Glookie Here - Delps8 Does NASC/Barney's Farm Glookies In DWC

[Delps8]

Grow #7±, starting with one in 2017 and about half a dozen since early 2021. The 2017 grow was a photoperiod then five auto grows then one photoperiod grow.

Strain/s:
Barney's Farm Glookies feminized photoperiod, purchased from North Atlantic Seed Company in 10/23. Germinated two seeds and they're doing great. One has to leave the res RSN.

Genetic Makeup:
Hybrid Indica

Growth Stage:
Veg

Pot/Bucket Size:
Superponics 12XL. Measures 40" x 23" x 14". 35 gals total, 28 gals usable. Filled to 1/2" from bottom of 3" net pots.

Tent Size:
2' x 4'

Grow Space:
Garage in Southern California

How Many Plants:
2 ==> 1

Environment:
Indoor

Stage:
Vegetative at 27 days above ground

Medium:
RO water

Nutrients:
Jacks 3-2-1 mixed IAW the current feed schedule at 3.79-2.52-0.99. Per the approach detailed by @Farside in his thread "Growing with Bloom Nutes", I'll be using the same mixture throughout. In addition to Jacks, I'm using a potassium silicate silica supplement and HydroGuard.

Room/Tent Temperature:
Temps have been below their climatic average for most of the past 2 1/2 years that I've been growing here in Southern California. Climatic average highs and lows for December through March are 64/47, 65/47, 65/48, and 67/49. I expect to run a heater in the tent.
Temps for this grow will be cooler than previous grows - I'm going for 70's rather than high 70's to low 80's.
Garage floor temp under the tent is 72°± due to crap SoCal suburban home construction. This helps ensure that tent temps rarely drop below the low high 60's.

Relative Humidity:
Varies.

VPD:
Seedling at 0.8, veg at 1.0, flower at 1.2-1.5

Media/Res PH:
5.8 - 6.1

Pests:
I've had thrip infestations and will be spray Spinosad prophylactically during this grow.

Watering:
N/A

Sensors:
PAR Meter: Apogee MQ-500 calibrated by Apogee 8/22
Light Meter: Uni-T
Air temperature: AC Infinity Controller 69 ("ACI" and "C69")
RH: C69
pH: Bluelab monitor in the res + Bluelab pH pen. Note: the wire for a Bluelab pH probe is not rat-proof. But it runs out that rats aren't 2 by 4-proof so it evens out.
pH Doser: Amazon had the Bluelab pH doser at a really good price so I took the plunge.
EC: Bluelab monitor in the res + Bluelab EC pen when making nutes
VPD: C69

Thanks to the C69, I no longer have to babysit RH to control VPD. The C69 controls Hugh, the ACI humidifier, and is keeping VPD at 1.0. One of the advantages of the ACI humidifier is that, when it's used with the C69, it has 10 levels of mist so it can be set to add RH very slowly or even continuously to the tent.

With the purchase of the C69, I was able to retire my PulseOne, two Inkbirds, and the humidifier that was controlled by the RH Inkbird.

VPD:
Seedling at 0.8, veg at 1.0, flower at 1.2-1.5

AC:
Whynter 14000 BTU portable. If I never use it again, it will be too soon.

Dehumidifier:
Waykar 4500 sq. ft. model. Will need to run this in flower. Winter-Spring is typically moist in SoCal and I lost my Spring grow this year to bur rot.

Fans:
ACI variable speed oscillating tent fan
ACI variable speed tne fan
ACI 4" inline fan
Two USB powered desk fans
Two 6" clamp on fans that I had before I went uptown with AC Infinity

Trellis: Scrog Pro 2' x 4' and ACI 2' x 4' net

Misc. Eqpt.:
Trupow 1/10HP 330GPH electric pump for res swaps. I only swap the res every few weeks but no way I'm going to hump 28 gallons of nutes.
Good Ideas Imp-L50-TC Impressions Palm Rain Barrel (50 gallon cistern)
HydroLogic 150 GPD RO unit
Wyze Web cams
GH Down
Chemboys Up (much stronger than GH Up)
Kasa Smart Strips are used to for scheduling and/or controlling power to all electrical devices in the tent. I did mechanical timers in 2017 and, after a power outage, I set them incorrectly and the plant revegged. No mas.
Grow journal is in Excel. I've considered with writing my own (I've been writing software for a living since the early 90's) but Excel does just what I need.
The Cannatrol is really enticing but I will probably end up making my own. Another cannabis forum has an extensive thread on a DIY model so that's probably the solution for me.
A bottle of CalMag that I use as a doorstop.

