Fools Rush In: Newbie's Adventures In Suboptimal Conditions

[syenite]

Interesting.. Found this on the two most prominent leaf tips on either end of Orange's second node.

Doesn't look like nute burn to me. Looks like a calcium deficiency, which itself could be a soil ph or lockout issue?

I'm not going to take any action yet. I did some soil slurry tests for ph but it's effing impossible to read the colour accurately and I can't trust that.

I have one of those fancy Bluelab soil ph pens on the way! It's an expensive toy. But I can't stand not having good information...

None of the new growth is showing any signs yet. We'll see in a day or two!

 

[syenite]

More humorless musings after reading around a bit.

Unlikely to be a calcium deficiency because the newer growth is all fine.

Could still (always?) be a ph issue. But not seeing any signs anywhere else, in any of the plants.

This could be light stress. This plant is in the centre and getting the most intense light. Those are the leaves closest to the side lights, and were the topmost leaves when first brought into the box. I guess it's good I took the lights down by 25% for now. Simple test is also to turn the plant so those leaves are no longer in the regions most exposed to light.

Everyone otherwise seems perfectly happy and drinking at normal or better rates.

We'll see.

 

[FelipeBlu]

Is it just that one spot? It could be nute splash.

 

[syenite]

It’s two spots on the same node. Middle growth too. I’m going to assume it’s an incidental thing until I see more repetition.

They are otherwise looking real pleased with themselves. Even the little one has seemed better since the root drilling incident.

Node growth has definitely slowed a bit since turning the lights down so I will be watching the internode spacing!

 

[FelipeBlu]

Monitoring is the name of the game

 

[syenite]

Monitoring is the name of the game

Reflecting a bit today. It's funny when you wake up one morning and realise you were freaking out about nothing. I guess it's also about being inexperienced - you don't know what you don't know! And so everything is a cause for worry.

Yesterday I tested the soil and runoff ph and was alarmed for both of them to be in the 4.5 - 5.5 region. But after reading more deeply I learnt that those ph values are quite common in some mixes, and that the ph buffers in the soil take care of it. After feeding (when I tested), especially, is when soil ph is lowest, and then can often be observed to drift upwards as the soil drains.

In my worry I dropped a load of cash on the Bluelab pen. But I don't think I regret it lol! It measures soil ph, soil temps and solution ph too. So I think it will come in very handy. Especially when I think about how annoying it is not to feel like my cheap ph pen is accurate, or like I'm reading the colour chart properly for the soil slurry ph test...

Hopefully I don't need to buy any more gear for a bit!

 

[McRib]

Hopefully I don't need to buy any more gear for a bit!

 

[syenite]

Sigh

 

[syenite]

Sometimes I think about what the roots are getting up to. What are they doing down there? What kinds of adventures?

The dingy streets of the root zone. The leaky buildings, the busted pavements and fractured lighting. Everything's sweaty. There's some shouting. A scuffle tumbling out into an alley. More shouting, more alarm. Too much ale over dinner. A baby wakes up in a building a few streets over and starts bawling. Is someone getting strangled?

And in the world above, a leaf somewhere begins to curl inwards..

 

[FelipeBlu]

What strain was that last night?

 

[Preston9mm]

I'll hang around if ya don't mind. LoL

 

[syenite]

I'll hang around if ya don't mind. LoL

An honour to have you aboard Preston!

Welcome to this river of accidents and angels.

 

[syenite]

What strain was that last night?

That was having had quite a lot of infused butter

 

[syenite]

the devil's lettuce,

 

[DonkeyDick]

Hey cool sciencey stuff on the grow conditions. Very detailed obs. You’ll be able to squeeze five nodes out of the first two inches, then grow them like stink after that - next time, too

Sorry also to the outdoor growers here (@Stunger, @FelipeBlu et al). I imagine things will be more interesting for y'all when the training begins!

They’re ok. Those guys all know the inverse square wotsit. If you half the distance to the light source, then numbers. It’s the same outside. You put a chair under it. Lift it up on a chair and the inverse square law applies. Makes the chair brighter. Well known fact.

Interesting.. Found this on the two most prominent leaf tips on either end of Orange's second node.

