Conradino23 Keeps On Keeping On Outdoor & Indoor Using LOS/High Brix Methods

I agree. Mg can make things chaotic in high concentrations, but at the end of bloom, I figured the concern would be lessened. Epsom aside though, I can't say with certainty in soil, but in hydro, upping my S was a game changer and my people informed me of the shift from common dank to sweet dank. On RIU, I've read that MagSulf accentuates sweeter notes and KSulf accentuates the piney notes. I use both together so can't confirm that, but who knows? As far as I'm concerned, just getting more sulfur in will lead to good results.
 
in LOS soil you really need to work on Ca/Mg ratio before you start growing the plants. The thing is that once Mg is off and your plants show it, it's very hard to fix this unless you use salts. There are organic sources obviously, but it takes at least few days after applying them to become available. I rarely have this problem, but once in a blue moon it pops up I admit.

Sulphur is interesting as well, cause cannabis uses more of it than your usual food crop or a garden flower. The same applies to boron. Both should be influencing production of terpenes in theory, but as always more research is needed to pinpoint the concentration and the right moment for applying them. As they're both micronutrients it definitely shouldn't be much, so I'd go with very small dose. In the best case it's gonna change something for better and in the worst it'll hardly influence anything.
 
Bubba Hash #1 Bubba Kush looking gal with frozen hearts buds or whatever they call these tops :) She's been on a dry finish, which is just keeping plant without water for the last 4-7 days. In effect and I confirmed it over and over the Brix will fly up and the smell is gonna get much stronger, which is how you squeeze out more terpenes by the very end when concentration is already high usually. She's kept the same smell since mid flowering basically, aggressive piney and earthy tone with bubblegum body, that now got creamier and rounder. Brix at 14 atm, popping amber and the moon is waxing, so I'm taking her tomorrow if I suddenly don't change my mind. The other Bubba has 4-5 days left at best.

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:smokin2:
 
When not feeding, and the brix goes high, do you notice if the buds are shrinking any, like is that even possible for them to lose weight? My hydro attempts at high brix so far is a total wash out save for the knowledge I accumulated along the way, lol, but it is likely that due to my need to feed regularly just to keep the media from drying out, high brix was never possible for me, at least not w/o making other changes that I didn't already consider.

Also, did you ever determine what kind of deficiency that was? I remember you were somewhere between Cal or Mag, my guess is P, but I honestly don't know and would like to.
 
Skybound said:
When not feeding, and the brix goes high, do you notice if the buds are shrinking any, like is that even possible for them to lose weight? My hydro attempts at high brix so far is a total wash out save for the knowledge I accumulated along the way, lol, but it is likely that due to my need to feed regularly just to keep the media from drying out, high brix was never possible for me, at least not w/o making other changes that I didn't already consider.

Also, did you ever determine what kind of deficiency that was? I remember you were somewhere between Cal or Mag, my guess is P, but I honestly don't know and would like to.
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Actually cells are bursting, cause they late in flower and you can see insides of some calyxes :) Plant is transpiring water though, so in theory you should have lower percentage of water in cells when you chop.

This deficiency was something K/Mg related not P definitely, cause otherwise that kind of bud would be impossible. It's mostly due to the heat, this strain has obvious limits and I went too far.
 
Brix readings are very sensitive to water content in the plant's cells. Drier tissue will always read higher. More fluid = lower concentration of solids.
So be careful of the conclusions you reach when you see the higher numbers. :Namaste:

It may also explain why it's harder to get high Brix readings in hydro ...
 
Yeah as the plant matures and she was grown properly the Brix will start to go up, but cutting off water work gives her a bit of a push. In hydro the problem is mostly lack of well established collaboration with fungi and bacteria.
 
Chem/Sour/OGK family genetics will very often be Mg/K deficient. The cure for me was to amend with 1-2 Tbs of Langbeinite in both Veg and flower mediums. Also when feeding, I use a Cal/Mag that has other micros, or at least Sulfer, Iron and Mangenese. Bloom City is what I use, it's great if you can find it.

The Lang is slow release and won't raise K levels out of ratio with high brix requirements, if not overdone. It's like the 'Head' method for soil, or a modified Lucas applied to soil.

I've done it with inputs too, but that much Mg will compact the soil and won't let it breathe as well, so something else will get borked later in flower. If amended with Lang and various types of Ca, I use Epsom & Calmag to keep them topped off, maybe 100ppm hits every other water, through the flush and even beyond - to tighten up the buds and keep the aroma. So far it's all been moving in the right direction.
 
conradino23 said:
Yeah as the plant matures and she was grown properly the Brix will start to go up, but cutting off water work gives her a bit of a push. In hydro the problem is mostly lack of well established collaboration with fungi and bacteria.
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Well, I'm referring to the correlation between Brix and plant health ...

