Hydro RDWC - Dr. Krippling's Puff Puff Passout - Advanced LED 350 XML

[Far East Buds]

Temps and the difference etc are something I have never bothered with lol. My first spot was in my cold kitchen with a 400 hps! Mad hot and then mad cold and never had a plant H through this. Even my plants now have a change of over 20 each night and I'm not worried one bit!

Good info LA I can never be certain what has caused what. I know I had read somewhere that a huge variance can be an issue at certain stages but as a noob it can always be attributed to other stuff too... I do feel it probably wasn't helping growth etc if anything for me. Hermie's I figure (my opinion) are stress related so it really can be caused by one or combination of things. If it is stressed/thinks it is dying it tries to pollinate itself. And I do know nanners suck so they are to be avoided at all costs...!!! Feel free to correct me if I am off base...

FE

 

[Bamalabrat]

MMMmmmm... Ganja-tastic
Cloning sucks...
I finally got a root to pop out on 1 but I let it get dehydrated and it withered up because it's been 5 weeks and I got bored
Patience my friend, it's the drug that fixes many problems.
Good luck with your cuttings. Flowers look nice. I'm on day 07 bro!
Vlad

Thanks Vlad. I am learning patience but I hate the lessons! Cloning is not that bad, but it is not that great either. lol

Flowering room looks bloody lush my friend!

Thanks LA. It is packed with very little on the edges. So that was the goal and so far that part is going well. The canopy has closed up mostly. I am going to wait another week before the last defol (I believe it will be the last) to give the plants time to grow some more bud leaves. I believe that is the reason for waiting 20 days between defols. I have to say the buds are getting bigger and looking sweet right now.

Good info LA I can never be certain what has caused what. I know I had read somewhere that a huge variance can be an issue at certain stages but as a noob it can always be attributed to other stuff too... I do feel it probably wasn't helping growth etc if anything for me. Hermie's I figure (my opinion) are stress related so it really can be caused by one or combination of things. If it is stressed/thinks it is dying it tries to pollinate itself. And I do know nanners suck so they are to be avoided at all costs...!!! Feel free to correct me if I am off base...
FE

There seems to be a couple of reasons for Hermie's FE. It is hard, as you know, to pinpoint any if you have a few things going on at the same time. I think there is probably a lot of myths floating around about what does what or cause what. To many fly by night noobs that make the wrong conclusion about the observations they made. It happens in my field with guys that have masters and Dr. So I imagine it happens a lot more in the stoner communities. lol, That is why I love this forum. There are a bunch of guys like ourselves that are trying to come at it from a reasonable position. Plus there are a ton of old heads on here that know whats what, and have seen it all. So if I see something and draw a bad conclusion, they can straighten me out.

As Vlad said, patience is good medicine. Combine that with preventive practices (best grow practices) and you have a very powerful prescription. This grow will give me a great new baseline to judge what is better for my setup. Pure Scrog or this way, Scrog + defol and cropping. So on my third grow with the PPP, I will decide which method to use and then shoot for improving my yields. I have read that some people (a couple of guys and at least one girl) where getting up to 5gr/w on their grows. That is insane to me. But if I can beat my last run which was ~1gr/w then I will be super happy.

As I said earlier in the journal, my last harvest saw that more than 80% of it was from the colas. They were very large and tall. There were tons of bud sites below them that just were not crap. So my hope is that I get more colas this grow, which I have already, and that I can grow out more of the lower budsites to at least a gr of dry nug. If those two things work, that could see me sitting on 2gr/w or more. I believe this is possible for a couple of reasons. The first being, that the light was not used effeciently. I had major shadowing in my last grow of a lot of the plants because of how tall I let the dominate tops get over the rest of the plant. The second was I had a lot of tops and plant spread out to the edges. These were the smallest colas and almost no nugs under the colas. So now, using the same lights and strain, I am training differently to concentrate the number of budsites and tops into a tighter volume. Defoling to open the interior and keeping the lights at a 18 hieght. This (hopefully) will be a much better use of available light. The only real question is whether the defol slows down the bud formation thus hurting final yield. I have seen evidence that defol does hurt. I have also evidence that it is big help in a grow. It seems that it is dependant on timing and what your defoling. Never defol nug fans or fans that are less than 1 inch of stem. There are some very impressive journals out there that show amazing results doing this. There are also journals out there that are full of disaster because of defol.

So yeah, it is scary going in and cutting off bits of the plant during flower. But it is something that I just need to see. Thanks guys for all of your great comments and sharing of your honest opinions. I really really appreciate it. Sorry for rambling here. Have a great day.

