Fools Rush In: Newbie's Adventures In Suboptimal Conditions

My mind keeps thinking bout the 12 days then flower from seed. So say 2 days 2 germ another 2 to pop from soil. That leaves 8 days which is crazy and I'm cracra. I mean would you even bother with veg nurtrients? Maybe 1 feed at day 5 cause I imagine they grow like crazy. Still a misstep like mime you are screwed cause already in flower. Transplanting in flower is scary. Idk I just wanna grow and as many strains as I can. So I look at the seed bank I got off of almost daily. Seeing all the pretty bud colors and reading bout em. Its an obsession I wish I could quit my crap job n just grow sweet buds as many types as possible 24/7.
 
Owe also how do you know they are still alive crawling around. I mean I use to ad worms always find em under planters when outside grow. I would scoop and add always wondering is that 1 that escaped? Doubting it cause a worm finding drain hole and crawling thru be well tuff for worm. Plus indoors I dug out old soil once and found the biggest worm. I mean stretched out hell huge. Must been living for months eating whatever after grow. But yea how do you know they are still there cause I was shocked to find the mega worm still living till I dug around.
 
I introduced worms only to my final pots which are 8 gallons and 13 gallons in size. From memory I put half a dozen red wriggler worms from my worm farm into each container. I didn't know how they would do and I was surprised that after a full grow and sitting idly by the side of house waiting for the next grow season where the soil was getting quite dried out, that when I added some amendments to the pots I discovered there were still worms in the soil, I found up to 50 worms in one of them. My pots are heavily drilled out with extra holes and lined with a breathable landscaping fabric so the soil is quite contained in the pots unless they wanted to escape from the top.

There is not really any way of knowing whether the worms are surviving until you check the soil after harvest. I just put them in to see what happened as my soil is all organic and presumably good for them.
 
Just making a little note for myself regarding lighting.

@McRib and @carcass (in his journal) have both pointed out the lack of top-down lighting. Carcass suggested angling the top panels downwards slightly, at a 75 degree angle. I have definitely seen this done before but continue to wonder how necessary it is.

With the lux meter sensor pointing upwards (i.e. to detect how much light is coming "down"), the leaves are getting about 10000 lux. Less than what they get from the sides directly (12k-15k) but still a significant amount!

I wonder what to look out for in the plants themselves to test the necessity of top-down lighting. Unwanted stretching perhaps?
 
syenite said:
I wonder what to look out for in the plants themselves to test the necessity of top-down lighting
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You may not get much upward growth... while it is true that you don't need them to get too tall-you also don't want them to get so wide that you run out of space- that wouldn't be bad for a single plant,but with 3
plants,each one is limited to 1/3 of the floorspace in there.
In a 2x2, that's 1.33sq.ft. per plant,and that's not very much once they start growing.
 
carcass said:
You may not get much upward growth... while it is true that you don't need them to get too tall-you also don't want them to get so wide that you run out of space- that wouldn't be bad for a single plant,but with 3
plants,each one is limited to 1/3 of the floorspace in there.
In a 2x2, that's 1.33sq.ft. per plant,and that's not very much once they start growing.
Click to expand...

Beautiful! Thank you. I will monitor their height through veg. Luckily these are photos so I can course-correct if necessary.


Yeah I'm working with 2 cubic feet including the pot! I should say that the intent ultimately is to only have 1 plant in there. A reality TV show in which the weakest get booted out of the box over time...
 
Alright @McRib @carcass @FelipeBlu ...

Behold the steeple!

Oh I like that name. Like a cathedral. A cardboard cathedral.

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So after all your feedback, I realised the central tension I was struggling with. On the one hand, side-lights are great for keeping plants compact during veg, in preparation for flowering stretch i.e. the good kind of stretch.

On the other hand, side-lighting is also about maximising the vertical canopy, therefore I should also want my plants to not be too short before flip.

This is a tough game to play.