It's nice to see growers using Brix to monitor their plants, and you're one of the few that I hear from, but I haven't yet run into anyone who did it on the scale that I did. I took 2-3 readings on each of my plants, every week, for over 2 years. I figure that's somewhere in the low thousands. :cheesygrinsmiley:

I found that if I re-squished a wad of leaf, the number would rise. I'd take a medium sized leaf from mid canopy, roll it up and squish out a couple drops, take a reading, re-roll the wad, and immediately squish a couple more drops and take another reading. The 2nd read was almost always higher. :hmmmm: The 3rd was usually higher still. I might get readings of 12/13/14 from one sample. If you go back to my early journals, you'll see that I always listed the number that way ... 12/13 or 13/15, etc.

If I took a leaf from a plant that didn't look vibrant and healthy, I might get a 15. Huh? So I'd find a better sample - a glowing perfect leaf - and I'd get the 12 I was expecting, and ignore the 15. The first sample was drier than the second. Same plant.

Brix doesn't always correlate with plant health. A dry plant isn't a healthier plant, no matter how high the Brix reading from the sample. So I'm just cautioning about the conclusions you might make about water deprivation. The dissolved solids are only higher because the fluid level is lower.
 
Yeah I'm not making any conclusions about the health, in fact I know this plant has suffered a bit. I also don't think there's much of a proof of how Brix help with pest control. But I can definitely see correlation between Brix, terpenes and smoothness of taste and that's what I'm shooting for: better quality produce.

The thing is you have to have the proper procedure to get the right measure. Sample has to be tried in the first 60 second after plucking, the temperature shouldn't exceed 25C and the time of the day has to be always the same, so I'm not surprised you got higher Brix with consecutive reading.

Brix can be affected by many factors, high levels of calcium and right levels of potassium are one thing. But it's enough to stop watering and nutrient density will go up. However I haven't seen a case in which you can go from 9 to 15 just by manipulating the moisture in soil. It's usually 2-3 points more that you can add up to your count and usually you already have to be in HB zone.

Anyway after drying water will evaporate from the buds anyway, but the moment in which you chop is important, cause the plant doesn't move sugars after that, so it's better to push up Brix as far as you can before harvest imo.
 
Yes, dissolved solids don't transpire. And they don't escape in the drying process.

Same amount of solids in less fluid = higher Brix with no difference in plant health or quality.
 
WOW! This is a great convo jumping off right now. I wish it happened 3 months ago, and I wish you guys (back then) were on my Hydroponix thread as I needed these insights and I could have likely made better decisions or came up with formulations that would be more likely to be successful. I've been doing a lot of feeling around in the dark, trying to learn Doc's method and do my best to emulate it in hydro. In all of my toils, I only got my brix up to 7 from 4/5. Last week I tried a 3 day "cat Drench" formulation that was very rich in NH4+ and low in K. I ran that for only 3 days and contracted a wicked Ca deficiency, lol. I think I'm about done trying to achieve "high brix" in hydro now, I pissed up that rain pipe for long enough.

That's a great point about water content versus nutrient density. I would think that by taking in more nutrient water that more density would be the result, but I guess not. I think I'm going to revert back to my old feed chart and hope to regain my lost weight. FWIW, I find my smoke to be super sweet and smooth and I believe it's from my ability to individually target my elements which then allows me to ensure nothing in my water is at toxic levels. Comparative to other nute lines, my K and N is greatly diminished and as a result I'm not pushing too hard.
 
CareStaker said:
I stopped testing after I found it too cumbersome. Now I'm just testing the old fashioned way. :hookah:
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The problem of testing the leaves is that unlike fruit & veg you don’t have any real idea about the density of the produce, which is flower. You can definitely see the movement of sugars throughout the plant and I learnt to recognise nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus levels from the colours and blurriness, but in the end it’s about how this smokes gets you high and what the organoleptic qualities of it are, which is much more about personal taste and expectations than actual science and I’m down with that :thumb:

Skybound said:
WOW! This is a great convo jumping off right now. I wish it happened 3 months ago, and I wish you guys (back then) were on my Hydroponix thread as I needed these insights and I could have likely made better decisions or came up with formulations that would be more likely to be successful. I've been doing a lot of feeling around in the dark, trying to learn Doc's method and do my best to emulate it in hydro. In all of my toils, I only got my brix up to 7 from 4/5. Last week I tried a 3 day "cat Drench" formulation that was very rich in NH4+ and low in K. I ran that for only 3 days and contracted a wicked Ca deficiency, lol. I think I'm about done trying to achieve "high brix" in hydro now, I pissed up that rain pipe for long enough.

