Chemdog's Out

[Delps8]

After five autoflower grows, I've decided to do a photoperiod grow, one of the main reasons being that I can have some influence on plant size by controlling when to flip to flower. In contrast, autos grow how they damned well please and I've ended up with plants all over the map with some plants nice and compact and while their tent mates have towered at 48" and taller. Enough of that. I'm looking forward to a nice, easy veg, flipping to flower, and then a clean, quick harvest.

Strain - Chemdog photoperiod, purchased from Nirvana in 8/21.

Number of Plants/Seeds - germinated two seeds, Charlie and Juliet. I want to fill the tent but I'm tired of "Twins" grows. My thinking is to cull one of the plants and, unless a catastrophe strikes, Charlie will be leaving the res.

Growth Stage - vegetative at 22 days above ground

Water source - RO
Indoor or Outdoor - indoor, unfinished garage in SoCal
Grow Type - DWC

Tent - 2' x 4' x 6' Gorilla tent with 2' extension

Hydro Setup - DWC
Reservoir - Superponics 12XL. Measures 40" x 23" x 14". 35 gals total, 28 gals usable. Will be filled to 1/2" from bottom of 3" net pots
Reservoir Temperature - 68° (Active Aqua chiller)

Nutes - Jacks 3-2-1 mixed IAW the current feed schedule at 3.79-2.52-0.99. Per the approach detailed by @Farside in his thread "Growing with Bloom Nutes", I'll be using the same mixture throughout. In addition to Jack's, I'm using a potassium silicate silica supplement and HydroGuard.

Grow Lights: Chilled Growcraft X2 veg 330 watt, Chilled Growcraft X3 flower 330 watt
I also have a Vipar Spectra XS-1500 and a Mars SP 3000 that have been needed for previous grows. I'll use those for supplemental lighting, if required.

Lighting Plan -
Seedling - 24/0 with PPFD of 200
Veg - 21/3 with as high a PPFD as plants will support.
Flower - 12/12 with as high a PPFD as plants will support

Light Meter - Apogee MQ-500 calibrated by Apogee 8/22

Tent Climate:
Temperature - temps have been below their climatic average for most of the past two years that I've been growing here in Southern California. We had a hot spell in September 2022 but for the past few months, it's been cool and wet. Temps for Jan, Feb, and March are highs in mid-60s, lows in mid-40's.
Garage floor temp under the tent is ≈ 72 due to crap SoCal suburban home construction. This helps ensure that tent temps rarely drop below the low high 60's.
The "wall mount space heater" heater has been running in the tent since the grow started so temps have been 77°±.

Sensors
PPFD - Apogee MQ-500, calibrated by Apogee 8/22
Air temperature - AC Infinity Controller 69 ("ACI" and "C69")
RH - C69
pH - Bluelab monitor in the res + Bluelab pH pen
EC - Bluelab monitor in the res + Bluelab EC pen when making nutes
VPD - C69

With the purchase of an adapter from ACI, I no longer have to babysit RH to control VPD. The C69 is set to control Hugh so as to keep VPD at 1.0. I set that up a couple of weeks ago and it working perfectly. The ACI humidifier is on order. One of the advantages of the ACI humidifier is that, when it's used with the C69, it has 10 levels of mist so it can be set to add RH very slowly or even continuously to the tent. ATM, the VPD is ranging from 1.1 to 0.9 on a two minute cycle. With the ACI humidifier, I'm hoping to smooth that out.

VPD values - seedling at 0.8, veg at 1.0, flower at 1.2-1.5

AC - Whynter 14000 BTU portable. I don't anticipate using the Whynter during this grow.

Dehumidifier - Waykar 4500 sq. ft. model. I don't anticipate using the Waykar during this grow.

Tent fans
ACI variable speed oscillating fan (still in box)
ACI variable speed fan
ACI 4" inline fan

Kasa Smart Strips are used to for scheduling or controlling power to all electrical devices in the tent.

Trellis - Scrog Pro 2' x 4' and ACI 2' x 4' net

Pests - I've had thrip infestations and will be spraying Spinosad prophylactically during this grow.

Misc. Eqpt.
Pets Pioneer Reptile Humidifier Digital
Trupow 1/10HP 330GPH electric pump for res swaps
Good Ideas Imp-L50-TC Impressions Palm Rain Barrel (50 gallon cistern)

 

[Delps8]

Day 22 above ground.

Per the intro, I started with two Chemdog photoperiods. Both plants were healthy but, per the pictures, Juliet is about twice the size of Charlie so Charlie will probably leave the res.

The AC Infinity Controller 69 has been a blessing. I've retired the Inkbird RH controller, “Wetbird”, because the C69 can control Hugh. Until a few weeks ago, I would change RH every few hours to keep VPD in range. It worked but was insanely labor intensive. The C69 + at $20 adapter changed that completely. I'll still use the Pulse but only for reference. The C69 are controlling the VPD in the grow. It's worked so well that I haven't had to even look into the tent for stretches of a few days at a time. That's what I want — set up the right environment and then leave it alone.

I have had an issue, a self-inflicted one. I think I had an Mg deficiency so I did a foliar spray of Epsom salts a few days ago. The foliar spray might have helped but I also found that the EC reading in my Bluelab monitor is 80ppm low so I thought my grow was at 410/500ppm when it was actually 330ppm. Dunno if that caused the issue but I added increased PPM to 530 yesterday and, in less than 24 hours, the color has changed and the plant is significantly larger.
That's good to see because I commented in my grow journal just two days ago about how small the plants were.