 

[Delps8]

It's well past time getting my Fall grow started.

My first attempt ended up getting eaten. Yup, I germinated a couple of seeds in RapidRooters, picked the best one, and, when I checked the tent one day, it was gone. Check out that last few entries in this grow journal.

After that loss, I decided to try some Gorilla Glue that I've had since early 2021. Same as my other grows: overnight in water, into a RapidRooter, into the dome, heat mat on, etc., etc. They grew a few inches tall and then both of them turned yellow. Dunno why: they were kept in their envelope in a fridge. Things just didn't work out as planned.

I was 0 for 2 at this point with time running out. I do grows in the Fall and Spring and I start the Spring grow so that it's done by the end of May. I'm not far from the ocean (10 miles) but it gets warm by June, plus that's when thrips abound. I've had enough of those little assholes (two infestations) and my A/C unit costs $500± per month to run so getting everything done by end of month May is a really good idea.

@North Atlantic Seed Co came to the rescue. I ordered on a Friday and got my seeds on Tuesday! Thank you, NASC.

Two Glookies seeds started their journey on 11/02/23 and popped out of the Rapid Rooters on 11/4/23. Unlike previous grows, I skipped putting them in a tray and the Rapid Rooters went right into net pots. They've done well, though it was interesting to see seed to seed variation.

"Alpha" popped before "Bravo" and was taller for a couple of days. Bravo caught up and I put Bravo under the Rapid LED blue puck. Bravo also got more XS-1500 light than Alpha, in the region of 50µmol, and she was getting about 60µmol from the puck.

Bravo got lotsa blue from the puck and a little more light from the Vipar so the foliage is really, really dense. As in "shrubbery in the making" dense, like my previous grow. Alpha, the one on the right, is easier to deal with but she's not going to end up internodal space as short as Bravo. Internodal space is a factor in colas "stacking".

Tent height is not a concern. It's a 6' tent + a 2' extension. This strain only grows to 3' indoors and the plants have been topped and will be LST'd so I should be able to get an even canopy from either plant.

Both of them got topped at day 23 but one has to leave the res in the next few days. Which one goes and why?

Photos so far…

11/19/23-Bravo, on the left, popped the day after Alpha but grew much faster.

11/23/23

11/26/23

11/31/23

 

[Delps8]

Day 29/week 4.1 above ground

Good numbers - PPM dropping, pH up, light up.

This is the first res and it's 21 days old. The starting PPM was 310/500 and I have added a total of 4 gallons of full strength (1030/500 PPM) nutes as PPM has dropped. Two days ago, I added nutes and PPM was 300/500. As of this AM, it's down to 260/500 and pH has gone from 5.8 to 6.1.

There's good water uptake, too, at about 0.5 gallons overnight.

At 21 days and two "top offs" with full strength nutes, it's time for a new res. I started at 310/500 - next res will be at 500/500.

I'd like to swap the res today but that will have to wait a day until the temps outside cooperate. The high today will be only 66° and I need to have the back door open when I do a res. Tomorrow's high is forecast at 74 so I'll take care of that tomorrow.

pH at 6.1 is fine - I'll leave it there for a few hours to increase Mg and Ca uptake. Of course, that depends on which pH chart you read. Check out half a dozen charts and they're not all the same. Funny that.

Light - I'm using the Growcraft X2 veg light now and jumped PPFD about 100µmol this AM. The numbers below are from one of the plants (the one I think I'm going to keep). PPFD is averaging 694 across the center line and, at 24/0, that's a DLI of 60mol. All signs are that light levels are good, which is not surprising since these plants are almost a month old.

Checked my grow journal from my Spring grow:

Looks like I'm right on track.

My veg light is a Growcraft X2 which means only two light bars. I can raise the light and up the wattage (from 244), which gives me more blue photons, but I can also hang the Vipar XS-1500 between the light bars if I want to add more red. It works out pretty well.

Depending on which plant I keep, I'll either add the Vipar (if I keep Lefty) to get more red, or, if I keep Righty, I'll raise the light and up the input power.

Oh, yeh — I remembered how to color correct the pictures. The veg light is really blue so I have to color correct every picture. The trick for these photos is to just slide the rightmost marker to the right side of the green curve. I've been out of photography for about 15 years so my photo retouching skills are gone. :-(

But I know how to grow weed now!

Photos below. One of the plants needs to be culled. Which one?

