Blackberry Kush - Platinum Girl Scout Cookies - 400W MH/HPS

[Far East Buds]

That looks impressively better

FE

 

[Twox]

Lookin good..

 

[TheFertilizer]

New pics of the girls today. I didn't notice but I have a couple 9 and 7 finger leaves! One of the platinum girl scout cookies just looks super bad still, looks more like lettuce than weed... Thinking about taking the one in the solo cup and putting it into its gallon pot and just killing it.

 

[Drazel]

How long before you put them in flower?

 

[TheFertilizer]

I want to flip them on about October 8th because I am wanting to harvest about mid December, and I expect about a week or so for them to begin flowering after the flip. Trying to get a 8-9 week flower, they turned out great last time with that amount.

 

[TheFertilizer]

Going to transplant this weekend, my buddy gave me some Mykos to put on their roots when I do. I have a bit of a problem with the way I transplanted from the yogurt cups. I posted a picture a few pages back of the root ball, and you can kind of see where the roots only started from like half-way down the cup. Well the same thing happened in the gallon containers, so now the plants aren't really rooted into the top couple inches of top soil. Going to make transplanting them into the 3 gallon pots pretty interesting.

 

[TheFertilizer]

Well the classes I'm taking a the local college are really whooping my ass and I didn't know if I would really have time to transplant this weekend so just decided to do it tonight. I am a little pissed off that my sauces are too wide, so the plants don't really fit in there very well. Hopefully I will be able to take the saucers out for a few days at a time and only nee dto put them in when I water.

I have a new HPS bulb on the way. A Ushio 400W Enhanced HPS. Basically it's just a more quality bulb with a little more PAR than the cheap-o generic included in my Apollo kit. I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong. Just hoping that there's no problems with it using more draw than the current one.

Anyway, here's a pic of them, I think the transplanting went okay but I kind of goofed on a couple of plants. I totally forgot to label any of them, but luckily they're pretty distinct strains. There is one beautiful phenotype of the Platinum Girl Scout Cookies, it has the most interesting shaped leaves on cannabis I have seen, they are narrow at the petiole and then just gradually curve into kind of a broad midpoint, and then taper back down at the end points so they look like a perfect mix between an Indica and Sativa. I am strongly kicking around the idea of getting some cloning supplies and picking two good parents out of this crop and then star cloning. There is one Blackberry Kush in particular I have my eye on, it seems to eat nutrients like it wants to grow out of the ceiling and it branches off nicely.

Speaking of growing out of the ceiling, I realized today the maximum height I am going to want to push is 4 feet. They're about 2 feet high now, so I think I need to flip pretty soon before they get much taller. I didn't really flip last time since I did 12/12 from seed, but I remember when they did start flowering the stretch was pretty significant. I am almost thinking I need to flip like, pretty much now. I want to give them at least 5 days of veg in these new pots to see how fast they take off though.

I FIM'd the mutant plant I have. I don't have enough dirt to transplant my solo cup plant into a gallon. Maybe I'll buy a little bag later, but for now I decided I am going to experiment with the mutant plant and see how it responds to training.

 

[TheFertilizer]

Well, lots to update. As some may have seen in the Frequently Asked Questions section, I decided my tent was a little too crowded and felt the plants weren't going to reach their potential sizes. So I ended up selecting 6 that looked the biggest, including one Platinum Girl Scout Cookies, the rest Blackberry Kush. I setup 2x 100 w CFLs in the corner adjacent to the tent to keep the other plants alive in the mean-time, hoping to take clones off of them, or who knows maybe I will just cycle them into the tent? Perhaps both. The tent got flipped to 12/12 yesterday, and I am going to keep the MH bulb in for about a week while they go through their stretch, then switch to HPS once they start setting some flowers. I got a new HPS bulb from Ushio, supposedly it has enhanced blue and red spectrum. it looks kind of like a MH bulb.

I also got a carbon filter, a pH meter ( been using GH's drops for a while now ) as well as two new clip-on fans and a power bar to mount inside of the tent.

Still really wrestling with not putting those other two plants in the front of the veg area back into the tent.That would at least give me 8.

 

[Far East Buds]

Don't fret too much about how many are going to be in there.. If you do all 8 vs 6 the results will usually be similar. It will be based on light power and floor space.. 6 will use up the space the same as the 8. the 8 would just be a tiny bit smaller....




FE

Looking Great BTW...

 

[TheFertilizer]

I think I have some zinc lockout going on, my soil pH was way up in the 7.5-8 range. I blame the General Hydro drops I have been using, but I bought a digital meter recently and calibrated it and my soil meter as well. I put 6.0 pH with 250 PPM of nutrients into the flowering plants, and 6.3 pH and plain water for the ones veg'ing out. I just figured the veg plants could stand to be a little hungry but I wanted to give the flowering ones at least a diluted amount. The pots weren't very dry yet, but I figured correcting the pH was more important than letting them dry out, at least just one time. The flowering ones seem to be better, the veg ones maybe a little too high, but hopefully with repeated waterings at the right pH it will bring the soil down a bit. For now I just wanted to get the soil wet and the pH at a level they could absorb some zinc. Assuming zinc is the problem, I should see them perk back up.