 

[Bamalabrat]

I know the clones are not really part of this grow. I do want to comment on them though. They are back. They just did not like the way I handled them when I transplanted them to the buckets. So they wanted to give me a heart attack to let me know. I did a top water yesterday and then in the afternoon I did another topwater, and a final one before going to sleep. The plant looked better and better after each top water. Now they look like they did when in the cloner tub. Scared the crap out of me.


Ok, so now that the clones are going to make it, I had to make decisions about my other 4 buckets. What was I going to put in them. My choices were to take clones of my clones when they got big enough. That would give me an all PPP grow. I really liked the idea. Or I could pop some more beans. I was very nervous about that idea, plus I would have to decide which beans to pop.

So I decided to pop another Dr. Krippling strain that I have. Kripple Shock. So the beans have been soaking about 18 hours now. Almost ready to put into the paper towel. If all goes well, I will start another journal to document these and the clones. There wont be a whole lot about veg. That is really the boring part. But I will take some pics at least once a week to show the growth. But when this grow is finished, the Dr. Krippling strains will go into flower and it will be a Dr. Krippling grow. I liked the idea of that. Also for the grow after that, I am going to do a Crop King seeds. I will use the PK and the Green Crack. I will add the journal link to my sig when I get it up. Please feel free to follow along with it if you like. Thanks and have a great day.

 

[Bamalabrat]

Update time
Ok today was the end of 5 weeks. That is pretty cool because this will be a 10 week grow, so today is the halfway point.
Ok now that that is out of the way, not everything is all sunshine and flowers in the tent. The leaves that I did not like the look of are getting worse. By that I mean there are more of them. I do not know if that is because of the leaves getting damage last week and now are growing out and becoming more of an eyesore, or that I still have some crap going on that needs to be addressed. I am going with the opinion that the leaves had already been damaged are are now just growing out crappy. The new leaf in the tops look fine. So I am thinking it was not an ongoing systemic problem.

Also I follow LA's journal, and he had a problem and his leaves look very similar to my leaves. As we know from experience, in flower once a leaf is damaged it stays damaged. You are just not going to get a bunch of new growth of leaves as the plant starts concentrating on flower. So, I am planning on defoling next week anyway. I will just wait until then and defol, and especially the damaged leaves.

I believe my problem to be the almost the same as LA's. Stepastyle said it before and I now think he hit the nail on the head. I had too high a ppm in the res and this lead to toxicity. I am pretty sure that is the problem. After I did the last defol, I did not lower the PPM to account for the plant to not being able to handle the increased amount of ppm. That was a nice learning lesson. I do not think it was severe or anything. It is a very small portion of the leaves but it is in every plant. I am liking this explanation a lot. It would explain it very nicely. If anyone has a different opinion or idea, PLEASE SPEAK UP!!!!! Help my dumb ass get the diagnosis right. LOL.

Ok so the clones are on full auto right now. They are looking soooooo much better than just 4 days ago. Also the KS beans have cracked and the tap roots are emerging. It is just over 48 hours from putting them in a cup of water. So they are on schedule. They will have a lot of catching up to do, so I need them to get the lead out. haha.

So anyway. Here are some pics. First up are the beans and the clone tent.

ok so now the girls in the tent. I took pics of some of the damaged leaves. Like I said if you have a different opinion or conclusion than I, please say something. I also took some pics of the grow overall, and tried to show some of the bud sites that are very tightly spaced and going to make a damn nice nugcicle!

 

[Far East Buds]

That's just what all my leaves looked like for me in the past... I left them all on until much later on but I hated to see them everyday ;/

 

[Bamalabrat]

lol FE. I am beginning to think that my def is maybe too much nutes. LA suggested his was from overfeeding and pH lock out. My pH is rock solid. very little variance. But the tips are def burnt and I know it spiked when the plants used more water than I thought and did not fill back up. But the pH was still the same. I have cut down the amount of nutes I am giving. I had let them drop to the 670 range. Today I filled the res up with 11 gallons of water. That is huge. There was very little in the whole system. The plants have been going through water like crazy and my RH stays around 65%. So I do not know why. Also there are no leaks in the system. Just a blows my mind. I can say that the plants are growing. I had a look under the canopy and tons of stuff is growing around the base of the plant. I did not want that to happen, it just did.

Anyway. thanks for your comment. I really appreciate it. Have a great weekend.