An Mg deficiency isn't hard to spot but one of the negatives of using a veg light is that the blue light exaggerates the differences in variations in leaf color. That makes it's really hard to tell if there's an issue. I need to shut off the X2 and wear a head lamp to be able to see the plants. It also impacts taking pictures but I can color correct for that. All in all, it's a bit of a drag but blue light does make compact, bushy plants.

The surge in growth is good to see. It could be coincidence but it couldn't have happened at a better time. My thinking is that, since it's day 22, it's time to top the plants (that's for autos - is it the same for photos?) and Juliet was so small that it was going to take some work to find the fourth node. That all changed in the past few hours though!

Pictures below are from different times in the grow.

During previous grows, I've used the XS-1500 to light the seedlings since it uses so much less electricity than the full sized X2. For this grow, the XS-1500 is in the box and I've been using the X2 from the start. One of my goals for this grow is to grow one plant that fills the tent. That will entail both low and high stress training.

First order will be to top or FIM - which is more appropriate for a photo? Also, I'd consider mainlining but I don't have a way to tie stems down. My res top is molded plastic and I'm not keen on drilling holes in it so I've used fishing weights in the past. I'm open to suggestions on improving that part of my grow.

PPM is 560/500. PPFD is 490 with a 21/3 light schedule for a DLI of 395. I'll be ramping to LST as quickly as possible.

 

[Delps8]

Day 28 above ground.

The AC Infinity Controller 69 has made my life a hell of a lot better. The temp in the tent has ranged from 79 to 68 and the Controller 69 has kept VPD at 1.0 for almost 100% of the time. VPD does drop when I open the tent but, other than that, the C69 has kept VPD on track, vary between 1.12 and 0.93 every minute, as the humidifier kicks in and then shuts off. One of the things I'm looking forward to when the AC Infinity humidifier gets here is that it has 10 levels for generating mist. With that level of control, I'm hoping that I can leave it running at, perhaps, level 2 and will be the right level to have a consistent VPD of 1.0. That would be excellent but right now, I'm really happy that the only thing I have to do right now to keep VPD on track is to add water to Hugh and clean it every week.

Light levels are enough to get compact, very bushy plants. I just upped to 685µmols which gives me a DLI of 52mols.

One thing that's definitely not good is that, in just the past 24 hours, what looks like an Mg deficiency has cropped up. I've upped my EC in response but I'd really appreciate input from additional eyes and brains.

The Mg issue appears to be hitting one plant, Juliet. Both Charlie and Juliet (female names from the phonetic alphabet) have a few burned tips and that was a direct result of increasing TDS too quickly. I'm using the 500 scale for TDS. I jumped from 310 to 530 then dropped to 480, saw the burned tips, dropped to 430, and dropped again to 380. The Mg def showed up when TDS was 430.

I realize those are low PPM's but that's how the plant is reacting and I did see a comment that Chemdog is a light feeder.

Water uptake is hard to measure because the res holds 26 gallons and the plants are small. Roots are as expected. Charlie, the smaller plant, on the left, has roots that are 18"± while Juliet has roots that stretch 2' or so. Both sets of roots are bright white and have the smell of "fresh dirt".

Water temp is 68°, and the water in the res is clear and has no odor particular odor.

pH has, interestingly, dropped over the past few days. I've added Up to bring it back to 5.8 but it has, repeatedly, dropped to 5.7 within about 12 hours.

VPD has been on target 100% of the time except when I've opened the tent for maintenance.

Wind - nothing on the plants themselves but a fan is blowing 3/10 at the driver for the light and at the heater, both of which are hanging in the tent, at about the same level as the grow light. The inline fan is running at 3/10.

In response to what I believe to be a Mg deficiency, about an hour ago I added 1 gallon of 1880 PPM nutes to raise the TDS to 430 and also added Up to bring pH to 6.1. The main reason I used only 1 gallon was because that's all I had left of the concentrated nutes that I made when I decided to increase TDS from 330.

(When plants reach an appreciable size, I add back RO so as to avoid but, seeing that I have tiny plants in 26 gallons of nutes, I wasn't uncomfortable with making a batch of hight PPM nutes and using that to increases PPM of the res.)

With that as background, the photos below illustrate the issue. On 1/26/23, the plants looked good. I was at a client site (I now have a client not only in the same time zone and in the same area code but also in the same city!) yesterday so I didn't check the tent until I got home at about 1800. At that time, the "light green splotches" were quite noticeable. I did not take photos at that point ("dumb programmer grower error") but my it seems that the issue has progressed in the 20 hours since then.

The plants are very dense and, per my previous grow, they are so small that I'm tempted to swap out the X2 veg light in favor of the X3 flower light. That's part of the magic I guess - plants just grow very, very tall under when there's so little blue light and so much red light. In the early stages, though, they sure do look tiny.

Per an earlier posting, these seeds were in a fridge for 18 months but they did germinate very quickly and, besides my upping the PPM quite a bit and causing nute burn, they've been doing great.

That's the update for today. If anyone can give me some feedback on the issues that I'm seeing, I'd sincerely appreciate it.

The tent cam has the best photos to show the progression.

