The Hexapus's Garden

Hey Weasel.... Good info on the Hempy. I'm planning on trying sooner or later and I was wondering about the solution in the "res" getting too salty or whatever. Did I read you or someone doing a weekly flush? Or could less be ok, if you were watering daily..?
I think I would do a half strength water to run-off everyday...or even twice a day rather than a heavy feed less often... Easier to correct problems?? At least at first...
 
Weaselcracker said:
I think one area where there is room for tweaking, depending how you want to do things- is whether to feed lightly with multiple feedings, or feed heavier and less often. That also probably depends on the size of your hempy pot in relation to the plant within. I don't think mine will go a week between waterings so I'm going to set them up on auto-watering at 1/2 strength every couple days or so. I think Tead feeds full strength. Maybe I'll have to bump up the feed for these indica strains- I'm not sure yet.

A question re hempy for whoever. I got the feeling that it may be a bad idea to let the hempy run dry. I just have the feeling there might be concentrated dregs in the bottom of the res that would be best not sucked up by the plant. Not sure if I'm just making that up. The hex plants took a downturn a few days ago as they got close to running empty. Not sure if they just ran hungry, or if they encountered some nasties in the bottom of the res at the last minute. Those ones did get a dose of the diy calmag, though I tried to flush it out. They seemed fine all week though, till the last minute.
Click to expand...

Ya i suppose feeding dose is debatable but i figure thats probably gonna vary heavily due many different varibles. As far as letting a hempy go dry tead and me had a discussion about that a while back and now from observing my own girls i also don't feel a dry cycle is called for infact if i forget to water and they get dry, they suffer decently and end up with problems. That is my 2 cents on the matter atleast lol :tokin:
 
Cheers friends,, so appreciating the info,, got me bucket, tho a bit big bit I can adapt, got me perlite, no vermiculite weaseley, thanks for that, got me plant figured out, a lemon haze/sandy cross, yum yum,

The one thing I do not have is, room for this, not in my veg room, not in my flower room,, what's a curious fella to do?

Weaseley,, just a side note, I have the nicest looking plants right now that I have ever had, in my veg room and in my flower room too,,

just a couple notes about that pls

First,, i read this recently, never occured to me before,, for any foliar feeding feller,, or gal, I read about the importance of foliar feeding the "underside" of the leaves when spraying, that is where the 'lungs' of the plant are, supposedly, anyhoo, I have been for a couple weeks now, and like I mentioned, me veg plants be beautiful right now. I only foliarfeed plants in veg, not in flower

Second, for some unbelievable reason, namely me working me eradicating ass off, I see to be bug free in my flower room right now. That really seems to be making a difference on the quality 'and' quantity of my budding plants.

I have also switched fertilizer, for my flowering plants, only three weeks ago tho, so could not have contributed a ton to the overall general fantastic look of my garden these days, btw, I bot some general hydroponics flora nova bloom, thats all

Anyway, just wanted to let ya know, things be good here,, i have two beautiful mamathai/thaistik cross plants awaiting sexing, one near twice the size of the other,, a female trait perhaps??? Fingers crossed. A beautiful blueberry plant three weeks from harvest, it will be huge, for me, a super sticky cheese a week or two from harvest, and some other dandies,, very excited indeed

All for now friend,, a hempying I go, a hempying I go, fa la the dario, a hempying I go,, haha, cheers weaseley
 
I've gotten a little behind here in the last few days, and my allotted 420 time has been taken up with fiddling around with the calmag problem. I've run out of calmag, and so have been busy screwing everything up much worse using various diy calmag concoctions. Worse than I would have if I'd just decided to live without calmag. Mainly the situation has been- crazy ph fluctuations with my diy calmag mixes.
Will update on that when I get time, but for now I've pulled the sad looking hex plants out of flowering and put them back in veg to try and recover their health.

