Weasel Forges Ahead

PC

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The original PC, which I have quarantined in a loft space after its colloidal silver induced sex change.
It’s been interesting to get a better idea how the plant is acting under the LEDs now that it’s isolated like this. I see now what was bothering me about the plants under the LEDs before, when I said ‘they’re just there, but I can’t tell what’s happening’. I wasn’t even sure exactly what I meant by that, but now I see.

It seems like the plant is not stretching at all.
If I had this same plant under a HID it would clearly and quickly point itself upwards in the direction of the big shiny thing above it. In this case it’s taken over a week for the plant to slowly orient itself in that general direction, and now seems to be growing small buds very slowly. Compared to what I’m used to, the growth looks weak. But I’m sure it will work out in the end.
They get good reviews and Graytail’s buds under those lights speak for themselves. I think I will leave this PC there under LED alone as long as I can, to get a better feel for how it grows.

Not seeing a lot of encouraging signs in the pollination dept. Zillions of pods but not many opening and most are just falling to the floor.

I’ve ordered the ingredients for STS (silver thiosulfate solution) which is rumoured to be a more reliable way to make fem seeds.
 
The local relative humidity for the last two weeks, as published by gov.canada- data collected by the local airport.
The airport is in a little dryer location than me unfortunately....
RH

RH

 
Yikes!...keep that air moving...cheerz... :high-five: ...h00k...:hookah:
 
Actually it’s pretty normal for this time of year. Ok, for most times of year actually, ha ha... :( In the grow the HIDs warm and dry things out and I have a small dehumidifier that runs during lights out. Works out fine for all but the most mold-prone buds.
 
RH that high, I'd get a fan on each plant individually. It's amazing you can even grow unmoldy buds if that is normal. Have you looked into VPD to see what the preferred temps are for your RH range? IDK if high RH makes plants sweat more or less, I just know that perspiration regulates calcium flow, so the VPD info might be critical.
 
It is a rainforest :). No- everything dries ok as long as it’s under cover. Anything left outside too long turns into a moss/rust sculpture.


Skybound said:
Have you looked into VPD to see what the preferred temps are for your RH range?
Click to expand...

Graytail mentioned it a couple years ago and at the time I decided there was only so much I could sanely do about it. Will look again and see if it makes sense to tweak the temps.
 
Weaselcracker said:
It is a rainforest :). No- everything dries ok as long as it’s under cover. Anything left outside too long turns into a moss/rust sculpture.




Graytail mentioned it a couple years ago and at the time I decided there was only so much I could sanely do about it. Will look again and see if it makes sense to tweak the temps.
Click to expand...

Clearly I only read about a sentence description, so I only understand the most basics of it, but what caught my eye is that you don't necessarily have to remove RH, if you can add heat or cool, there's like a sweet spot for every temp or RH range.
 
I’ve been away from home a bunch, on the run, and generally flaking out on the journal upkeep :(

I harvested the two bunny turd experiment P Chunks tonight.

So what happened with these plants on the bunny turd diet is they yellowed severely in flowering.

Attempt #1 was flowered almost all the way through before I finally abandoned the bunny turds and started feeding it the regular bottled mix concoctions.

Attempt #2 started yellowing by the second or third week of flowering. So I decided to just go for broke and gave it a huge dose of the turds. Strangely, instead of having a nitrogen overdose as I would have assumed, it just kept getting more and more yellow. So I abandoned that one too and it went back to the regular diet. She straightened out somewhat after that though was always a little pale.

However, on the bright side.... Both these plants, which are two different PC phenos, turned out to be much more delectable and frosty than any of the other examples I have ever grown of them. I have to assume that in spite of the yellowing they did get something out of the turds that has been otherwise lacking in the diet. As usual I couldn’t guess what and am but a helpless jellyfish drifting in a sea of confusion. But I think I will start adding turds to the mix.

