Chemdog's Out

[Delps8]

Day 89 above ground, day 25 of flower, and 9 weeks of flower puts me 39 days till Chop.

Decided to swap the res yesterday. The res was 20 days old and I had added back 20 gallons. That's 20 out of 28 gallons. pH was rising a couple of tenths a day, consistently, so I figured that it was time to go. That res lasted 20 days.

Along with a res swap, I checked the roots and they look great.

This look good "above ground". Lots of bud sites but "stretch" was a non-event and she's only 22" at the most. We shall see, eh?

 

[CharlieWaffles]

Wow, nice looking grow!
I am currently growing one photo plant, possibly a Cinderella 99, in DWC. Any suggestions on why my pH is continuously rising? This has been ongoing throughout the grow. I will start off and pH my water to anywhere between 300, 400 500 or 600 ppm and within three or four days. It has risen two or 300 points. I tried reducing the PPMs to as low as I could around 300 but they would still rise up within a few days to six or 700. I always try to PH around 6.0. I’m using Advanced Nutrients micro grow & bloom, and Cal Mag. Changing my Reservoir every 7 to 12 days with a top up somewhere in the middle. My plant doesn’t look bad but I just can’t understand why the pH keeps rising. Sorry for hijacking your thread lol

 

[Delps8]

Wow, nice looking grow!
I am currently growing one photo plant, possibly a Cinderella 99, in DWC. Any suggestions on why my pH is continuously rising? This has been ongoing throughout the grow. I will start off and pH my water to anywhere between 300, 400 500 or 600 ppm and within three or four days. It has risen two or 300 points. I tried reducing the PPMs to as low as I could around 300 but they would still rise up within a few days to six or 700. I always try to PH around 6.0. I’m using Advanced Nutrients micro grow & bloom, and Cal Mag. Changing my Reservoir every 7 to 12 days with a top up somewhere in the middle. My plant doesn’t look bad but I just can’t understand why the pH keeps rising. Sorry for hijacking your thread lol

Hi - thanks for contributing to the thread!

You're saying that you fill a res with 300/400/etc. ppm nutes and it rises 200 to 300 points?

Have you recently calibrated your EC meter? Other than that, I'm stumped. I can't think of how a plant could do that.

What's your VPD or temp + RH + wind info?

What about water uptake - more, less, 200 ML, 1 liter?

One thought - I haven't used Advanced Nutrients but I think I have read reports of growers having problems with it in terms of its pH management. Do the directions say that it's OK/not OK to "manually" change the pH? Obviously, I know very little about AN products…

 

[Delps8]

Day 110 above ground, day 46 of flower, and "7-9 weeks of flower" puts me at 18 days till Chop.

Forgive me reader(s), it has been 21 days since my last posting…

The 18 days till chop is based on the 7-9 week timeframe from the seed vendor. I spent a few minutes checking out the plant today and, big news, a very small percent of the trichs are amber on a few nugs. Could this grow be done in 18 days? Nah but even if it takes an extra week, it's a hell of a lot more accurate than the timeframes I have dealing with for my auto grows.

One things that's thrown me a bit is the shape of the plant + the size of the colas. I did use the veg light for about 45 days, IIRC. That plus weighing everything down got me a shrubbery. In contrast, even though I tried to get a compact plant for my auto grows, they ended up at 50" plus. I switch to photos and a get a 2' tall plant. Howzat?

Another factor is that these colas are nowhere near as big as the ones on my autos. OTOH, there are about twice as many of them. Harvest will be interesting.

I spent some time delarfing and, while I'm sure it did some good, there's all sort of immature growth below the canopy. There are enough colas and they're frosty enough that I don't want to try to depart any more so I'm thinking I'll just trim off the good stuff and leave the lard on the stems.

Very little has changed. Light levels are good, res is slowly dropping in TDS and slowly rising pH. I'm adding 2 mk Down every other day or so. TDS started at 680/500 with the new res and I've put about 20 gallons back in the res since the new res on 3/29/23. I've tried different approaches to maintaining the res and adding RO and then swapping the res at the 50% level (14 gallons) is a very valid approach. This res has gone to 75% so it will time to do a new res this weekend.

I did one top off with ¼ strength nutes about 10 days ago and it looks like that caused a little nute burn in some of the leaf tips. That idea came from a Bugbee paper on res maintenance but it was was a crapshoot for me — Bugbee's team does actual chemical analysis whereas I just went with a 25% solution. No worries though because the amount of tip burn was minimal but it was worth a try.

The Bugbee paper is "Nutrient Management in Recirculating Hydroponic Culture".

