The Gee Spot - You Finally Found It

[Gee64]

 

[Azimuth]

Here is some theory as it was explained to me on the mechanics at play and how it makes soil different than bubble cloning.

Normally, a plant has a circulatory system that draws water and food from the soil, runs it through the plant, expires the excess water out the stomata, and then uses the remaining water to push sugars back down and out the roots returning to the soil.

When you take a cutting you no longer have this. You still have a loop but there is giant holes now on intake and outflow.

The nutrients the plant will use to grow the roots are stored in the leaves and without roots you have no pump to circulate water to carry the nutes down so you must create it through gravity.

Water is heavy and flows down. So in soil cloning you need 2 things to be successful.

You need water on the leaves (misting) to permeate the leaves and flow down, and your wet soil needs to be less wet than the water on the leaves so it can enter and flow down.

If your soil is too wet then the water pressure in the soil resists the water pressure of the misting above and the nutes in the leaves can't flow down or ate greatly reduced.

So damp soil and wet leaves is what you want. Plus a very humid environment so the less wet soil can't suck all the moisture out of the leaves. The humidity keeps the leaves wet.

For bubble cloning you use the puck to isolate the cut end from the plant and the mist sprays onto the stalks, runs down, and drips off. The weight of the drips pulls the fluids down and out the giant outflow wound at the cut, but while that is happening fresh water is being sucked in through the giant gaping hole of the intake so you create inflow and outflow beneath the puck and mo misting or humidity is required above the puck. The circulation allows nutes to be grabbed and used on their way out the outflow.

If that makes sense to you and you keep that principle in mind for soil or bubble cloning and cater to it you will get roots far quicker and your success rate wil soar. Don't fight the physics, use it in your favor.

Then there is rooting hormone. This is vital here. Don't use very much. Its extremely powerful.

I use powder and it comes in a pill bottle. Its half full when new and I have cut hundreds or more likely 1000+ clones and my bottle is still half there of the original amount.

All the hormone is, is a chemical signal that tells the plant to grow roots here please.

If you use no hormone the plant will create its own at the bottom end where its dark and signal itself. Think about that for a second. Does the plant create a quarter teaspoon of rooting gel hormone or does it create a microscopically small amount just to send the signal?

Too much hormone will fry your cuttings fast. I tap all excess off until there is only a light dusty look left, no blobs or cakes.

The instructions on the hormone indicate this too.

Make sure you buy the right hormone too.

Small delicate cuttings work best with softwood cutting hormones, larger cuts like the ones I prefer use the hormone mix for semi-hardwood/semi-softwood cuttings (marketing created semi-hardwood and semi-softwood, they mean the same thing here), and trees, shrubs, berry bushes, etc use the hormone made for hardwood cuttings. What they are is different strengths of hormone.

I find smaller cuttings root better in soil vs bubble cloning, and larger ones root better in the bubble cloner.

I prefer bubble cloning because there is no hardening off period, you just plant and water, and you have opportunity to dust the brand new roots with myco before planting.

The paper towel tube method allows the root to stay long and not be all balled up like when you only dig a small hole and drop your roots into it all piled up.

Also let your roots in the bubble cloner get as long as your pot is tall before planting. If you have roots long enough to reach the bottom of a 5gal pot then use a 5 gal pot. I prefer 10gals but everyone has their own preference here.

Its not like you have to spoon feed a sproutling to get its roots to chase water to the bottom, you are already there, so you can immediately treat it like a plant, not a baby. No coddling needed.

I start with soil that is a bit too wet so the roots don't shock, overwater to run-off once or twice (I suppose you could consider this hardening off), and a week later its a regular plant with root tips starting to poke out and vegging nicely.

In soil you need to greatly slow photosynthesis as there is no pump so the nutes in the leaves will photosynthesize into sugars and you don't want that. So cutting the leaves back to about a third of their normal size really works well.

With bubble clones you have a circulatory system and leaf nutes do get pumped out the bottom so you need more nutes. Don't trim the leaves or you won't have enough nutes.

I determine where to cut the cutting by going down the stalk until I have at least 1 set of large fans in the cutting.

I hope that helps a bit more. Cloning looks easy, and it is, but you MUST pay attention to details here.

You have inflicted life threatening wounds to the cutting so every little bit helps. Add up all the details and success soars.

If your mother is sexually mature remove all preflowers and their calyxes from the leaves and branches you trimmed off at the cut site, you want roots not seeds down there.

The lower the branch/cutting is (the closer to the roots), the more rooting hormone/nutes contained in the cutting. Cuts from the top of the plant are loaded with growth hormones/nutes, not rooting ones.

On plants grown from seed the 2nd set of branches are called "clone branches" and definitely work the best.

