PeeJay's Perpetual Organic Homebrewed Soil - Stealth Cabinet And Greenhouse Grow

[RainStacks]

Your plants grew so fast that I seriously got confused. Helen is looking bodaciously budular, and like she will bring a bounty of bud beyond belief! I think we are beating a dead horse with the alliteration huh? LA seems to make it work though. I was not sure if I was at the right journal! I had to go back and make sure! Everything is looking awesome my friend. I too had a confused seed, the plant in my journal Runt, did exactly the same thing, but she only had one root. Maybe aliens tried to abduct you and and the plant's gravitism mechanism was just reacting to the tractor beam? I am giving you some reps, you can use them in the tea!

 

[Jay233]

Plants are looking great PeeJay

Nice job with the supersoil mix

 

[PeeJay]

I am giving you some reps, you can use them in the tea!

Thanks Rain! I threw the reps in the pail to bubble away.

 

[PeeJay]

Plants are looking great PeeJay

Nice job with the supersoil mix

I'm not sure that I should really call what I did supersoil... Demi-supersoil? I have close to the right amounts of many of the ingredients in there. Hopefully the micro herd likes it! In around three weeks I'll transplant the two Dark Stars into the veg-mix and well see what happens.

 

[CronicHempHog]

Happy Skunkday Pj

 

[Dyold]

Plants and everything is looking great PeeJay, nice stuff and thanks for the information on my journal.

 

[PeeJay]

A couple of pics of the White Panther I call Dyarina. Dy is about 2' tall. Her growth is interesting. She throws out big fan leaves at intervals. The nodes between the big fans only grow small leaf sets. I'm thinking this would be a great strain for a SOG. The breeder calls this strain "the original white dwarf."

 

[Lady Cannafan]

Beautiful leaves on Dy. How tall will it get according to the breeder?

 

[PeeJay]

You know, Canna, there really isn't much info out there on this strain. The breeder info only says that it is a dwarf variety, calls it "compact" and also suggests it is good for sog. Flowering is supposed to be 45-55 days. It's pretty fast. It is a cup winner from Amsterdam in 2000 or 2001.

I'm sure how tall it gets depends on the amount of time it veges. Roxy had an extra week of veg and is about 6" taller than Dyarina. Both plants are probably about done stretching. It'll be interesting to see how it fills out in flower.

It's sort of interesting to contemplate how well it would do with a three week veg in one or two gallon pots. In a space like yours you could probably run two deep and five across - ten plants. It would harvest in around 80 days assuming a three week veg, nine days after 12/12 to start flowering, and a 55 day flower period.

 

[Lady Cannafan]

Well, I'll keep watching that Dy girl then. Next grow my veg time will be MUCH shorter than I did on the first. LOL
It will be great to see how Dy fills out too.

 

[PeeJay]

One of the coolest things I've seen in a while is a metric graytail used to evaluate his last multi-strain grow. Folks often throw around the old grams per wat stat. Graytail provided a "grams per-day" analysis. Neither metric can account for the subjective value of quality. That said, grams per day is a fascinating way of looking at things. Training plants is fun and can be rewarding when it comes to total yield. Extensive training takes time in veg.

Doing an in depth study of what leads to the best grams per day result would take years. It's food for thought. I'm guessing a White Panther sog would generate a decent GPD figure. I wish I could run a half dozen tents to do some testing. lol

 

[CA215]

Subn up PeeJay. That photoshopped foot was freakin hilarious.. Did you guys miss that?
Looks like I am missing a killer journal, don't mind me. Continue with your thoughts

 

[PeeJay]

Thought I'd put together an overview of the SCRoG technique I used since training is a very popular topic. What I did was much different than the current popular training trends on the forum. I did not train the plant before the screen was placed. I used the screen to train. At five nodes high the plants were transferred to the five gallon pots with the porta-SCRoG rig. I cut down some tomato cages and buried their legs into the soil. The top hoop of the cage was around 5.5-6" above the medium. No manipulations, LST, topping, or FIM was done before placing the plants under the screen. Once the transplant was done I did a FIM at the fifth node.

Next I started bending the FIMed top under the screen each time it was tall enough to move to the next square in the grid.

Essentially, I used the screen to LST the plant. The FIM gave me multiple tops. I moved those towards one end of the rectangular screen. Two factors contributed to rapid growth on the nodes below the FIM. Both the FIM and the LST increased growth hormones (auxins) available to the lower branches. Because the main top(s) were being bent out and away from the lower growth, there was plenty of light for the four nodes below. Because the screen was only six inches above the soil they hit the screen pretty quickly.

Growth from the lower nodes was moved in the opposite direction from the main FIMed top.

A few dominant tops from the lower nodes were topped to double them, but I think I only did three or so. New branches growing up from all the bigger branches moving horizontally through the screen sent tops up through the screen, too.

[img]https://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/500/helen_goes1212.jpg

I've done almost no defol. The plants seem to take care of that by themselves. The canopy is thick enough that little light reaches under the screen. When a leaf is not being productive it turns yellow and falls off.

