Oh No - It's A Green Hole! - Reverse Thrusters! - Dammit - Too Late!

Weaselcracker

Weaselcracker

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November 2020
Alright.
Good day everyone. I'm starting a journal.
I'm going to start with just the basic facts and I will blather more after that. Of that you can be sure. But in the meantime in case someone wants to know the general grow situation here is that info.



JOURNAL NITTY GRITTY

- Alright here is the nuts and bolts of what is going in in the grow room these days.

- It is a 8x12' room overall about 7' high, divided into two rooms -to make a perpetual grow. The outside climate is quite cool and humid year round. During lights-on the thermostat controlled fan kicks in to bring in fresh cooling air from outside. During lights-out the room doesn't generally heat up, so the fans do not come on. RH gets extremely high ( usually in the 80s but often in the 90s ) especially during lights -out, as the temps drop, plants transpire, and no fresh air comes in. I have been in a borderline situation keeping bud rot at bay for years. I recently bought a dehumidifier which I'm hoping will help with this.

FLOWERING ROOM

- I'm flowering in a (roughly) 8' x8' room.

image29736.jpg


image29737.jpg

Left side- two Mama Thai plants on left about a month apart in age. Blueberry back right. White widow front right, has some problems.




image29738.jpg

This is the right side. Four pineapple chunks including the one in front left which I just wrangled into a screen tonight.




SCROG

- I made individual screens 24"x 19". They're supported by aluminum shafts stuck in the pots and I can shuffle the pots around to work though it's a bit cramped. Four screens fit under a light. As of a few weeks ago this is the first time I've had a full set of 8 screens going.

POTS

- A mix of 7-10 gallons. The ten gallon ones I only filled with about seven gallons of 'soil' but they are big enough that they hold the supports for the scrog screens well.

PLANTS

- This is a mixed bag of strains. I'm trying a couple new ones and also growing a couple favorites.
Currently I have growing

~2 Mama Thai - 100% sativa. One reveg, one straight from seed.
~4 Pineapple chunk - indica dom- One reveg, and three other clones of plants that I grew from seed last one round.
~1 White Widow ( Seedsman)
~1 Blueberry. (Seedsman)

- I just harvested a GSC mystery cross tonight and replaced it with yet another pineapple chunk. So that one escapes the journal. It's not that I'm in love so much with the PC but it was just the biggest plant in the veg room and ready to move, so in it went. I have a patient that likes it so I suppose they'll be happy in a few months if all goes well

LIGHTING

- HPS lights. They are dimmable- one is 300- 600+, the other one is 600- 1000+ (+ meaning the super lumens setting which is about a 10% power boost)
I pretty much always keep the two flowering lights set at 600.


GROWING MEDIUM

- Currently sunshine mix #4 which is basically peat moss and perlite. I've been mixing powdered beneficial fungi and bacteria into it before the plants go in.
- Water is rainwater which falls out of the sky at 5.6 PH

PH

- 5.8 - 6.2

FLOWERING NUTRIENTS

- Botanicare Power Flower, Grow, Cal mag, Hydroplex
( haven't tried this yet)- and the occasional tea with various beneficial ingredients.

TEMPS

- Currently in the 72 - 80 range

RH

- This was in the 50 - 85% range this week but I'm plugging in the dehumidifier tonight, as I just discovered my precious Mama Thai buds started showing a spot of bud rot. So I should be able to bring the RH into a better range as of tonight.

VEG ROOM

- This is a space about 3.5' x 3.5. It's pretty crowded at the moment and I'm figuring out it's a little small for vegging biggish plants. But for now I'm making it work.

image28993.jpg


PLANTS

- 13 plants if I counted right. There is a variety of strains, pot sizes, and plant sizes. I have examples of all the strains growing in the flowering room, as well as a freshly sprouted Thai Stick seedling.


LIGHTING

- Dimmable MH 300- 600+ watts.

