Frankenstein - Soil - 2 x 4X4 Scrogs by Freezy - Heavy 16

F

Freezy

Well-Known Member
Whats up guys. Sorry to those of you who followed my last journal, the girls hermied on me and I stopped posting. This time around my hopes are a bit higher. Its the same strain - Frankenstein. This time around though its no joke. Got an awesome new grow setup that I'm pumped about seeing what she produces. I just picked up two plants still in veg from a friend of mine. They just went in the room about 4 or 5 days ago.

What Strain is it?- Frankenstein
Is it Indica, Sativa or Hybrid? What percentages?- I believe its around 80% indica
How Many Plants?- 2
Is it in Vegetative or Flowering Stage?-veg
If in Vegetative Stage... How Long?-About 6 weeks
Soil grow
If Soil... What is in your Mix?- My friend mixed the soil. I believe its a little bit peat moss soil mix
If Soil... What Size Pot? - 7 gal pots
Size (Wattage) of Light? How Many?- using one 1000W right now have another for when they are being scrogged
Is it Air Cooled? yes
Temperature of Room/Cabinet?- room temp is a constant 75
RH of Room/Cabinet? RH fluctuates a bit but trying to keep it steady around 45
PH of Medium or Reservoir? Watering at 6.5 - runoff as of yesterday was 5.8
Any Pests? none (knock on wood)
How Often are you Watering?- Feeding every watering every 3-4 days
Type and Strength of Fertilizers used? Heavy 16- full strength
Size or Square Footage of Room?- Big enough for me to fit a 4x8 scrog and have plenty of room to walk around.

As I said, I just got these girls. The guy before me was feeding them full strength and every watering. Im not sure what nutes he was using. I fed them half strength on last sunday and by yesterday they showed signs of what i think is a slight deficiency, but I'm skeptic of the soil ph. I just tested the soil runoff yesterday and it was 5.8 on one plant and 5.7 on the other. Just foliar fed the girls today. I will post a few pics of the concerning signs and any input would be helpful. you can see the girls have been topped and topped again. one of them was mainlined. I am going to start lst with them to bush them out a bit to get ready for scrog. my plan is to get the two girls into their own 4x4 scrog with their own 1000W light. I hope to get this grow to be the best I have had. I would like to run a different strain but how do you pass up 2 6 week old girls.

Anyway, feedback is really encouraged! I am way more apt to doing this journal if i can get peoples 2 cents. I am not by any means as good at this as i hope to be- i have never really had a mentor or anything teach me so its all on me to just do trial and error here. Enjoy.
 
Re: 4th Grow. Frankenstein- soil 2 monster scrogs by FREEZY

Oh and BTW they get to listen to some classical music 24/7 :thumb:

ANY HELP IS MORE THAN APPRECIATED WITH WHATEVER DEFICIENCY OR ISSUE THAT IS PRESENT


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Whats up. Its been a few days since my last post figured I would update. The girls seem to be growing nicely, but they are showing more signs of what I hope is just a deficiency. Today I gave them just filtered water, and a significant amount to flush a bit out of the pots. each plant got a little over 2 gallons. My runoff is still coming out of a Ph of 5.8. Is that okay? The deficiency, or hopefully not lockout, looks like it may be something to with K.

Besides that, I tied down all the limbs today to start getting them ready for the scrog. I haven't built the scrog yet Ive been way to busy but I think Ill be able to get it done this week hopefully and start filing it out. These plant were put into flowering for a few days before I got my hand on them and I put them back into veg. since then I have had vigorous growth and the nodes are incredibly close to each other. I feel like this will make a really nice finished plant once its in the scorg. I would really appreciate any feedback about my deficiency issue. Heres some photos of the girls all tied down. Ill get some new photos when they perk back up.
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After the flush we talked about I would make a beneficial bacteria tea and add that to the soil. I will post a link below to a thread that explains a lot about it. At the very end I have posted a slightly better recipe that is great in soil. In DWC as I state you have to be more careful about the dose but the exact recipe works great for soil.

I have lately been upping the sugar I add to increase the bacteria breeding and I run it an extra 12 hours to try and really break down the crab meal and alfalfa. Every 12 hours add more sugar and keep agitating it every few hours as best you can to get the sediment off the bottom of the bucket.