Attempt #1 was a bit of a failure mainly because I should’ve harvested her two or three weeks ago. I knew it, but was too busy. Also about a week ago she got badly dried out when I stayed away from home several days longer than I’d been planning. All her fans died on that occasion .
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This is about as extreme as I think anyone one would want to get with the ol ‘vine ripened’ effect. Ha ha ha.
In the photos she looks like she is dried to a crisp. This actually was not the case- just the fans are dead and the rest of the bud is normal if a little mangy looking with all that dead sugar leaf and whatnot. Actually the bud was quite nice looking. I just didn’t get any good pics.

Attempt #2 was harvested at a better time and she turned out really great. By far the frostiest example of this PC pheno I have grown. I have to credit the bunny poo.

A lot of the plants I’ve been harvesting in the last year have lacked a certain something, IMO. The original Pineapple Chunk had high levels of goo and frost, and it’s nice to see a little bit of that frost again. Hence why I took so many pics... :)
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Do you give the bunny poo and peat some time to cook before putting a plant in it?
 
Nice,, and just,given er right to the end,, as far as flowering and,building buds. beauty plant. we still have a bit of the pc3 left,, we will vape it tonight in honour of your harvest. Good to see you around weaseley.

CCheers friend

KKeepin warm up there? got yer winter commin work done yet? oh, thx agin for the seeds,, growing a cheese now, and have a gt just startingmflower. Gonna be a big one for me

CCheers agin,, enjoy the dark
 
Skybound said:
Do you give the bunny poo and peat some time to cook before putting a plant in it?
Click to expand...

Generally not. Bunny poo is one of the few manures that aren’t hot, so in that sense it’s fine to add as is. Usually I treat it as a sort of granular fertilizer and add some when I transplant in veg, or top dress with it. I’ve done this for years in the garden with potted plants- tomatoes, herbs, etc, with very good success. The stuff seems to get used up reasonably quickly, so often its a matter of top dressing every few weeks, depending on the type of plant.
When I overdo the poo, the plants usually turn greener and take on a droopy N-toxicity look. So I was surprised to see all the yellowing in flowering weed. With attempt number two when I top-dressed with about a cup or more of turds I expected to see N-tox- but not so.

If you’re talking about cooking the soil, with some compost, etc, to get more micro-life happening- I did add compost and some goodies to Attempt #1 early on. Not sure it made a difference- and then I’m veering more into a true organic soil grow. Which is maybe something I should just bite the bullet and try anyway- especially if it yields frostier plants like these last two.

I’ve got some totes of bunny turds in the greenhouse that are just sitting there and will probably be there for the winter till I use them next season. Perhaps since it’s all just sitting there I should mix some compost in, or some seaweed, or some Recharge? Some have straw bedding mixed in- so will need composting anyway.

I’m sorta emabarassed how long I’ve dithered around over the years with the subject of switching grow styles/nutrients. But every time I delve into the subject of organic soil mixes I seem to end up with a long list of obscure ingredients that I can’t source. The end result is hours wasted in Internet-land looking for stuff that’s going to cost me hundreds or more likely thousands of dollars, most of it in shipping. The quest for soluble hydro nutes has been similar.
Mostly I just end up running out of time for internet research, and decide to make do with some variation of what I have going already. The chaos factor in my grow is large enough to keep me entertained with only making small changes, ha ha.

I’ve seen @bobrown14 post simple organic mixes before. If he doesn’t respond to paging him here I’ll look him up and ask. I’d love to make a simple mix with seaweed, bunny poo, compost, peat...

I have access to a ton of organic ingredients in raw form. But when I picture myself gathering a truckload of crab shells off the beach and baking them in the fire and then lovingly grinding them into crustacean shell flour to mix with my DIY fermented kelp extract and homemade rock dust, and going out to the bog and digging up a couple truckloads of peat, drying, picking through and sifting it, grinding up fish remains in the blender to make rotten fish stew, etc etc -that all sounds really fun and is exactly the type of stuff I love doing. But I’ll have to just pick away at it cause at least for today I have to go to town and make some money instead. Boring... :(




nivek said:
Nice....
KKeepin warm up there? got yer winter commin work done yet?

CCheers agin,, enjoy the dark
Click to expand...