 

[CA215]

Thanks much for that PeeJay! Going to give it a go on a girl or two of mine here later tonight. Contemplating the topping and fim I've done, & I am thinking/hoping that it is just going to increase my number of tops and make my girls extra bushy. Your plants look extremely healthy, will push some more reps your way soon. Keep up the killer work!!

 

[Madmunchies]

They really do look healthy. Wide and bushy, just awesome. I'd top mine too but it's an auto, and autos don't like any kind of stressful training, so yeah. I'm going for the scrog and hoping for the best since that method is not as nearly stressful as topping or fimming is.

But yeah, the plants look just beautiful,
cheers & keep up.

 

[Lady Cannafan]

The more I look at your individual scrog screens, the more I really like that idea. I'm going to buy some of that wire at the local farm place and make some. I love the idea that you can move them around, instead of having several plants under the same screen and it being "where it's at" for good. LOL
It would be great, as you've shown with yours to be able to just move them somewhere when a flush has to occur. Just too danged schmart Peejay!

 

[PeeJay]

LOL Canna. Sometimes I'm too Schmart for my own damn good and go all kinds of Rube Goldberg. Overthinking things can be a debilitating handicap!

Not being able to rotate plants to even out light, difficulty watering and NOT BEING able to flush effectively are some major downsides to the SCRoG, for sure.

Now I'm on a roll and am going to go on a flushing rant. Many growers think of a flush as something that's good in the last two weeks, or as something to do when things go drastically wrong. Not many grasp the notion that flushing is a way to prevent big problems from happening in the first place. I'm prone to analogies, and I'm going to nauseate anyone who actually reads my drivel with an analogy now.

Someone feeds me breakfast every day. Usually it's the same thing, a big bowl of Total breakfast flakes fortified with eleven different vitamins and minerals. They give me a nice big portion. I don't finish it all. The next day I'm given another nice big portion of Total. The leftover uneaten Total is still in the bowl from the day before. I eat roughly the same amount of Total as I did the day before. The amount of uneaten total in the bowl doubles. The next day I get another big serving of total dumped on top of two days worth of left-over Total... You can, I'm sure, see where we're headed...

When we mix up our nutes and feed plants growing in a container, we are dumping "Total" into a bowl. All of the eleven essential Vitamins and Minerals that aren't used by the plant stay in the bowl. Over time the concentration of some or all of the Vitamins and Minerals increases and increases. It can get quite toxic. An animal pees the extra out. Plants can't really pee. When we pee, we flush the unnecessary extra Vitamins and Minerals away. *Imagine the sound of a toilet flush*

In a container plant environment there are a bazillion bacteria and fungi living. They are breaking down organic material. Just like humans they poop and pee. Large microbiological populations commonly die off because the end up drowning in their own piss and shit.

Striving to give a container plant exactly what it needs, no more and no less, is a lofty and unrealistic goal. Some things are going to build up. Many of them are "salts." These "salts" tend to end up in the lower root zone. Salts are water soluble. They are washed to the lower root zone of our bowl containers. If you water and feed and never let any water drain from the bottom of the pot it only compounds the problem. No poop, pee, or salts get washed out at all.

Flushing is not something to do only when there is an obvious problem. It is something that should be done periodically as a prophylactic (preventative) measure. A fixed screen SCRoG makes flushing a difficult proposition, to say the least.

I have much more to say about flushing and flushing technique than I've said but I'll restrain myself unless anyone wants to talk about it more..

 

[CA215]

Very insightful Great read, makes complete sense.

 

[Lady Cannafan]

I now understand your name, Pee...jay. LOL
Your analogy makes perfect sense to me. It does concern me that I can't really let any decent drainage go out of the pots due to the way I have them "fixed" there. As I think about the house plants I was always killing, they had nowhere to run off that build up of salts etc. either. It's painfully clear that the roots/plants were just telling me "I've had enough of this sh*t!(pun intended) I quit!"
Next grow will be much different in the layout and the plants will be mobile if needed and will have something different under them to give some run off when needed.
I like the idea you had with the hose and the holes in the wood base...I have something in mind to expand on that base idea. ;-)
Obviously what you are doing is working extremely well, your plants look incredibly healthy and green.
So ...rant whenever ya like lil' green dude....er sprout. ;-)

 

[RainStacks]

I would love to hear more of the rant. I have heard that people who grow in coco tend to do periodic flushes since EC will build up faster in coco than in soil. When you do these flushes do you notice that the plants pucker up for a while from a lack of 02 in the root zone? I recently found out that worm compost and worm castings are not the same thing, silly me. So I inadvertently overferted my indoor plants by giving them a tiny dose of tea. They seem to be recovering just fine, but I seem to get the claw look from too much water. I think I am going to have to PH my water now. I know my tap water has high ppm, but perhaps the filtered stuff I buy at the grocery store does too.

I also think I will be using your portable scrog method I am doing a transplant in the next few days into 5 gal.