I would add this a week after the flush after every things has dried out again.

So do the flush, pH it, add the enzyme...wait until it is dry, add a few cups per plant of the tea brew and top off with some more pH'd sugar and silica water. There is a lot of nutes that come in that tea you will not need to add anything for a while and the bacteria will break down stuff in the soil and make it active again. So you will just be on water for a while.


Tea Bag your DWC
 
Sound advice here.

A couple questions.
1. Is your room in a basement? If so you must insulate the floor under the pots. I use a bit of builders foam to do so. Otherwise the concrete floor will sap the heat from the soil causing nutrients to get locked out.
2. If you just disconnect the red fan from the exhaust and vent into the room does the temp go up or stay the same? For such a big room I think the best use of the fan is to put it 3 feet from the last light and vent directly into the room. We want the heat off the scrog with as much airflow as possible. Venting it into the room with that short but of hose probably won't change your temps in the room but will certainly increase airflow through the hood and make the temps over the plants lower so you can keep the 1000 very close @24"
3. I would get some bigger saucers the ones you have there have capped the bottom of the pots tightly. This will cut off oxygen to the bottom of the roots especially when wet. I bought some large green saucers that are very thick plastic online. You would love them. The 16" size will give you a lot of space with those pots. The cool thing about the green saucers is they give sizes for the bottom of the saucer. Other brands measure the top. So 16" green ones are the same as 18" clears that have angled walls.
4. Avoid hard bends in ducting they decrease airflow dramatically by creating turbulence. The air acts like it is slammed into a wall with hard turns.
5. Relocate that carbon filter to the ceiling right where the red fan is now. I am assuming that is exhausting outside. By putting the carbon filter there attached to a fan and then 1-2 feet of straight ducting you will exhaust a lot more heat from the room. Just make sure the fan is the correct speed for the filter and you are golden. If it does exhaust outside I would put a little tool shed there and have it exhaust inside that. This way there won't just be air blowing outside and you can also detect hints of small as the carbon filter gets old by opening the lid of the garden toolbox..
6. Do what village idiot recommends! He is the exact opposite of an idiot.
7. Grow giant Nuggs please.
 
hi! checked in on the grow log... still think this can be solved by adjusting the incoming pH to the upper end to pick up the magnesium before the peat drives the pH down into the basement.
 
So the deal with the lime is that is we don't grow those types of plants. Lime is a great things for yards and lawns... for things in permanent soil that will be there for years. Our plants (when done correctly) are in soil for 4 months. So there is a lot of cool things done in Horticulture that just don't apply to us because we are in and out so fast. And then we get into your situation where you have a stressed plant that may take more like 6-8 months to do it correctly. That's when you start to run into problems where things that are common knowledge outside of the world of cannabis become "tricks" to the novice grower.

So just like we want to borrow "tricks" from apple tree farmers about pruning, we are not growing the plant for multiple years in the same soil where bugs may exist. So how they treat the soil and how we treat the soil are very different.

In growing cannabis, in a decent soil, you can control the pH very easily by making sure what you add is correct. It will adjust the pH immediately and within 2 watering worst case you have fixed the pH...unless there is a disease / infection / or rotting going on in the soil.

SO

I always recommend after a flush that we dry out and recondition the soil. 1/3 of the plant is the roots so to ignore them is just stupid and sometimes futile. So the previous advice will get that soil back in line. Then we can get you back on a medium feeding schedule as you still have plenty of good fan leaves doing good photosynthesis so we don't need to back all the way off.

In the mean time we can fix the environment and then all will be good in the world.

But do not use that lime. You will be fighting it the rest of the grow. It will be a slow release of constant UP that you will have to keep adding low pH water to compensate for. That is the beginning of a downward spiral.
 
Okay. Its very frustrating that This happens to me every time I grow I do not understand why. My ph is always messed up and i don't get it I always water/feed it with 6.5 so what am I doing wrong? I have a really good ph meter that I calibrate for every grow. I thought lime with the consistency of dust would be the best way to fix it but if you say not to use it okay but i don't know what is going to get my ph up. I have a soil ph tester which i know aren't that reliable but it read 7 in my 7 solution for calibration. the ph of the soil always starts around 6.5, with a runoff of 5.8, and then a day or two later the soil pen reads a ph of like 5.