Santb I'm just mostly guessing re the multiple light feedings idea. But my solo cups, and even the last hexapus run, did well on that schedule. They suffered from ph issues but seemed happy with the level of feed otherwise, I think. No burned tips, no sign of hunger, and I never messed with the feeding levels much other than watering it down a bit in the last couple weeks.
I actually do not know what I am doing with hempy at all, but it appears easy. It's not a big change from soilless.
Though having said that I've been having pretty good success f-ing up the hempies I've got going now.

Thanks a lot for the hempy info Lexort. Again I'm just mostly going on intuition- and letting the plant drain the hempy res dregs seems bad.
Someday hopefully Tead will wander in here and drop a couple cents worth too. Distracting times down there in America I know.

Sounds like things are going along nicely Nivek. :thumb: With luck you can keep those stupid mites out of the grow for the winter at least. Worth a try anyway. I remember one of the time I reinfested my grow it was January and I'd been free of mites for months. I grabbed a planting pot from my greenhouse to use in the grow. I remember, oh so clearly, thinking I should rinse the pot off- but... it wasn't even very dirty, and we were having a cold snap, the outside water was frozen and shut off. Anyway- it was cold. There were chunks of ice clinging to the pot. What mite could be alive in that? Of course ten days later I found them crawling around in the grow the bastards.
So check your pant legs when you go in in case one is clinging there.

BB it's not a stupid question, but in the case of the Thai Stick -No I did not look at the trichomes. The plant didn't end flowering in the healthiest state and I chopped it because I wasn't expecting it to improve. It would have been chopped no matter what the trichomes looked like. But I don't usually get much out of looking at the trichomes of the sativas. My impression is that they don't seem to go amber much, and there are always quite a lot of new clear trichomes and fresh pistils coming up. I find a clearer answer in the plant's overall appearance than I do wandering around in micro-land. It's fun, but mostly confusing, for me.
But in the last couple months I've started checking trichomes more so I'll be doing this through the next few harvests just to see if I'm missing anything.
 
Hey Weasel sorry to hear that you're still having problems with the cal mag, I've got some of Emilya's recipe on the go currently myself but can only hope that the soil buffers the PH level. Talking of trichomes though they're back! I'm unsure as to whether it was a strain thing (I hope not as those seeds I crossed are growing as we speak) or whether it was the environment or lack of light, but one thing is for certain, these girls are getting really frosty now. I can't wait for chop chop :)
 
Ahh no problem Kriaze. I'm always screwing around with things, and it always seems to be ph that jumps up and bites me.
In hell I am sure everything is always the wrong ph.
No big problem I'm glad it came at a time when I still had the option to pull the plug and put them back in the veg room. I'll limp along and continue to experiment while I wait for that Canada Post oxcart to show up with the calmag delivery.
Smoked your way through that giant nug of White Strawberry whatever it was called yet? That thing was huge.

image18806.jpeg

My CBD Therapy plant as of this morning. All my hopes for a completely pain free future rest upon her tiny shoulders. I haven't told her this because I'm sure she'd collapse on the spot.
Grow bitch grow!
Just kidding darling.
 
I've still got a fair amount of the White Strawberry Skunk left, it just doesn't knock me out enough for my liking and I've been mixing it with the remains of my Think Big which works really well in comparison. There's nothing worse than drinking all the alcohol in the house and still being awake when the shops are open if you get what I mean, I need the knockout hits.

I'm tempted to try a CBD plant sometime in the future and see if that relaxes me enough to sleep, if so I could go all out on a run of those as I'm not even sure that I like getting high, at least not the lively type of high anyway. I've just managed to get hold of 14 Killer Skunk clones and 1 sweet cheese to supplement my veg tent, apparently they should do the trick according to my mate. Cost me £6 apiece too and I usually pay more than that per seed, I see more clones in my future :)

Anyway it's 7:30am here and I have to sleep before I pick up my son from college at 3pm, no beer or smoke last night so the brain keeps on kicking into overdrive hence why I'm around typing whilst watching the sun breaking through the clouds. Have a fantastic day and I'll keep on following the grow, the CBD in particular. All the best mate :thumb:

*edit: Forgot to mention, crackerdino was put into flower yesterday. She's small what with pushing roots through rock hard clay but I'm sure she'll provide something, plus I needed room in the veg tent (which is now my single tent, the double has been changed to flower). All change again lol
 
I was wondering why you're up so horribly early. Damn, I have the same problem.
Spitz sent me an interesting pm a couple days ago re the cbd plant, which I haven't had time to reply to. I'm thinking he won't mind me posting a paragraph of it here. Thanks Spitz.