VEG NUTRIENTS

- Basically just the Botanicare grow formula. But when I look in there I see some other bottles I've acquired. This stuff gets splashed in to the mix as well. I'll list them in rough order of how much I use them
Cal mag
Liquid Karma
Molasses
GH Subculture M&B - beneficial fungi and bacteria
Hydroguard - beneficial bacteria
Zho - beneficial fungi
Silica (I just got this and haven't tried it yet)


CLONING

- I do this off in one corner of the veg room, under a cfl. My current method is to take cuttings ' the usual way' and clone in rockwool, but then put the rockwool/ cuttings in a tub of moist coco coir. I don't put a dome on, but my RH is naturally high which maybe accounts for why things are fine without the dome. The coco stays at a happy moisture, generally without any further touching up, during the ten days or so before roots form.

PESTS & PROBLEMS

- No pests in there these days except for me.
Problems, hmmm, I've got a few of those but I'll deal with those as we come to them I suppose. At the moment things are going pretty well. Some days this whole thing is a teetering house of cards ready to collapse but hey that's life. This is a seat of the pants, skin of the teeth growing situation.
 
Oh No - it's... A Green Hole!!! Reverse Thrusters!!! - Dammit!!! Too late....

Ok I'm back. Ha ha! I couldn't quite remember the title I made for this journal that first night at 4am. Oh well...

PURPOSE OF THIS JOURNAL.

- I don't really know.
I don't actually have enough time for a proper journal so I think this will have to be some other sort. Let me ponder this here.

I have to be away more often that not for work and stuff. Some, like actually most, weeks I do the absolute bare minimum at the grow. Like go splash some water around in there and feed the girls and run out again. Usually I'm so busy that any trimming or intensive work I do has to be done at the end of a long day- like I often don't get a chance to get to the grow till past midnight and then I might work for four or five hours in there before getting a couple hours sleep and going to work. Most every week I'm away for at least five days straight and I expect the plants to not dry out or otherwise die during that time. So the grow suffers for this situation. I could have some innovations going in there to save me time- like an auto-watering system, but I haven't found time to set that up either.

One twist of fate re. the work which takes me away, is that I sometimes get quite a lot of time in places away from home where I am trapped in rooms at night without much to do but sit and surf 420. So- more time on 420 than on the grow which seems backwards but it's been awesome tapping into this forum which I joined last winter and has really changed my life in ways.

I've grown a few years but really badly Neanderthal- throw the water in, guesstimate the nutes, never write any shit down, screw up twenty times, take twenty steps backwards, twenty one steps forward. Why? I don't know. I didn't know. I didn't have internet (or barely) in those days and I didn't have all you geniuses to set such a good example. I just winged it. I've never felt in a hurry with these plants, and never much worried about yield. I've made nearly every mistake in the book just to see if the book might be wrong, or something.

Now I've got a couple patients to supply and am trying to get a little more responsible. Also I'm being shamed into it by the growers on this forum! I'm not a great grower or anything. I'm sort of getting past the worst of the learning pains but don't be surprised to see - embarrassing mistakes, trashed plants, dirt swept, or not, into the corners, and general mayhem and confusion. PLEASE chime in when you see me doing stupid crap and save me. Thanks!

This journal catches me in mid flight with my perpetual. I don't have anything really specially interesting happening but I suppose this, which is my first journal anywhere, will just be a slice of my growing life for the next few months or whatever and then I'll end the journal and do something else for a while. The Mama Thai strain is one I haven't found any journals of so maybe that's one reason to do a little journalling.

I admit I felt some pressure to do a journal on 420. I've been wandering the halls of 420 for months, blathering stuff all over the place on other people journals, and drifting around trying to help with newbie questions and any stuff that I might have some input on, and trying not to screw up too bad. This is a chance to get some help, maybe give a little back to the forum, and have a good time doing it.

I've got some good things to say about this forum. In that MOTM thread I said this place gives me hope. Sounds cheesy but it's true. This policy of no negative energy has opened my eyes a bit to possibilities. Sure- the mods will kick us out and piss on us and ban us if we don't follow the rules- so it's not exactly because we are all such saintly people that this place functions, but still, it's really so cool to be able to chat with all you and learn so much awesome stuff. I'm sure we wouldn't all get along in real life, but we're making it work here aren't we? I like it a lot!

I am not going to do regular complete weekly plant progress updates and such. There's no way I could pull that off properly.
I'll just focus on whatever is interesting happening at the time, if there is anything, and whatever tangents we find ourselves on. I hope you guys can help me with a few things too.

Alright- cool. This is my journal then. Welcome one and all!