So I lifted the pots off the ground and put them on something to insulate them from the cement floor. I also got those big green saucers down at my local grow store. I adjusted the light bringing it up and I made sure my exhaust fan is working well. i will change it so that it is not dumping the air outside but instead just recirculating in the room. As far as the flush goes can i just use straight RO water? I've done a bunch of research on this and theres never a straight answer, like with everything else. I don't get how you can ph RO water, when i put as much as one drop of ph down in over 5 sometimes 10 gallons of RO water it drops to a ph of like 4 i understand why this happens but I just want the answer to can i flush with straight RO water or not. if not what am i supposed to flush with? I don't want to use my tap water its not good water. Im eager to nip this in the bud, no pun intended. :laughtwo:

also, should i use flora keen with the flush to break down any salts in there? Thanks agin this is a lot of really good info.
as far as the tea goes, there is three recipes there which one do you recommend i use and you say use sugar… I have mendocino honey will that work?
 
Its very frustrating that This happens to me every time I grow I do not understand why.
Click to expand...

I think if it were me and I was seeing consistent problems of the same kind with each grow, I would be looking hard at this soil mix my friend was mixing up. It is well known that as we reuse heavy peat based soil, the organics breaking down the peat cause the pH to dive into the basement. I think next time I would try something different, like Roots Organics Soil, that really needs no adjustment at all to grow pot... it even has the perlite already mixed in, along with a lot of the raw mineral nutrients that people use in their super soils.
 
One of my Favorite all time quotes is Benjamin Franklin's Definition of insanity..."Doing the same thing over again expecting different results". It comes in so handy on this website.

Not to worry my friend we will get you there.

Lets see where to start...hmmmm...yup as usual Emilya is correcto. For your next grow why don't we take a step back and try something totally different. 1 thing to consider is there are many styles of growing and in all honesty there is not much of a difference in time to final product or yield. I say lets get something going next time that is just plain simpler and focus on getting a solid base of growing knowledge.


But back to where we are.

If you have a consistent problem every time lets talk about what is always the same. Are you reusing pots that may be toxic? Are you reusing soil ( a lot of growers do this and if you don't do it correctly you can cause a lot of problems). I find it very hard to believe that if you take a new pot and wash it good before use AND use a clean tub to mix up a good blend (soil or soilless), and feed properly pH'd water and allow for good drainage and let it dry out between watering that you would have a problem every time. One of those things must be broken.

So I am going to go out on a limb here and say maybe you are not measuring the pH correctly in the water you are dumping in there (I do not think this is your issue but I am just going to go through everything...except washing pots :Namaste: ). It is common for people to measure pH wrong even and or especially with fancy tools that they think make it faster or easier when in fact it does not. I am going to say how I would start by proving to yourself you are doing that correctly. Start by mixing up your water in a clean washed bucket. Add the nutes or whatever and take the measurement how you always do. Then let it sit for 10 min. Then stir the bucket and take out the pH pen and take a new reading. Stir the bucket with the pen until the reading stops going down and when you stop stiring the reading goes back up. Then hold it there for a while and wait for it to stop. Lets confirm that the 2 readings are the same. If you want to really explore this get some pH test strips and do it the old school way next to confirm the second reading using a second source. Lets make sure all 3 of those readings agree. If not lets talk.

I am substantially more concerned about the medium you are using. I would not be surprised if you have decaying material in there. Once something starts to decay in there it can cause all sorts of issues. I really don't like that you dump in 6.5 and get out 5.8. That seems way to different. We can talk later about making your own soil for your next grow. For now lets talk about fixing what you have. I am betting you have something in that blend that is decaying or maybe even the rootball in there right now is diseased or dead and decaying. So you say you ran a flush. If you have flushed them properly then any bad build up of nutes and also most of any disease and rot will be removed. Then all we have to do is recondition the soil. To properly flush you want to run 5 times the soil mass in water through that minimum. I personally do it the easy way and put it in the bathtub and run water through it for a good 15 minutes, turning the pot and keeping the flow into the pot equal to the flow out and go until well after I see clear water coming out the bottom. Then I take a pre-dechlorinated and pH'd batch of water that is again 2 times the soil mass and run it through to get the pH started correctly (so if not using a bath tub, 5 times soil for flush plus 2 pH'd). If you do that correctly then you have cleaned out the soil. That does not mean that things that are decaying in there are gone just you have washed the worst of it away. Now we need to get in there with some enzymes and bacteria. The enzymes will break down decaying materials and in some cases turn it back into plant food. The bacteria do all sorts of things but one of the most important and overlooked things is wherever good bacteria are breeding bad bacteria are not.