Lefty sprouted a day after righty and got lots of blue light because I had her under the puck. Righty is markedly bigger and you can even see between the branches. Not so with Lefty.

The plants were topped a week ago so it's time to get them LST'd.

 

[Delps8]

Will do an update shortly ("Who you calling 'Shortly'?"). For now, I just wanted to attach a PDF of research about light levels in veg.

And thank you 420 for allowing us to upload PDF's and to allow us to link to other, non-competing sites. The web was built on the idea of information sharing and I'm glad to see that we can now take advantage of "hyperlinking", if anyone remembers that.

I've also attached the paper "Cannabis Yield, Potency, and Leaf Photosynthesis Respond Differently to Increasing Light Levels in an Indoor Environment" by Victoria Rodriguez-Morrison, David Llewellyn, and Youbin Zheng which is referenced in the first paper.

 

[Delps8]

Day 33/week 4.5 above ground

And then there was one…

One of the two had to leave the res and I culled Lefty. She had more dense foliage and had excellent roots but I decided to go with Righty (now named "Alpha") because she would be easier to LST. My last grow, which had a beautiful morphology, was a bear to train. I suspect I'll get a good crop but with less hassle.

I've decided to name my plants using the phonetic alphabet. My thinking is that, if I do two grows per year, that will get me to age 80 and I will revisit things then. So that's how "Lefty" became "Alpha".

The tent looks empty! Yikes! Grow ya little bastad!

Cannabis plants do look a little…unkempt when they're young and being LST'd, don't they?

Thinking about "unkempt", I feed the squirrels in my back yard and it does rain here in SoCal from time to time. Have you ever seen a wet squirrel? That looks really sad.

I wrote it once, might was well use it twice:



That's a copy and paste from my grow journal which I keep in Excel.

Day 33, week 4.5

110=water level in cm from the bottom of the res. As with other measures on the page, there's zero value in typing in periods.

1.2=gallons down from the previous read
1.2=gallons down the the previous refill

(shouldn't those be "12" instead of "1.2"?)

575PPM=I use the 500 scale instead of EC out of habit and because it's more granular so I can see that EC was changing as soon as it drops. If I were to use EC, that will require a 50PPM change so I'll stick with PPM on the 500 scale. When I post PPM, I post it as 580/500 to indicate the scale. Entries that end in 5 units indicate that the EC readout on the Bluelab is fluctuating, like it is now.

Below that is daily light. The X2 is my veg light running at 296 watts. It's an X2 Growcraft so it's a 2 bar light. I get a lot more PAR out of the X3 flower light (for a couple of reasons). The downside of running the X2 is that it generates more heat than the X3 at the same wattage (because it generates less PAR, it's got to generate more heat or else we've got a physics problem).

The formula for the "4.5" is =IF(A183>0,INT(A183/7)&"."&MOD(A183,7),""), if anyone's is interested.

My sharp-eyed reader (I'm getting the distinct impression that I will only have one reader per grow journal) will note that I'm not at the light saturation point ("LSP") yet. Yeh… I look at the wattage and the 924µmol in that one spot and, agreed, that's enough. Gotta put on my big boy pants and get to 900. Which will happen right after this update.

Next change will be to swap out the veg light for the flower light. It's been 33 days and Alpha is plenty dense. Between the veg light, lotsa light, and the silica supplement, the stems on this plant are thick and very strong. Add in the fact that I've got an 8' ceiling in the tent, I don't have to worry about running out of head room, so it's time to get put the veg light away and fire up the flower light and change the photoperiod from 24/0 to 18/6.

The spectra for my lights is here. The lots of blue photons weighting for the veg light switches to lots of red and growth takes off. Since I've got two of the same model light, I leave one driver outside the tent and have one inside. All of the wires are on push locks so it's a very quick changeover, so much so that it takes longer to get the lights back in their box than it does to swap the lights in the tent. Whoever designed the boxes for ChilLED must have been a packaging genius who hates humanity. They're secure but that shipping box is tighter than a nuns…ear.

I swapped the res a few days ago. PPM started at 310 which the seedlings loved. It gradually dropped to 260 and pH started rising a little more often than I wanted so it was time to swap the res. The weather was chilly (highs in the 60's) so I ended up adding the 4 gallons of full strength nutes instead of a res swap. After a few days, PPM was down to 240 and then we got temps in the 70-somethings so I did the deed. Yup, PPM went bumpety bumpety bump bump bump for a while but it was only the grower who knew that.

