Donpaul.p's Latest 400 Watt HPS Grow

[donpaul.p]

@GiGa, not sure on the hermie autos mate, not happened to me yet but autos dont rely on 12-12 so might take more than light shock to make them go hermie,
i could do with one going hermie to get me some fem pollen though,
@pierce, wonder why that auto hermied outdoors, was it a femenised auto or regular auto,

it sounds like that p chunk was a bad batch by the sounds of it but if others had problems they either bought them as single seeds and didnt say anything as it was just one seed, as you bought more you would notice more if their was a problem, we all know some seeds dont germinate,
i just got a dragon fire strain i think its called, ill check tomorrow, but i planted it over 2 week ago and it never grew, i dug down to throw the seed out and plant another thinking it sprouted and died but it never sprouted so i took a sharp knife and ran it around the edge of the seed, i think the seed casing was to hard and water was not getting in, so i scraped it all the way around the edge and replanted it a few ml below soil level, within 36 hours it had grown and was poking out the soil, ive had to do this twice now, once with one of my own crosses and now this seed, if the seed dont grow but its cracked open then i throw them but if they are still sealed after 10 days then i just scrape around the edges and replant, it allows the water to penetrate and then it grows, i read this in a grow book i got a while back,

the method they used though was putting the seeds in a match box with some sand paper and give it a good shake to scuff the seeds, but i found running a sharp knife around the edge just scraping a tiny amount off is enough to let moisture in,
i wonder if this was the problem you was having with these p chunk seeds, maybe the shell was to hard, its happened twice to me,
i got the mazar seed also but not planted it yet, ill grow that next time round

my purple cheese auto is ready for harvest, 1 seed fell out the plant today so its flowered about a week longer than it should of done and no sign of it going hermie, i might harvest most of it and leave a couple of buds on the plant and see if it does go hermie,

hopefully 1/4 of the seeds will be auto

so i should have
gdp cross purple cheese autos once i grow out a male and female thats auto and cross them with each other,
ill also have gdp cross purple cheese none auto from the seeds that dont turn out auto, again ill cross a male and female with the best traits,
the other bud on the plant was given fem pollen from ak47 cross uk cherry cheese, again hopefully i can get an auto from this and cross it with another auto to get me auto seeds, hopefully fem auto if i can get one to hermie in late flower,

so it will be something like
gdp cheese auto
gdp cheese regular

not sure what to call the other cross, need something short and easy to remember,
once ive crossed these seeds from this auto ill stop crossing plants for a while, ive not had chance to grow all of the crosses out yet and i got a lot to be working with for future grows,

i got 3 kc45 regulars growing the one is growing really quick, its not started flowering yet either so looks like another good yield from this kc45 if its female, if not it will be used to collect pollen from due to how fast its growing, its over 2 weeks old and not showing sex yet so its doing ok compared with other kc45s grown under 20-4 and 24-0, all showed sex around 2 weeks under them schedules

 

[TaylorMade420]

sounds like some interesting crosss mukker, im struggling big time with temps just now, only running 600w and reaching temps of nearl 100f if i dont have the light on the seedlings will stretch like crazy, cant win either way lol

 

[miwa]

temp in my g r = 90s for last 8 days..hum = 40%...got 2 fans going..as long as hum is low and high air flow..everythings good...

 

[mcloadie]

sounds like some interesting crosss mukker, im struggling big time with temps just now, only running 600w and reaching temps of nearl 100f if i dont have the light on the seedlings will stretch like crazy, cant win either way lol

Mines runnin at 88-90 F.

 

[GigaGrew]

sounds like some interesting crosss mukker, im struggling big time with temps just now, only running 600w and reaching temps of nearl 100f if i dont have the light on the seedlings will stretch like crazy, cant win either way lol

i would have dropped down to a couple of hundred watts of cfls to ride out this heatwave. also if in veg you could try putting your air intake pipe inside a freezer and leave its door open enough to allow the airflow, not very efficient but doesnt involve buying an air con and the plants wont mind a little humidity in veg. =)

 

[miwa]

cfls is the way to go..

 

[JamesTheGreen]

OK Don, I Am SUBBED, Although Me Thinks, I May Have Subbed Before, But That Cannot Be, As I Never Get This Journal Popping Up When I Get E-Mailed That Some One Has Written Something To One I Am Subscribed To??? Pretty Weird!!! I Have So Many Subscribed Threads, That I Never Actually Catch Up To Them All At Once, Especially If My Wife, Is Playing At The"You've Been On That For Hours" Game!!! So I Do As Much As I Can, When I Can, My Problem Being, I Can't Seem To Say Enough Whilst Typing. Otherwise Known As Being Long Winded!!! I Cannot Help It, I Do So Swear!!!