Some of the plants have some green stippling that looks a little like mite bites, but though you might not be able to tell from the picture they're secluded to inbetween the veins of the leaves, so i think this is more along the lines of intervenial necrosis/chlorosis. I checked out the leaves pretty good with a nice 60-120x scope and didn't see any mites or eggs. Still, I think I better give them another neem application soon.

 

[UserNameD]

Hello fellow grower! Damn. you had bad luck on your 12/12 from seeds already. IMO it was due to nutes. Your plants were very hungry! and you could have bring you 400W closer to the apexes!

This times you over nuted a bit. But the symptoms I see is no pest (mites spider or else). It really looks like PH issue.
You should know that the ph in soil varies with depth. Thats precisely why a plant need to reach down. Different nutrients will be available at different depths.
Im not a soil grower but red stems are red stems ans indicate ph problem. too high PH. Also the marks on leaves also go in that direction.
check the ph and ppm of your drain and compare it against optimal values for soil culture using your size of pots!

Also each time your plants are dried, it adds stress. making any other issue more difficult to manage!

Ill stay around!

 

[Grant1153]

Hello, first I must say your grows are all looking really nice and I'll be subd in from now on. I also have a 400w mh/hps setup but seeing that you may be more experienced with it than I am, how many plants do you think can be efficiently grown under 1 400w?

 

[TheFertilizer]

Hello fellow grower! Damn. you had bad luck on your 12/12 from seeds already. IMO it was due to nutes. Your plants were very hungry! and you could have bring you 400W closer to the apexes!

This times you over nuted a bit. But the symptoms I see is no pest (mites spider or else). It really looks like PH issue.
You should know that the ph in soil varies with depth. Thats precisely why a plant need to reach down. Different nutrients will be available at different depths.
Im not a soil grower but red stems are red stems ans indicate ph problem. too high PH. Also the marks on leaves also go in that direction.
check the ph and ppm of your drain and compare it against optimal values for soil culture using your size of pots!

Also each time your plants are dried, it adds stress. making any other issue more difficult to manage!

Ill stay around!

I think the red stems are actually a genetic trait of the Blackberry Kush. The Platinum Girl Scout Cookies are more of a lavendar.

Yeah I was really disappointed with my 12/12 from seed results. I think it's not a method a person should try until they really know how to read a plant. Just because you can get so much more from a single seed even if you screw up if you grow out a larger plant.

Hello, first I must say your grows are all looking really nice and I'll be subd in from now on. I also have a 400w mh/hps setup but seeing that you may be more experienced with it than I am, how many plants do you think can be efficiently grown under 1 400w?

I think Twox was covering that above, it has a lot to do with floor space. Mine is a 4x4 tent and I had 12 and felt it was too crowded to manage well, but technically there's no reason why they wouldn't grow in a SOG. The general wisdom I've heard is you want to have just enough room that the plants leaves don't shade each either out or touch.

 

[Far East Buds]

yup definitely just get the PH in line and it should balance the intake... soil 6.4-5 is great from what I read... I use coco but anyway. In flower I try not to run as dry as I want them to get a good intake. And they drink alot more.. In veg I run them a little dryer but mostly on the young ones that are more fragile. Soil doesnt aerate as well as coco so I would run it dryer but not too too dry...

All good tips above...



FE

 

[Baybreeder]

That's sexy!! I meant to add a photo of your bud sorry.

 

[Baybreeder]

PH water kind of high so plant can take in more water than nutes. Then after some days the soil will re adjust.

 

[Baybreeder]

Dang I just read you don't use soil lol.

 

[Far East Buds]

dang I must have been confused as well not soil? That changes alot....

Wasn't it happy frog or something?

 

[TheFertilizer]

dang I must have been confused as well not soil? That changes alot....

Wasn't it happy frog or something?

Yeah I think he was talking about your use of coco, I am kind of confused too.

I use Happy Frog


Wouldn't pH'ing high block out more zinc? I'm not sure it's zinc, but if I look at nutrient availability charts, all of the elements it looks deficient in are the ones that are less available at 7 or above. I was thinking it could be Iron, Phosophoros, Calcium or Maganese based on the appearance and charts I could find. My general thinking was getting the pH in a good range would make it simpler to troubleshoot what's wrong.

Happy Frog tests at 7 right out of the bag for me, and I never really hear of many people having problems like this so I'm not sure pH is the right angle but it's pretty simple to fix. Otherwise I think they might be a little burned.

 

[Baybreeder]

That doesn't look like a nutrient deficiency