 

[Bamalabrat]

Ok,
I got my new thread up. It is going to journal the PPP clones and the Kripple Shock seeds that I just popped. The link is in my sig. I will not be writing or posting a whole lot of things in that one during veg. So until this flower is finished the other will just kinda be like a weekly summary. Unless of course something bad happens. lol

 

[Bamalabrat]

Mini Update Time,

Ok, so went in this morning and this afternoon to have a look at the girls. Its sunday so why not. They are looking pretty good in my opinion. I hate looking at damaged crappy leaves. It is a reminder of mistakes and well it is ugly. However i was looking hard at the flowers and the sugar leaves in the flowers. The sugar leaves are looking awesome. They are dark green, flat, and coated in crystals. The flowers are also forming new very nice sugar leaves. The main flowers in the biggest tops have 4 - 5 sets of sugar leaves. The secondary tops (the ones from the small branches) have about 2 - 4 sets of sugar leaves. This tells me that my def is probably corrected. The vast majority of fan leaves are green and healthy. I just screwed up for a few days.

Screwing up in early - mid flower is a very painful mistake. You get to spend the next several weeks looking at ugly leaves and wondering how bad this will affect your harvest. It is not a great feeling. However it is better than screwing up late in flower. I believe I did many things correctly this flowering period so far. I had excellent structure going into the flip and was able to train the plants during the stretch to achieve a very nice canopy. It is not as nice as I wanted, but that will come with experience. I have been able to keep the budsites in the strong light foot print and increasing the bud site density of that foot print. That should equate to a more efficient use of the available growable light. Now the things I did not do so well or even poorly was anticipate how the defol on day 20 was going to affect the plants ability to handle a "normal" PPM range. I believe my toxicity (high PPM) was because I was keeping the ppm at the 1100 level even after I took all of those fan leaves. As the plant was slowing way down at the end of stretch, it did not need all of that and it lead to some burnt tips and toxicity in the res. I changed one thing but did not allow for that change in my feeding.

So that is the conclusion that I am drawing from that experience. It was not really bad. The plants were only slightly damaged. They are still on track and ~90% green undamaged. But because everything else is so green, the damaged leaves stick out and just scream at you; "YOU FAILED". lol. It is a little hard to take that off of a stupid plant. haha

So now that I feel comfortable about my understanding of the why I had def, I have a plan going forward. I still will defol next Friday. I am going to keep my PPM levels between 700 - 800 this week. I will of course continue to monitor water levels and pH as well. Next Friday I will make sure that my PPM does not go over 700. I will keep it at that level for one week and then start to raise it again by small increments until I get to ~800 - 850. And Of course week nine I will dial that back down to about 700 and week ten I will flush and only use flawless finish.

Growing and training technique are very important. It is very important to understand the particular way you decide to grow and train and cultivate you plants. You want good results and anybody that takes the time and spends the money to get a system and make a journal is trying to get more out of the plant than a few hits of a bowl. We are all trying to "Up our game" so to speak. What I am trying to do here is not just find a growing style and training method that works for me. I am also trying to find the details and directions for how to get the most or best results (as I define for myself what that means) out of my system. So yes I found journals that were very good at explaining hydro and RDWC. And LA is fantastic at explaining all the training he does with his plants and he pointed me at a journal that was excellent at a deeper how to about cropping and super cropping the plants and defoling and when to do it. However LA is a soil grower, so his feed routine and water routine are not applicable to me, and the other journal did not go into the minutia of PPM, pH, schedules things like that. It said up front, that you needed to be experienced with your kit and strains. To already be dialed in and know when and what your girls are going to do things. So I am probably over confident in my grow abilities. lol (understatement I know). I had one grow under my belt and it was far from dialed in. lol. I still decided to jump in and tackle this style, because I am very impressed with LA and Doc and the guy who made that journal. They all do defol and training and get amazing kick ass results. So in the highest expression of flattery, I wanted to copy them.

This is why I am writing down all of my observations and conclusions. Good and bad. The good will be self evident in pics and harvest. I dont focus too much on them. The bad I do focus on, because I want to draw attention to it, so that it will spark a conversation about the reasons why. For me, technique is the most important, followed very closely by the why. Why grow this way? Why do a schedule? Why are my leaves turning crappy? lol you get the idea. So, anybody that is considering a RDWC growing system and is looking at training styles, will hopefully read this and come to a better understanding of how it works and why you do things when you do them.

Ok, so this was a much longer post than I had started out to make. LOL. i do have some pics. Please enjoy them. Again comments or questions or welcome and encouraged. Thanks and have a great Sunday.