What Most Can Say In Three Words, Takes Me Twenty, It Is Almost A Curse, But I Do Enjoy Using The English Language So!!! That Unfortunately Is Why, I Take So Long(IF EVER) Getting Caught Up, And Yes I Do Berate My Self For It!!!

BTW Don, I Like Your Idea For Getting Seeds With Extremely Hard Shells To Open By Lightly Peeling Away The Outer Skin, That Is A NEW ONE FOR ME!!! I Have Several OLDER Land Race Strains That Have Not Been Opening The Last Few Times I Have Tried To Get Them To, Maybe Your Trick Will Work!!! I Have Several Land Race Sativas(OAXACAN,PUNTA ROJA,COLOMBIANS,GUERRERO GOLD,ETC), They Are Old, But It Would Be So Cool To Get Them To Open Up!!! Well Take Care All, Sorry For The Long Windedness?!? SINCERELY, JAMESTHEGREEN.

 

[donpaul.p]

its good to hear from you james, im like you tend to write a whole page instead of a few lines of words, but thats just me and i guess its just the way you are as well,

the seed idea was something i read in an old european grow book i got, it was written by one if the UKs biggest growers who grew millions of £'s of bud each year, the method he used was the match box method, put some sand paper inside a match box and put a few seeds in, then give it a good shake and this scuffs the outer shell and allows moisture in, when i had seeds that would not pop even after 2 weeks under ground i decided to scrape them with a knife, so i carefully scraped around the edge of the seed, not enough to open the shell but enough just to shave a tiny outer layer off, then 2 days later the seed had grown above ground so clearly some seed shells are just to hard and moisture cant penetrate, could be possibly due to old seeds or maybe seeds that was harvested at wrong time, not really sure why they are to hard to be honest but ive had it happen twice and used knife twice and the seeds then grew.

im sure you subbed before as well, im pretty sure you commented on this journal as well james a while back so not sure why you wasnt getting any msgs saying about new comments, all you can do is see how it goes now, might work this time round. its good to see you around the site my friend.

it sounds like we are all struggling with the temps, ive had to raise my hps a good 5 or 6 inches to keep the heat off the plants as the leaves where starting to cup up on the tops of the plants, luckily i can leave my grow door open during the lights on period so i stick a big fan on a chair and leave the door open and fan running on high to push fresh air into the room as quick as the fan can blow it, the only down side is the plants are starting to stretch due to the hps been raised to high, cfls might of been the better option here as i know for a fact my temps where much lower when i was using cfls,

i dont have issues with temps in my small veg room but i only got 4 x 30watt cfls in their so thats not suffering with heat, that door i can keep shut with no fan and temps are not an issue in their,

the seeds dried from the purple cheese auto so i planted a few of the new seeds from the cross i made,
i planted 2 x gdp cross purple cheese auto and 2 x ak47 x uk cherry cheese fem pollen cross with the purple cheese auto,

seeds had dried for a few days before planting and all have now sprouted above ground, it will be interesting to see if any of them turn out auto or not, i got a poor yield off the purple cheese auto, possibly an 8th in total and it was grown under 17-7till harvest, so yield was very poor, all the lower buds gave me seeds, i harvested the top of the auto first and the bottom i just harvested yesterday and is drying so the seeds fall out once dry,

so ill see what these seeds turn out like and try and do some crossing to produce a gdp cheese auto and a none auto strain with the gdp cross, hopefully that will give me a nice strain to work with.

im quickly running out of room in my flower room, i was hoping id have 1 or 2 males but when you dont want males you get males then when i want a male i dont even get 1, all my plants are females, so my room is full, not sure what im going to do at the minute, might need to set up a cfl room for 2 of the plants just so i got some room in the hps room, the plants are starting to stretch a bit much though now as i have had to raise the hps, its pretty shocking how much difference the light makes when its raised from 1ft up to 2ft from the tops of the plant, node spacing is getting pretty big now, my 2ltr dwc hempie is huge, never wanted it to get his big but it loved the 17-7 schedule, well all the plants seemed to like it,

next go round ill try 16/8, another grower called jon has used 16-8 and said he get good results with that schedule and he only usually uses 18-6 or 16-8, so ill reduce my veg time by an hour and add an hour to the dark period and see how the plants do under 16-6.

so alls going well, temps are crazy high but we moan when its cold then we moan when its hot, but im not a summer person, i prefer to be cooler, theirs only so many layers of clothing you can take off before the neighbours start thinking your some kind of naturist, at least if its to cold you can put more clothes on.

