Emmie's LSD Grow Log

[Emilya Green]

a couple more bud shots while I am at it, just for comparison purposes to our LSD.

Royal Queen Critical

AK-47

Green Crack

 

[DrZiggy]

a couple more bud shots while I am at it, just for comparison purposes to our LSD.

Royal Queen Critical

AK-47

Green Crack

Beautiful, Emm

 

[StillANoob]

Plants are looking great Emmie!

 

[Emilya Green]

Tonight upon lights on our girls in the bloom tent will be getting another AACT. Upon the last feeding a quick and dramatic greening was noted, but it only went so far... for example, the big fan leaf shown earlier still looks exactly the same... no yellower, but no greener either. My theory is that with that last watering we did get a bit of a surplus into the system, but since then we have been just holding steady with these heavily flowering plants. Hopefully with this tea tonight, we will catch up a bit more.

A little bit on tonight's tea too... You know I was commenting on how I really was trying to resist adding the commercial FoxFarm Big Bloom to my tea as The Rev suggests to do...

Well, I was in the Independence Hydro store the other day talking to Sam about ceramic HID lights and as long as I was there, I picked up some Big Bloom.

Wow... that stuff really does activate the tea fast! In the first 24 hours I had the new problem of having to turn the bubbling down a bit because it was foaming over so bad. For the first time, I had to put a drip pan under my 5 gallon bucket! Now today, at the 30 hour mark, I see something else new... the foam develops into a thick almost black mass... very yummy looking! It is obvious that this will be the most active tea I have brewed yet and that Big Bloom made a Big Difference. I am wondering however, if I saved back a quart of this brew, and kept brewing it, whether that could be a "seed" for a similar experience for the next tea... without spending $5 on the Big Bloom every time.

We shall see... one never learns without experimenting. I really do need to get a microscope though.

 

[millertm]

I use Micro brew, roots drench, both are loaded with beneficial bacteria. Big bloom is mostly EWC, bat poop, kelp. Great stuff but after what you stated about your tea and possible lockout. I was going to point you to the bushmaster line by FF. It's the best upgrade I've added to my nutes line.

Cheers

Sent from my SPH-L720T using 420

 

[Emilya Green]

I use Micro brew, roots drench, both are loaded with beneficial bacteria. Big bloom is mostly EWC, bat poop, kelp. Great stuff but after what you stated about your tea and possible lockout. I was going to point you to the bushmaster line by FF. It's the best upgrade I've added to my nutes line.

Thanks for the hints millertm, and those are some very good products that allow you to come very close to what I am theoretically supposed to be able to do with my highly amended and cooked living soil, even though you are using basic FFOF. I believe that I am not really having a lockout such as one would typically see caused by improper pH, salt or an imbalance of nutrients, I simply wasn't supplying enough active microlife, with enough digested minerals each time, to supply the ever increasing needs of my plants. A weak tea such as those I produced in the beginning worked fine for smaller plants, but as soon as the plants got really hungry, my improper methods just weren't cutting it.

It seems that brewing a proper tea has a lot more to it than just mixing up ingredients and bubbling it for a while... there is a real art to this, to do it right. It seems that you must start with a seed... and timing is everything.

 

[Emilya Green]

Happy Easter everyone. I am learning so much lately, and tonight I want to celebrate a bit and show you some buds that are making me very happy. Actually the entire color and growth in the bloom tent is giving me reason for celebration. In this message I will concentrate on our star, LSD... and in the next I will show you some of the other buds in the tent.

It is already obvious when comparing this round to plants already grown last round, that something special is going on this time. The colors and density of the buds already, not to mention the trichome development... it is simply amazing to this reformed synthetic gardener. I am convinced. The microbeasties are much better at this feeding thing than I ever will be.

So, without further ado... I give you LSD, at day 19:

Just imagine how she is going to look at day 60!

 

[Emilya Green]

Oh... another thing I am doing now that I have never done before, and I credit Doc and all his work with Brix levels for these ideas, I am now doing a foliar feed every 10 days of Liquid Karma and Organic CalMag. This seems to be a good mix to give the vitamins, amino acids, auxins and whatever else is in that stuff, along with the calcium, to increase the Brix level. I can't deny that it seems to be working quite well. I have never had such healthy plants at this stage of the grow, nor have I seen colors like I am seeing here.

I promised you some bud shots:

AK47

Green Crack

Tangerine Dream

 

[Papageno]

Subed - saw you were uploading photos and found this thread at the end of the rainbow.

 

[DrZiggy]

Emm, looking very beautiful!

Happy Spring!

