Well it's been a long week. So here's the latest
HYENA'S GROW HOUSE update!
Harvest time is always a bitch...three days of sitting and trimming, trimming, trimming, trimming........
So Monday when the inevitable chore began I was to say the least somewhat daunted by the sheer volume of biomass I faced.
First I looked the produce over. There are a lot of very pretty apples on these trees...
Lots of purple influence this time around.
But it is hard to believe the diversity I see in this group of (now 11) plants. Even though they all came from literally the exact same BUD on the same plant, they couldn't be more different. Tall, short, fat, skinny, plus every smell and terpine combination you could possibly imagine in this bouquet of bouquets. As I look at the buds I feel they are overall just smaller than my previous runs, even though there's millions of them. My questions about return on canopy density have been answered.
The canopy experiment was, after all, an experiment...I wanted to reach the practical limit of production and I reached it, then surpassed it. What almost two weeks of extra vegging accomplished was to produce a huge additional biomass that didn't really contribute to more production, rather, it reduced the size of the average bud and created a huge forest of useless space.
As I chopped I saw a lot of nice buds. Obviously a hedge this big is going to have a lot of nice candy in it...
But as the days passed I just wasn't seeing the bud density overall. Compared to my last couple projects, these buds are just a touch more larfy, they don't have the solid cores I'm used to getting. Since I am using the same variety as grow #1 I know the variable is the canopy density. Nevertheless, the produce gradually stacked up...
Rather than describe the endless hours (about 30) that it took to hand-process this forest, let me just say in the end I was looking at this...
There should really only be 12 stumps...so every bit of this jungle was wasted infrastructure, so to speak.
When one considers each plant as a single organism, with only so much growth "energy" to give (related to the size of its container, mainly), it becomes clear that energy can be put to a range of uses. Ideally, as much of it as possible goes towards making buds. In this case, a hell of a lot of it obviously went into growing stems and useless, larfy mid-canopy growth and a zillion unnecessary leaves. Okay, this is an amazing amount of plant mass to get from 12 pots but sadly WAY too much of it went into the unusable category.
So the harvest work was literally multiplied by the sheer number (and smaller size) of branches. Instead of trimming lunkers I was spending hours trying to manicure and make the most of a zillion small buds. It was especially time consuming and my eyes aren't as good as they used to be and it gave me a headache to have to dwell in this mini-world. It all added up and in the end I'm sure I'll have a fairly decent harvest, but it was a LOT of extra work. Especially the final remnant hedge because it was over three hours of sweaty bullshit to cut it all up and pluck thousands of small budlets that were all through it. I am counting on these to become an additional valuable thing because I plan to run it for concentrates but we'll see...the work it took to amass it was back- and mind-breaking.
I was at a particularly low point of complete depression when this shot was taken...
But in the end things get finished. When the smoke cleared it was all clean and ready to begin reconditioning the system (fully drained, refilled, everything cleaned) then bringing the next generation in to their new digs. This involves dropping the rockwool cubes into the buckets and filling them with Hydroton. If you use these clay balls you know they first have to be rinsed, since they're covered with clay dust that gunks up a hydro system. There's no easy (or clean) way to do this. It's nasty, unless you figure out a better way, eh? Well, here is my method...I open the bag and stand it in the bathtub, then fill it nearly to the top with water, bathing all the pellets inside the bag.
Then after a few minutes I poke a bunch of small holes in the bottom of the bag and let the water drain out.
Voila! A full bag of freshly-washed Hydroton pebbles in only a few minutes...and no mess! Then just scoop it out right into the buckets. No mess. Did I mention no mess? Anyone who has taken 30 minutes to clean a bathtub after washing this filthy, dusty stuff knows exactly why this is a big deal. My gift to you.
So it took a couple more hours but finally the next run was in and done!
These two varieties are professional strains and I'm learning once again the value of true-bred beans that you can count on. My idea of using seeds that were produced by a hermaphroditic plant saves money, but that's a small victory when you consider the grow probably produced 25% less because I had to slash it once that same trait began to appear in the offspring. Not worth it. I was lucky to detect it in time to prevent the overall grow from becoming fertilized. I saw many of the male flowers on multiple plants but nothing ever reached the point of pollen emission...so bullet dodged. This next grow will be much more productive!
My final result looks pretty impressive I guess, though it's a few hangers short of the last one.
But I'm not worried about a bit here and there, my goal is to learn exactly how to maximize my setup and this was an important step in that education. The lesson seems to be pigs get fat but hogs get slaughtered. Going forward I will be turning the lights to 12/12 a lot sooner and trying to get bigger, if fewer, colas. I will also get more grows in because I basically wasted a couple weeks growing this extra-huge but useless biomass.
Then I remembered the other tent! I hadn't even opened it since Monday when I first arrived...no need to disturb a nicely-filling scrog of healthy clones. I had noticed it looking a little limp but chalked that up to it being a bit warmer than usual in the tent and hadn't really thought about much since. So I unzipped it, and to my dismay the whole grow was totally limp, as if it hadn't been watered in a week, with many branches actually hanging down! Shit!
It could only be a water issue. Sure enough, upon examining everything I found the main pump in the reservoir had failed. So they really WEREN'T watered for almost a week! One cycle and they were all perky again. I turned the light timer back to 12/12 before I left...right at my preferred
6 weeks plus 2 or 3 days total vegging time from initial transplant, which has been the exact number of most of my grows and results in the optimal size for maximum production for most varieties IMHO.
So that's where we left things, with lots of buds drying and the new kids all playing in the sun. I will return Sunday to hopefully finish processing my harvest. Things dry a lot faster in the dry heat of Winter so by Sunday-Monday I hope they are ready to be bucked and packaged. Then the payoff which this time around likely won't be as much, but was very much earned...
I love to go on and on about the endlessly fulfilling emotional aspects of all this...
but I do it for the money. 
Have a gr8 week! Keep 'em green!
Peace, Hyena
btw great work as usual!
