Doc Bud: High Brix Q&A With Pictures

Doc Bud;1672515 said:

Hello everyone!

My last journal was getting too long, so we'll switch over to a new one. What I'm doing on this journal is showing what I'm doing and what I'm learning and experimenting with in my garden. High Brix is where all the action is and that's what I'm all about. This is also an open forum for questions on high brix. I'll try my best to answer them as clearly as possible.

Disclaimer: If someone joins of page 18 or other random page and says, "What's your soil mix. What do I add to get the brix up," or something like that, I'm going to ask them to do some homework on their own. I will not post my soil mix every other page, unless something changes.

Here's a short description of what I mean by High Brix Gardening.

Brix is a unit of measurement that tells us how much sugar, minerals and other dissolved solids that are in a liquid. In our case, the liquid is leaf juice and occasionally a small bud. Average brix for a solid organic grow is going to be 7 to 10. Moderate brix levels clock in at 10-12. Once you get over 12 brix you're in High Brix territory. The highest I've measured to date is 17.

Once brix gets over 12, pests aren't a problem and it is very unlikely any diseases will ruin your crop. The higher the brix, the healthier the plant.

The high changes a bit as well. It's still strong, but its also softer and fuller. I've tried to describe it many times but tonite I'll say it like this:

Let's say you're cold and want to get warm. If you smoke organic or hydro weed, and electric blanket appears and you soon warm up. However, if you had smoked High Brix weed, a thick down comforter appears instead and you soon warm up. If I could get brix over 23, a naked nymph appears with the blanket. So, I've got some work to do. But I digress.

Soil Mix:

ProMix HP
Worm Castings
HIgh Brix amendment

Lot's of microbial products, biochar, humic acids, fishy ferts and groovy foliar sprays, all formulated by a lab for my specific soil.

4000 watts total light, covering a 3x6 tray and a 4x8 tray. The lights on the 4x tray are on movers.

The environment is 100% climate controlled. I can make it whatever temperature I want, anytime I want. Same with RH.

It's all in my kit!!!
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So, here's what I'm learning at the moment.

In my quest for the stickiest, best tasting weed possible, I'm experimenting with different forms of nitrogen and changing the ionic balance in the soil.

Nitrates are readily available to the plant, but they also leach out of the soil easily with watering. Ammoniacal nitrogen (NH4) is different. It has a positive charge, whereas the nitrate (NO3) has a negative charge. Cation is positive, Anion is negative.

NH4 is captured by particles in the soil and are stored there until the roots and mycorrhizae on the roots break them loose and feed them to the plant.

When you feed with strongly cationic forms of nitrogen, like Ammonium sulfate or ammonium phosphate, you get these cations and it stimulates reproductive growth from the plant.

The question is when to add this?

So, I added at the onset of bloom on these plants and immediately noticed more triches than I'd ever seen before, right off the bat.

At the same time, I've also noticed that the buds aren't swelling as much as usual for these strains. So I'm hoping to change that by getting the soil back into the anionic range a bit, by feeding with Calcium Nitrate, which is rather unique.

Calcium is a very powerful cation, which will dislodge the NH4 and also boost calcium in the plants. The nitrate is readily available to the plant as well. This will very slightly favor reproductive growth and should bulk up the flowers a bit.

Next cycle, which is 3 weeks behind this one, I'm going to bulk up the buds first and then hit them with the cations and see what happens.

As you can see, this isn't your run of the mill soil grow. The stuff I'm using is very powerful and makes big changes. We'll talk about all of it as we go. The topic will be whatever is going on in my garden right now.

Stick around for a few weeks and you should see just about everything from seed, to cutting, to harvest.

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