Thanks, Gee!


Now do perlite Hempy. Seems like a combination of the two?

 

[Gee64]

Thanks, Gee!


Now do perlite Hempy. Seems like a combination of the two?

You are welcome

 

[Gee64]

Im not sure what my next grow will be. I chopped and tossed every plant and clone I had plus the soil.

Over the next few days I will come up with a plan while I strip both tents and redo everything.

I also have a uv/ir bar I want to hang and possibly a new oscillating fan or 2.

As for the grow its either four 10gals or four 7gals with clones, or 1 big single plant scrog.

Four 10gals means 8 clone branches so I am kind of leaning that way. Maybe try some 4 headed clones and if they work out flower 4 of those in the 7gal cubes.

Bottom watered or not I haven't decided yet, but I have a theory I would like to try with it so I need clones for comparisons.

 

[Gee64]

@Savvage61 this grow is for you. Ask anything and I will try it. Let us be your amusement until you heal.

You know, unless the bugs come back... Then its worm farm time.

So after some pondering I decided what my next grow will be.

Last Friday, so a week ago, my broken light crashed my brix and I got thrips.

Initially that really ticked me off and I cleaned out all my plants, clones, and soil.

Then my morbid curiosity took over and I figured, "Well the bugs are in the tents, so before I eradicate everything, lets see if raising brix really will kill them off." So I kept 2 clones. A double header topped to 12 tops, and a really pretty conventional clone. 2 different phenos from the same Durban seed pack. I left them outside in the blazing desert sun (well into the 90's every day) and gave them a flower tea with a shot of molasses and some fish ferts.

My brix were down to 9 when the bugs moved in.

Today, 1 week later, brix is 12 on the conventional clone and 13 on the 2-headed one.

There are no fresh signs of thrips so I brought them indoors, which is breaking my own rules but, the tents are compramised until I sterilize them, and I have a new UV/IR bar that I have set to UV only right now, and UV is a bug killer/brix raiser too, so I really have nothing to lose by seeing if I can get them to harvest without any other bug issues.

I can sterilize everything after the grow.

So here we go.

Also I have been asked a few times lately how long it takes to see a raise in brix when you make an adjustment.

I can now honestly say that a week is plenty of time to see a 3 point rise. I also try to pluck as few leaves as possible as the plant is rather fond of them, but I will be plucking them every few days to chart the progress, so they will start to look ragged.

They are both a little over watered right now but the next 24 hours should fix that and they are only in 2gal pots so I will have to dial in the perlite swicks as swicking is still new to me but mostly I want to see if I can eradicate bugs with healthy food. Being in small pots means its a race to the finish, so I also flipped them today so it's officially Day 1 of the Thrips Girls flower life.

17" and 18" at flip. This one found it's spike today. The tips are revolting. The top one is still a little stressed but hopefully in the next couple days it perks up.

 

[Azimuth]

So, did you confirm that it was indeed thrips?

 

[Gee64]

100% full powered light 30" away. Lets see how it goes.

It's a new light so lets try stuff.

Hopefully they stretch until they are 12" away.

I will give the bushy one a few more days before I thin her out below. I love bright green sativa phenos.

There is still a slight hint of purple in some of the petioles on both, but its almost completely gone.

 

[Gee64]

So, did you confirm that it was indeed thrips?

Not really but a spade is a spade. As you put it.... Its classic thrips damage. I could not find a single bug anywhere, but whats in the video I posted last week explains how that can happen.

 

[Carmen Ray]

Gee, please will you consider making side journals from time to time. I believe that they could make an awesome journal of the month contender. You can't be nominated if you're running a perpetual journal though. Your work is fun science and you make difficult things easier to understand.

 

[Gee64]

Gee, please will you consider making side journals from time to time. I believe that they could make an awesome journal of the month contender. You can't be nominated if you're running a perpetual journal though. Your work is fun science and you make difficult things easier to understand.

Thanks Carmen.

I do try hard to put things in a manner that allows people to understand but 1 journal is enough for me, and life kidnaps me in blocks of time where if I had a side journal I would disappear from time to time and thats not fair to those following, so for now I will just keep the perpetual one.

It's a fun place to show people what/how I do things, and many of the things you see here were learned at 420mag many years ago so I try to repay that. Also its not a grow so nothing is off-topic here which allows anyone to ask or show or discuss anything whenever they want and thats a valuable thing for anyone who just needs to spitball something or just show a pic and be proud of what they have going on in there tent.

If I can help others then they can hopefully apply that to their journal and maybe win a contest.

Every time someone wins a contest it means the rest of us got to follow a cool grow.

Then we all win.

But every now and then when a very interesting plant, such as The Mutant pops up I will side journal it.