Now you don't want to over water as that causes many problems and can actually restart this whole downward spiral again and is usually the reason to begin with. SO...the very last buckets of pHd water you run during the flush should contain a good enzyme, I like to use Hygrozyme. Then we wait until the plant shows signs of not having enough water. In your pots we are talking about a week in a good environment and the leaves will start to droop from lack of water. So at that time we want to add in the bacteria + enzyme + a low does nute. I gave you a link. At the very end of the thread after he explains almost everything I have a post. In there I give a recipe and instructions and links to all the ingredients. You said there was a bunch pf recipes. Well now at the very end are a few comments but at the end of the first page I have a post with one recipe. Follow that and add 2-4 cups per plant and then drive it in with 2 gallons of pH'd water. Wait again until the leaves show signs of lack of watering and then depending on the plants response we may just add water or we may add a very light nute dose. I say light because if you follow my recipe there is a lot of organic nutes it will get and it should be fine for a while.

Flora Kleen should be unnecessary if you have done correctly what I have described. The flush gets the worst of it and the bacteria finishes off the rest. If you want to use flora Kleen go ahead and use it with the enzyme rinse at the very end of the flush but if you flushed correctly it doesn't matter.

There you have it that is a clean root system with a restart. So as long as the air is good and humid and properly temp'd the plant will perk right up and take off I guarantee it....Unless we have toxic pots or something crazy like that.



NOW lets talk about Reverse Osmosis water.

This is something usually only Hydro guys really need to worry about. Even then I don't use it and I know many who don't. There are 2 things you need to really look out for in the water and everything else that shows up really wont hurt nuthin. You want to remove both the Chlorine and Fluoride if that is in there. Many people do not have fluoride in the water. If you do then you may want to get an RO filter. there are some cheapo filters that also claim to remove fluoride so find out if you need to and deal with that if necessary. Otherwise Chlorine evaporates out of water easily. Every time you use a bucket of water just refill it and it will be dechlorinated then next time you need water. Have enough buckets of water around so you never need to go to the tap in one watering and you will be fine. Chlorine will evaporate out of a 5 gallon bucket in 12 hours or so. If you put an air-stone in there you can get it out in less than 2 hours.

So those last 2 buckets of water you use when in flush ...they also should be dechlorinated. The flush ones don't matter like I said I run it in the bathtub straight up and actually if you have an infection it helps. But in the end you ant the roots to NOT be attacked by chlorine.

You say you have bad water from the tap ...well that sux. look up water filters for "prepers" (yo know those people who are preparing for the end of the world). You can stack 2 buckets together with a filter (like a britta or something) connecting the 2 and then you fill the top one and wait for it to filter to the bottom one. simple and cheap and gets all the crap out you are worried about.

Like these guys.

How to Make a Homemade Water Filter

Then you have easy clean water you can sit in the corner to dechlorinate.



And lastly..Yes Mendacino Honey is exactly the type of thing I am talking about. You can use that instead of Aphrodites extraction in my tea. Sugar every 12 hours to keep the bacteria breeding, stir it up every few hours getting the sediment off the bottom. So it is a 24 hour process. start it in the morning, add some sugars 12 hours later, when you get up the next day add some more, the after filtering that at the end add some more and put that in the soil.

:thumb:
 
the only problem with the above is that most tap water anymore contains chloramine, not chlorine... and it does not evaporate. If you add this stuff to an organic culture, it will kill it... that is what it is in the water for. If you want to use synthetic nutes, by all means, use tap water... it won't hurt a thing. If instead you are attempting to build up the mycorrhizal fungi and the other micro life... I have learned here that it is imperative to use purified water in any of the forms it comes to us in, spring, filtered, drinking, RO and distilled. I get mine for .79c/gal at the grocery store. I tell them at the counter how much I hate the taste of the water here, and everyone so far has given me a nod and a knowing look, and pays no attention to me walking out of the store with 10 gallons of water a couple of times a week.
 
yeah good call....but the recipe I call out only needs like 2 gallons so that is easy to get anywhere.
I always forget that because I have stellar water. 12-14 ppm out of the tap. And my bacteria teas work awesome with it.