First picture - 20230126 2137

Next morning - 20230127 0800

And then 20230128 1329 (the plant is turned a bit from when I took it out to inspect the roots)

Charlie as of 1300 today. A bit of nute burn but all OK other than that.

Juliet has a few burned tips but the other damage is…? I'm thinking is a lack of Mg but the picture after next looks different than "light green splotches". Perhaps I dropped some of the 1880PPM nutes on that part of the plant?

Just a tent shot. There are a lot of sensors in the tent in this photo. Hotbird controls the heater, the Acurites are there to get a better picture of what's going on in the tent. The Pulse was "the brains" of the grow but needed me to futz with Hugh (the humidifier).
They were all calibrated at the start of the grow and, when I shut Hugh off, after a couple of minutes, they all give the same values. When I was using the Pulse as my primary data source, I wanted those sensors to validate the readings from the Pulse - they all report their values at about the same frequency. In contrast, the Controller 69 reads temperature and RH every second. In one fell swoop, there is no need for me to run the Inkbird RH controller and the rest of the sensors are obsolete. I'm getting near my goal of making this as simple as possible.

That really does look like I splashed nutes on it, doesn't it? I'm thinking that based on the different colors within each "section" of the leaves.

I can accept that the above photos could be showing damage from dropping nutes on those leaves but what about this photo? I'll accept that it may be a little too early to tell ("trust me, things will get worse!") but could this be high strength "nute water"?

Another fact bearing on the situation — when I pulled Juliet out of the res to check the roots, they were dripping wet and I caught myself touching the leaves with a hand that had touched the roots. In contrast, I haven't checked the roots on Charlie in a few days so perhaps I mucked things up when I checked the roots.

 

[Delps8]

Day 29 above ground.

Pretty psyched that the nute issue is resolved and it appears to be a DGE ("dumb grower error") instead of a deficiency. Yeh, I stepped on my…thumb when I bumped PPM to quickly but dropping 1800PPM nutes on Juliet was yet another brite move. Ugh.

Good news is that issue is resolved//damage is very localized, pH is steady after falling slowly for a couple of days, and PPM fell from 495 (that's how I annotate when the Bluelab is flipping between 490 and 500PPM) to 480 overnight. That tells me the plants are maturing to the point where they're taking up nutes quickly enough to lower PPM and/or the "quick acting" nutes are all gone and they're now taking in the nutes that are slower to be taken up but that impact PPM. How's that for a long sentence?

When doing some reading on reservoir nutrient management, a Bugbee document revealed info about the rapidity/sequence in which nutes are taken up. Some are removed from the res in hours, some take days. Check out the copy and paste below from an Excel document that I put together to try shed some light on reservoir maintenance.

If anyone has additional info re. timeline of depletion of the various chemicals, I'd love to learn more about that.

With it having been a few days since I added the 1800 PPM nutes (and then dropped PPM by adding RO), the group 1 nutes are already in the plant so it's now the chemicals that impact EC significantly that are being relocated. I'd like to have a definitive answer on that.

Adding a few photos of the plants this AM. I did a little LST yesterday - not easy on these little buggers - and they're looking great this AM. They're very short, which will change when I fire up the X3, but they're very dense with lots of thick stems and excellent color. Charlie never got "nutered" (that's when you drop double strength nutes on a leaf) and she does "rook mavelous" (only in todays world can a "she" get neutered) . "rook mavelous" is a throwback to Billy Cristal's character in SNL some years ago.

The plants are very dense, to the point where LST is difficult. There's not much there there. I'm tempted to to add red light. I can switch to the X3 and that will cause things to take off, growth wise. Next option is to suspend the XS-1500 between the bars of the X2. That will add light right where it's needed and, with the "white" spectrum, I'll be adding just a touch of red.

Tangent - the X2 has just two bars which is OK if I had a lot of plants in the res. As it stands, the X2 puts lights where the plants aren't — brilliant move to buy a light that puts light where the plants aren't. :-(

Seeing that I've settled, perhaps temporarily, albeit, to grow only one (do I hear "two"?) plants at a time, I scouted around for a single bar veg light. Growcraft makes a light that would work really well for that purpose but at $259 for that light, which would burn about 80 fewer watts, the payback period doesn't make it worth buying the new light, even at 34¢ per KwH. Yeh, I shoulda bought the single bar light. Just thought I'd pass that along.

Out of concern over the burned leaves, I held off on bumping light levels. They've been at 685/52 for a couple of days and they're loving it. I'll move things up to 750/57± and see how that goes. Weird using a 21/3 schedule but that's driven by Bugbee's comment that, paraphrasing, it's OK to run cannabis 24/0 because plants could use a rest and, second, between 1500 and 2000, the price for a KwH goes from 34¢ to 65¢. By dropping the lights at that time, I'm only saving something like $15 per month but the main issue is that I am "giving them a rest".

As I've come to convince myself based on two years of growing, cannabis will generate a big crop if you get things "in the ballpark". If you set things up with good VPD, good light, good ferts, etc. you will get a "metric shitton" of weed.

My Gorilla Glue grow that I harvested in the Spring blew me away at almost 1 kilo per square meter. I think that's due to a big res that allows plants to "super size" themselves plus a lot of light but that was also 21+5 = 26 ounces from two autos.

Just think what a "real" cannabis plant could do! ;-)

 

[Delps8]

Day 32 above ground.