PPM is dropping very slowly now, pH is stable, and water is being taken up. What's not to love about that?

 

[Hafta]

Day 33/week 4.5 above ground

And then there was one…

One of the two had to leave the res and I culled Lefty. She had more dense foliage and had excellent roots but I decided to go with Righty (now named "Alpha") because she would be easier to LST. My last grow, which had a beautiful morphology, was a bear to train. I suspect I'll get a good crop but with less hassle.

I've decided to name my plants using the phonetic alphabet. My thinking is that, if I do two grows per year, that will get me to age 80 and I will revisit things then. So that's how "Lefty" became "Alpha".

The tent looks empty! Yikes! Grow ya little bastad!

Cannabis plants do look a little…unkempt when they're young and being LST'd, don't they?

Thinking about "unkempt", I feed the squirrels in my back yard and it does rain here in SoCal from time to time. Have you ever seen a wet squirrel? That looks really sad.

I wrote it once, might was well use it twice:



That's a copy and paste from my grow journal which I keep in Excel.

Day 33, week 4.5

110=water level in cm from the bottom of the res. As with other measures on the page, there's zero value in typing in periods.

1.2=gallons down from the previous read
1.2=gallons down the the previous refill

(shouldn't those be "12" instead of "1.2"?)

575PPM=I use the 500 scale instead of EC out of habit and because it's more granular so I can see that EC was changing as soon as it drops. If I were to use EC, that will require a 50PPM change so I'll stick with PPM on the 500 scale. When I post PPM, I post it as 580/500 to indicate the scale. Entries that end in 5 units indicate that the EC readout on the Bluelab is fluctuating, like it is now.

Below that is daily light. The X2 is my veg light running at 296 watts. It's an X2 Growcraft so it's a 2 bar light. I get a lot more PAR out of the X3 flower light (for a couple of reasons). The downside of running the X2 is that it generates more heat than the X3 at the same wattage (because it generates less PAR, it's got to generate more heat or else we've got a physics problem).

The formula for the "4.5" is =IF(A183>0,INT(A183/7)&"."&MOD(A183,7),""), if anyone's is interested.

My sharp-eyed reader (I'm getting the distinct impression that I will only have one reader per grow journal) will note that I'm not at the light saturation point ("LSP") yet. Yeh… I look at the wattage and the 924µmol in that one spot and, agreed, that's enough. Gotta put on my big boy pants and get to 900. Which will happen right after this update.

Next change will be to swap out the veg light for the flower light. It's been 33 days and Alpha is plenty dense. Between the veg light, lotsa light, and the silica supplement, the stems on this plant are thick and very strong. Add in the fact that I've got an 8' ceiling in the tent, I don't have to worry about running out of head room, so it's time to get put the veg light away and fire up the flower light and change the photoperiod from 24/0 to 18/6.

The spectra for my lights is here. The lots of blue photons weighting for the veg light switches to lots of red and growth takes off. Since I've got two of the same model light, I leave one driver outside the tent and have one inside. All of the wires are on push locks so it's a very quick changeover, so much so that it takes longer to get the lights back in their box than it does to swap the lights in the tent. Whoever designed the boxes for ChilLED must have been a packaging genius who hates humanity. They're secure but that shipping box is tighter than a nuns…ear.



I swapped the res a few days ago. PPM started at 310 which the seedlings loved. It gradually dropped to 260 and pH started rising a little more often than I wanted so it was time to swap the res. The weather was chilly (highs in the 60's) so I ended up adding the 4 gallons of full strength nutes instead of a res swap. After a few days, PPM was down to 240 and then we got temps in the 70-somethings so I did the deed. Yup, PPM went bumpety bumpety bump bump bump for a while but it was only the grower who knew that.

PPM is dropping very slowly now, pH is stable, and water is being taken up. What's not to love about that?

 

[Delps8]

It was a faux pas, not an intentional slight…

I didn't do a "welcome aboard" to this grow. My apologies to one and all…well one and the other two. Limited readership is not a problem when your readership of such an esteemed audience.

Re. my comment about not "trusting" the res sitting at 580 - I checked some old grow journals. The same sort of thing has happened and I wrote almost exactly the same words I've used here. Creatures of habit, aren't we?

The res dropped to 570, as of this AM.

 

[Delps8]

Switched to the flower light and from 24/0 to 18/6. Alpha is loving the new light.

Water and PPM are falling, pH is rising which is "FFR". Yup, Alpha's having a good time in there.