As for CBN... This stuff is pretty cool. I stumbled on this while making butter. I made a few batches in a crockpot and cooked them for 24hrs +. Decarb at 100C for 24hrs leads to a high CBN content. I can't back it with data but this has been my experience. CBN is fairy dust. These batches of butter leave everyone stuck, unable to move their feet, and fighting to keep eyes open.
Click to expand...
 
Weaselcracker said:
I've gotten a little behind here in the last few days, and my allotted 420 time has been taken up with fiddling around with the calmag problem. I've run out of calmag, and so have been busy screwing everything up much worse using various diy calmag concoctions. Worse than I would have if I'd just decided to live without calmag. Mainly the situation has been- crazy ph fluctuations with my diy calmag mixes.
Will update on that when I get time, but for now I've pulled the sad looking hex plants out of flowering and put them back in veg to try and recover their health.

Santb I'm just mostly guessing re the multiple light feedings idea. But my solo cups, and even the last hexapus run, did well on that schedule. They suffered from ph issues but seemed happy with the level of feed otherwise, I think. No burned tips, no sign of hunger, and I never messed with the feeding levels much other than watering it down a bit in the last couple weeks.
I actually do not know what I am doing with hempy at all, but it appears easy. It's not a big change from soilless.
Though having said that I've been having pretty good success f-ing up the hempies I've got going now.

Thanks a lot for the hempy info Lexort. Again I'm just mostly going on intuition- and letting the plant drain the hempy res dregs seems bad.
Someday hopefully Tead will wander in here and drop a couple cents worth too. Distracting times down there in America I know.

Sounds like things are going along nicely Nivek. :thumb: With luck you can keep those stupid mites out of the grow for the winter at least. Worth a try anyway. I remember one of the time I reinfested my grow it was January and I'd been free of mites for months. I grabbed a planting pot from my greenhouse to use in the grow. I remember, oh so clearly, thinking I should rinse the pot off- but... it wasn't even very dirty, and we were having a cold snap, the outside water was frozen and shut off. Anyway- it was cold. There were chunks of ice clinging to the pot. What mite could be alive in that? Of course ten days later I found them crawling around in the grow the bastards.
So check your pant legs when you go in in case one is clinging there.

BB it's not a stupid question, but in the case of the Thai Stick -No I did not look at the trichomes. The plant didn't end flowering in the healthiest state and I chopped it because I wasn't expecting it to improve. It would have been chopped no matter what the trichomes looked like. But I don't usually get much out of looking at the trichomes of the sativas. My impression is that they don't seem to go amber much, and there are always quite a lot of new clear trichomes and fresh pistils coming up. I find a clearer answer in the plant's overall appearance than I do wandering around in micro-land. It's fun, but mostly confusing, for me.
But in the last couple months I've started checking trichomes more so I'll be doing this through the next few harvests just to see if I'm missing anything.
Click to expand...

A lot of your experience mirrors mine. I couldn't get the hang of growing better plants in hempys, having over 40 years growing in soil. So I drilled new drainage holes in the bottom of my hempy pots and went back to a 50/50 perlite and soil mix. My side-by-side comparisons favored soil, with 30% larger plants in veg and more buds.

As for Sativas, I notice the same thing. My first grow of OGKs wouldn't stop putting out. I finally had to call a halt at over 100 days in flower, because all I had left were buds on a stick! They had lost all their leaves by then and it was well over harvest time. Their trics never did amber up.