 

[Spitz]

Great post!

 

[Bamalabrat]

This is not an update (the girls in flower are looking great though) but I did want to let everyone know that I placed my order with CKS this weekend and got a confirmation today. I went with a feminized seed called the Green Crack. I am not a fan of the name but I did find the marketing details to be interesting as well as the flowering time plus yield potential. So I will let you guys know when those seeds get here.

 

[Bamalabrat]

Ok this is going to be an Update (lol)

First I apologize for not being able to post pics right now. I am having hardware issues. I hope to have this resolved tomorrow. I did take pics so you will still get to see, when I can post them, what I am going to describe.

The flower tent looks awesome. I did a defol of the plants today. I did not go as severe as I could have. I kind of chickened out. But I did do a major defol. It filled a bag up and that was with me pushing the leaves down and everything. The first leaves to go were all of the crappy ones that just screamed you suck. Then I went through and started cutting away the big fans at the canopy and started going a bit lower. I did not go past the 5 node on any plant. Nor did I take any fans that did not have at least an inch of stem. I also did not take any leaves that were in a bud. That being said, I was so excited as I was taking the leaves out of the canopy, because I was sometimes finding a top that I did not see before. I had leaves that were covering up branches with tops almost up to the canopy. These are the budsites that I am trying to encourage growth at as well as further down.

After clearing the canopy out, could look into the interior of the plant and see light going further into the plant. And of course this light was landing on buds. That was the intent and the whole purpose of training the plants this way. I really really hope this works out. I cant put the leaves back on, so there is no going back. I just hope I did not mess this up. I can say that today is the end of the 6th week. I have four more to go. The number of tops is way more than last time and the nugs are starting to really swell now. They are much bigger than last week for sure. I started measuring the width and I am very comfortable saying that the nugs are pretty much all .75 - 1 inch wide. If they continue doubling in size every week this will be an amazing grow. I do not think that they will though.

My last grow of the PPP had colas that got to 3 inches wide and then went to 1.5 - 1.75 inches wide after drying and curing. So i think for the next 2 weeks the colas will double in size every week. Then i will guess that they will just get dense after that. I did not give them enough time last grow to build that density. This time, however they will get another two weeks to grow, so that should make them heavier. Maybe not fatter or taller, but should def make them heavy.

They are covered in crystals of course. I love seeing that. Especially when lights go out. I use a flashlight and have a look to see all the "ice" on them. It is a lot of fun to do that. Now let me get to the smell. Last grow I actually for a while enjoyed the smell of the PPP. It had a citrus smell similar to a lemon or grapefruit or something. Sweet but with a def bitter smell. Now, these girls just stink! I mean seriously. Is that just because of them being clones? They smell like,,,idk what it smells like, but it is strong and it is def marijuana smelly. People who judge pot off of smell, will love the smell of girls. So glad I went with a 6 inch carbon filter. It is getting a work out right now. lol.

Thats about it. I can not believe it has been 6 weeks of flower already. They are healthy and green and smelly and sticky as crap. The buds are finally starting to put on some weight and then there is just the sheer amount of crystals convering them. All in all a very good week.
Thanks for checking me out guys. I hope that everyone has a good week.

 

[Bamalabrat]

Ok so here are the pics from yesterday. Hope you enjoy them. Feel free to comment. Have a great weekend everyone.

 

[Far East Buds]

How are your PPM's? Still low..? Need to be Gentle til they recover ...

 

[Bamalabrat]

650 - 710 today. I started taking samples from buckets and from the res. I will try like hell to stay in that range for the next few days. Then I will see how they respond to 750 range late next week. Two weeks from now I want to be back in the 800 range but it will depend on what I am seeing. So far no burnt tips in the sugar leaves. So that I a good sign.

I was thinking this evening and wanted to just put this down in the journal. I get really excited about my grow right before the flip and during the stretch. I am then excited watching the budsites develop during the late stretch and for like a week afterwards. Then during mid flower I hate the grow. I am looking at the flowers and thinking; Are they growing? How much will they grow? How much will this produce? How much more nutes do I need to order? Are the flowers any bigger yet? lol