You can get info on both the chloramine and Fluoride from the water district maybe even on their web sight.
 
Okay wow. That was a lot. I had to read that like 3 times and write down notes. okay just a few things here let me make sure i got everything. I have a RO filter I have been using btw I just was not sure what to do when just watering about the ph if there is nothing in the water- ill worry about that later because for now its all good.

-Run roughly 21 gallons through the girls (7 gal soil) ill use the bathtub
-Flush another 14 gal or so through them of pH'd water
>The last 5 gal bucket of pH'd water use a good enzyme - First question I have some gold label goldzyme is that okay? and how much/ gal should I use
-Then I wait till completely dry
-At this time I will add the tea + enzyme + low dose nutes- do you think 1/4 strength is okay? also, should i use general organics nutes instead of the heavy 16 if I'm doing an organic tea? I have a GO box kickin around
-use 2-4 cups of the tea (is this right out of the 1.5 gal mix or diluted into 30 gal res?)
also, with the tea, you said it takes 24 hours and to continually add sugar water and silica correct? how much sugar water should I add every 12 hours and how much water with it?
I will be using a 5 gal bucket with air stones for the tea.

one more question about making the tea. I'm going to buy most of the ingredients you listed there. I have two different kelp foods already. can i use these instead of the alaska kelp fertilizer? I have kelp me kelp you by fox farm and suprekelp by supreme growers. If that's okay for the ammount to use you say follow bottle directions. the suprekelp says 8ml gal does that sound okay?



Okay I think were getting somewhere here. Thanks a bunch man this is a lot of time anyway into helping me so i appreciate it a lot. im going to wait for the soil to dry a bit more before i do a flush considering i put around 2.5 gals through them on monday and I want to avoid over watering them.
 
Just getting the pots out of contact with the cement may solve quite a bit of your issues. People underestimate the importance of warm soil. I have seen many a garden change drastically by just doing that one thing so it is in my list of go to questions.

In the end of your pH is 5.8 at runoff it is probably higher in the medium. Find out exactly what your friend put into the soil mix. I would imagine that there is no actual soil and that it is a soilless mix. If so then the ph range of somewhere between 5.8 and 6.5 range is a decent soilless mix pH. That is priority number one. Find out your soil content. If it is just peat, perlite, vermiculite or other non topsoil additives then this is a good pH. See what the effect of keeping them off the cold floor accomplishes. Find out what is in the potting mix.
 
ShiggityFlip said:
Just getting the pots out of contact with the cement may solve quite a bit of your issues. People underestimate the importance of warm soil. I have seen many a garden change drastically by just doing that one thing so it is in my list of go to questions.

In the end of your pH is 5.8 at runoff it is probably higher in the medium. Find out exactly what your friend put into the soil mix. I would imagine that there is no actual soil and that it is a soilless mix. If so then the ph range of somewhere between 5.8 and 6.5 range is a decent soilless mix pH. That is priority number one. Find out your soil content. If it is just peat, perlite, vermiculite or other non topsoil additives then this is a good pH. See what the effect of keeping them off the cold floor accomplishes. Find out what is in the potting mix.
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I think that you might have nailed it with this one Shiggity... I wasn't considering a soilless mix, and that most likely is what he has here... but then again, I have seen some very odd hybrid mixes these days too. :) You are spot on when you say that he needs to find out what is in the mix.
 
So I always say anything with zyme in the name will do...LOL...so that sounds about right. I am just an old fart and use what is the gold standard.

1/4v strength will be fine. Underdoseing nutes is never an issue that can't be easily remedied...overdosing nutes will permanently ruin at least part of a fan leaf. The issue is like Shiggity said is what the heck are you using for soil. We really need to know that.

I am very sorry but I don't understand this question... "also, should i use general organics nutes instead of the heavy 16 if I'm doing an organic tea?"