And now, since I haven't slept in two days, I'm going to take off, eh.
G'nite folks.
image29734.jpg

MAMA THAI
 
Hi
Here are a few Things going on
- in my grow at the moment....

My White Widow plant is looking definitely worse- though I cut back the nutes more, again. I should know what the problem is but I don't. I was assuming nute burn.
Maybe someone will come along who can help me on this- and I will post some pics of it at some point- but for now I'll move on to a couple other things.

Other Stuff Going On-

As I mentioned - I am/was having mold issues with my ripest Mama Thai. I told you I hooked up the dehumdifier. However, it turns out the dehum was leaking, so the water it produced, instead of running through the hose attached to it, and down my drain, was pouring on the floor next to the unit and pooling in an obscure corner of the room. So I'm not sure how much it's been helping. Probably a little bit. Fixed that now, obviously.

However- I found one more big bud with mold so I cut it down. That's six of the biggest buds gone from the. MT so far. I haven't lost much though. It's almost ripe- was mostly mold free and useable and I'll smoke it myself.
Anyway- while I was discovering that moldy bud I discovered a seed or two- and then on further inspection- nanners!
image29837.jpg

This is the first flowering of this MT plant, from seed. The other MT is a reveg and didn't have nanners last round. So it's either the plant genetics, and/or a light leak accident. The latter is possible because I noticed my dehum has a small yellow light on top, which I've now covered, and also I'm worried I may have accidently let a glimmer in through the door once or twice in the last month.

Anyway- I'm not worried about any of these things. Haven't taken any real losses yet. Well, the WW plant does bother me a little, but I'll sort it out.
Anyone grown it who has some input re it's feeding habits? Or are all the 'White Widow' strains completely different from one another? This one is from Seedsman.

Ok Next,
here in the vortex of
The Green Hole,
even though it's highly doubtful that anyone out there is actually listening, I'm going to do a little review of some HPS sunglasses I recently got, which helped to make this wondrous new journal possible.

I wasn't going to start a journal till I found a way to take decent photos under the Hps. I find that pics taken under led or Hps look very bad, unless somehow light-balanced afterwards. I could not find a way to post process pics on my iphone and come up with a decent picture. These sunglasses work as a camera filter, besides working as eye protection.

They are called Lumii Growroom sunglasses.
image29882.jpg


In appearance they are kind of upscale safety glasses. Better quality than your average bottom of the barrel safety glasses, and more styley, though lacking the heft and strength of expensive sunglasses. They definitely look like they're up to the wear and tear of the job, as long as I don't step on them or anything.

They look alright on me. I look cool enough in them that I think I could blend in well enough anywhere with them on, and I doubt if the mean kids at the beach would kick sand in my face because I look ridiculous in them, even though they are tinted blue.

My flowering room looks great through them! I can see much more clearly and it's relaxing on the eyes. I also don't have that nagging worry anymore that I'm killing my vision. The glasses are comfortable enough to wear, and I can't think of any issues I have with their performance.
They work nicely to filter my iphone camera. A little awkward to hold against the phone- but I'm not complaining. Here are a couple pics for comparison.
image29884.jpg

UNFILTERED


image29885.jpg

FILTERED

They cost me a little over $20.

Oh yeah

One More Thing

I'm making a new drying box for the flowering room.
image29881.jpg


My current box is too tall. I'm converting a fridge for the task. I grabbed it from the recycling junkman guy yesterday.
It's not really what I wanted- any plain light proof box with a door that shut well would work, and the fridge is insulated, which I don't think I need, and was a bit of a hassle to drill holes through, but it should work and it was what I found when I looked yesterday.
I modified the door and replaced the interior side, which had shelves to hold milk and butter trays and stuff, with a sheet of plasticky material :)

I will control the air flow through the box, and therefore drying time, with a computer fan which lays on top of the 3" hole I jigsawed into the top of the fridge. The fan will operate possibly wired up in conjunction with a humidistat, if I have one around somewhere. Up till now I've adjusted the air flow rate (on my current drying box) by just sliding the fan around so it covers less or more of the hole, or removing it completely.

*One note*- and another reason a fridge may not be the best choice- this fridge had been drained of freon by the junkyard guys, and I removed the motor and tank from the back and left it with them.
Freon is a toxic substance so don't go cutting apart that area of a fridge unless you have a way that you can deal with that issue.

