VladimirPutin's - Colombian Gold - Coca Fiber - LED - 2nd Grow

VladimirPutin

New Member
Hello ladies and gentlemen, :welcome:
I present to you my coca fiber and hydro bucket setup with an ancient land strain clone from south america, the legendary Colombian Gold. This is a recreational project as where I am living now, it is legal to grow and carry according to the "personal dose" law. Without further ado, she is a 2 month old clone 2 weeks into flower. She is on LST regimen and rapidly outgrew her baby lamp. It is time to replace the poor metal halide and dump on 40,000 lumen 400 watt LED @ 5000k. The lamp change will take place this weekend.

PH is around 6.5 adjusted to 5.8.
Using flower nutes with micro nutrients and added calcium 10-30-10 plus an addition of beneficial bacteria.
Using ordinary granular flowering nutes which have to be dissolved in hot water than filtered into the tank.
No Meters are being used to monitor the tank, so nute strength is limited by trial and error.
Tank is topped up with fresh water once a day.
2 airstones aerate the bucket all day
Tank is thoroughly cleaned out once a week and roots flushed with clear water and new feed solution applied.
No root rot or slime so far
Plant is on 12/12 light timer
No tents or closets, just an available room that is undisturbed during plant sleep cycle
Started off with a ceramic metal halide reflector spot lamp, going to upgrade to 400w LED this weekend.
Using coca as substrate for upper root system.

Also in these first pictures posted are a sample of left over bud from the mother where this clone came from. She was delicious.
Sub and keep an eye on my plant! I will be updating with new pics at least twice a week until harvest which should be in less than 10 weeks. I will be moving again so just going to let this one plant finish up while I root some new clones from the mother.
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Good news! The lamp is being assembled now right in front of me, 6 x 100w COB LED modules, each one running at 65w for a total of 390w @ 40000 lumens. No fan cooled crap, went fanless. Heat sink is less than the size of a 12 pack of beer but only weighs 9 pounds. She'll be hung up in about 2 hours. Should be more than enough for one plant, but a land race Sativa needs intense sun for rock hard buds so you know it will not be easy. Let's find out! Stay tuned for more pictures. :high-five:
 
DONE! Finally some real light for the girl. What do you fellas think? Next update will be tomorrow when I take some root shots.

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Before joining 420M, I cruised through some threads featuring DIY led lamps. Some were very nice! I'm only going to show one shot of the lamp itself, to avoid the unnecessary idea that I'm a wheelin' and dealin' money grabber! Nope, just a humble engineer that wants elite home grown chronic. This lamp doesn't feature fans. It's a big chunk of extruded aluminum that handles a lot of power without needing to be blown. All of the china lamps and even the alleged "made in the USA" LED lamps feature an array of craptastic fans on a skimpy piece of metal and they call it 400 watts. $500 or more and a year later, they start to fail because of piss poor heat management. LOL! oooh consumers, when will they get a degree in engineering! Just kidding, here's the beast.
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Subbed! Can you take a shot of the underside of you LED panel when the lights go off? I'd love to see what you rigged up. I have no experience with hydro, but to me your lady looks a little over watered with the leaves drooping. Either that or she just woke up when you took the pictures.
 
Sub'd.

Be careful dude. Don't hang things by their electric cords. Take the time now when your plants are small to get everything safely tied out of the way. When the light is good, the plants will grow fast.

PS. Can you please take your not-our-troops out of Ukraine? ;)
 
Subbed! Can you take a shot of the underside of you LED panel when the lights go off? I'd love to see what you rigged up. I have no experience with hydro, but to me your lady looks a little over watered with the leaves drooping. Either that or she just woke up when you took the pictures.

Thanks for Dropping in UltraDan. I think the root res is too full, because she outgrew her 1 gal bucket and tomorrow I will transplant her to a proper 5 gal bucket. I will also post some diode shots when the lamp is off.

Sub'd.

Be careful dude. Don't hang things by their electric cords. Take the time now when your plants are small to get everything safely tied out of the way. When the light is good, the plants will grow fast.

PS. Can you please take your not-our-troops out of Ukraine? ;)

Salutations CoNerd,
Sourcing my following opinion from fact, let's take a trip into the international business of war. I dare share with the 420 community another look at the real world that is not shared by the major western news groups. Our Ukrainian brothers are under hostile attack from a western installed coup. How would Americans feel if someone came into the white house and violently forced John F Kennedy (r.i.p.) out of his chair and replaced him with a sinister shadow government leader that only wanted to throw the people into perpetual slavery to a private bank? Well they'd be pissed and of course one part of the country would fall into total rebellion. That's how Eastern Ukraine is right now. The new and illegal Kiev government is willing to destroy part of its own country and kill millions of Eastern Ukrainians in the process. Even they have gone low enough to request NATO munitions and troops to be sent into the Ukraine to help crush the citizens. Without Russia, East Ukraine would have no one left to give a damn about them. So although Russia is not without guilt, she is only defending Ukrainian core interests in the end. Look what happened with Greece, apparently joining the E.U. didn't solve anything and so they are still struggling to avoid a total collapse. And that's my two cents.