Did some LST and was able to get more light on the grow. The 18/6 photoperiod really drops DLI so I'll bump it up to 20/4.

Average DLI is 56 and StDev is 4. I'll take the StDev as a win but would like to get another 100µmol on the canopy.

Found a very informative video from a PHP ("pointy headed person") called Dr. Allison Justice

This interesting read was on a site that I've used primarily for info re. grow lights. One of the contributors on that site is a PhD in plant bio, or somesuch, so I take note when that person makes statements of fact.

One particular issue is that of removing leaves to allow light to get to bud sites. It never made sense, to me, to remove healthy leaves from a canopy nor did "leaf tucking". For one, if you move a leaf that's getting, say, 800µmol and expose a leaf that's 6" below it, that leaf will be getting, what, 600µmol?

Same with the idea of letting light fall to bud sites instead of letting the canopy handle it. Bud sites can't do much in the way of photosynthesis. What the discussion in that link brought up is that leaves below the canopy aren't capable of photosynthesizing as efficiently as the "sun leaves" and that exposing them to light could actually harm them. That makes sense when you think in the terms that evolution tends to create plant and animal cells that perform a limited, though highly efficient, function. LeBron is not a gymnast for very sounds reasons.

Another point, one that I saw Shane at Migro demonstrate, is the amount of PPFD on the underside of a leaf. I measured it at 5%, IIRC, which I think is the number that he got. The PHP came up with 10% but that could be a function of different lights being used. Or perhaps I remembered wrong! Green photons tend to go through a leaf, as do far red, whereas blue and deep red are absorbed far more quickly.

My mindset is that there is no usable PAR below the canopy due to how quickly light levels from LED's drop as distance increases. For example, the 800µmol at a height of X will be severely diminished at X-12". Drop off another foot and you're in dark as a whale's ass territory.

[time passes]

I just did a simple test in my tent. With the sensor sitting on the top of the res, PPFD was 624µmol vs 845 at 6" above the deck. With a hang height of 14"± that's 845 at 8" from the light and 624 just 6" below that. Difference.

So, yeh, the canopy is where it's at and the ash and trash below the canopy aren't helpful in terms of photosynthesis but they do transpire. That's one of the reasons I've switched to the flower light - I've got enough foliage in there. It's time to stop inhibiting cell expansion and time to get growing.

 

[Hafta]

I am glad you posted the numbers. I don't measure intensity but let the plant tell me what's going on. It is reassuring to note that your numbers correspond surprisingly similar to what I have observed. You see a 26% drop in intensity at a six inch increase in distance from the light.
This is day 38 of veg.
My main light is 12 - 14" above the canopy at 227 watts.
Six inches below the main light, and six inches from the plant, I have two supplemental (full spectrum) lights at 65 watts (29% light added back on each side). Leaf will not burn on contact.
Six inches below those I have and additional 30 watts of 4000K supplemental lights (an additional 24% of supplemental light added back). Leaf will not burn on contact.
My goal is to grow a dome shaped plant.

I also agree that the internal leaves cannot possibly compete with the large fan (sun) leaves, so I leave the majority of the fan leaves from the initial growth. I use the word internal because I remove fan leaves from new growth daily. The result of this is .... although the canopy looks crowded

There is plenty of open space within the plant, beneath the canopy, for air circulation.

I know it is a poor photo but the floor was particularly uncomfortable this morning.

Thanks again for the data.

 

[Delps8]

I am glad you posted the numbers. I don't measure intensity but let the plant tell me what's going on. It is reassuring to note that your numbers correspond surprisingly similar to what I have observed. You see a 26% drop in intensity at a six inch increase in distance from the light.
This is day 38 of veg.
My main light is 12 - 14" above the canopy at 227 watts.
Six inches below the main light, and six inches from the plant, I have two supplemental (full spectrum) lights at 65 watts (29% light added back on each side). Leaf will not burn on contact.
Six inches below those I have and additional 30 watts of 4000K supplemental lights (an additional 24% of supplemental light added back). Leaf will not burn on contact.
My goal is to grow a dome shaped plant.

Apologies for the delayed reply. Thank you for posting this.
Beautiful plant and great lighting!

I also agree that the internal leaves cannot possibly compete with the large fan (sun) leaves, so I leave the majority of the fan leaves from the initial growth. I use the word internal because I remove fan leaves from new growth daily. The result of this is .... although the canopy looks crowded

There is plenty of open space within the plant, beneath the canopy, for air circulation.

I know it is a poor photo but the floor was particularly uncomfortable this morning.

