not being added the nutes do not need to go up and more. Since virtually all of the photosynthesis is happening in the fan leaves as more get added and grow bigger we need to up the nutes. But when they atop growing and adding more the nutes come down with it. As the fan leaves start to become less used we need less nutes. And the reason that chart drops so fast is near the end instead of working so hard to grab nutes from the environment through the roots the plant takes the easy route and starts taking it from the leaves where it is already stored up. Just like a trees in fall the plants leaves will start yellowing and that is a good thing. But what that means is don't over compensate by adding more. If the plant does not start yellowing naturally near the end of bloom you are over feeding it. You may end up with poor tasting buds.


We have talked about this before but sometimes it is best to wit until it is starting you in the face to reiterate this.

As I have said before...you haven't burned them yet. Keep wandering the slow path to success.

You are in bloom now. So we want Phosphorus and Potassium and need very little nitrogen now.

 

[closetcase420]

Day 83 (35 Days in Flower)

Ahh the wonderful smell of buds in the morning

Not much new, the girls continue to drink water. I've had a few issues with water control that I believe I've rectified now with a full water change. My daily readings and water addition for the last 2 and 1/2 weeks are below.

Everything was going great with me adding back a solid 5 gallons every 3-4 days up until the 17th and the PH/PPMs were very steady. On the 17th I tried to lower the PH a few ticks to bring it down into the mid 5s from the steady 6.0 I'd been sitting at. I added a cap of PH- which I suppose was to much because the PH dropped to 5.7 immediately, 5.1 later that night, and 4.7 the next morning. I went ahead and did a full water change on the 18th. I was thinking it might be a good idea to lower the PPMs a bit with the water change but I did not get the right amount of nutrients for what I was looking. I ended up at 6.8 / 470 and left it for the night to see if it would adjust at all by the morning. The next day i added back a gallon of highly concentrated solution 3.8/1070 and now I've managed to level her off at 5.7/500 which is right about where I wanted to be.

The buds are looking good to me, what do you think? The aroma is very fruity.

I also went ahead and dropped 2 seeds for the next grow. The seeds are Aurora Indica, something different. I built a mini rig much like my actual RWDC. The mini rig is a 2 gallon reservoir with 3 1/2 net pots. Two days ago I used the paper towel method to germinate the seeds. This morning I moved them to the rapid rooters. The res is sitting under 4 60w CFLs..