Doesn't look like nute burn to me. Looks like a calcium deficiency, which itself could be a soil ph or lockout issue?

I'm not going to take any action yet. I did some soil slurry tests for ph but it's effing impossible to read the colour accurately and I can't trust that.

I have one of those fancy Bluelab soil ph pens on the way! It's an expensive toy. But I can't stand not having good information...

None of the new growth is showing any signs yet. We'll see in a day or two!

Oh that looks like..

Is it just that one spot? It could be nute splash.

... see? They know their stuff.

Sometimes I think about what the roots are getting up to. What are they doing down there? What kinds of adventures?

The dingy streets of the root zone. The leaky buildings, the busted pavements and fractured lighting. Everything's sweaty. There's some shouting. A scuffle tumbling out into an alley. More shouting, more alarm. Too much ale over dinner. A baby wakes up in a building a few streets over and starts bawling. Is someone getting strangled?

And in the world above, a leaf somewhere begins to curl inwards..

Yes! This. Thank you! Nice.

 

[curls2cute]

Hi everyone!

I'm a beginner grower. Discovered this place earlier in the year via @Katins ' diaries of 2019! Lurked for a while and eventually gave in and created an account.

First, some context!

I stumbled onto growing by stumbling onto a curious looking seedling in our herb garden. I didn't believe my GF at first when she said she thought it looked like a cannabis plant. I was deeply excited, in a way I didn't immediately recognise.

In the beginning, I tried to suppress this excitement. I said to my GF (and myself) that I didn't have any high hopes. I moved the plant from the herb garden into some spent, store-bought soil, perforated by old, dead tomato plant roots, (yes, I know, horrifying in retrospect), and said, what will be, will be. In the meantime, in other parts of the world, a different kind of entity was beginning to grow and spread, and would be referred to widely as Covid-19.

Fast-forward a month or so. The plant was UNDENIABLY a cannabis plant. My GF and I debated how it got there. I believe that I threw one of my bagseeds into the herb garden while very stoned one day and didn't remember. She thinks it might've been the birds. Will we ever know? At this point of the story, my country decided to move into full lockdown to counter the pandemic. I started working from home. The plant was a month old, a tiny specimen, sitting on our deck, perhaps 8 or 9 inches tall. We were into autumn at this point, with temperatures ranging between 15 and 20 degrees celsius.

My mind, itching to escape the overwhelming amounts of information pouring in about the pandemic, eventually latched onto the plant for some respite. I did my first bit of active research about cannabis cultivation. One of the first facts I learnt was that my plant had germinated in the worst time of the year possible, the beginning of autumn. It also occurred to me that it's so tiny because its roots probably didn't have any space to grow in that spent soil. Heartbreak. But nothing I could do, I thought. It was also around this time that the plant started showing sex. Definitely a female.

I learnt about plant training for the first time. As she was showing the first signs that she was entering flowering, I decided that I would have one shot to try my hand at training. I did the simplest form of LST - bent her sideways. And also gave her a little defoliation.

Fast-forward to now

It's illegal to grow where I live. But the excitement I mentioned at the beginning has stretched its own roots out - I'm caught! I've invested in a little starter LED and a cabinet to start a micro, stealth grow. My accidental plant is so small, and the deck where she lives so far from the street and passers-by, that I deem her not a risk to be outside until she meets whatever end she has coming.

I will be lucky to get a joint's worth of weed from her. She is still growing in that spent, store-bought stuff. I don't have any appropriate nutes for her, so I have been feeding her some banana peel tea for P and K. It's been dropping to 8-9 degrees celsius outside at night, so I have been bringing her in at night and have fashioned her a hat to stop light exposure while she's in the house. I call her Hatty. Even though she probably won't yield me anything (much), I love her dearly, and will try to take as good care of her as I can, until the end.

While Hatty is doing her thing, nearing the end of her time, and in anticipation of the indoor gear I have coming in about 2 weeks, I have also sprouted 3 seedlings. All bagseed, all presumably from the same batch. I have 20-30 bagseeds. I will probably look to invest in some proper seeds once I've gained more experience and confidence.