A nice change from previous grows - pH rising slowly, EC drops slowly, significant water intake. In previous grows, EC didn't drop that much, perhaps indicating that EC was better matched to plant needs than the current grow? Maybe, dunno. I just like the idea that this res is now behaving "like the other kids reservoirs".

Visits to the tent require just a few minutes a day - check/tweak the light levels, check/add water, leave the plants alone. That's been the pattern for a few weeks now but, based on the growth that I'm seeing in the plants, I suspect that will change in the very near future.

Photos below are from earlier today. What strikes me is the uniformity of the plants. I don't recall the autos growing like that but one difference is that these plants have always been under the veg light whereas I used the XS-1500 to some extent during previous grows. Charlie and Juliet have been getting lots of blue photons for all 32 days.

And that brings up the issue — I was planning on culling Charlie because she's the smaller plant. What's causing me to pause is that Charlie an extremely healthy plant so it seems like a waste to toss her out. OTOH, two plants…two photos will be monstrous based on past experience growing in this setup (I think it's due to the huge reservoir, lots of light, steady VPD, and Jacks 3-2-1for nutes) and I don't want to be in the same situation I've faced in previous grows.

One way to deal with that is to train the plants and my expertise is limited to light LST. I don't have anything that I can use to tie the plants down. I have tried to do that in previous grows but it just didn't work out too well.

I would really appreciate suggestions on how to proceed. Cull one of the plants or can I train the plants well enough so that they can actually fit into a 2' x 4' tent with the flaps closed. The latter point is a big issue - when I grow autos, they growth so wide that they hang about a foot outside of the tent. What's the impact of "squishing" a plant into a tent during lights out? This is new territory for me so I'd appreciate advice on how to handle it.

Forgot light data. I'm exceeding 600µmols…and we know how bad that is, "Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!"

The plants are big enough that I'm taking multiple readings with the Apogee. The Growcraft is at 277 watts. The readings were taken in left to right, front to back order and I am plotting the values in the bottom row are, from left to right, the standard deviation of the PPFD, the average of the PPFD, the average of the DLI, and the standard deviation of the DLI. In this case since the 721 value for PPFD is an outlier. Seeing that it wouldn't allow me to accurately represent the amount of light falling on the canopy, I have removed it from the calculations.

That's an insanely even canopy and an insanely even light cast — it would be great if this continued for the rest of the grow but I'm pretty sure that will fall apart real soon after I swap in the flower light.

 

[Delps8]

Day 36 above ground.

Maintenance day - first time I've spent any appreciable amount of time in the tent. VPD has been rock steady at 1.0, plant(s) have had good water uptake, pH was rising slowly, PPM dropped from 510 to 380 over the course of a week. Great numbers and plants are doing well.

Charlie "left the reservoir" yesterday. She's in the closeup photos. The plants were only 12" tall so it was very hard to even see into the foliage, much less to anything like LST. Plants are very compact and dense under a veg light. That keeps plant height down but it certainly does delay the onset of LST - you really can't do much LST when the branches are so short. Check out the closeups below and you will get some idea of how short and stout the plants are.

I did some LST on Juliet and am trying to spread her out across the width of the tent. Juliet's photo shows that I've been able to spread her out a bit, including covering some of the space that Charlie was taking up.

Lights - the Vipar Spectra XS-1500 is suspended between the two light bars on the X2. The 1500 looks like there's more blue in the spectrum than a lot of other white LED's but it does have a decent amount of red in it so that will give the plants a little more size. I toyed with the idea of swapping in the X3 but I really would like to run the X2 in veg and then the X3 in flower just to see how things turn out. Yes, the XS-1500 is running but it's only at 20 watts versus the 300 watts that the X2 is drawing.

These numbers were taken right after I LST'd the plants. That very uniform canopy will change, no doubt, and I'm going to check the plants this evening to make sure they're happy with that much light. Lights out is 1700-2000 (that's when electricity is 61¢ per KwH) so I'll poke my nose in there after they've had about 6 hours at 900+ and see what's what.

The standard deviation of the PPFD values is 30µmols and the st dev of the DLI is only 2 mols. Those numbers will never be that uniform again unfortunately.
Average DLI of 69mols is a lot of light.

Nutes - Jacks 3-2-1 for RO. It's great.

I had planned on flipping in a couple of weeks. Juliet was 12" tall before I did LST so two weeks might work out about right in terms of height. The top of the opening in the tent is 50" above the res top so I'm thinking of flipping at 20"±. That would allow the plant 20" plant to grow an additional 30". It's a real pain in the ass when the colas go out of sight. I'd rather the plants be a little too short than being too tall.

I've been using the Pulse for two years. Hotbird is an Inkbird temperature controller. The AC Infinity Controller 69 has made both of those obsolete. I've kept them in the tent out of habit. They need to go.

 

[spliffas]

Oh boy they look so sexy )

 

[Delps8]

Day 38 above ground.

I realize that "the dog didn't bark" in my previous write up (very little mention of ferts). Jack's continues to impress by the complete non-issue. I swapped the res three days ago after PPM hit 310. The new res is only 480 PPM which I realize is very low for a photo but there's no sign of deficiency.I did cause some nute burn a couple of weeks ago so I'm getting the impression that Juliet is happy with a modest level of ferts.

pH has been bouncing around 5.8 and when it dropped to 5.7 this AM I added a little Up to get it to 5.9. I suspect it will drop for a few more days and then stay at 5.8 for a while.