Because life does cause me to disappear from time to time, if you guys ever need to use The GeeSpot to help each other out and I'm not around, please do. Theres a lot of good organic growers stopping by with a ton of knowledge. I can catch up when I resurface.

Crowd-sourcing is a powerful tool.

 

[Savvage61]

Gee tyvm I will tag along from my chair lol .They look beatiful
Thanks. Im feeling a lot better Im ready for release

 

[Savvage61]

@Gee64 I been meaning to ask can I keep a few nightcrawlers in my worm bed, with Red wigglers?
27 gallon plastic tote about 18 in/46cm x 36 in/91.5 cm (God I love Alexa instant answers)

 

[Gee64]

@Gee64 I been meaning to ask can I keep a few nightcrawlers in my worm bed, with Red wigglers?
27 gallon plastic tote about 18 in/46cm x 36 in/91.5 cm (God I love Alexa instant answers)

I'm not sure to be honest. From what I have read on the internet they will cohabitate but they prefer different temps, and either species will stop multiplying if it gets crowded, so you may not end up with enough of either species to have a perpetually breeding worm farm, and both species will peter out.

But I haven't tried it, plus I have heard a rumor that sometimes the internet is wrong.

Anyone else here ever try this?

 

[Gee64]

I use red wrigglers and the same pound of worms has lasted about 5 years and I have also seeded other worm farms for friends and family and they are still going strong too.

 

[Azimuth]

@Gee64 I been meaning to ask can I keep a few nightcrawlers in my worm bed, with Red wigglers?
27 gallon plastic tote about 18 in/46cm x 36 in/91.5 cm (God I love Alexa instant answers)

You can if your bed is deep enough, though most commercial ones aren't. The nightcrawlers really aren't the ones you want anyway. The red wigglers are both surface dwellers  and vegetative processors which is what we want for turning vegetative material into unicorn poop.

 

[Savvage61]

I'm not sure to be honest. From what I have read on the internet they will cohabitate but they prefer different temps, and either species will stop multiplying if it gets crowded, so you may not end up with enough of either species to have a perpetually breeding worm farm, and both species will peter out.

But I haven't tried it, plus I have heard a rumor that sometimes the internet is wrong.

Anyone else here ever try this?

That is absurd if, Facebook says it I belive it ,sad part is some in the family , swears by it lol.

I was wondering about nightcrawlers I remember 50cent a dozen today I would guess closer to 5.00 now they are great bait for Croaker and Spot Big deal on the Chesapeake. Ill be wise and stick with the wigglers. it is unbelievable how much the lil Mofo's eat and poop.

while I gotcha, cooked plain spaghetti no sauce is it ok? Im thinking it is just about the same ingredients as bread. but I want to make sure before I fed it to them
Thanks for the info
I did not know it would stop breeding by running out of room. that's important
Thank you
Have a great evening

 

[Azimuth]

Thanks for the info
I did not know it would stop breeding by running out of room. that's important

Well, the population will stabilize based on habitat size and food provided. The population won't crash unless you stop feeding them or overheat them or something.

You can even keep them outdoors in freezing temps and the population will recover in the spring when the cocoons hatch.

 

[Gee64]

while I gotcha, cooked plain spaghetti no sauce is it ok? Im thinking it is just about the same ingredients as bread. but I want to make sure before I fed it to them

I once read that you shouldn't feed them cooked scraps so I never have but again.... internet.....

 

[Azimuth]

I once read that you shouldn't feed them cooked scraps so I never have but again.... internet.....

I think that's because most stuff is cooked with oils which you don't want in the bin, but cooked pasta without the sauce or any oils should be great. Flour based so I would think that would be a good fungal food.

 

[Gee64]

Well the conventional clone is already at brix 16 with an extremely fuzzy line so calcium is good, but the double-header has dropped to 12, and a very fuzzy line, but it still looks stressed so I will top water with fish ferts today and start a tea to up microbes.

I also moved them up 12" closer to the light to up photosynthesis.

They are forecasting thunderstorms tomorrow and plants know when its coming and push sugars down to the roots in case they get sheared off, usually resulting in a 2 point drop at least, so I'm not worried yet.

If that doesn't fix it I will topdress some high phos guano as well. The pot is perfect on moisture so O2 isn't the issue.

Summer in the desert....yikes. Lets let it ride. Plus...you know... I raised them 12" closer after this reading. What could go wrong?....

Indica people are so spoiled lol. These little suckers are 49 days old. My durbans untopped would be at least 6 feet tall.
They are so cute. You just wanna hook them onto your keychain they are so compact. The pots are 16" tall and the plants are about the same. I always forget how easy indicas are to grow.