That's a great point about water content versus nutrient density. I would think that by taking in more nutrient water that more density would be the result, but I guess not. I think I'm going to revert back to my old feed chart and hope to regain my lost weight. FWIW, I find my smoke to be super sweet and smooth and I believe it's from my ability to individually target my elements which then allows me to ensure nothing in my water is at toxic levels. Comparative to other nute lines, my K and N is greatly diminished and as a result I'm not pushing too hard.
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No you can’t raise Brix by watering. In fact plant will always show higher reading the farther it is from the watering. 3-4 days after watering is when the Brix are the highest on average in my personal experience for the reasons we’ve mentioned above.

But it’s not only about reducing the water content. That’s the obvious after effect, however a number of things happens simultaneously. Nitrogen uptake is being reduced together with phosphorus and potassium, which pushes the plant to transport the nutrients from the bottom, where growth is not necessary. Dry root zone then stimulates movement of micronutrients such as calcium, magnesium and so on to combat the effects of “drought”. Transpiration stress comes in and pushes plant into even harder work... and that work gives you the optimal produce.

I base this on the research that’s been done mostly on aromatic plants such as sweet basil, lavender, rosemary cultivated for essential oils, which is exactly what we get in a terpene basket.

Conclusion is always the same: mild water stress helps a lot with production of terpenoids. Low nitrogen and high calcium also contribute a lot.

Similar tactics is used for grape cultivation. Fertile soil brings too much comfort and plants perform best when they have nutrient limits and temperature swings that are like exercises for their “bodies”.
 
I have to revise my conclusions about K/Mg deficiency in Bubbas. As you know I’ve been experimenting with MSM, which is organic, but apparently it can burn the plants!

Because I wasn’t really sure what happened before I used the same concentration a tsp per plant diluted in compost tea to feed UD and PD and they both showed slightly burnt tips after 3 days. It does correspond with sulphur burn, so mystery’s been finally solved!

I’m gonna check how it affected the bud and if I’m convinced it was good for the taste I’ll reduce the dose next time.
 
That’s actually what I’ve been talking about beforehand.

“Effect of Soil Nutrient on Production and Diversity of Volatile Terpenoids from Plants”, E Ormeño and C Fernandez.

Effect of Soil Nutrient on Production and Diversity of Volatile Terpenoids from Plants - PMC

Terpenoid production (emission and storage) within foliage plays direct and indirect defensive and protective functions for the plant, mediates complex trophic relationships and controls the oxidation capacity of the atmosphere. Both biotic and ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

2.2. What Ecological Theories Anticipate

In the early 1980s, attention began to be focused on the role of nutrient resource availability in terms of the costs and benefits of producing carbon-based metabolites such as terpenoids. This attention resulted in 2 resource allocation theories used for predicting allocation of carbon and nutrient resources for the production of carbon-based defense compounds, especially phenolics and terpenoids. The carbon-nutrient balance hypothesis (CNBH) presumes that carbon and nutrient availability in the plant environment determines the production of metabolites. When nutrients, especially nitrogen, are highly scarce, a plant will allocate proportionately more of an abundant resource, such as carbon, to the acquisition of the scarce resource and to the synthesis of defensive compounds [14]. This was based on the observation that limited nutrient resources curtailed plant growth, rather than photosynthesis [15], resulting in an excess of carbohydrates. Under such conditions, the CNBH asserts that the excess of carbohydrates is not used for growth but provides, instead, an additional substrate to synthesize defense secondary metabolites. This theory considers that carbon-based defense compounds have no cost since they do not directly compete with growth, because their synthesis is achieved through an excess of carbohydrates.

The growth differentiation balance hypothesis (GDBH), also referred to as “excess carbon hypothesis”, assumes that there are 3 types of balance between growth and terpenoid production. Whenever all required resources for growth are available, that is under soils rich in nutrient resources, the theory prescribes that growth (e.g. cell division, biomass production), will be favored over differentiation (e.g. cell maturation and production of defensive compounds) [16-18]. As nitrogen becomes scarcer and not optimal, differentiation will predominate, and consequently terpenoid accumulation or emission will increase at the expense of growth, since the plant allocates proportionately more of an abundant resource, such as carbon, to the acquisition of the scarce resource and to the synthesis of defensive compounds. Finally, under limiting nutrient conditions, both primary and secondary metabolisms are at their lowest levels.
 
Man, that's alot of reading... Can I get a condensed version?????? in simple man's version?????????? By that I mean all words under 5-6 symbols? If not,,, guess I'm going to have to really read it??????

JK my friend..........
 
I'm gonna try :)
 
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