I germinated them all slightly differently. 1 was soaked in water for 24 hours, then put straight into soil. 1 was soaked in water for 24 hours, and then put into a peat pellet. The last was put straight into a peat pellet. They all live on a heatmat right now.

I now have some better soil, containing peat, perlite, neem, lime and worm castings. I am waiting for the deliver of Canna Bio Flores and Bio Vega. Sadly, I can't get any Megacrop where I am. I've heard so much about it and feel like it would've been ideal for a noob like me!

My intentions and experiments

1. I would like to take care of Hatty until she's ready to be harvested

I think this is self-explanatory.

2. I would like to follow the "most optimal" route for one of the seedlings

This seedling will go into my indoor cabinet. It will be fed with the Canna Bio line. So I guess that makes them "pseudo-organic", i.e. no living soil and with derived nutrients, no matter how "organic" the source/derivation.

3. I would like to test how the other seedlings/plants cope with a temperate winter (5 - 15 deg celsius), while living indoors at night

As I only have space to grow 1 plant indoors, 2 of my seedlings will be forced to live outside, at least in part. I plan on leaving them in the sun during the day, when it's the warmest, and bringing them in when it gets dark. While in veg, I will have no choice but to leave them under ordinary house lights for the evening, after the sun has gone. There's also a possibility that I will have some spare LEDs that I can dedicate to them for the period during the day when they are inside. Who knows, maybe ultimately I can make some space for a small cardboard box to veg them in? Regardless, for now, they will be part-outdoor and part-indoor plants.

4. I would like to test some less orthodox nutrient sources (banana peel, coffee grounds, eggshells, etc.)

For my suboptimally placed plants, I would like to feed one of them with "teas" made from bananas (PK) and coffee grounds (P) that have been sitting in 1L of water for the past week. In the further future I would like to move to living soil and amending it myself.

5. I might try different (permutations/combinations of) training techniques on each of them

I haven't decided yet who-what-when.

6. I would like to learn how to water them properly

I will be trying my hardest to follow @Emilya 's advice on watering.

Summary

It's the beginning of winter here. It's too cold for cannabis plants but I'm growing them anyway. Some of my plants will get fed with improvised (ill-advised?) nutrients and some of them are in crappy soil for now. (See: "fool")

Plant 1, "Hatty", flowering in crappy soil, outside in temperate winter cold for the day, and inside at night.

Plant 2, "Baglady", in organic soil, small seedling.

Plant 3, "Desert", in crappy store-bought soil, small seedling. Will move to organic soil in final 2 or 3 gallon pot.

Plant 4, "Eponym", in peat pellet, small seedling. Will move to organic soil in final 2 or 3 gallon pot.

All bagseeds. All will live an indoor-outdoor lifestyle until my indoor growing gear arrives, at which point I will select one to be grown "optimally".

Ultimately, the strategy is to do the best with what I've got, while in some areas, indulging some ill-advised impulses, partly to get them out of my system, partly as fun experiments and learning opportunities. This is a passion project, and I am growing solely for enjoyment. Some yield for my own consumption would be a bonus!

That's all for now! If you made it to the end, thanks for reading this long introductory post!!

I love this, love the cacti in the background and would throw down fisticuffs for Hattie. My weedbaby was a surprise find too! I found it June 13th. Too funny! I'm scrambling to get everything too. I'm into the improvised feeding as well..compost tea is awesome..you just need a big jar/container, food scraps etc...and you water with it. Worth a google. You have legit plant food though, so I don't know if you should double down on food..? I can't name my baby yet..cuz I dunno what he/she is..lol. so I'm just enjoying the ride and hoping my weedbaby makes it

 

[syenite]

I love this, love the cacti in the background and would throw down fisticuffs for Hattie. My weedbaby was a surprise find too! I found it June 13th. Too funny! I'm scrambling to get everything too. I'm into the improvised feeding as well..compost tea is awesome..you just need a big jar/container, food scraps etc...and you water with it. Worth a google. You have legit plant food though, so I don't know if you should double down on food..? I can't name my baby yet..cuz I dunno what he/she is..lol. so I'm just enjoying the ride and hoping my weedbaby makes it

Hahahah yes that long list of things I was going to try at the beginning has been shortened, as my reality and circumstances have changed over time. I realised that trying too many weird things for my very first grow was just going to cause me too much stress, and probably failure lol. So I'm following the principles set by other growers, and allowing myself a little bit of space to try weirder stuff here and there.