Water uptake is good at 0.75± gallons a day. RH in the tent is in the 60's which is a tad high but the temp in the tent is in the low 80's. We're getting a few days of 70° temps but the AC Infinity Controller 69 handles adding humidity when needed and I've also set it to run the inline fan when temp > 83°.

Juliet is only 8" tall and she's 22" front to back and 24" across. Per the photo, she's responding very well to LST. The branches at the front of the tent are starting to go vertical so I'll need to deal with that but I'm pleased with her being so uniform, even though it won't last for long.

I decided to use the Uni-T after measuring light with the Apogee. Light data here:

The variance in the factor value is based on the fact that I did the Apogee readings first and then stuck the Uni-T in the tent. I take light readings with the tent flaps shut but unzipped which is where the Apogee wand is very valuable — the readings in the front half of the tent increase with the front part of the plant getting about 100µmols more than when the flaps are open. That's one of the areas where the Uni-T, lacking a wand, it harder to use. The Uni-T is also about 1/20 the price of the Apogee so, yeh, there's that.

One reason I publish this info is to try to provide a counterpoint to the recommendations that growlightmeter.com and Shane at Migro are making re. light levels. I see GLM's chart in more and more postings as the months go by. It's good that growers are focusing their attention on light (which has a direct, positive impact on yield) instead of agonizing about which placebo supplement to add. What's unfortunate, however, is how deeply growers blindly follow their advice but that does show the power of marketing.

I'll give credit to Shane - he recommends modest light levels and he sells light that produce modest light levels.

OTOH, for GLM, the only rationale the I can come up with is that they want to keep growers well away from the light saturation point because if growers start using Photone and start stressing their plants, they're going to blame Photone. I completely understand that approach - it's self-serving, of course, but GLM probably isn't in business to educate growers on the fine points of grow lighting. I suspect that their interest is in selling their product on an ongoing basis so it makes sense to build in a good "margin of error". And, of course, you can grow a lot of cannabis at 43 DLI (but it takes a lot more than 43mols of photons to grow a "metric shitton"!).

The readings from the Uni-T are "close enough" - at 5800 lux, the general light level that we're dealing with, the lowest factor of 0.15 gives a PPFD of 870 and the highest factor of 0.161 converts to a PPFD of 934µmols. That's only 64µmols different and, seeing that the Apogee is calibrated to only 5%±, the PPFD reading of 900µmols is somewhere between 855 and 945. Using 0.155 *5800 yields 898 and that's pretty good compared to the average value of 896 that the Apogee is reporting.

 

[Delps8]

Day 41 above ground.

Keep on keepin' on…

LST is working out pretty well with some of the branches at least ¼ pound holding them down. I'm using homemade silica supplement based on Bugbee's statements about its benefits. Between the veg light and the silica, the stems in this plant are very thick and very strong. That works fine for me because I need to persuade the branches at the front to the tent to do a 90° turn and grow to the right side of the tent. The left side of the plant (stage left) have lots of open space to grow into. The foliage is really dense but I can get to the branches and weight them down. It just takes time to dig through all of the branches and leaves to get to until I can see where to add a weight.

Water consumption is 0.7 gallons/day. RH is in the 60's and VPD has remained at 1.0 (thank you AC Infinity!) so that tells me that my eyes aren't lying — there's a lot of foliage in there.

Res news - PPM is dropping very quickly. Six days ago, the res was 490 and it's now 370. That's a one plant in veg causing a 120 PPM drop in a 26 gallon res. None of my auto grows have come close to that. I was hoping to be able to get a couple of weeks out of a res but with TDS dropping at 22 PPM/day, the res is already 25% depleted which is the level at which, according to this source, the res will start to get "squirrely".

The large res gives me the luxury of not having to top off very often. The water level drops 9 mm for each gallon so the water level is only down a couple of inches even though water consumption has been heavy. With roots that are well over 2' long by now, there's no issue with the roots drying. It's nice to have a res that large that I don't have to top it up all the time but it does take some time, and equipment, to do a res swap. Gotta say, it has worked out well.

One little hitch in the git along is where I cut the hole for an "access port" in the res. I don't remember why I cut it near that middle of the res but, now that I'm growing just one plant at a time, it's clear that I should have cut it at the end of the res instead of in the middle. :-( Per the pictures, Juliet has grown over the portal. Sure, I just move it out of the way when I need to but how do you "move a hole"?

It would make a lot of sense to get rid of this res, get a large cooler, and make my own res top. The insulated cooler will eliminate the heating and cooling issue vs now where I've got 26 gallons of 68° water stuck between a 78° floor and the 74° to 83° tent temp. The res access portal should be in pretty much any location along the front other than where it's located now. And making my own top might make it easier to LST, as well.

If anyone has suggestions about building a res from a big cooler, please lemme know.

We've had three days of highs in the 70's and the inline fan has been kicking in to keep the tent temp < 83°. A bene of those temps is that the 200 watt heater isn't running 24/7. The forecast highs are in the 60's for the next 10 days so the fan won't be running inline fan and I'm hoping that the heater won't kick in, either. Sure, the heat helps but the heater does cost about $60 per month.

My timeline for flipping was 2/18 but seeing that Juliet is well under 1' tall, I'm in no rush. It is tempting to switch to the flower light and let Juliet go vertical but I'll do at least another week using the veg light.

Res swap later today. EC/PPM will be low. She's hungry at EC 1/490PPM so I'll bump that to EC 1.1.