So thanks to @carcass ' comment about the kind of angle I would need, I went with a drawbridge approach that will let me keep the top lights angled down for now, but also allow me to raise them if and when the plant gets tall enough.

I want the whole damn cake!

:rofl:
 
Well had to get new phone my old 1 I left in the sun while staring at my plants and talking to em :D. Some words of encouragement can help em along. But damn phone got to hot still turns on just fried something so no signal. Owe well that's why I get $40 phones so if they die no biggie. Just sucks cause leaves me in a bigger debate in getting more seeds. I was looking at both gorilla and zittles myself and imagine a cross is a good yielder and tasty smoke. I got maybe a week to decide cause place I got from took about a week to get em. I can go cheap 4 reg seeds and hope for females. Just means gotta pop 2 so I can hopefully get 1 female. It's $20 for 4 seeds plus 8 shipping. I could go crazy auto I looked at or fem both from same company I got kiss Dragon. I just noticed they are definitely sensitive plants so idk. Maybe just strain I got and others be more resilient. Or I drop $60 after shipping and get more 420 fast buds they seem to handle things well. Just strains I'm growing are very sativa even the mystery chemdawg. Like to have an indica for nighty night. Till I decide I will just keep browsing all the pretty plants there are. Some are crazy over$200 for 10 reg seeds. That better be the bomb and a stressful grow.
 
Little update! For now I’ve settled into having the top panels at 80% and the bottom four panels at 30%. The tops of the plants are getting about 20000 lux.

The two bigger plants seem happy. The third node is developing on both. There is a little crinkling happening in two leaves on the biggest one, which I will keep an eye on. The little mutant is all droopy this morning and still way behind the other two. I feel it may not be cut out for the corporeal plane! But who knows. We shall see.

0E7E4859-1BAC-4512-83FC-4316F58E618D.jpeg
 
FelipeBlu said:
Did you just water? Does it take a long time for your pot to get lighter?

Whenever I see droopy plants pointing at their roots, I wonder about oxygen and drainage.
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Yeah I was wondering the same. That plant was watered/saturated/fed 4 days ago. I weigh them all twice each day, and that one has lost 98g since watering. It's got about another 100g to go before reaching the pot's approximate dry weight. So it will take another 4 days at the same rate, roughly. Which means it currently takes the plant about a week to finish up the water.
 
I have a suspicion that the little one is root bound within the peat pellet that's embedded in the soil. You can actually see the darker region in the photo that indicates the peat pellet.

I had a closer look and I could actually see some of its roots peeking just above the surface of the soil. This further reinforces the possibility of a lack of oxygen @FelipeBlu !
 
Not a netted peat pellet! :eek:
If you’re going to use peat starters, get the ones without netting, like Rapid Rooters or the like.

Your soil sounds like it doesn’t drain very fast. Cannabis loves a medium that drains fast and allows frequent exchange of fresh/waste air around the roots. You should maybe consider going with something lighter and more porous.
 
FelipeBlu said:
Not a netted peat pellet! :eek:
If you’re going to use peat starters, get the ones without netting, like Rapid Rooters or the like.

Your soil sounds like it doesn’t drain very fast. Cannabis loves a medium that drains fast and allows frequent exchange of fresh/waste air around the roots. You should maybe consider going with something lighter and more porous.
Click to expand...

Haha I did get rid of the mesh! Perhaps the peat pellet didn't "merge" with the soil properly when I transplanted?

Yeah I forgot to consider that part of the reason for the slowness was the poor winter conditions, before they were moved indoors. Now that they're in the box I can see that the rate of water/weight loss has ramped up considerably! They've been in the box for 2 full days now, so I will see what the first full wet-dry cycle is like within the box, i.e. how slow.
 
I did something. Possibly ill-advised. Remembered some discussions about "root-coring", so I poked a few holes straight down through the original root ball. Partly to provide some air channels and partly to break up the peat pellet. We'll see what happens.

Honestly I'm feeling pretty reckless about this little one. Maybe because I need a reason to boot a plant out eventually :P
 
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