 

[swwilson20]

Looking good! I am very curious as to how you cure Emilya. I saw somewhere where you chimmed in on a guy's post and you suggested using Boveda 62 packs in mason jars. Is that what you have planned for these ladies?

 

[Emilya Green]

Looking good! I am very curious as to how you cure Emilya. I saw somewhere where you chimmed in on a guy's post and you suggested using Boveda 62 packs in mason jars. Is that what you have planned for these ladies?

Excellent question swwilson, let me try to give it the attention it deserves. Curing and drying is easily half of the process of growing weed, but it doesn't start at the time you chop, it happens earlier than that as you attempt to make your plant run out of 2 things at the end... nitrogen and magnesium. Even in an organic grow, we stop giving nitrogen and even as much molasses (magnesium) during the last 2 weeks and the curing process actually begins as you do this.
Then at the end, I am now convinced that it is very beneficial to do a 2 day darkness period before the chop... again, working on the cure, well before an expert such as yourself would even think of it, enticing the plants even at the very end to throw that very last bit into the process.
Then I chop, and hang in a dark tent, not with the idea of drying as much as curing... I dont want a lot of airflow on the hanging plants, I certainly don't want my air system sucking huge amounts of air through that tent, and in times of low humidity I will even run a vaporizer in the room to raise humidity up to 60% or so. My goal at this stage is 5 days or longer.. if I can get them to slow dry in this environment for a week, I am really headed for a great cure.
Once the branches have dried to where the branches will snap when you bend them, but not break... and the buds are starting to get a crispy feeling on the outside, it is time to put the product in paper grocery bags, folded over one time to keep some of the humidity in. I try to get 2 days at this stage. By now the branches are really getting stiff and will start to break when snapped, and the buds will have a definite crispy feel to them. The RH at this point should be right about 70%.
Now it is time to put them in a sealed jar... all through this process it is all about keeping the moisture in, and slowly, ever slowly getting your product down to the range of 65-60% RH. This is the cure range, and once you allow your product to ONCE get below 60%, curing is done. You can not add back moisture by any means, and expect curing to continue after this point... the moisture must come from within the bud and the cells of the bud as they convert.
Once I get down to the cure range and the jar will stay stable for a day, I will throw in a Boveda 62 pack or two, depending on the size of the container, but until I get to that point, I keep burping the jars, at first for an hour at a time, and at the end, just to let the gasses out once a day.
For the first week in the jars with the Boveda packs, I will still burp once a day to release the gasses and extra humidity, and then I let the packs do their thing and probably pop the lids at least once a week for the first month or so... and then I pretty much forget it and let Boveda do its thing. After 2 or 3 months in the jars, the cure is complete the buds are at full potency, taste and smoothness and instead of eventually drying out below 60% RH and getting stale, Boveda packs probably will allow storage of bud for 9 months or more before needing new ones... personally I have never made it that far before running out of cured weed.
Hope this helps!
Emmie

 

[Pigeons420]

Nice write up Em!

You're just an endless book of information!

Em did a fantastic job writing this up, but if you'd like a visual aid, check out my video journal and check out curing your buds. Em's info is spot on!

 

[Emilya Green]

(Flower, Day 23)


A quick update this morning. Things seems to be going well and I believe I may have just hit on the major cause of my yellowing...

I am new to smart pots. I have used them in the past, but never this many or this big. It seems I am now being schooled on how fast a rootball developed in one of these pots can drain the water. I also failed to adjust my methods to include a container that is getting air on ALL sides, top, sides AND bottom. I am having to severely re-examine all my thoughts on watering in flower, in smart pots.

So, as of my latest epiphany I will now be watering much more often. It shocked me when my big 7 gallon containers drained their water in 3 days... and I am not sure I am even comfortable letting them get that dry now that we are in flower, and of course also attempting to keep the microherd alive between waterings. I am now 99% convinced that in flower we must modify the watering methods that worked so well in veg.

I was also shocked how much water the room took last night... an extra 2 gallons across the entire room! Doesn't matter the size of the containers, the 5 gallon containers with their cute 5 gallon plants, as well as the huge 7 gallon plants in their containers... all drained their given water in 3 days. Hmmm. Smart pots... what that means, is starting to "sink in."

Bud Shots!!

 

[DrZiggy]

Em, are you able to completely dunk your softees?

 

[Emilya Green]

Em, are you able to completely dunk your softees?

no, not an option where they are at. I do it the old fashioned way, with a 3 cup watering can, with several sessions, taking at least a couple of hours to get all the water in there. Dunking would certainly be easier, if it wasnt for the difficulty that it would involve.