The thing is with gardening, I like the process. I like the ritual of watering and pruning and harvesting. I like watching the flowers of my pepper plants turn into peppers. My strawberries emerge from flowers and stuff like that. With canabis, there is no transformitve process like with fruits or vegetables. It is a lot like growing basil for my wife. She has 5 different basil strains that she likes. They dont have flowers that turn into basil. Basil is the leaf. So all you ever get to see is a stem grow and put out a lot of leaves and you wait until the leaves are big and pick them. That is almost how I feel during the middle of flower on the canabis. The crazy incredible growth that it can have in veg or the epic growth it puts on in stretch is over. All of the budsites are formed. And then you just have to be patient as the plant's flowers very slowly mature. It is fun to go and look at them during lights out with a plain white led. The crystals are just very pretty. But, there is little to no excitement until you are close to chopping. Then you are just super busy with chopping, manicuring, cleaning and set up for the next grow. You watch your humidity and pray that no mold spores get onto your buds. I feel so much better once they are in jars and curing. But get sad as a full jar last night loses almost half the volume of buds due to drying out as the buds cure. LOL. Its like who the hell is taking all my bud?

Well that was just what I was thinking tonight as I was checking on my girls. The buds are getting bigger. Some of the pistils are turning brown, and new pistils are sprouting in clumps and stuff. Less of the stems are visible as the lower nugs are growing and combining to look like one long super bud (cola). But it just is not fast enough. LOL. I "shared" too much of my last grow. lol. I should have saved a bit more for me. Now a short 4 weeks (6 counting a one week dry and one week cure) seems like an eternity. Have a good weekend guys.

 

[ShiggityFlip]

For me the stretch is the time I don't like. Once the stretch stops and the trichomes start coming I am a happy camper. I breathe a sigh of relief and just enjoy the show.

 

[Bamalabrat]

Hi everyone. Ok this is not an update on the plants. Just wanted to give an update on the CKS contest prize. I received my prize today. 5 seeds of the Green Crack. I hate the name but I liked the stats of the plant. I plan on popping these seeds and my last of the pk this summer. I currently have PPP and KT in flower. I have PPP and KS in veg so I will start these beans with the pk after I harvest this grow.

BTW, anyone interested, the girls are looking ok. I wound up doing a res dump on saturday. They seem to be responding well. Flowers are growing and getting bigger. I just do not like seeing some def that are showing up in the fan leaves. however, ugly fan leaves and growing flowers are still a win. I estimate that there is probably ~400 - 500 grams worth of bud in the tent right now. Over the next 3 weeks I want that to get to 2k. I will say that from last Thursday until today the buds have probably doubled. If they continue to double every 5 days for the next 20 days, this will really be an epic success. So, I am hoping that things continue to go well.

I am also really considering entering one of my PPP's for the March POM. I have two of them that I am very happy with. If the nugs get to the size that I am hoping for, I will probably do it. Tomorrow I will take some pics of the stem and canopy. The stems on these plants and the health of the roots (serious the roots are almost bone white after 3 months of being in buckets) are just incredible to me. I will probably be cutting these stems with my hack saw instead of my clippers.

 

[Bamalabrat]

Update,

Ok the girls are building bigger buds. That is awesome. So happy. I am seeing a difference in size everyday now. I like what it is telling me. I have the PPM up to 800 again. The reason being, they started to show a definite cal/mag def. I did not add that last week as I was thinking of keeping ppm low and did not want another pH problem. But the plants were starving for it. So I added it on Monday and over the last 48 hours the plants have had really impressive growth in the buds. I would really really like to have a flowering that did not have def!!!

Well this is only my second one, so I will not get too down about it. I am just loving the bigger buds. And about time too. I have been looking at other peoples grows and the pics of some of their buds in the last week or so of the grow is just awesome. I am happy for them, but jealous as hell! lol I want big 3 - 4 inch wide nugs!!

Oh well, we will just have to sit back and see how this shakes out over the next 2 weeks. I am estimating a 2 March finish. That can slide to the right or left a little. It will just depend on the plants. Right now they are making me think the first week of March is about right.

Real quick note about my veg tent. I have another journal going about it so I will not go into a lot here but, I wound up dropping a Green Crack seed that I just received into water as one of my seedlings died. So i will get to try a Green Crack a little earlier than I thought. I would like to have you guys chime in whether or not I should also pop my last PK bean and do that one as well. I will have to do it today if I want to just to keep the GC and Pk about the same size and development so I am not completely behind schedule for my next flowering.


Anyway, here are a couple of pics of the girls. I am really digging how my front 2 PPP are looking. Take care and have fun.

 

[CronicHempHog]

Nice

 

[Bamalabrat]

Thanks Cronic!

 

[Light Addict]

Looking damn fine my friend, some nice looking buddage!