And now we're Back to the Ganja, those cords that are supporting the lamp just happen to be recycled old cables.

Vladimir Putin signing off for a nap
 
As was pointed out in a previous post, I had to get to the bottom of the clawing appearance on some leaves. I found some possible explanations.
As we already know, the claw can come from N Toxicity and over/under watering. I knew right away that the DWC and the nutes may not be dialed in all the way yet.

A. The probiotic plant food that my MJ is getting is too rich in N to be used during flower stage.
B. Root reservoir bucket may be too small/over field

Without a doubt, I washed the roots this morning, inspected them and notice some very small browning at the tips, pics will come in 8 hours before I put her to bed. So the res was cleaned out and filled only 1/3 the way with plain PH'd water. In the mean time I will prepare a new 5 gallon bucket to receive her root mass and be fed with just 10 30 10 flowering solution with cal supplement. That's all for now! Thanks for watching and stay tuned for pics today.
 
Salutations CoNerd,
[...] I dare share with the 420 community another look at the real world that is not shared by the major western news groups. [...]

So sorry Vlad,

I can only joke, not argue about the plight of the unfortunate people in Ukraine. The politics are too poison. ;)

In all seriousness, I'm all for making love, not war. Here in the US we have Fox News to feed us truth like RT in Russia.
I'm old enough to understand why they exist. If we don't hate the enemy we won't support killing people. Historically, killing people often gives the powerful more power, prestige and profit.

I just don't play the game. I've been fortunate to know several Russians and loved their stories and jokes about life in the CCCP. We use NSA and KGB/FSB in the same sentence and all laugh.

I was trying to make a joke in the Russian style, my friend. I didn't expect the real VP to be a closet cannabis user.

I guess I should add ;)

:Namaste:
 
CoNerd UltraDan Humboldt, what's up fellas?
So it's been a long weekend for me, just getting back to the regular routine now. I have some news about the grow. Reps to UD for noticing that something was wrong in the pic from last week. I made a noob mistake to not transplant the growing root mass from 1 gal to 5 gal and eventually the oxygen to water ratio went out of whack, and that almost whacked my plant! But she's fine now. Here's the scoop:

Low and behold: A blown out diaphragm in my air pump did not help matters. Pump replaced.
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Craptacular... this was 3 days ago. She already has new white roots growing, will post them today.
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And here she is after being defoliated from all the bad leaves. The remaining leaves are healthy and new buds are forming again. She has started spewing sugar, and therefore wanted to removed bad leaves now and hope to never have to do it again.
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Here's a shot of the diodes on my led gear.
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You know that root rot is a N00B's worst nightmare with hydro. Of course many have the advantage of buying tricky potions that do really work if you have them available to you in your country, but in no man's land there will only be 2 choices: Trash it or treat it with what's at hand. First thing I did was find out what caused the problem and fix it. In my case, the air pump that supplied the DWC was trash, I found a hole in the diaphragm. Next, the plant should have been in a 5 gallon bucket rather than 1 gallon. So with the new hydro habitat ready, I could move on to treating the plant. Next, I grabbed another bucket, filled it with ordinary water, than gently sloshed the affected root mass into the water, inspecting for snapped roots, withered and brown ones too and just pulled them off. I took care to not bother with the healthy roots that remained, and surprisingly they are quite resistant to breakage when they are healthy. Over all I removed 20 percent of the roots, not by cutting indiscriminately, but by only pulling off the dead or dying ones. The gentle sloshing also helped break off damaged root pieces. These dead roots would otherwise continue decomposing in the nute reservoir, causing the PH to go out of control. Then I picked the plant back up and put her to hang for 10 minutes in the fresh air breeze. This was repeated about 8 times and now 80 percent or more of the rotted roots are gone. The smell of the roots has greatly improved, and the remaining leaves hold their healthy features. The res was filtered every day as well, to capture all the floating crap that broke off the roots. I will be completing the last root washes by tomorrow, so she should be in top fighting condition by Friday. She lost 30 percent of her leaves, the root rot caused a myriad of deficiencies to show on them, mostly the new leaves and the old ones were not affected so much. So in the end, I did not use any potion in a bottle to remedy my N00Bish mistake, although the bottle treatment may have been less brutal, but still would never have arrived in time even if it could be shipped to my home. Granted this was easier to do with just one plant, I could not imagine doing many! Best cure is prevention I guess. I hope this will inspire anyone else with Pythium or root rot to not give up, because there's more than one way to do it!