Yeah I forgot to mention the coincidence of finding a plant in your garden when I first came to your journal. Sadly that plant has now passed on, but her bud remains! Curing. LOL. Smallest/worst outdoor grow in the history of cannabis cultivation. You can see the post(s) here.

Thankfully the current plants are under much better conditions, and I'm a world away from that in terms of knowledge now. A lot of thanks to the awesome crew here who have helped me.

 

[curls2cute]

Hahahah yes that long list of things I was going to try at the beginning has been shortened, as my reality and circumstances have changed over time. I realised that trying too many weird things for my very first grow was just going to cause me too much stress, and probably failure lol. So I'm following the principles set by other growers, and allowing myself a little bit of space to try weirder stuff here and there.

Yeah I forgot to mention the coincidence of finding a plant in your garden when I first came to your journal. Sadly that plant has now passed on, but her bud remains! Curing. LOL. Smallest/worst outdoor grow in the history of cannabis cultivation. You can see the post(s) here.

Thankfully the current plants are under much better conditions, and I'm a world away from that in terms of knowledge now. A lot of thanks to the awesome crew here who have helped me.

RIP Hattie ::::: tissues:::::: hey, mine might be the worst yet to come, I'm such a newb...I don't even have any ph meters! I do have fish tank testing supplies....wondering what this soil slurry is...and if I could use my pH test strips to check my pH until payday...going to Google it right now

 

[syenite]

RIP Hattie ::::: tissues:::::: hey, mine might be the worst yet to come, I'm such a newb...I don't even have any ph meters! I do have fish tank testing supplies....wondering what this soil slurry is...and if I could use my pH test strips to check my pH until payday...going to Google it right now

Ph test strips are totally fine to begin with to get a ballpark figure. And there's nothing wrong with a cheap ph pen as long as it actually works

Forget about the soil slurry test. Just don't think about soil ph for now. It's generally not the problem and from what I've seen it drives people crazy to think about it, like some terrible ancient curse.

As you saw, I almost succumbed to it myself.

 

[curls2cute]

Big day today for me today. It's technically my first harvest, although I hope this isn't representative of the harvests to come

A reminder of the poor stunted soul I'm dealing with, here's a pic of one of her "colas". You can infer just about everything she's been through from this photo: the winter cold, the lack of light, the re-vegging, the spent soil she was in...

By the time I knew the difference between right and wrong in growing, it was way too late for me to be able to intervene in any effective way for her. And today the curtain falls on her stage for the last time.

It was over in a flash of secateurs.

RIP Hatty - the one with nothing but the one that was also responsible for all of this, my newfound infatuation with growing!

An autopsy would confirm my diagnoses.

She was in a 5 gallon pot and this was the extent of her root system. This is what happens when you try to grow a plant in soil that's already been leeched by a tomato plant! And she even had to deal with the tomato plant's dead roots. I'd done this without thinking, knowing nothing at the time and thinking nothing of it. I assume this is a big reason her root system never got any bigger. That, and probably some poor watering habits on my part.

So I've given her buds a wash using the basic baking soda and lemon method, and they are currently hanging to dry. I'll follow the cardboard-box-to-mason-jar method for now, and will continue to read about the low-and-slow method in preparation for next time.

But, as we all know, the end of one thing is the beginning of another. Hatty is dead. Long live Hatty!

I've learnt so much already since Hatty appeared without explanation in our herb garden. I'm so pumped for what's to come!

And so the horizon of the future is laid out before me - the next generation!

According to the tracker, my LEDs have already arrived at the local depot, which is only a few hundred metres away from my house. It's taking considerable willpower to stop myself from running down there and being one of those awful entitled customers, banging on the walls of the depot, howling at the door, demanding my package be handed over to me!

Hattie lives on..I will honor her and if my weedbaby is a girl, she will be named Hattie