So, yeah, I agree that the overall look of the Sativas is a good enough indicator for us old farts.
 
AKgramma said:
A lot of your experience mirrors mine. I couldn't get the hang of growing better plants in hempys, having over 40 years growing in soil. So I drilled new drainage holes in the bottom of my hempy pots and went back to a 50/50 perlite and soil mix. My side-by-side comparisons favored soil, with 30% larger plants in veg and more buds.

As for Sativas, I notice the same thing. My first grow of OGKs wouldn't stop putting out. I finally had to call a halt at over 100 days in flower, because all I had left were buds on a stick!
Click to expand...


Well, my tiny bit experience with hempies has been positive generally and as of a week ago everything was going great, or at least good.
The hell I put the hempy plants through in the last week was 100% guaranteed to screw them up. Really can't blame the hempies for it. It's a prime example of some of the pros and cons of the different growing styles.

- The diy calmag using drugstore calcium, and Epsom salts - resulted in the res ph shooting up to 7, where it was for at least a couple days. Large amounts of ph down were not about to stabilize it.

-Next came the diy calmag using powdered milk and molasses. This one also seemed pretty stable for the half hour or so that I hung around after mixing it. But the next day my ph was at 4.8 And still falling.

-Next up came the diy calmag using oyster shells dissolved in vinegar, along with Epsom salts. This concoction seemed stable in the jar at 5.1, and I added some to some nutes and water and bumped it all up to 5.6 before putting it in the res.
Next day the mix was 6.7 and rising. Used the rest of the bottle of ph down and a bunch of vinegar trying to see if I could stabilize it. Then dumped it all out.

Then.... Well there's even more to this boring tale of stupidity but you get the idea. Extreme ph fluctuations over a short time.
The plants were predictably trashed and I removed them from flowering as I mentioned. Really - a little ca or mag deficiency, if it even occurred, would have been much preferable, but I was totally fixated on getting some calmag into the hempies.

Meanwhile my soilless plants were spared most of this. Not only is the soilless quite a bit more stable against ph swings, but the soilless plants only got one of the diy calmag potions and not three as the hempies did.
I've been enjoying the immediate results of hydro, and getting a bit tired of the delayed reaction/stewpot feeling of soilless- but this week -soilless definitely won out.

Here are the plants 8 days ago. All seeds were planted on the same day, including the Panama which is in soilless at the front left in this pic.

image18761.jpeg






Here are the plants from tonight. What a difference a week makes. Panama, in the 3 gallon pot at right, suffered a little from my tlc as well, but was spared most of it and has left my hempy victims in the dust.

image18814.jpeg




I decided that the two tallest hempy plants were strong enough to flower after all so I've put them back in. All six are showing signs of budding as of tonight so there may be some revegging and confusion- but that's better than starting flowering in such an unhealthy state.


image18815.jpeg
 
Never thought about adding the p/h up concoction with a bit of the p/h down concoction to see if that stabilised.. Bit of the cal & Epsom salt to the powder milk and molasses mix?
 
"In hell I am sure everything is always the wrong ph."

:lot-o-toke:

:rofl: :rofl:

Oh, man.. You're a bloke after my own heart. Just gotta roll with it..
But you're not there yet!
 
Weaselcracker said:
I've gotten a little behind here in the last few days, and my allotted 420 time has been taken up with fiddling around with the calmag problem. I've run out of calmag, and so have been busy screwing everything up much worse using various diy calmag concoctions. Worse than I would have if I'd just decided to live without calmag. Mainly the situation has been- crazy ph fluctuations with my diy calmag mixes.
Will update on that when I get time, but for now I've pulled the sad looking hex plants out of flowering and put them back in veg to try and recover their health.


Someday hopefully Tead will wander in here and drop a couple cents worth too. Distracting times down there in America I know.
Click to expand...


WTF baby?!?!
Did you get crazy and dig thru and old chemistry set for possible concoctions?
My suggestion is the milk/epsom combo. One can even use powdered milk.