Thanks for your support! Stay tuned

VladimirPutin
 
More info about why I trimmed off bad leaves during this battle with root rot.

Osmotic Pressure : Wiki P article about root pressure

If your roots are ridiculously damaged from something like root rot, they cannot recover easily while trying to support the original canopy of leaves. So in order to equilibrate the growing masses, I decided to lop off the worst leaves which accounted for almost 30 percent of her foliage. It was a risk I was willing to take so early in flowering. That's my 2 cents on Pythium fighting. Avoid it like the plague!
 
UPDATE:
Whitey is back! here are the roots so far, 3 days in to aggressive organic treatment without intervening with additives to the tank. I will wash her roots again as stated above two more times and that will be it. She should be cured. A little learned goes a long way. Thanks 420 team!
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H2O2 should be available locally.

You are right. However I want to save that for a last resort. I like the idea of beneficial bacteria in AquaShield but I don't think I will need it. Check out the most recent root pic. She is coming around on her own now because I nailed down the source of her ailment. I believe in having a harmonious bacteria community in my tank without going in there and killing off what little beneficial bacteria there may be.

VladimirPutin
 
Just added a 9 watt submersible pump to the 5 gallon tank. I felt that the little pump should raise the chilly temperature of the tank by a few degrees, plus recirculate all the yummy granulated nutrients that don't dissolve 100%. Right now the tank is almost half full, with 2 air stones, leaving a nice air buffer for the middle and upper root zone. I mixed up a new batch of flower nutrients, and decided add a teaspoon and a half of Magnesium Sulfate and Calcium chloride for added insurance. I hope for smooth sailing now with recovered growth... I am watching the roots like a hawk, to make sure no burning starts. Wish I had an EC meter!
 
You are right. However I want to save that for a last resort. I like the idea of beneficial bacteria in AquaShield but I don't think I will need it. Check out the most recent root pic. She is coming around on her own now because I nailed down the source of her ailment. I believe in having a harmonious bacteria community in my tank without going in there and killing off what little beneficial bacteria there may be.

VladimirPutin

Yes, the H2O2 will knock back whatever is there. Whatever bacteria survives in the lines, tanks and room will just come back, so it's a temporary solution.

It will be interesting to see how much recovery you get. Lots of people seem to think you had a hopeless cause.
 
Yes, the H2O2 will knock back whatever is there. Whatever bacteria survives in the lines, tanks and room will just come back, so it's a temporary solution.

It will be interesting to see how much recovery you get. Lots of people seem to think you had a hopeless cause.

:reading420magazine: Thanks for being honest brother. My goal now is to make the plant bounce back, even if she won't be as big as she was before, a little depressing but by no means a total failure because she still has a prayer to fight back. In the mean time, she is still picking up steam despite the losses and I plan on finishing this grow journal even if it makes me insane! A new observation occurred to me, that a plant struck with root rot and in recovery should not be blasted with full intensity HID/LED at close range. I noticed a continual loss of turgidity in the smallest developing leaves, similar to what occurs when you put a freshly cut clone that hasn't rooted under intense light. Yet the roots show white and fresh fuzzy limbs growing like crazy so it seems that the nute reservoir is not the problem. It must be the light is too strong. I've decided to put the plant in a window and leave her be a couple days without the LED on. At this point I've decided that if she's going to be a producer she will need a full recovery before going under my mini sun lamp again. Will follow up with pictures later today.

VP
 
So it's been about 6 days or so since last touching the plant, and during that time I had just let the plant be by herself on auto pilot, no more wrangling at roots or dicing up her pitiful new growth that showed signs of dying due to the root damage. In total, it took about 6 days to fight the root rot at the source, by filtering out the tank daily, lowering feeding density, hanging her up to dry for 10 minutes to aerate the roots, etc. During that time I did cut some stuff off of the canopy, because the roots caused dying off of otherwise nice looking bud growth. I felt like it was more for vanity than any actual plant benefit so I just stopped looking at her while recovery took its unassisted course. She has been drinking 300 ml a day, more or less during her recovery when she drank seemingly very little at all. This was not an epic experience for me and too bad the plant was not allowed to realize its full genetic potential on my journal. So enough with the fail and let's see more devastation recovery! I am not growing her for my supply anyway, I just want to see what happens in the end.
Here's how she looks since a short moment ago.
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