It's no masterpiece but it's shorter and less clunky than the old box, and I can stack a plant on top of it- which is going to be a really great because right now it's very cramped trying to shuffle those scrog plants around. I have a place I can stack a plant on the other side of the room. So now I can stack the two plants, which are front and center, both out of the way and access the other six plants. :thumb: which will be awesome.

Once I get some racks for it. Which will mean another junkyard run soon.

Ok friends, that's it for now. Most of you are probably sleeping peacefully by now, and that's what I should try to do as well. So... goodnight! :)
 
Thanks Roach. I'm actually not that great a gardener and I will be needing your help so I'm glad you're here!
 
I'll post some pics of my white widow later if I get time. It's probably simple nute burn- and this will show one of the many gaps in my growing knowledge :). But a few months ago I thought I had nute burn and I dialed back the nutes till I eventually realized, standing over the shriveled blackened ruins of my plants (I'm exaggerating a little) that they were deficient because they were underfed. I gave them full strength nutes and that stopped the destruction.
This may be a repeat of that.
Either that or the WW is just a very light feeder.
Or something else is going on. Ha ha
 
Nice setup Weaselcracker!

I should get it together and start a journal myself but where to put it. Have two girls in 4 gal pots ScroGing in the grow room with one DWC girl squeezed in on the screen all flowering for almost 2 weeks and one plant in a pot that that sits in the shop window at night and out in the yard during the day. She's a clone from the DWC one.

Enough about that, this is your journal!

I'm used to working in cramped spaces too so lucky I'm just an average sized dood. I use sheep fencing for my ScroG. Nice big holes and if I need to go across a few inches I have a roll of twist tie wire that I can use to bridge the gap to have something to lash the tip down to. No frames needed either as it's stiff enough to hold it's own shape.

Those growroom glasses are great! Gotta get me some of those as my eyes are messed up after working in the room under my 2 - 400W lights. Come back up here to play in the forums and all the colours are wonky for a half hour. I watch TV in a corner of the monitor so spend a lot of time on-line while watching the boobtube.

I hope you have turned off the location function for the camera on your iPhone or the GPS location where the picture was taken is imbedded in the picture data file that goes with each picture. EXIF data it's called. You're safe with pics you've uploaded here as the wise fellas that run this place seem to strip that file from the pic before it's posted. I've checked yours with an EXIF file viewer and it's not there. My wife was recently gifted an iPhone4 to use for a camera and pics from her garden and chicken coop had the GPS data in them. I turned off the location setting so the GPS data is gone but it still has all the other stuff like camera settings, model etc.

My Nikon digicam died recently and it had a manual white balance function so I could take pics under HPS lamps that looked great. Now I'm forced to use the old Sony that doesn't have that so just sneak in after lights out and get a pic with the flash if I want one. I'll have to play with the iPhone and see if there is some setting to balance the colour or maybe an app.

I like that drying box and have often thought of doing something similar to slo-dry larger quantities. I wrote about I how I slo-dry now in another thread you frequent so I'm sure you'll see it.

I hear you about the difficulties of growing when work takes you away. I've been in the oil patch since 2001 and often had to leave the room in the care of my wife for weeks at a time. Was never happy when I got home and twice lost whole crops. Once to a little male in the corner that wasn't a showing sex when I left and mites the other time. She survived the beat downs and is a lot more careful now. :rofl: Was my fault for leaving the male in the corner of the flowering room. She did water it faithfully and it was in great shape when I got back. I was way up north near the territories for 45 days without phone contact but at least had seedy bud to smoke when I got back.

A little stroke took me out of the work force a couple years ago so any screwups are on me.

Looking forward to seeing more! :popcorn:

L8r
 
You bet I'm in. :party:

Now, let me read. :battingeyelashes:
 
OldMedUser said:
Nice setup Weaselcracker!

I should get it together and start a journal myself but where to put it. Have two girls in 4 gal pots ScroGing in the grow room with one DWC girl squeezed in on the screen all flowering for almost 2 weeks and one plant in a pot that that sits in the shop window at night and out in the yard during the day. She's a clone from the DWC one.

Enough about that, this is your journal!