Thanks again for the data.

The bottom photo tells the story. Lots of air flow through there. And the Walmart USB fans - got a pair of those myself!

That looks to be < 2' tall but the full width of the res which is great. Will that plant thin out as it matures in flower or have you pretty much hit max height? My ChemDog photo got to about the same size. The stems were pretty were bowed so they grew out from the center and then curved up but only to about 2'. It was a big change from my autos - they grow just silly stupid big.

How big is that grow area?

floor was particularly uncomfortable this morning.

Got a kick out of that!

I know the feeling. I'm in pretty good shape (I'm back to running half marathons) but I can tell I'm not as limber as I was even five years ago.

 

[Hafta]

Apologies for the delayed reply. Thank you for posting this.
Beautiful plant and great lighting!



The bottom photo tells the story. Lots of air flow through there. And the Walmart USB fans - got a pair of those myself!

That looks to be < 2' tall but the full width of the res which is great. Will that plant thin out as it matures in flower or have you pretty much hit max height? My ChemDog photo got to about the same size. The stems were pretty were bowed so they grew out from the center and then curved up but only to about 2'. It was a big change from my autos - they grow just silly stupid big.

How big is that grow area?


Got a kick out of that!

I know the feeling. I'm in pretty good shape (I'm back to running half marathons) but I can tell I'm not as limber as I was even five years ago.

I ceased horizontal training of the mains when they reached within six inches of the walls (the cabinet is 2' x 3'). Thge plant was 8" tall at the time. The entire plant is growing about 1 -2 inches per day and is now approximately 17" tall. It will continue to grow at that rate until about three weeks following flip. I expect it to reach somewhere near 30" tall by harvest.
The Auto Jack Herer in my avatar was 22" tall when harvested. The difference was that I stopped horizontal training when it went into flower. Otherwise, it was trained the same way. It yielded 287 grams, dried, jarred, and cured. It did not quite fill the space, horizontally.

When allowed to grow vertically the plant also begins to thin/stretch a little. I will continue to defoliate daily until the end of the third week after flip (more or less) which will keep the air flow through the plant high. At that time I will install a trellis for vertical separation of the tops. I will also remove some of the shoots to homogenize the canopy and give room for others to swell. This will be the final defoliation and thinning. Afterword it will allow the roots to focus primarily on making flowers.

 

[Delps8]

I decided to pull the plug on this grow.

Growth stalled a while ago and I've been hemming and hawing about when to flip. I was going to flip on Saturday and, for the first time ever, Iifted the res top. No idea why I've never done that before! Just never thought to do it.

The root ball on the plant was not much larger than the root ball on the plant I culled two weeks ago. One factor that struck me as strange over the past few weeks is that EC did not change. I attributed that to the size of the res but, in retrospect, that was happening because there was something (not) going on with the plant.

The major issue for me is the number of calendar days between now and June 1, 2024. This plant got a late start and I would have continue with the grow if it had been growing as expected. But, rather than nurse a small plant through to harvest, which would burn up the same or similar number of calendar days as a healthy plant, I decided a better approach is to call a halt to this, drop a couple of Dos Si Dos, and start that up as my Spring 2024 grow.

The mistake was culling the plant with less foliage. I thought it would be easier to not have to deal with the heavy foliage of the other plant so I did end up with a plant that had less foliage. Duh. Be careful what you wish for!

This has been a tough year. The Spring grow got bud rot, the first Fall grow got eaten by a rat, and now this.

When the winds of life change, adjust your sails, right?

 

[gwhunran]

Sorry to hear about the troubles. The way I look at it or try to, is to figure I'm getting my bad luck over with all at once, so I will have a stretch of good luck leading me for a while.

 

[Wastei]

I decided to pull the plug on this grow.

Growth stalled a while ago and I've been hemming and hawing about when to flip. I was going to flip on Saturday and, for the first time ever, Iifted the res top. No idea why I've never done that before! Just never thought to do it.

The root ball on the plant was not much larger than the root ball on the plant I culled two weeks ago. One factor that struck me as strange over the past few weeks is that EC did not change. I attributed that to the size of the res but, in retrospect, that was happening because there was something (not) going on with the plant.

The major issue for me is the number of calendar days between now and June 1, 2024. This plant got a late start and I would have continue with the grow if it had been growing as expected. But, rather than nurse a small plant through to harvest, which would burn up the same or similar number of calendar days as a healthy plant, I decided a better approach is to call a halt to this, drop a couple of Dos Si Dos, and start that up as my Spring 2024 grow.

