Scientific's Coconut Coir Dwarf Low Flyer Summer Pot In An Air Pot Grow

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Scientific

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We're starting on Day 21. (I'll backfill as I push off from the dock.)

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Day 20: Snipping of node 6 the day before preflowers start

STRAIN: Crop King Dwarf Low Flyer autoflower (70% Indica, 20% Sativa, 10% Ruderalis)

LIGHTING:
Deck daylight plus (until the sun comes out)
Bulbs: 4 Luxrite 23-watt, 1600 lumen, 6500 K compact fluorescent in a hanging parabolic reflector
Light cycle: 16/8

GROWTH MEDIUM:
Medium: Coco coir plus 30% Perlite
pH: Target pH is 5.5 to 6.5

GROWING:
The plan is top this gal just before flowering starts so she develops her lower growth sites AND to make this little dwarf plant look different from a typical pot plant as possible since the neighbors can see her.
 
Day 29 -- She's going into flower at 10" tall

Two shots for your amusement as she begins her fifth week. I apologize for not updating more. I do have some science stuff I want to post about tracking PPM and pH...

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Camouflage so when the upstairs neighbors look down on my deck and see her amongst the tomatoes and flowers (which are there mostly for concealment) they think she's just another pretty face. (Can you see that she's switching over to flowering from the froufrou around the growth tip?)

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This is a summer, outdoor grow, but when the skies are cloudy all day I put her on the windowsill and beam her with 30,000 lux from 4 CFS, 2 LED light bulbs, and a 12-watt LED grow light (that's so weak you can put it just inches away from the plant).
 
Day 30 - Feeding the Beast

My big question is what is the best way to grow in coco? I'm weighing the plant before and after feedings and measuring pH and PPM of both the feed mix and the runoff, but that's pretty labor intensive. I'm wondering if regular feedings of lower strength (the orchid grower's "fertilize weakly weekly") could give good growth but with less measuring.

For my first coco grow, I'm using General Hydroponics FloraMicro, FloraBloom, FloraGro, and CALiMAGic (Ca/Mg supplement), plus 1 ml of Hydroguard at each feeding (because I have it and want to use it up--can't hurt, right?).

I'm using Nebula Haze's Coco Coir nutrient schedule, which is her adaptation of General Hyroponics' "Drain to Waste Program" for its Flora Series base nutrients.

Target pH of the coco is 5.5 to 6.5.

I'm trying maintain the PPM of the undiluted nutrient mix in the coco each week by diluting the mix that I add as needed to avoid nutrient overload.

To prevent nutrient build-up, Nebula recommends alternating feeding of her nute mix with pH'd water. I have read that that feast/famine cycle can stress the plant, so I'm shooting to maintain the target PPMs of the nutrient schedule by diluting the nutrients as needed.

As you can see in the chart, I have been giving the plant about a liter or so every other day.

I have been successful in keeping the pH in the target range, but the runoff PPMs have been a lot lower than target. However, the plant looks fantastic so I think it's happy. A dwarf plant like this is probably a lot less demanding of nutrients, however. (It's 10" tall after completing what might laughingly its "stretch" from 3" to 10" over five days.)

(If you have read this far in this post, congratulations, you are a serious cannabis horticulturalist--and/or you really need to find more things to do outside of the house.)

Going forward, I'm really going to try to keep the PPMs up about 500 or more.

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Eight feedings over the last 19 days, showing the pH and PPMs of the nutrient mix and the runoff
 
Day 30, continued -- More on Stealth Mode

Here she is, hiding from the neighbors among the tomatoes and flowers out on the deck. The deck faces east and gets direct sun from 5:15 AM to 2:15 PM. When it's cloudy, I often bring the plant into the house and set it on the windowsill with 30,000 lux of artificial light. That's cheating, I know, but sometimes the sun just disappears for a month at a time here and I know from experience what that does to a plant.

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A weed among the flowers. (Cannabis is legal here and I have a medical card, but you're supposed to keep it out of sight.)
 
Day 30, continued some more--First Defoliation

I hate to cut off big, healthy, green leaves, but four of them were seriously shading the rapidly developing flower sites, so snip snip!

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Looking good at all of 10 inches tall, but those big leaves are shading the eight flowering sites.

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The victims

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Flowering sites out of the leafy shade and enjoying some sun on the deck.
 
Before Day 0 -- Making an air pot and preparing the coconut coir

I wanted to experiment with coco coir and pots that let lots of oxygen get to the roots, but air pots are annoyingly expensive. (The other option for lots of air to the roots is a cloth grow bag.)

Here's how I made a pot from scrap that was lying around and used Nebula Haze's process for preparing the coco coir.

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650-gram coir brick goes into water with Ca/Mg supplement.

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Soaking it up

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Scrap piece of 1/2" hardware cloth and a burlap coffee sack. Hardware cloth is also used to make a bottom for the pot.

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Ready for the coco mixed with four quarts of perlite

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Just add cannabis :)
 
Day 31 - Growth sites pop after defoliation

I love the way a healthy plant takes trimming and training in stride. The day after removing the four big leaves that were shading the growth sites, the leaves there have already grown visibly and the plant is worshiping the morning summer sun. (She might also be responding to a full strength dose of nutrients yesterday.)