I'm used to working in cramped spaces too so lucky I'm just an average sized dood. I use sheep fencing for my ScroG. Nice big holes and if I need to go across a few inches I have a roll of twist tie wire that I can use to bridge the gap to have something to lash the tip down to. No frames needed either as it's stiff enough to hold it's own shape.

Those growroom glasses are great! Gotta get me some of those as my eyes are messed up after working in the room under my 2 - 400W lights. Come back up here to play in the forums and all the colours are wonky for a half hour. I watch TV in a corner of the monitor so spend a lot of time on-line while watching the boobtube.

I hope you have turned off the location function for the camera on your iPhone or the GPS location where the picture was taken is imbedded in the picture data file that goes with each picture. EXIF data it's called. You're safe with pics you've uploaded here as the wise fellas that run this place seem to strip that file from the pic before it's posted. I've checked yours with an EXIF file viewer and it's not there. My wife was recently gifted an iPhone4 to use for a camera and pics from her garden and chicken coop had the GPS data in them. I turned off the location setting so the GPS data is gone but it still has all the other stuff like camera settings, model etc.

My Nikon digicam died recently and it had a manual white balance function so I could take pics under HPS lamps that looked great. Now I'm forced to use the old Sony that doesn't have that so just sneak in after lights out and get a pic with the flash if I want one. I'll have to play with the iPhone and see if there is some setting to balance the colour or maybe an app.

I like that drying box and have often thought of doing something similar to slo-dry larger quantities. I wrote about I how I slo-dry now in another thread you frequent so I'm sure you'll see it.

I hear you about the difficulties of growing when work takes you away. I've been in the oil patch since 2001 and often had to leave the room in the care of my wife for weeks at a time. Was never happy when I got home and twice lost whole crops. Once to a little male in the corner that wasn't a showing sex when I left and mites the other time. She survived the beat downs and is a lot more careful now. :rofl: Was my fault for leaving the male in the corner of the flowering room. She did water it faithfully and it was in great shape when I got back. I was way up north near the territories for 45 days without phone contact but at least had seedy bud to smoke when I got back.

A little stroke took me out of the work force a couple years ago so any screwups are on me.

Looking forward to seeing more! :popcorn:

L8r
Click to expand...

Thanks OMU. I enjoyed that post a lot.
Thanks a lot for checking my location data! Security is something I make efforts to manage, but I'm relying on 420 to do their good work as well.

I've gone through the iphone a lot in the last few months and found no balancing settings that work well. Also no apps, and talked to others who have also had no luck finding anything for the iphone. Though mine is an older iphone so maybe the new versions do have better settings.
I'm not sure about this drying method I'm using. This will probably be a short lived box- I'm just trying to clear a bit of room. Drying is another area I have a lot to learn in.
I try to get my plants to be dry to the 'snap' point no faster than 5 days or so, then into jars for curing.

I grew a bit once with a fellow who supposedly was an expert, and learned some good things from him, but some things that were totally wrong, and which set me back literally for years, making some bad mistakes, before I learned better from 420.
When we trimmed our buds we did all the trimming at once- then set them on screens to dry. This is what I've been doing ever since.
I see that a lot of people on 420 just trim the fans and hang entire plants or branches with the sugar leaf still on, then go back and finish trimming afterwards. I also read somewhere- Maybe Pigeons's journal?- someone saying that it is bad to cut the sugar leaves at first because you'll spread a chlorophyll taste around on the bud.

I think maybe your cardboard box method, or a paper bag system is probably better than my drying box- but I'm scared to break the ice on doing it that way because I may not be able be around to monitor for mold, and learn the process. I know with my drying box I can put it in there and leave for a week, though sometimes it dries a little faster than I like. That's better than risking mold however.

Re the glasses- there is also apparently a sponsor who sells a top of the line version called Method Seven grow room glasses. Kriaze did a review of the LED version. I got these cheap ones because funds were low. There are also a couple other cheap and mid price versions out there.
 
I use a tv box (32 inches screen).
I put a piece of pipe over the open part and hang the buds from there using that green twist wire to hang them. They dry very slowly, 8-12 days, but after that they can be smoked without any hay flavor. I use a glass jar with one of those hermetic pressure lids to cure the buds.
 
Well I guess there is very little airflow and lots of humidity, but I havent had any problems with mold.
I will post a pic in my journal later on tonight.
 

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