Radogast's Hi-Brix Basement Grow - New Location - New Soil - New Experiences

[Graytail]

Just try it sometime, Wood.

Take a few colas and dump 'em into a sinkfull of nice warm water with some lemon juice and baking soda, swish 'em around as much as you think the experiment requires (I thrash the hell outta mine), then dump them into the other side of the sink with nice cold water and do the same thing over there, and then shake 'em off and hang 'em up. Do it - it'll be interesting at the least and I guarantee you won't harm your buds.



Then you'll get it. They feel better, they dry better, they taste better. They just do. Try it.

 

[Radogast]

Just try it sometime, Wood.

Take a few colas and dump 'em into a sinkfull of nice warm water with some lemon juice and baking soda, swish 'em around as much as you think the experiment requires (I thrash the hell outta mine), then dump them into the other side of the sink with nice cold water and do the same thing over there, and then shake 'em off and hang 'em up. Do it - it'll be interesting at the least and I guarantee you won't harm your buds.



Then you'll get it. They feel better, they dry better, they taste better. They just do. Try it.

I bud washed my first harvest, and all but 2 harvests since then (sometimes I just forget stuff - ya know?) I never mentioned it to the family, but those 2 I didn't wash ended up being the last picked strain when the family reached for a jar to fill a bowl. Some of the buds were traded for pizza

Sorry,,,, I can't understand why one wood wash there buds... Unless you got budworms or have been spraying your plants... Once my plants start to flower,,, anything I put on them I could'nt care less about smoking.. Maybe some dust from the air? I always think you'll knock off all kinds of trichome heads... Handling knocks them off why woodn't washing them... And I'm not a believer in the 'free radical's' theroy. I can understand washing outdoor weed.. Bird shit, bug shit, mold, alot of things,,, but a proper indoor crop shouldn't need washing,, should it?
Nice looking girl,,, has she figgured the 'cube' yet???????? Keepem Green

When chosing between buying street weed and smoking my home washed home grown, I chose not to smoke for 9 months. I just plain prefer washed buds - especially when vaping.

Those cubes are multimodal security devices to insure a good grow. They seem to work better than Lego action figures.

Besides, the cubes have been solved so many times the colored stickers started sliding around.The cube with 5 pieces on an edge is my favorite size. It has extra moves and strategies compared to 3 on an edge and 4 on an edge cubes. After 5, they don't get harder to solve, just more moves. (The 6 on and edge is just more of the 4. And the seven is just more of the 5.) With no new patterns emerging, I decided not to waste my money on buying any larger sizes. I might buy a replacement 5 sometime, but I have a working 6 and 7, so I get my OCD style puzzle fix from them. Some of the patterns when they flow from order into an apparent mess and resolve back into order are fun to watch.

 

[NorCaliwood]

I never could get one of them SOB's Keepem Green

 

[bobsacamano]

but pot smokers are like computer programmers - their demand expands to keep up with the supply

hi Rad. that notecard idea is really good, thank you. i'm always flipping around in my journal looking for the important dates....tried highlighting at one point so i wasn't always searching, wasting 15 minutes at a time....but your notecard is much better. thanks!

 

[Radogast]

hi Rad. that notecard idea is really good, thank you. i'm always flipping around in my journal looking for the important dates....tried highlighting at one point so i wasn't always searching, wasting 15 minutes at a time....but your notecard is much better. thanks!

With the perpetual grow, aiming for 2 plants in flower a month, there is a lot of different watering schedules. With Doc Bud's kit, I am watering different patterns and strengths of nutrients. In flower I have one watering day for all the plants, but the nutrient mix the older two are getting is different than the nutrient mix the younger 2 are getting. Every plant more than 6" tall gets the Brix foliar on the same day. Basically, each plant is on it's own schedule, but folllowing the same pathway towards harvest. I follow rules to respond to specific conditions, leaf curl, dry soil, clone with roots. I let plant growth set the schedule.


With note cards, I can look up a harvested parent and compare side by side with the growing cloned child. At tmes, that is helpful. As the database grows, it will be more helpful. In my brain, each notecard is an object of type plant with properties (strain, phase of life, intensity of nutrients, etc.) and events (dates and types of watering, change of life phase, change of watering intensity, date of flowering , date of bud set) - with the notecard as the database representation of the object (the MIB), each plant can be managed with object oriented programming techniques. After 45 years of programming, specializing in monitoring object states and programming responses, this is an easy way for my mind to process complicated states


Without a seperate list tracking each per plant, I would be lost. One could do the same thing with a page in a notebook. Each plant would need it's own page and I would be flipping around. Note cards on a bulletin board make it all quite simple.