ill take some pics and get an update done tomorrow, still not had time to make any hash yet, going to try the ice water method but not the bubble bag method, ill give the stir and settle method a try, seems a good option and very easy to do without using bubble bags, quality may not be as good but quantity should make up for it,

 

[TaylorMade420]

mate your crosses sound amazing if i ever try autos i wanna try yours

 

[donpaul.p]

well all i can do for now is grow these seeds out, pick out the autos, collect the pollen from any autos from the gdp cross auto purple cheese and store this until i get female auto grow from that batch of seeds, hopefully crossing the auto pollen with a female auto should then give me 100% auto seeds.

at least thats what im hoping, not tried crossing autos with autos yet so this will be my first try with autos, plus i know the seeds from the ken estes gdp male cross with purple cheese auto fem will only produce around 1/4 auto seeds, so ill need to grow a few seeds out to pick out the autos and collect pollen, once i done that i can turn a whole plant to see to produce several hundred auto seeds.

plus ill be working with the none auto gdp cross purple cheese auto, as most the seeds will be none auto ill need to pick the best male and female from the batch and cross then with each other and see what results i got, im just hoping that the gdp and purple cheese will give some nice results, the purple cheese auto buds are stinking the place out, their drying and the sooner they go into jars the better, its by far the stinkiest bud ive grown so far, not quite a true cheese smell but certainly a really strong smell, so im hoping ill end up with a very nice gdp cheese auto and a very nice gdp cheese regular, hopeefully some of the gdp traits will come out in the cross somewhere so fingers crossed it should work out ok.

it will take a while but im sure it will all work out ok.
the other seeds its giving me is fem seeds from fem pollen, but the pollen is from a really nice fem strain so the fem seeds from this cross should be good as well, not sure what to call it though as i cant write ak47 x uk cherry cheese fem pollen cross with auto purple cheese,

i just wish i knew what the breeders had called the ak47 x uk cherry cheese, i got sent 10 seeds as a sample so i could grow and write a review on the strain, its a really nice strain and i was down to my last 2 seeds, luckly i had a male and a female so i crossed them to produce more seeds of that strain, so again that ak47 x uk cherry cheese fem pollen put on the purple cheese auto should give me some nice results, the ak47 x uk cherry cheese was also a very stinky strong strain so its why it was chosen to cross with the purple cheese auto,

the gdp male was chosen because i grew out a few gdp males and didnt even get 1 female, so kept the best male alive until i found something nice to cross it with then i grew the auto purple cheese so decided that id use it from that, i guess only time will tell how the cross turns out, it will be a while until i get 100% seeds from it unless i get very lucky and the 1st 2 seeds planted turn out to be a male and female auto, but that would be like winning the lottery.

ill drop you a pm and let you know how i get on with them once i grew them out, i only planted 4 seeds due to not having much room left for plants and all 4 sprouted which was pretty shocking considering the seeds have only really been drying 2 days, i got many more seeds to get out of the buds once their dried,

 

[geturgrowon]

i popped 10 seeds all the rest are now above the cubes i had5 pineapple chunk, 3 purple paralysis, popped now seedlings 1 mazar x white rhino now a seedling and a critical jack herer now a seedling the mazar and jack were freebies from my order so popped them just incase, the pinapple chunk popped but its still not above ground either

hey taylor have u ever grown purple paralysis before ? I been looking at the strain thinking of doing it

 

[donpaul.p]

just uploading some pics,

if anyone is using bpn can you please drop me a pm as i need to discuss something with you,

 

[donpaul.p]

give me a few minutes and ill have the pics up, just uploading them now,

 

[donpaul.p]

ok.
so here is a few pics, ive only taken a few as my batt was running flat in my camera, so its just a quick update,

below is a clone now in flower, clone is from sleestack x skunk

below is the 2ltr dwc hempie, its critical seeds sensi star

below is a kerala x skunk fem

below is one of my own fem strains

below is a sensi star grown in soil, same strain as the 2ltr dwc hempie but growing totally different to the hempie, the leaves on this are much smaller, the plant is bushier but not as big as the hempie

now im growing more kc45 autos under 12-12, again their doing a whole lot better under 12-12, under 24-0 or 20-4 they would of been harvested at this height, but their not even showing sex under 12-12 and i got 3 in total growing and all are growing like crazy under 12-12, no signs of flowering on any of them, all are well over 1ft in height and under 20-4 and 24-0 they started flowering at week 2 and at roughly 3 nodes high, so again these kc45 autos are doing a whole lot better under 12-12 than any other schedule