The tea recipe I linked you to (I will just paste it here) has everything a growing plant needs plus some boosters to help it thrive. this is a complete food and soil fixer upper. If you read through the thread the warnings I have about it being strong are only for if you are using DWC hydro. when I use it in my hydro the dose really depends on the reservoir size. Lets not talk about that today. The point is the recipe gets you to about 1.2 -2 gallons. and it really doesn't matter too much how close you are. If you want 2.5 gallons just put in 2.6 gallons of water and run the same recipe...savvy?

The diluted statement was simply..for my DWC I had a 5 gallon bucket of dechlorinated water. I poured about 1.5 into a second bucket, brewed up the tea, filtered it, added it back to the original bucket and added some sugar, then dumped in 5 gallons to my res. None of that is your deal. Just make the 2 gallons of tea, use what you want, then drive it in with a good dose of water.

No need to add silica... it wont really hurt or help. In soil silica does need to break down so it isn't a bad idea but you are adding in something I have never done for no purpose. Silica is something we add to strengthen cell walls which helps in a lot of ways.

In the recipe I will copy and paste below it states the amount of sugar to use. It doesn't hurt to over do it...you just get way crazy bacteria breeding. You don't want it to ferment over the top of the bucket though... :) I brewed it about a week ago and added a bunch of sugar and it was up to 2/3rds of the bucket even though the water level was way below that.

I didn't look up the kelp you are using but I would be surprised if it wasn't the right stuff. There is a specific type of Atlantic kelp that is used and when it breaks down it turns into Ascophyllum nodosum. it may say that on the bottle and that is what we want. but I would be very surprised if it is anything else. Everyone makes it as it is a basic super food for plants.

This is easy and fun and during bloom it causes massive flowering.



Recipe:
1/4 cups alfalfa - General purpose Fetilizer great for all blooming type plants ( main ingredient in advanced nutrients Nirvana)
1/4 cup crab meal (I am going to up this next time) - ( too much to say about this...main ingredient in Advanced Nutrients Bud factor X)
1/4 cups Earthworm Castings ( this does all the work. this is where the microbes come from to break down everything)
1/4 cups Humus soil ( this has tons of good stuff for the plants general health)
1/4 cup Oatmeal ( I read adding this can generate so beneficial fungi... generally I normally add fungi differently but I couldn't help but try)
Alaska kelp fertilizer - followed bottle instructions for 1.5 gallons ( super food for plant)
Aphrodites Extraction - 1 teaspoon (again molasses is fine) ( makes the bacteria breed and do their work)
Hygrozyme - 15ml (10ml per gallon) ( helps to break down stuff and it good to have anyway when fixing soil)
Fulvic Acid - 23ml (15ml per gallon) (Similar to Humic acid it is another ancient forest acid that does wonders for plants AND people. this will aid in nute uptake significantly)



How to brew:
Take a 5 gallon bucket and put in the dry ingredients. Then add 1.5 gallons of water (I take it from a dechlorinated 5 gallon I will return it to after filtering). Then add the wet ingredients and stir up good. There will be heavy sediment on the bottom you will want to agitate it all up. If it sits too long you can get anaerobic growth which we don't want. Add the air stones before the solids settle. Stir it up every few hours if you can. Keep it indoors so it stays at room temp or about 70 F. After about 24 hours add a second dose of the Aphrodites Extraction, mix and let sit for a few minutes. That will stimulate the microbes again. Then Strain into second bucket. I recommend straining twice then using an old wool sock for a third one.


And I took pics one time when I brewed 5 gallons with appropriately up-sized ingredients and this is what it looked like.


right away it looked like this...

begining1.jpg



After some time the bacteria was breeding and it looked like this (the more sugar you add the crazier this gets)

fewhourslater.jpg


Then I filtered it using a siphon effect with some extra buckets.

Siphoning.jpg


After filtering it through the screen I suggest using an old big wool sock to filter it one more time.


Then the final product looks like this

Filtered.jpg



I think I ended up at about 800 PPM which is good considering my water is about 12 to to start with.



And when I did this in my Hydro setup it caused my nute and water uptake to double overnight. I was adding high nute doses and water constantly and the plants just blew up.
 
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