At times, I feel like a 1940s bookie tracking bets that are laid off or shared with other bookies. (I have a rich fantasy life )


Folks like Bobrown have an intuitional and educated relationship with plants, They can manage 5 times as many plants in their own organic and organically developed way, and make it look easy. I manage plants as I would a computer server farm, and make it look tehnical

 

[KingstonRabbi]

I manage plants as I would a computer server farm, and make it look tehnical

So does that mean your plant capacity will double in 18 months?

 

[SweetSue]

Sorry,,,, I can't understand why one wood wash there buds... Unless you got budworms or have been spraying your plants... Once my plants start to flower,,, anything I put on them I could'nt care less about smoking.. Maybe some dust from the air? I always think you'll knock off all kinds of trichome heads... Handling knocks them off why woodn't washing them... And I'm not a believer in the 'free radical's' theroy. I can understand washing outdoor weed.. Bird shit, bug shit, mold, alot of things,,, but a proper indoor crop shouldn't need washing,, should it?
Nice looking girl,,, has she figgured the 'cube' yet???????? Keepem Green

We're not really ganging up on you Woody, but budwashing lets the buds dry better, IMO. The taste is cleaner. You'd be surprised what accumulates on indoor-grown plants. It's in the same line as washing your fruit and vegetables before you eat them. Your ingesting the cannabis, in one form or another.

Like Graytail said, try a couple branches once. The trichomes won't be damaged unless you smash them up against the sides of the sink or buckets. We try to avoid that.

 

[Radogast]

So does that mean your plant capacity will double in 18 months?

Spoken like a man who knows server farms


Not double - I'm an incrementalist not a proponent of big projects and new releases.


I just saw a newbie setup of 9 plants in a 4x4 under at 600W HPS. With the right environmentals, I figure he can get 9 plants with 16" canopy at 1-2 oz each.

In my grow I'm only running 4 plants in a 4x4 under dual 600W HPS. I'm getting 4 plants with 22" canopies at 2.5-4 oz each.

9-18 oz his way, 10-16 oz my way. He's growing with bottled nutes, not living soil.

I need to measure my pots and see if I can fit 9 in my space. Either that or start growing 5+ oz plants
With more plants in flower, I could grow more strains

 

[Graytail]

Rado, you're running two 600w hps in there? That's a crap ton o' lumens!

I easily averaged 2+ oz plants in my 4x4 with one hps (got a total of 75 oz the first 12 months) , and I run 6 gallon 14" square pots so I can fit 9 in there. With the 600w hps, 9 was too many for the footprint though - the outsides suffered. But with 1000w of blurple (5 panels, spread out) I could run all 9 pots, so total yield and plant health and structure was better.

With two 600s you can pack that space as tight as you want.


[Edit] Was rolling some numbers around ...

Two 600w hps should get you 1000 -1200 PAR at the top of the canopy which is perfect, and you should get the full 500 PAR at least 18 inches down into it, so that's ideal lighting for the space - in the 20-25 PARwatt per sqft range.

Nice!

At about 16 inches headroom, you'll start to cook 'em though - keep some distance. More headroom = deeper penetration anyway.

 

[Radogast]

Rado, you're running two 600w hps in there? That's a crap ton o' lumens!

I easily averaged 2+ oz plants in my 4x4 with one hps (got a total of 75 oz the first 12 months) , and I run 6 gallon 14" square pots so I can fit 9 in there. With the 600w hps, 9 was too many for the footprint though - the outsides suffered. But with 1000w of blurple (5 panels, spread out) I could run all 9 pots, so total yield and plant health and structure was better.

With two 600s you can pack that space as tight as you want.

Yeah - the two 600w HPS kind of snuck up on me.

I had 2 600W in a 4x8 space, but I left a central aisle so it was really like two 3x4 spaces
So built a 6x4 space, and planned for two 3x4 spaces, each with a 600W HPS.
But with fans and heater and a grow tray, I ended up with a 6x4 space being used as two 2x4 spaces.

So it snuck up on me

I've considered running the lights at 75% on my digital ballasts - but I wanted a few harvests under my belt before fiddling with lighting.

Yestrday, I was looking at the roots after 7 gallon and 10 gallon harvests, and the roots are there but I didn't fill the pot with roots. The 4 oz harvest didn't fill the pot, so using 10 gallon pots is a waste.