below is a sour diesel
the plant im bending over on the right of the pot is a badly abused sleestack x skunk clone, just doing a quick experiment with that and some sever pruning, if it works then ill document it, if not i wont as its not a biggy, just something im trying

below is another kc45 auto

below is another sleestack cross skunk i think, not 100% sure id need to check when the lights are back on so lets leave this as unknown for now as i have got plants growing that are from my own crosses so this could be one of them,

below is another kc45 auto, again under 12-12 and not even showing sex yet, under 20-4 they showed sex around week 2 and started flowering around week 3, ive been in 12-12 longer than 3 weeks now,

below is a monster cropped clone, its a revegged clone from my own fem strain,

as you can see im quickly running out of space, the plants just grew to quick under 17-7 might have to set up a cfl flower room and put a couple in their, my plants have not got this big before this quick before, could of done with going to flower a bit sooner but more growth means more bud but also means lack of space

i can see some space, right at the back, time to reorganize the grow room when the lights come back on

 

[DharmaBud]

I know you probably already know this, and I should know better than to ask, but couldn't you do a little lst and topping to fill in the other side from where it's leaning to?

 

[donpaul.p]

yep, looks like thats the next plan of action, i need to pull all the plants out and give the room a good clean as i like to do this every few weeks to prevent bugs or anything like that so i can then trim some plants as a couple need some leaves removing to let light into the rest of the plant but didnt have much time to do this before the light went off as i got back late,

so tomorrow ill pull them out and defol only a small amount to open the plants up then ill try and move the pots around to even them out a bit, but i think your spot on with the lst, its my only option at this point, im to far into flower for any other type of training so lst is about all i can do, i do have around 450 actual watts of cfls i can use in another room if needed so i could take 1 of the big plants out and put that under cfl and that will free up some space,

the problem is i was counting on having at least 2 males, but when you want males you dont get them, so this time everything from the regular seeds turned out fem so thats left me with a full room,

so ill have a play around tomorrow and get the plants moved around a bit, i might be able to free up space by moving them around and having pots in different places, but i should be able to use some lst to pull the plants in a direction that gives me more room as some of the plants are pretty crowded and leaves from one plant are on top of leaves from another plant and this makes them sweat so i got to do something before i get any pm issues,

lst is really about my only option without removing a plant from the grow room, most of them have now finished stretching so their just going to bulk up now so i should get away with some minor lst

 

[DharmaBud]

Sorry DP, I thought the Sour Diesel was still in veg, or I wouldn't have mentioned topping.

 

[donpaul.p]

no everything in flower, the problem was i have got the hps raised about 10 inches higher than normal, so with it been that high during the start of 12-12 the plants stretched more than i wanted to, so id normally be ok with plants at this age but node spacing is further apart due to the light been raised because of the heat wave we been having, so if they never stretched id of been ok,

im pretty sure ive got enough room, they stopped stretching now and buds are forming so i should be able to move plants around and do some minor lst and get them back under control, i could even take 1 or 2 plants out that are still in early flower and put them back into veg until these are done,

i didnt plan on having this many females, thats whats caused the problem, every single plant i planted turned out female,

not a huge problem but ill have a sort out tomorrow and move the pots around, some of the plants have just stretched which has opened them up so i should be able to use some lst to pull some of the branches back in a bit,
ill get it sorted tomorrow.

on the plus side big plants means bigger buds, bigger buds means bigger yield

 

[DharmaBud]

That's why I plan to follow a routine I saw on u-tube. He bent the main stems over and kept topping, then he would snap certain branches over, careful not to break the exterior wall, and laid them over the blank spots. As he went to flower, he had a nice bush 5 ft in diameter with all buds exposed to light, none hiding under a canopy.

 

[JamesTheGreen]

You Know What Concerns Me Don, Is What You Said About Only Getting An 8th Of Herb Off That Top?!? That Kinda Scares Me, I Know You Must Be Going For A Size Increase,Right? With An Auto Flowering Period? Right Now I Am Just Guessing, So If I Sound A Fool, Sorry!!! I Know That Depending On Where One Lives, Plays A Huge Part In How They Grow.

I Wish You Could Grow In The Full Sunlight, In Our Climate, Someday Don, I Think That It Would Blow Your Mind!!! It Did Mine, The First Time We Did It, Legally Of Course, It Is Just Strange To Ponder Sometimes?!? Outside Off The Wife Being Sick, It Is A Good Life. Living In The Woods Does Something To A Person, Hard To Explain. Like Knowing That YOU, Have To Count On YOU!!! Anyways, I Am Blathering, So I'll Stop, Just Wanted To Say Hello To One And All!!! Take Care. SINCERELY, JAMESTHEGREEN!!!