Honestly, if one pays attention, it's always a distracting time in the US. I try to ignore the circus. Let's hope the circus train doesn't derail and release all the elephants and donkeys.


Edit-
I see you DID use the old chemistry set.... and perhaps every piece of it.
What exactly is "drugstore calcium"?
 
In my experience, simpler is better.

I gave up on hempy or anything resembling hydro just because of the complexity of trying to balance the chems and the PH. You don't have those issues in healthy, well-aerated soil. Land-based Plants were meant to grow in soil: that's why they have roots, stems, and leaves. Seaweed, on the other hand, evolved to grow in water. No roots, just air bladders to keep it afloat. But

Yes, in space, or if we pollute Earth so bad we can't grow ANYTHING in soil, we may have to use hydroponics, but IMO, for the small grower, any small change in the balance of chems is going to be disastrous. You need a large operation to absorb those fluctuations.

Enough ranting for now.
 
Enough ranting for now.
Click to expand...

You go baby! I can certainly see how any given style of growing doesn't work for any given human.
Of course, I would have preferred seeing you take to it like a duck in water... but if you want to be a bird in the sky, I'll cruise with you for a bit. Hydro surely is not for everyone and I can't thank you enough for dipping a toe.
 
I think it is key to at least give er a go, one never knows where, or when, one might settle down, if ever,, life long learning, and maybe mj, keeps the mind young, at heart
 
AKgramma said:
In my experience, simpler is better.

I gave up on hempy or anything resembling hydro just because of the complexity of trying to balance the chems and the PH. You don't have those issues in healthy, well-aerated soil. Land-based Plants were meant to grow in soil: that's why they have roots, stems, and leaves. Seaweed, on the other hand, evolved to grow in water. No roots, just air bladders to keep it afloat. But

Yes, in space, or if we pollute Earth so bad we can't grow ANYTHING in soil, we may have to use hydroponics, but IMO, for the small grower, any small change in the balance of chems is going to be disastrous. You need a large operation to absorb those fluctuations.

Enough ranting for now.
Click to expand...

Iv'e literally just changed to using hydro nutes from full organic in soil/coco. So far, I've not bothered to check anything! I only bring it up cos I'm just using tap water and GH Flora series and Armor Si and Vegan Booster, with the plants still in soil/coco, and they are loving life after a shaky start (everything was stunted, and I have no idea why. I put it down to my own inexperience and/or rough treatment). Apart from a few yellow original leaves on one plant, no signs of anything bad.. The girls are lush, green and going nuts.
That's not to say problems won't arise! But so far, so good. I'm lucky here in that my tap water is excellent.
Organic-wise, every pH test comes up 6.5-7, every time. Water, soil, run-off...Would never have dreamed of using "chems" 12 months ago, but after reading Weasel here playing and watching Tead as well (not as much as I should lately), and others, I've changed my mind a bit. I guess I want my weed a bit faster... 4 week veg instead of 6-8... I am hoping the GH nutes will give the plants that extra speed...
I'll be doing at least one Hempy in the new year, side by side with an organic, just for fun.
My point is, I've been spoiled by organics, cos it's so easy; even with some random problems here and there.. But so far, my transition has been painless...
Flipped last week; flowering still to come, so fingers crossed the luck continues..
 
Tead said:
You go baby! I can certainly see how any given style of growing doesn't work for any given human.
Of course, I would have preferred seeing you take to it like a duck in water... but if you want to be a bird in the sky, I'll cruise with you for a bit. Hydro surely is not for everyone and I can't thank you enough for dipping a toe.
Click to expand...


I DID come away from the experiment with a major change in my soil mix. You introduced me to coarse perlite (not the Sh** they sell for houseplants). I now go 50/50 coarse perlite to soil mix (BG soil, sand, vermiculite), and anything else the soil needs. The drainage is superior to the soil mix alone, as it does not pack down in the lower root zone.

So, Tead, it was worth the journey. Thank you! :circle-of-love:
 
Back
Top Bottom