Photos from a week ago and a day ago.

 

[Delps8]

Day 64 above ground.

One of my goals for this grow was to LST the plants to keep them it short and compact. My Growcraft X2 veg certainly did its part, so much so that I swapped my X3 flower light in a couple of weeks ago — Juliet was only 10" tall and the foliage was almost impossible to work in. After couple of weeks under the X3, the foliage is still pretty thick but I have had a couple of defol sessions to clean up the undergrowth and remove the dying leaves. The pictures I've attached show how things have progressed.

First goal (grow a shrubbery) accomplished. As I understand it, most photos are flipped sooner but I've held off on that because of the unusual plant shape. I think now is the time to…

 

[Delps8]

Day 65 above ground.

The little dearie made it through 12 hours of darkness. Only issue I see is RH/VPD. VPD was 0.6± because RH was low 60's. Running the dehumidifier will get the RH down plus it will get some heat in the garage.

Everything looking good, except DLI.

Only 41 mols? Yikes - that's seedling territory! I've ordered a CO2 bag. At $36, it's worth a shot. I've got an Inkbird CO2 monitor but has a white light display. Guess I'll have to put that on the Kasa SmartStrip.

In addition to the CO2 bag, I'll try to get the canopy more even. I'm at 298 watts on the Growcraft which gives me only another 10%.

"Run what ya brung.", right?

Front of plant is 14", 12" for the rest. Hang height is ≈12". Light levels below.

Based on the info from the vendor, this strain is in flower for 8-9 weeks. At 9 weeks, that gives me a chop date of 5/8/23 but, in my tent, it means it might be done by June.

 

[Bill284]

Thick healthy bunch of ladies.
They will burst that tent soon they are growing so well.
Hope everything is going well my friend.
Take care.




#Vivosun #Love What You Grow
Bill284

 

[Delps8]

Thick healthy bunch of ladies.
They will burst that tent soon they are growing so well.
Hope everything is going well my friend.
Take care.




#Vivosun #Love What You Grow
Bill284

Healthy lady — that's one plant…a "shrubbery"!

 

[Delps8]

Day 70 above ground, day 6 of flower.

Everything continues to hum right along. I've allowed EC to drop over from a TDS of 620 PPM (500) to 420 PPM (500). I added a few gallons of water over the course of those two weeks but, other than that, haven't done much maintenance until today.

Per the pictures, this plant really does look like a shrub. Weird. And it needed some trimming because it's so dense that old leaves aren't able to fall to the top of the res. I spent a fair amount of time pushing the branches apart so I could trim off the dead and dying leaves. Along the way, I removed some of the weights.

The plant has grown noticeably in the past couple of days and it's more noticeable because they're starting to grow vertically.

The new res went in at 680 and has dropped to 640 in a few days; pH has been steady at 5.8 and 5.9. We're getting some normal temperatures after months of being about 10° below average and temps in the tent are ranging from the 80's to the low 70's at night.

Light has been running at or above 900µmols or a DLI of about 40mols. The light is a 330 watt light, running at 300 watts and hang height is about 13" so they're getting good light. After the defoliation I did today, I'm going to wait a few days and then add more light.

The battery on my Apogee is low so I took these realigns with the Uni-T light meter. PPFD is calculated using the factor of 0.155 — Oops, I just realized that's the wrong value for this light.

The Growcraft X3 has a factor of 0.16 so these are the light levels. Wow, that's pretty bright. They've been at that level for a couple of days and they're loving it.

I did try a CO2 bag for a couple of days and the readings on an Inkbird CO2 monitor were not noticeably different than they were without the bag. I had tested the ag by putting it in a box with the CO2 monitor and PPM hit 700 a few hours later so I know that the bag was working. Unfortunately, between the modest rate at which is generates CO2 and slowly moving air in my tent, the CO2 levels were not significantly different.

I'll follow up on the defol that I did today. There's tons of tiny undergrowth in there, so much that I decided to clean things up in stages. I'll put another half hour into it tomorrow and then it's back to hands off.

The AC Infinity Controller has been flawless. The huge timesaver has been controlling the humidifier. Until this grow, I would check the VPD that the Pulse displayed and then use the Inkbird app to change the RH setting. I ended up keeping VPD in range a very high percentage of the time but I had to check on it at least four times a day. The Controller 69 completely eliminated a need to do that and I retired the Pulse, the Inkbird RH monitor, and the Inkbird temperature controller.

It's a very impressive piece of equipment so much to the point that I'm getting a second one. I've already got four devices on the current C69 but I want to control a fan that I can use to blow air over the driver and the heater downward, toward the plant. The C69 should make setting that up a…breeze.

Early next week, I'll have an AC Infinity humidifier and will swap that in for the current one. The new one will wok directly with the C69 controller I'm hoping that it will allow the controller to set the mist rate at a consistent level.

Jack's continues to impress. It just works. And reservoir management has been simple - the res is so big that I don't need to add water often. The water level drops by only ⅓" for each gallon of water that's taken up. At the rate of 1 gallon per day, that can be an every other day thing, at most.

The other issue is EC - I use TDS PPM 500 scale - and it was great to start with a res at 620 and let it drop to 430/420 before I swapped it. Even at 33% PPM drop, the res was stable and every indication has been that the plants have sufficient levels of nutrients.