The mistake was culling the plant with less foliage. I thought it would be easier to not have to deal with the heavy foliage of the other plant so I did end up with a plant that had less foliage. Duh. Be careful what you wish for!

This has been a tough year. The Spring grow got bud rot, the first Fall grow got eaten by a rat, and now this.

When the winds of life change, adjust your sails, right?

I'm afraid running a live system with bacteria culture (bacillus amyloliquefaciens in Hydroguard) is only really considered stable with also running a chiller and controlling water temps. Pythium root rot is your biggest enemy in DWC.

As pointers I see that you're pushing light intensity for no reason or gain in late veg and early flower? As much light as possible is not what's considered optimal. With the internodal length, leaf shape and structure I can tell that you feed them more light intensity than necessary and beneficial in late veg and early flower. There's a positive to negative return when it comes how much light the plant can tolerate and how that translate in to the plants growth and structure.

Hope that helps! Cheers!

 

[Delps8]

Sorry to hear about the troubles. The way I look at it or try to, is to figure I'm getting my bad luck over with all at once, so I will have a stretch of good luck leading me for a while.

Thanks for the message.

Great attitude — get it out of the way now. Couldn't agree more.

 

[Delps8]

I'm afraid running a live system with bacteria culture (bacillus amyloliquefaciens in Hydroguard) is only really considered stable with also running a chiller and controlling water temps. Pythium root rot is your biggest enemy in DWC.

Thanks for pointing that out. I use an Active Aqua 1/10 HP water chiller. That's not in the equipment list but I'll make sure to add that for my next grow.

Never had an issue with root rot, fortunately. The chiller keeps temps at 68° though my Bluelab monitor reads 70°.

As pointers I see that you're pushing light intensity for no reason or gain in late veg and early flower? As much light as possible is not what's considered optimal. With the internodal length, leaf shape and structure I can tell that you feed them more light intensity than necessary and beneficial in late veg and early flower. There's a positive to negative return when it comes how much light the plant can tolerate and how that translate in to the plants growth and structure.

Hope that helps! Cheers!

I appreciate your input. I've based my lighting practices on "the research", on feedback from cannabis consultants and, to a much lesser extent, outcomes I've seen in reading grow journals on three cannabis sites. The latter are always taken with a dose of salt because they're anecdotal and, as we know, "The plural of anecdote it not data".

There seems to be a significant divergence between the attitudes of a lot of growers (at least on the three cannabis sites where I'm a member) and researchers/consultants. My bent is to give much more weight to the latter group for a variety of reasons. Amongst the latter group, there's concurrence that more light, with the widely understood caveats, leads to increased crop yield and crop quality. They have the data and the understanding of plant biology to explain the results that they're getting, both in the lab and in the field. The former group often choose to take a different approach and that works out pretty well, too.

 

[ChronicKid007]

Day 33/week 4.5 above ground

And then there was one…

One of the two had to leave the res and I culled Lefty. She had more dense foliage and had excellent roots but I decided to go with Righty (now named "Alpha") because she would be easier to LST. My last grow, which had a beautiful morphology, was a bear to train. I suspect I'll get a good crop but with less hassle.

I've decided to name my plants using the phonetic alphabet. My thinking is that, if I do two grows per year, that will get me to age 80 and I will revisit things then. So that's how "Lefty" became "Alpha".

The tent looks empty! Yikes! Grow ya little bastad!

Cannabis plants do look a little…unkempt when they're young and being LST'd, don't they?

Thinking about "unkempt", I feed the squirrels in my back yard and it does rain here in SoCal from time to time. Have you ever seen a wet squirrel? That looks really sad.

I wrote it once, might was well use it twice:



That's a copy and paste from my grow journal which I keep in Excel.

Day 33, week 4.5

110=water level in cm from the bottom of the res. As with other measures on the page, there's zero value in typing in periods.

1.2=gallons down from the previous read
1.2=gallons down the the previous refill

(shouldn't those be "12" instead of "1.2"?)

575PPM=I use the 500 scale instead of EC out of habit and because it's more granular so I can see that EC was changing as soon as it drops. If I were to use EC, that will require a 50PPM change so I'll stick with PPM on the 500 scale. When I post PPM, I post it as 580/500 to indicate the scale. Entries that end in 5 units indicate that the EC readout on the Bluelab is fluctuating, like it is now.