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Less than a foot tall, but no longer a baby--she has switched into flowering mode with enthusiasm.
 
Day 32 -- Switching to every day watering/feeding

Today's feeding:
Input: pH 6.2, 540 PPM, 1.7 liters of Week 5 "Early Bloom" nutes at full strength
Runoff: pH 6.1, 392 PPM, 0.25 liters

Scientific said:
My big question is what is the best way to grow in coco?
Click to expand...

The video below advocates strongly for watering coco every day. His preachment seems to be that treating coco like soil (letting it dry out between waterings) misses the value of coco. He says that because coco still has 30% air even when watered to runoff, so you can water it very heavily--to the point of saturation--every day so the roots are always getting fresh nutrients and in the right ratio. He maintains that a coco grow is essentially a modified hydro grow.

(He also says that letting coco dry out causes air pockets to form, which promotes salt buildup, something I have heard before (possibly from someone quoting this vide?). I'm slightly skeptical, but the guy clearly knows a lot more about growing in coco than I do, so I'm willing to consider what he's saying.)

So I'm switching to every day watering/feeding from every-other-day. The question is, how to do that without overfeeding? In the video he's feeding about 600 PPM daily with just a small amount of runoff and he's getting just a tiny bit of leaf tip yellowing. I have a feeling that I'm going to need to dilute my stock more than that, but we shall see. Maybe once the plant's roots are fully established and it's bigger it will be able to handle more nutes without problems?

How to water Marijuana growing in coco
YouTube video with crummy audio but interesting advice about how to grow in coco coir


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Dwarf Low Flyer topped at node six and with LST just about everywhere, growing (mostly) outside in 2 gallons of coco coir. It's about a foot tall 32 days from seed.

She's entering her bushy phase
She filled in to such a remarkable extent overnight that I looked at the log for my last DLF grow and saw that at exactly this time (days 32, 34, and 35) I started having to defoliate heavily. I think that that was because for the last grow I had experimented with pulling the plant over 90 degrees for "No Technique" training, which worked, but having all of that bushing out of the plant confined to half as much space (because it was pulled over and the stalk was about 1" off the top of the reservoir), confined all of the bushiness to a very limited space, so it began to choke on its own leaves. This plant was topped (I can never leave well enough alone), so it, too, is kind of compressed, only this time vertically instead of horizontally.
 
Love those "flowers" and it does a good job blending in to the neighboring plants!:goodjob:

I have been watering my coco gals on a twice a day no run-off/once a day with run-off schedule since I put them in the 1st pot with no problems. The only time I flushed them was for 2 days straight just before I switched them to 12/12 and a day before I up-potted them into their final 5 gal smart pots.

I would think this would also work for an auto with a occasional flush to prevent any build-up, what ever your are doing, keep it up, she looks happy, happy, happy!:goodjob:

I purchased a Continental AWS-10 Automatic Watering system for the coco gals since I am away for a few days, tested it for a couple days before I left and it seemed to work good (fingers crossed I don't walk into a nightmare when I return home!) The only thing I don't like about it is it is battery operated and from some reviews I read about it, the batteries don't last too long but it can be converted with a transformer to 110v.

When I get back I will look into that more and may use it full time with some modifications.

Keep up the good work, she's looking great!:thumb:
 
Day 36 -- Daily Feedings Are Working

I switched to daily feedings four days ago on day 32, and as you can see, it looks like that's working well: 500 PPM goes in and about 300 PPM comes out. So fertilizer isn't building up (which was my worry). Given that, I'm tempted to switch to the General Hydroponics' (higher) recommended amounts, but the plant looks fantastic, so I'm going to leave well enough alone.

My process
  1. I weigh the pot. (It was 4545 grams this morning, down 753 grams from yesterday.)
  2. I give it enough media to get about 200 ml of runoff. (It's down 0.75 liters, so I gave it 1.0 liter.)
  3. I weigh the pot again and measure the pH and PPM of the runoff. (5350 g -- up 805 g, pH 6.2, and 334 PPM).

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What I'm feeding in "Week 5, Early Bloom"
I'm using Nebula Haze's "Coco Coir Nutrient Schedule," which is adapted from General Hydroponics' "Flora Series Drain to Waste Program."
  • The first number is what Nebula recommends and I am using.
  • The second number (in parentheses) is the GH recommendation
  • Units are milliliters per gallon
CALiMAGic: 2.5 (2.5)
FloraMicro: 2.5 (4)
FloraGro: 1.25 (1)
FloraBloom: 2.5 (5.0)
HydroGuard: 1.0 (NA)

Nebula's recipe comes out about pH 6.3 and 540 PPM with my soft 28 PPM city water. GH's chart says "500-700" PPM.

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There are eight bud sites (from nodes 1, 2, 3, and 4) You can see six here. This plant has low stress training on every branch to help keep everything out of the shadows and soaking up the sun.
 
Is this the grow chart you are talking about?
I have been using this for my outside plants and moving them into the tent soon.

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