For those 6 gallon pots, does 12x12x12" white pots sound about right?
By the math, those pots should hold up to 7 gallons (7.48 liquid gallons per cubic foot.)

+reps to Graytail for helping me analyse the lights and pot sizes challenge.

 

[Graytail]

Thanks for the reps!

My pots have a pretty wide lip on them and they taper like all pots do, so I only get 6 gallons. Square pots that big are really hard to find! What I'd like to do is score a bunch of those modular closet organizer shelving grids - they're 14" x 14" - wire 5 of them into a pot, stick a 10 gallon softie in there - bingo bango, 90 gallons of soil in 9 pots, yessir.

BTW, have you ever seen the pattern an HID bulb projects?

 

[Tead]

That's only 1/2 oz per week, but pot smokers are like computer programmers - their demand expands to keep up with the supply.

How is 'expanding to keep up with supply' an attribute associated with programmers?
Don't get me wrong... it's totally spot on and this little nerd can surely attest to the principles in play (Oh man... data centers have huge fans and awesome filtering in place.... need I say more?), but I need some help connecting the dots here.

 

[Tead]

At about 16 inches headroom, you'll start to cook 'em though - keep some distance

I've been using a CoolTube forever. You really can get it super close to the canopy.... like 6" or less without heat damage. The body of my CoolTube floats at about 106f on the outside.

 

[Graytail]

I've been using a CoolTube forever. You really can get it super close to the canopy.... like 6" or less without heat damage. The body of my CoolTube floats at about 106f on the outside.

Yeah, but ...

I had mine at 12 inches and they perked up and grew faster/better when I backed 'em off to 16 inches. Our plants can't even use more than 1500 umols without supplemental CO2.

 

[bobsacamano]

My pots have a pretty wide lip on them and they taper like all pots do, so I only get 6 gallons. Square pots that big are really hard to find!

Graytail, i too was in search of high capacity square pots. found square laundry baskets to do the trick. they are perfect for my outdoor container-gardened tomatos. don't have room for that size for my indoor grow, sadly. the square (sterilite is the brand) ones i use avg out to about 2.2 cf, they're about 16"x 20"x20". i line them with burlap and that has (so far) been enough to keep the soil from coming through the holes. built-in air pot for about $6.

 

[Tead]

Yeah, but ...

I had mine at 12 inches and they perked up and grew faster/better when I backed 'em off to 16 inches. Our plants can't even use more than 1500 umols without supplemental CO2.

Geez. Thanks Gray. I hadn't even considered any need to change things when I upgraded from a 400w... and even then I may have been too close. I worry about penetration... perhaps too much.

Dontcha just hate it when you discover you could have had better bud somehow for a long, long time.

Secret bonus tho... I'm chatting about lights somewhere.... I may steal your chart.

 

[bobsacamano]

Yeah, but ...

i am totally printing this out and putting it in my non-virtual journal for future reference. thanks, Graytail!

 

[Radogast]

Rado, you're running two 600w hps in there? That's a crap ton o' lumens!

I easily averaged 2+ oz plants in my 4x4 with one hps (got a total of 75 oz the first 12 months) , and I run 6 gallon 14" square pots so I can fit 9 in there. With the 600w hps, 9 was too many for the footprint though - the outsides suffered. But with 1000w of blurple (5 panels, spread out) I could run all 9 pots, so total yield and plant health and structure was better.

With two 600s you can pack that space as tight as you want.


[Edit] Was rolling some numbers around ...

Two 600w hps should get you 1000 -1200 PAR at the top of the canopy which is perfect, and you should get the full 500 PAR at least 18 inches down into it, so that's ideal lighting for the space - in the 20-25 PARwatt per sqft range.

Nice!

At about 16 inches headroom, you'll start to cook 'em though - keep some distance. More headroom = deeper penetration anyway.

I spent about 2 hours before breakfast this morning calculating the relative strength of light on each plant in 3x3, 3x2, 2x2, and 1x2 arrays under a single 600W HPS based on a fixed point of light somewhere upon the length of a nominal 2x10" tube. The inverse square rule. Reduced penetration due to shading at the fringes with their oblique angle of pentration. In about 20 sentences, I saw the value in a 1x2 under a single light and the falloff of light on each plant in the numbers that I found by obervation in my previous flowering room. I also saw how my 2 HPS 600W lights can support 6 plants just as well as 4 plants, so I'm going to move up from 4 girls in flower to 6 girls in flower.