Below that is daily light. The X2 is my veg light running at 296 watts. It's an X2 Growcraft so it's a 2 bar light. I get a lot more PAR out of the X3 flower light (for a couple of reasons). The downside of running the X2 is that it generates more heat than the X3 at the same wattage (because it generates less PAR, it's got to generate more heat or else we've got a physics problem).

The formula for the "4.5" is =IF(A183>0,INT(A183/7)&"."&MOD(A183,7),""), if anyone's is interested.

My sharp-eyed reader (I'm getting the distinct impression that I will only have one reader per grow journal) will note that I'm not at the light saturation point ("LSP") yet. Yeh… I look at the wattage and the 924µmol in that one spot and, agreed, that's enough. Gotta put on my big boy pants and get to 900. Which will happen right after this update.

Next change will be to swap out the veg light for the flower light. It's been 33 days and Alpha is plenty dense. Between the veg light, lotsa light, and the silica supplement, the stems on this plant are thick and very strong. Add in the fact that I've got an 8' ceiling in the tent, I don't have to worry about running out of head room, so it's time to get put the veg light away and fire up the flower light and change the photoperiod from 24/0 to 18/6.

The spectra for my lights is here. The lots of blue photons weighting for the veg light switches to lots of red and growth takes off. Since I've got two of the same model light, I leave one driver outside the tent and have one inside. All of the wires are on push locks so it's a very quick changeover, so much so that it takes longer to get the lights back in their box than it does to swap the lights in the tent. Whoever designed the boxes for ChilLED must have been a packaging genius who hates humanity. They're secure but that shipping box is tighter than a nuns…ear.

I swapped the res a few days ago. PPM started at 310 which the seedlings loved. It gradually dropped to 260 and pH started rising a little more often than I wanted so it was time to swap the res. The weather was chilly (highs in the 60's) so I ended up adding the 4 gallons of full strength nutes instead of a res swap. After a few days, PPM was down to 240 and then we got temps in the 70-somethings so I did the deed. Yup, PPM went bumpety bumpety bump bump bump for a while but it was only the grower who knew that.

PPM is dropping very slowly now, pH is stable, and water is being taken up. What's not to love about that?

"What's not to love about that?!' hahaha love it

 

[KBUENOS]

Day 29/week 4.1 above ground

Good numbers - PPM dropping, pH up, light up.

This is the first res and it's 21 days old. The starting PPM was 310/500 and I have added a total of 4 gallons of full strength (1030/500 PPM) nutes as PPM has dropped. Two days ago, I added nutes and PPM was 300/500. As of this AM, it's down to 260/500 and pH has gone from 5.8 to 6.1.

There's good water uptake, too, at about 0.5 gallons overnight.

At 21 days and two "top offs" with full strength nutes, it's time for a new res. I started at 310/500 - next res will be at 500/500.

I'd like to swap the res today but that will have to wait a day until the temps outside cooperate. The high today will be only 66° and I need to have the back door open when I do a res. Tomorrow's high is forecast at 74 so I'll take care of that tomorrow.

pH at 6.1 is fine - I'll leave it there for a few hours to increase Mg and Ca uptake. Of course, that depends on which pH chart you read. Check out half a dozen charts and they're not all the same. Funny that.

Light - I'm using the Growcraft X2 veg light now and jumped PPFD about 100µmol this AM. The numbers below are from one of the plants (the one I think I'm going to keep). PPFD is averaging 694 across the center line and, at 24/0, that's a DLI of 60mol. All signs are that light levels are good, which is not surprising since these plants are almost a month old.

Checked my grow journal from my Spring grow:

Looks like I'm right on track.

My veg light is a Growcraft X2 which means only two light bars. I can raise the light and up the wattage (from 244), which gives me more blue photons, but I can also hang the Vipar XS-1500 between the light bars if I want to add more red. It works out pretty well.

Depending on which plant I keep, I'll either add the Vipar (if I keep Lefty) to get more red, or, if I keep Righty, I'll raise the light and up the input power.

Oh, yeh — I remembered how to color correct the pictures. The veg light is really blue so I have to color correct every picture. The trick for these photos is to just slide the rightmost marker to the right side of the green curve. I've been out of photography for about 15 years so my photo retouching skills are gone. :-(

But I know how to grow weed now!

Photos below. One of the plants needs to be culled. Which one?

Lefty sprouted a day after righty and got lots of blue light because I had her under the puck. Righty is markedly bigger and you can even see between the branches. Not so with Lefty.

The plants were topped a week ago so it's time to get them LST'd.

thank you for the trick