 

[DrZiggy]

no, not an option where they are at. I do it the old fashioned way, with a 3 cup watering can, with several sessions, taking at least a couple of hours to get all the water in there. Dunking would certainly be easier, if it wasnt for the difficulty that it would involve.

You can spray the fabric pot with a garden sprayer ..works great to saturate the outer layer of soil against the fabric - lots of surface area..if unable to dunk them.

 

[ShiggityFlip]

Nice Idea Ziggs. Another thing that has worked for me this grow is that I left the last 3" of my 10 gallon fabrics empty and topdressed about 2' of it when the girls went into flower. Now the first two pitchers of water just get dumped in there because a nice volcano cone has developed in the pot that holds all the water inside that cone. I come back around and dump water back in the same way. Because this top few inches of soil doesn't have roots it has worked nicely for watering like this. The volcano stops right at the point on the stem where it met the top dressing. I then push a majority of it into that center hole and it stays that way until next watering where it forms the volcano again. I feel around the pot and it is uniformly wet. And my watering time has dropped dramatically.

And congrats on the real start of serous budding Em!

 

[Emilya Green]

thanks for the tricks... got to say that patience works too. I enjoy my sometimes 2 hours in the room watering, moving plants around, turning them, cleaning up... soon, adding supports for the heavy branches about to be overloaded. I get a lot of productive zen time in doing this... I get right up and personal with my girls so that I should be able to spot any issues that are developing...

I just need to do it more often. lol

I get chastised sometimes for my scolding of people in my watering threads, and my ridiculing of knuckle waterers and such... and I have heard it said on various boards that Emmie doesn't know everything, and of course they are right! Emmie is still learning! It now appears that my watering thread needs to have a flowering addendum added to it. What is sad to me about this whole situation, is that some of these wise old growers who could see the flaws in my logic, who read my words and knew that there was still a whole chapter of information missing, didn't offer to help fill in the gaps. It has been left to me, to discover these things on my own, through trial and error.

This is exactly why I go to such detail in explaining my thoughts when it comes to things like this. It is my belief that as I am learning, I can explain my misconceptions and revelations, and hopefully help someone else along the way. I think this style of approaching this hobby on the forums is very helpful to the community, and I have been oftentimes rewarded by someone telling me that a discussion I had online, much like this one, made a light bulb come on. These special moments in the garden give me great joy, and it is this that I wish to share in my grow journals.

I think I am about to make a dramatic turn around here, across the entire tent, and I think in doing so I am going to have learned another fundamental lesson about watering. My present working theory is that once you get to this point in flowering, the game is no longer about teasing out new root growth like it is in veg. Now it is time to allow those roots to do their thing, and the name of the game now in the second half of flower is to see just how much water you can get them to uptake. It no longer makes sense to me, that while in a smart pot we must starve the plants of water using the lift method, which allows the top to go dry while waiting for the bottom roots to dry out. The epiphany the other night was just that... now with airflow on the bottom and sides and a good container wide rootball that a smart pot produces, traditional root rot is no longer an issue. Frighteningly, I actually stuck my finger in the top of the soil last night to see how dry the upper root mass was, and comparing that to what I would normally have done using the lift method. I realized that in a well done smart pot rootball, if it is dry on the top, it is also dry on the sides and bottom and that only the core is still wet. Dang pot turned out to be smarter than me!

 

[ShiggityFlip]

I never let them go dry in flower as you are saying. We build roots in Veg and use them in flower. I try to think of it in this way:
In veg we play the wet dry game and it is ok because we are building roots. When we let the soil go dry to the point of almost wilt it is signalling the plant to send out roots in search of water. But it also sets the plants growth back a little bit above soil. This is fine because we can veg however long we need to.

When we hit flower the game changes. The whole point of flowering is to have as many days in optimal conditions as we can. This is also one of the reasons why I avoid small pots in flower. Sure it can be done but at a cost to the plant. For flower we have a day limit. The plant will flower that many days then start to lose vigor and die. Each day the plant is not in optimal conditions we lose yield and quality. We can let the pot go dry in flower but then we stunt its flowering for a day or two while it recuperates. So when we flip to flower we must count on having enough roots to carry her through though there will be growth of roots in flower as well.

I feel like on watering day the medium is undersaturated and then becomes oversaturated. The conditions are hardly optimal. But in the days between we hit a magical ratio of water, oxygen, and nutrients.The plant is putting out at its maximum potential. Our job is just to try and keep that state for as long as possible. So we don't let her get truly dry and we water to saturation so that as many days of peak growth can take place before watering again. My way of keeping track is to slightly lift the pot and pat the bottom. If the bottom is almost dry to the touch its time to water, there is still some residual moisture in there.