How is 'expanding to keep up with supply' an attribute associated with programmers?
Don't get me wrong... it's totally spot on and this little nerd can surely attest to the principles in play (Oh man... data centers have huge fans and awesome filtering in place.... need I say more?), but I need some help connecting the dots here.

It's because I have been around programmers for 45 years. Every time you give them a machine with x more capacity ( Storage, megaflops,etc.) they manage to fill up that capacity within 8-10 months. It doesn't matter whether you increase by 20% or 300%, they use it all. From the client perspective, there turns out to be almost zero return on investment from capacity upgrades. The client has the same product, it just take more resources to provide that product. Applications programmers (the consumer side of computing resources) don't see this, but on the systems support (supply side) of the equation, we see this happen year after year.

One datacenter I worked in had 3 diesel generators the size of SUVs for backup power. When load testing with the power company, we fried 4 of 18 searchlights on their testing trucks

Another datacenter I worked in had exposed copper bars the size of construction girders that I had to step over while it was carrying live current. Not quite as impressive as when my uncle brought us inside a hydroelectric dam where we could watch the penstock under a perforated steel grate spin the 12' turbine under foot, driving the 2' diameter shaft by our sides to power the generator over our heads, but still impressive

I've been using a CoolTube forever. You really can get it super close to the canopy.... like 6" or less without heat damage. The body of my CoolTube floats at about 106f on the outside.

I have minor (smokable) heat damage to the pistils of buds at between 6-8" from the glass (8-10" from the bulb.) It's not really a bad thing, it's like automated backbuilding for buds. When the cola can't grow up, the buds fill in lower down - or so it seems

 

[Graytail]

I spent about 2 hours before breakfast this morning calculating the relative strength of light on each plant in 3x3, 3x2, 2x2, and 1x2 arrays under a single 600W HPS based on a fixed point of light somewhere upon the length of a nominal 2x10" tube. The inverse square rule. Reduced penetration due to shading at the fringes with their oblique angle of pentration. In about 20 sentences, I saw the value in a 1x2 under a single light and the falloff of light on each plant in the numbers that I found by obervation in my previous flowering room. I also saw how my 2 HPS 600W lights can support 6 plants just as well as 4 plants, so I'm going to move up from 4 girls in flower to 6 girls in flower.

Beware the practical application vs the pinpoint source. In my experience the dropoff is typically 1/3 at half the distance. And Fanleaf has a meter and has run extensive measurements on his COB rigs, and he gets closer to 1/2. I think it's gotta be the wall reflection and, in the case of the COBS, multiple dispersed light sources.

Icemud tried to get to the root of "penetration". At the time, I thought he was talking about 3 watt LEDS vs 5 watt etc, but he was angling at actual penetration of a given wattage into the lower canopy. He got into spectrum too, and I'm not sure if a widely dispersed light source came up. But since seeing Fanleaf's numbers, I've rethought the whole penetration issue. Also, counter intuitively, because of the inverse rule, you get good PAR deeper into the canopy when the light is farther from the tops. I suspect you know this, but others may need to think about it a little bit. More headroom gets you wider dispersion AND a deeper canopy.

 

[Radogast]

The only veg plant that wanted water today was CBD Critical Cure

My wife had a full kief catcher in her grinder, and her tic-tac storage container was falling apart. I found her a new container. I also put in an LED dimmer switch for proper lighting of our 420 glass collection and cleaned 2 pipes and a bowl. I was a good husband today

American Grinder has a new(ish) grinder out, the AGS1-W. It combines the durability and ease of use of a 4-piece American Grinder with the viewing window of her Diamond Grind Shaker. Filled to capacity, the Diamond Grind Shaker holds over 2 oz of ground bud (a bit much to carry around), and it's pretty worn out now. The AGS1-W looks to hold a more reasonable 6-10 grams of ground bud.

The American Grinder has lasted 3x longer than either the Diamond Grind(4) or Sharpstone Grinders(2), and still has life in the grinding teeth, but as you can see, it's threads to the kief catcher are loosing their seal. It still grinds with the speed and ease of a Space Case grinder and has the best grip I've seen in a non-crank grinder. The boy just replaced his 5-piece Diamond Grind with a 4-piece American Grinder. My wife is planning to buy the American AGS1-W 'window' grinder, she just has to choose a color

Unless you folks have a better grinder recommendation.