While writing this, PPM dropped another 10 units to 630. Good signs - water uptake, PPM dropping slowly and consistently, pH slowly rising. Now I just need to turn up the light a bit and continue to leave things alone.


The growth at the front of the tent is taller because it's all pushed up against the tent doors. I keep the flaps closed 24/7 because the temps in the garage are too low.

The plant is really boxy, hedge-like. She's 12 to 14" tall. My thinking is that her branches are about 24", most of that being low to the ground. If the branches double in size, that will mean the tops will be at 30" and they would have to almost triple in size to grow up into the tent.

I couldn't get the colors back…

After cleanup

 

[Delps8]

Oops, forgot to post a photo of the roots. I didn't check the roots for the last res change but did so this time.

In my last grow, the trunk bulged the net pot out below the top of the res so I had to cut the net pot open to let the hydroton pebbles drop into the res. That was the only way to get the plant out. To avoid that, I dug out some of the pebbles today and just had a BFO - in future grows, I'll cut a a length of tubing and stand it in the net pot. It will get squeezed by the growing trunk of the plant but I can also just pull up on the piece of hose and that will allow the net pot to return to its normal shape.

Back to roots…

 

[Delps8]

Day 73 above ground. Day 9 of flower.

More of the same. Res is steady as can be. PPM is dropping very slowly and pH is 5.8 to 5.9 to 5.8. Water is down 1.8 gallons in two days. A gallon a day± is good to see. PPM finally dropped to 610/500. The new res was 680 on day 68 and it's down 70 PPM in 5 days. No signs other than sufficiency.

Did some more defol, as shown in the pictures. There's some dead and dying, as expected, and I also took a few of the older fans leaves. Nothing is senescing but older leaves are less efficient in terms of photosynthesis so I don't mind removing older leaves that are not well lit. Speaking of well lit…

Hang height ≈ 12" and I'm still at the 300 watt mark. No sign of issues with the plants even though

She's big enough that I can take 12 light readings. The readings are front to back, left to right, tent flaps closed with just the front, vertical zipper open. I put the Apogee wand into the tent and take the readings. Closing the flaps adds about 100µmols to the readings in the front row and, IIRC, bumps up the readings in the middle of the tent, as well.

I'm a little perplexed by some of the readings because they're significantly higher than the 800-1000µmols range for the light saturation point. Perhaps keeping temps at 83° contributes?

The inline fan kicks in at 83 and it's been running a lot since the outside temps have come up to climatic average (67° avg high this month, 65 for Jan and Feb). In response to the fan tuning all the time, I switched to the external driver. I have two Growcraft lights, a X2 (two light bars) for veg and the X3 for flower. One of the drivers is hanging in the tent, the other is next to the Bluelab monitor right outside the tent. Seeing that the fan was running so much, I powered down the driver in the tent, connected the X3 to the lead from the driver outside the tent, and powered up the external driver. Total time off the air was a few seconds. Gotta love pushlocks!

Took these light numbers today. Lotsa light but going to have to raise the canopy on right side. When I look at these numbers, I kinda sorta wish I'd bought a Growcraft Ultra. I mean that's just an amazing looking light but what intrigues me is that it generates a huge amount of light (50% more than my X3) using the same wattage and generating the same amount of heat. And it's only $600 more!

The best buy from Growcraft for a 2' x 4' is the X6 mini, though. Same price as my X3 but a gorgeous PPFD map. The X3 has a great 2' x 3' foot print. The x6 mini has a great 2' x 4' foot print. Today, I'd get the X6, hands down.

She's up to about 16" now and I'm thinking I'll be OK in terms of headroom. Nice even canopy and lots of little shoots coming up. I'll do some more defol to get rid of the scraggly stuff. Part of the process was to rearrange branches to move things into the light. It's DAWA in there ("dark as a whale's asshole").

And I'm lovin' that AC Infinity humidifier and the Controller 69 handles VPD like a complete champ.

Took off more weights, too. I think I've removed most of them by now.

You can see the branches laying out horizontally but the plant, as a whole, is "lifting" like I hoped she would. In addition to removing foliage "inside" the plant, I've put a 3" desk fan under the canopy.

 

[Delps8]

Day 74 above ground. Day 10 of flower.

Flower buds showed up over night.

I lowered the PPFD because I didn't like having parts of the canopy at 1150±µmols. That's almost in CO2-enhanced territory so I'm a bit skittish to leave it that high. I'll do defol on Saturday and will adjust the light then.

Temps dropped a few degrees by switching to the driver outside the tent. It got to 80° in mid-afternoon and then rolled off. If temps drop outside, at least I know that I can switch them very easily.

pH steady but I did add a gallon of RO so my TDS dropped to 580PPM.

 

[Bill284]

Day 74 above ground. Day 10 of flower.

Flower buds showed up over night.

I lowered the PPFD because I didn't like having parts of the canopy at 1150±µmols. That's almost in CO2-enhanced territory so I'm a bit skittish to leave it that high. I'll do defol on Saturday and will adjust the light then.

Temps dropped a few degrees by switching to the driver outside the tent. It got to 80° in mid-afternoon and then rolled off. If temps drop outside, at least I know that I can switch them very easily.

pH steady but I did add a gallon of RO so my TDS dropped to 580PPM.

I'm going to move my driver today , I think it will help my temps aswell.
Your canopy is perfect.
Girls are loving life.
Hope everything is going well my friend.
Take care.