Thank you. Ha - yeah the dark is not naturally that easy to enjoy but I’m working out more anti-winter strategies this year. Currently storming out and blowing sheets of cold water sideways. Heavy seas in the yard.
Back home now but have been staying on a recently acquired sailboat quite a bit lately, which is sort of fun but also somewhat chilly. We are working on putting in a bigger woodstove once we figure out how much we can get away with in terms of modifying/cutting holes through a main bulkhead to make room for it.
In the meantime it’s a lot like the description I once read somewhere-
‘Like being in a cold shower burning hundred dollar bills to keep warm’
 
Weaselcracker said:
I’m sorta emabarassed how long I’ve dithered around over the years with the subject of switching grow styles/nutrients. But every time I delve into the subject of organic soil mixes I seem to end up with a long list of obscure ingredients that I can’t source. The end result is hours wasted in Internet-land looking for stuff that’s going to cost me hundreds or more likely thousands of dollars, most of it in shipping. The quest for soluble hydro nutes has been similar.
Click to expand...

Doc's Kit would cost you hundreds, but no hours wasted in Internet-land ... no experimental fuggups ...

Sourcing Canadian peat is the spendy one because of bulk and shipping, but it can't be that hard for you to find locally. And you can use the soil indefinitely, as long as you mix in more peat every few runs ... Duggan is going for 5th run now.

:bongrip:
 
That sucks that shipping up there is so expensive. Heck, from Missouri to PA it more than doubles my order when getting salts. Perhaps their chem nature makes the cost more? I know some boxes come with a placard sticker on the side. I know you're not a fan of Warlock spells and potions and the like, but you are in a remote location, so you gotta realize that you're playing by much different rules than the rest of us and need to get more creative. Emilya has a thread for making lactobacillus from milk, and since you're out in the wilderness, you can make the stuff away from your house. Crab shell calcium looks like a pretty standard source in organics, so if you can find them, collect them IMO. Epsom salt is great for Magnesium and it's cheap if you can locate a decently sized pharmacy or place with health remedies. The phosphoric acid I got off the web is also listed as a rust remover, so maybe a hardware store or auto shop. Weird things from weird places, collecting them so you have them is half the solution. AFAIK, peat is very high in K, so I would think it's good, but I'm not sure.
 
Graytail said:
Doc's Kit would cost you hundreds, but no hours wasted in Internet-land ... no experimental fuggups ...

Sourcing Canadian peat is the spendy one because of bulk and shipping, but it can't be that hard for you to find locally. And you can use the soil indefinitely, as long as you mix in more peat every few runs ... Duggan is going for 5th run now.

:bongrip:
Click to expand...


Peat is technically ‘free’ for me if I put the work in. There is peat all around including a patch about 50’ from my window behind me. Easiest though to drive down the road 30 seconds where the side of the ditch gives easy access to it and I can fill from buckets to the back of the truck. It’s soaking wet, insanely heavy, and needs sifting.

I pm’d Doc Bud today and it looks like shipping isn’t as insane as I expected.. About $100 American for the Xl Kit- so I’d be looking at around $500 Canadian, maybe a little more if the border decides to do a cash grab on the way through too, as I hear they’ve been doing lately.

Still not an amount I have just laying around at the moment, but worth thinking about. Would keep me going for a long time- I’d learn some new tricks.

Skybound said:
I know you're not a fan of Warlock spells and potions and the like, but you are in a remote location, so you gotta realize that you're playing by much different rules than the rest of us and need to get more creative.
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Ha! Preaching to the choir here :) Actually I am very much a fan of this philosophy. It’s DIY or die, around here. I love just DIY and scavenging, hunting and gathering. It’s basically my main occupation.

The problem is that living this way sucks up huge amounts of time doing laborious tasks. For example today I ended up spending almost all day today pissing around changing the power steering hoses on a truck, when there were many other things I was supposed to be doing today.
Managing trucks, cars, a bunch of boats, gardens, houses, outbuildings, animals, power tools, milling equipment and saws, fishing and hunting and gathering/preserving food, running the grow, a bunch of creative interests, etc etc. They all seem to devour my time to the point where it’s often hard to focus on everything to the extent I want, I end up slaving away all day while being pulled in 1000 directions, and in some cases I realize I’d be better to just go to work and then throw some money at the situation.
It’s just me. I’ve taken on too much in recent years and haven’t really figured out a way to slow down. If there is a way.

