Danner's DWC UC White Widow Journal - 2013

[Danner]

Hi all! Thanks for dropping by to take a look at my first grow journal. To start off with I'll give a little background as far as my experience goes then I'll get into my setup and the grow.

I started growing just a few months ago, with this grow being my 4th grow (3rd grow is currently in 6th week of flower). First grow ended disastrous with a bug problem I never dealt with. All but one plant died around the 6-7th week of flower (almost made it lol). Second grow was moderately successful taking 8 plants in soil to harvest under the 1000w and harvesting roughly 1/2 lbs. I say successful just cuz I didn't kill any plants lol! The 3rd grow I decided to dive into the world of hydroponics and at the same time try out Bassman's recipe for defoliation and supercropping. That grow is coming along and is in 6th week of flower. Only problem is I've been battling a bad case of powdery mildew with that grow, which has become a daily battle of plucking infected leaves and spraying with PM Wash. It's a total pain in the ass, but I just can't bring myself to scrapping the grow after all the work I've put into it!

So that brings me to my current grow. I started off with a 4x4 tent and a 1000w HID light and have expanded to the following:

Veg Tent: 4x4 tent w/ 400w MH and 27 gallon 6 spot DWC tote w/ 70 liter air pump
Flower Room #1: 5x7 room w/ 1000w HPS and 4 bucket DWC UC system
Flower Room #2: 4x8 tent w/ 2 600w HPS and 6 bucket DWC UC system w/ 20 gallon control res

This grow started in the veg tent in the 6-spot DIY DWC tote and will be moving to 4x8 tent and the DIY DWC UC system I built and will be under 2 600w HPS lights.

I started off sprouting 6 feminized White Widow seeds from Attitude Seed Bank around the end of March. Once sprouted I transplanted to plastic cups in dirt until sturdy enough to transplant to the 6" net pots and the tote in the veg tent, which occurred on 03/30. I experienced pretty slow growth at first due to low water temps (I think). Once they started some decent growth (around the middle of April) I hit them with the first topping and defoliation. My plan is to defoliate and top one more time before I move them into the flower tent, which needs to be ASAP due to them out growing the tote they are currently in. Anyway, here's a break down of everything I'm using in this grow and some pics and dates that will bring this grow current:


4x8 Tent
2-600w HPS
1 450 cfm exhaust fan
1 200 cfm intake fan
DWC UC system: 20 gallon control res w/ (6) 5-gallon buckets (total of 38 gallons to bottom of 6" net pots)
connected by 2" pvc and uniseals w/ 550 gph water pump and 110L/hr air pump
Nutrients: GH FloraNova Grow & Bloom
GH Floralicious Plus
GH KoolBloom
Rapid Start Root Enhancement
Superthrive (as needed)
Silica

March 29th

Transferred to DWC tote - March 30th

March 25th - Right before first defoliation and topping

March 25th - After defoliation and topping

May 7th

DIY DWC UC System

DIY DWC UC System

DIY DWC UC System

DIY DWC UC System

So there it is, hoping for the best. I plan on one more defoliation and topping before switching to 12/12 (currently on 18/6). I took clones from each plant during the first topping and put them under 12/12 to determine sex. Clones have rooted but not shown any preflowers yet. I have my fingers crossed for 6 for 6 females. If that actually happens I'll be buying myself a lottery ticket that day lol!

 

[Danner]

I was hoping to have these transferred out of the veg tent and into the flower tent early this week, but just haven't had the time to finish the tent up. I spent the better part of 2-weeks building the under current system and just now have gotten it done. Now I have to put the rest of the tent together (i.e., lights, fans, vents, etc..). The system took so long to build due to persistent leaks I was dealing with. I finally scrapped half the buckets and got 3 new ones. It's a total nightmare taking this thing apart and putting it back together with the pvc and uniseals. I've found out using such large uniseals is completely dependent on the hole that you cut for them; it needs to be a perfect 3" hole, deburred using some sort of blade, and then finally lightly sanded. Even after doing this I still had one minor leak that went away after about a day. So finally I can move on to getting the rest of the tent ready.

Since I didn't mention my feeding schedule above I figured I'd throw that in here. After transplanting the seedlings into the 6" net pots I let them recover from the transplant with just plain tap water (no R/O water). After several days I started adding the nutes, first @ 300 ppm and bumping that up by 100-200 ppm every 2-3 days until I'm at 1200 ppm. They haven't shown the slightest bit of nute burn at all, so once transferred I'll probably keep bumping ppm's up to see how much this strain can take. After that it's just a matter of adding back PH'd water when needed. I've only changed res water once. Now that they're really starting to take off with some good growth and drinking a good amount of water, I'll be changing res every 10-days or so. I maintain PH between 5.6-6.0, but with the GH ForaNova line of nutes, there's really not too much adjustment that ever needs done as it stays pretty steady around 5.8. PH usually stabilizes after 24 hours of a new res.

So anyway, the plan from here is to get them transferred to the new system by this weekend. Once transferred I'll continue to vegge for another week or so, give them one more topping and defoliation, and do some bending to start getting them bushing out for me once they have enough room. I've applied the same basic formula to the girls I have in flower right now (a Gods Gift & Aurora) and they're about 20" tall and at least 2' across with bud sites galore! The only thing different I'm going to do is keep the bottoms a little more trimmed during the stretch period. A problem I ran into during the stretch using this method is that the plants become absolute leafy monsters with foliage galore and it becomes extremely difficult controlling RH with that much foliage, especially since I don't have a dehumidifier (an item I'll be picking up as soon as some extra funds become available). Thus the reason I'm now battling powdery mildew on a daily basis with that grow. I'm tellin' ya, once that shit crabs a hold there's no getting rid of it! It becomes a matter of containment rather than eradication, so I'm praying to the cannabis gods that I won't be dealing with it on this grow!

 

[Truth Seeker]

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[Danner]

I have to apologize for totally flaking out on this journal. Though my intention was to document this grow through this journal, I never could find the time. Anyway, I just finished harvesting this grow and figured the least I could do was update with some photos and report on the results. It was definitely not without problems but I was able to deal with them and come out with a respectful harvest.

Though I started off with the intention of defoliating throughout the grow, I abandoned that plan a little into flower. I did defoliate in veg and partially defoliated in flower (out of necessity) due to PM problems again. My last crop was pretty badly affected by PM, but with this one I found a strategy that worked out pretty well and the final product shows very little trace of any PM. Instead of spending $20/qt on PM Wash, I just used high PH'd water every day at lights on. It was a pain in the ass but it virtually eliminated the PM.

So here's some pics of the grow. Final dried weight was just shy of 2 lbs at 860 grams! By far the best results of my 4 grows.

Approximately 4th week of flower

Just before harvest

 

[Carol Vining]

what yield did you have?

 

[Danner]

Just shy of 2 lbs. (30 ounzes)

 

[Carol Vining]

couple of questions how much grow in the last 4 to 6 weeks? Did you average 5 oz per plant?

 

[Danner]

Yeah with 6 plants the average is 5 oz per plant, but in reality there were two plants that were upwards of 7 to 8 oz and a couple that were down around 3 to 4 oz. I would say by the 4th to 6th week of flower the buds were as big as they were going to get. The last couple weeks the spend ripening.

 

[Carol Vining]