#VIVOSUN #Love What You Grow
Bill284

 

[Delps8]

Day 76 above ground; day 12 of flower.

What hit me the other day about that canopy is that all of those little "stars" that are looking up from the ends of the branches are all going to be buds/colas. That just sorta blew me away. There's a lot of them.

So I have another "proud grower" picture and I did some more defoliation. I'm not a fan of schwazzing or radical defoliation but I am surprised at how much I've cut off that's never going to grow into a flower. Part of it is that this is a plants that has been, to one way of thinking, "flattened" so there's going to a bit of a jungle in there.

And it is. Per the photo, another couple of hands full. It was also good to look at each branch because it helps me understand how topping plus LST impact the plant and I also see why manifolding/mainlining is so effective.

The irony is that those types of HST remove the center stem and allow the side branches to grow but that's not where the light is. Guess where even the very best lights are the brighest? Yup, in the middle, right where the plants aren't.

 

[Delps8]

Day 82 above ground, day 18 of flower, and 9 weeks of flower puts me 46 days till Chop.

More of the same, that being not much of anything new.

The shrubbery continues to grow taller but it's hard to tell in the same way that it's hard to see a table rise. Even though buds are starting to grow, the canopy looks to be pretty good and the light data confirm that.

Weather - back to the 10 degrees below climatic average that we've had for a couple of years. I'm using the driver outside the tent but the X3 is doing a decent job of keeping the tent temp in the low 80's. In addition to global warming keeping the temps well below average, the perpetual drought that we're in has resulted in a lot of rain over the past few months and these past few days continued the drought with about 1½" over the course of this week.

Tent Weather - the wet weather outside means plenty of humidity and I'm using the Waykar is dehumidifier to get RH down. It's in the low 40's in the garage and that works out about right for Hu (the humidifier). A couple of weeks ago, I was going through a gallon a day. This week it's been about half a liter a day. Water consumption, uptake by the plant, is good at just under a gallon a day.

The Res - great numbers. TDS dropping about 20 PPM/day with pH slowly rising. I've changed res maintenance — instead of just adding back RO and then swapping when I've added 28 gallons or if pH gets out of whack or if TDS drops "low", I've decided to follow the tack that Bugbee has written about in "Nutrient Management in Recirculating Hydroponic Culture". The paper provides a lot of good info and one in particular is that Bugbee reveals that researchers do not swap out their res over the course of a grow. Rather than pump out all the news and start anew, their protocol is to maintain a res by adding ½ strength Hoagland solution. Stock Hoagland solution has a PPM of 1880 and it just so happens that my SOP has been to create create a 4 gallon batch of my nutes at twice the normal strength. And, yup, that comes out at 1810ppm.

After reading (re-reading for the Nth time) that paper last weekend, I decided to adopt that approach and I did a top up this week. It made topping up a breeze - a scoop of the nute solution with my 500 ml measuring cup, then 1 ½ gallons of RO and it's done.

The AC Infinity C69 keeps VPD in range. The new humidifier is working out really well. It has let me retire hundreds of dollars of other sensors but it had allowed me to not have to launch the PulseOne and Inkbird apps to monitor & tweak RH to keep VPD in range. In addition to saving hours and hours of my time, it undoubtedly does a better job than I did. I can't say enough good things about the C69, their fans, and their humidifier.

Plant - oh, yeh, that's right. This grow journal is about a plant. The plant is pretty much the same as it was before, just taller.

She might be 18" tall now but I haven't measured her in a week or so. I do know that she's growing and, because the canopy is really flat, it's not easy to see the grow - she's just sort of "rising". Like a shrubbery.

When I took photos today, I checked for dead and dying leaves and found very few. One "dog that didn't bark" is that I don't have a lot of big fan leaves. I hadn't thought of that till now. There's lots of foliage but none of the big-as-your-hand fan leaves that my autos had. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised since this is such an unusually shaped plant - the plant is so low to the ground that that's not how the leaves grew. What would I know - I'm a history major still looking for a real job…

Light - there's a lot of light in the tent. Some of the readings have been > 1100µmols and, initially, I was concerned about that. The light saturation point is 800-1000µmols so I was seeing readings that were 15% above the high end. 15% is a lot. In this case, it's at the low end for the light setting for when you're using CO2 (Bugbee recommends 1200PPM CO2 and 1200µmols, if anyone's interested).

It just didn't make sense to me that Juliet would be getting that much light and not showing any ill effects. Yet another case of "Who you going to believe - the experts or your lying eyes?". I checked the buds that were getting "too much light" and zero issues. I went over the original of the "whole plant" shot on my 27" iMac. It's a 5k monitor and a 28 meg image so even the smallest details were visible but, all in all, good to go. IIRC, I did LST one of the buds out of the photon-storm but that, other than that, they're just catchin' rays and enjoying life.

Averaging almost 1000µmols and the 768 is the outlier-drop that out and the average goes to 1015. Very nice to be at 1kµmols and have 50 watts in hand.

No idea why I left the PVC pipe there…

I've done a fair amount of clean up. No larf!
Another thing that's interesting to me is the "secondary" branches that are growing vertically. It's turned out to be a scrog without a net.

Lots of colas but there are some wasted photons because she's not filling the width of the tent. I thought about that earlier today and, as much as I'd like to have the bigger crop, that's just the right size of the humidifier.

Too bad I can get an AC unit that would fit in there, too, eh? Then I could grow all year 'round!