But yeah- I’ll grab some crab shells for sure, why not. Sounds fun. There are always a bunch on the beach and once in awhile they moult and the shells get pretty thick. Also I have a large shell midden of oysters, scallops, clams, etc by the house. Those just need to be burnt to break them down a bit. Once the oyster shells are burnt they pulverize pretty easily and can even be run through an old coffee grinder if you don’t mind the nasty smell.
 
Aside from hunting and fishing needed to stay alive, I'd love to live up there in DIY or die-land. My whole life now is about tinkering, designing, inventing, plus I have experience in nearly every trade, I feel I'd do ok out in the yonders, though because I don't hunt or fish, I would probably die in a few days if I went out there, lol.

I still feel you should invest in nutrient salts. I think that's your best bet for the weight being shipped. It gives you the utmost control of what's being fed which means you can adjust any part to your desire. Once you mix your micros to a recipe made in hydro buddy, your macros all (except sulfur) resolve to perfect resolution which means full control.

I'm using about half of them salts in my soil, so it's like dual application. And since I start my clones in hydro to get them to about a foot tall before putting them in dirt, I'll keep using the salts, just slower. If you want to window shop, my BOM for salts is on top of page 3 of the hydro buddy thread. Less than $200 before shipping. If you get the salts, you can make your own Megacrop, and if you decide you don't like that Megacrop, you can change it, lol.
 
Thanks Skybound. If you did it all over again would you order more or less the same way?
In particular I’m wondering about the micro-nutrients on that list, since there are various pre-made micro-mixes available out there.
 
Weaselcracker said:
Thanks Skybound. If you did it all over again would you order more or less the same way?
In particular I’m wondering about the micro-nutrients on that list, since there are various pre-made micro-mixes available out there.
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most premade mixes use chelated metals, but if you want to mix Megacrop, but your micro mix (Flora Micro for example) is way off, you would be powerless to make alterations. I bought LOTs of micros that I didn't need to due to limits of my knowledge. When I started with salts, I began using Jack's 321, then added something called STEM (soluble trace element mix) in effort to sure up the micros, but I was still having probs. I then bought a bunch of micros compounded with sulfate, and that stuff is fine when it stays in powder form, but if you mix metallic sulfates into a concentrate, the metals instantly oxide (rust) and fall out of suspension/availability. That's when I studied hard, learned what all the chelators are, and how they are toxic at high levels, what PH they are viable in and which can be mixed together. FYI, chelators are toxic at high concentrations, but not at trace concentrations.

That said, I wholeheartedly endorse the purchase of chelated metals, from wherever you can get them. I fudged up and got mine from Greenway, so my packages are resealable bags which sucks for working with powders, but I later located all the same micros at CHN, and I know that they put their stuff in jars which I prefer.

The only kicker to using chelated metals is that you MUST add a preservative or the organic nature of the chelators will turn into algae which then ruins the chelators, they release the metals, those released metals attack other chelated bonds and your jug turns into a mosh pit until all the chelators become algae and metals fall out of the mix.

Still, if you want to halve the cost of an order, you can leave the micros for another time and rely on whatever micro mix you have or can easily get. There's no set rules, you know that. Having your macros in salt form will triple your game when the delivery comes, but maybe having the micros will quadruple it? When formulating my drenches for my soil grow (peat based), I only use the macros and rely on the other source of micros I offer which is Minerals Plus and Planters II, but those are soil amendments and require microbes to convert into plant food.

It might be helpful to note that Doc Bud doesn't speak highly of chelated micros in relation to his kit. My studies haven't yet unearthed why, but when I whip up another first run mix, I won't be using any chelated stuff just to be safe and will probably finally use some of the sulfate metals I wasted money on.
 
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