Another good paper that I dredged up - "The Effect of Light Spectrum on the Morphology and Cannabinoid Content of Cannabis sativa L." Good info in there. Lots of subtleties.

In response to a thread, I'm not sure which cannabis site, I checked the temps on the light - 95° in one corner and 107° at the hottest spot. I never grew with gas discharge but the low temps of this light allow me to use a hang height of 10". I referred to an HLG light as an "air fryer" though that was my description of the hot spot that board lights have. Still I thought it was apt - check the PPFD map of any board light — they all have that hot spot.

I tried adding in the Mars SP 3000 to get more PPFD on the front row but that meant I would have to leave the tent open so VPD went out of range. That's was a no go.

After two years and, I think five grows, I'm not at "zero maintenance" but very close. I check the tent every other day, add a little water, refill Hugh, check the lights, and then zip it up and leave it alone.

Another big excitement today was swapping to the external driver. I have two 330 watt lights - one for veg, one for flower. They use the same driver so I have one in the tent and one hanging outside. One of the reasons why these lights are on the $$ side is because they use push lock drivers but they're worth it.

With three days of temps approaching 80, the garage/tent will get in the 80's. Parking a car in the garage adds another 2° and that gets the tent into the mid-80's. Me no lo gusta. Thanks to the push locks, it takes all of 30 seconds to switch from the internal driver to the external.

No thrips. I've had thrips for the past three grows and nothing so far. I've held off on spraying, primarily because the tent is open only when I"m working in it. I was used to having the tent open and being able to push more light in using the Mars but this grow has given me a different perspective. I did like the rapid growth and the size/yield from autos (I won't be pulling 24 ounces from this grow, that's for sure) but, based on this grow, I see no reason to grow autos. Not to knock autos per se but because of how my grow equipment is set up, photos just make a hell of a lot more sense.

Ok, enough angle bargle.

First the lights:

Current light levels

Light levels for this grow:

And now it's time for the camera:

 

[Delps8]

Day 118 above ground, day 54 of flower, and 10 days left in the "7-9 week" flower time from the seed seller.

"low and slow" is how you cook BBQ, not how weed is supposed to grow.

I've been a little frustrated by this grow, seeing that it's almost 120 days since germination but I recalibrated my thinking when I realized that I vegged the plant for a long time. I'm still 10 days from the end of the window where the seed vendor said it would take for the plants to mature. My previous grows were autos, growing into the roof of the tent with colas as long as my forearm. This is a photo that I've trained differently but I guess I wasn't sure what to expect.

Three or four days ago the buds were getting fatter and I'm glad to see that. I was getting concerned that This grow wouldn't turn out too well. Water consumption has been stable at 1 gallon/day but that may pick up over the next couple of weeks.

The new res was 650 on the Bluelab monitor which is only 600 on the calibrated Bluelab pen. I was surprised that you can calibrate the EC side of the Bluelab but I use the pen to get in range and, frankly, the 5%± is more than close enough. With the RO add backs, PPM is down to 650 on the monitor.

I think I got some nute burn from the new res but nothing serious. The leaves a senescing but there are big fan leaves. There is a fair amount of growth below that canopy, some of it is larfy but there are some decent looking buds under the canopy.

A few of the branches were starting to fall over because of the weight of the buds so I broke out the Scrog Pro net. It's an interesting design - rather than a standard net with a grid of elastic in fixed positions, the ScrogPro is a kit that has 5 metal bars, connectors, and elastic with hooks on each end. The great thing about it is that you string the elastic around the plants to "build the net" instead of having to bend the plants to fit the holes in the netting.

Trichs on the sugar leaves are amber but the trichs on the calyx are clear. Plenty of time to go. It's done when it's done.

I'm hoping this grow will wrap up in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the weather will stop cooperating soon. Now that we're heading into May, highs will hit the 80's and, unfortunately, RH is up. Guess we'll just have to see what happens. This coming week is cool, though, with highs in the 60's. That would be great if it continued but wishing won't make it so.

Checked light levels for the first time in a few days. No change in input wattage and still a good amount of light. I should poke my nose in there tomorrow and rearrange things so I can raise PPFD.

 

[Delps8]

Day 127 above ground, day 63 of flower, and 1 days left in the "7-9 week" flower time from the seed seller.

There are very few amber trichs but you gotta play that hand you've been dealt and this hand included bud rot.

Shit. Shit shit shit. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit. <=== there's a melody to those lyrics but I'll spare you.

Going back about a week, I replaced the little desk fan that was on the top of the res with two 6" fans, running on high. I also added an AC Infinity tent fan during the week. My goal was to avoid any issues with bud rot that might be caused by the high RH we're having here (that's due to the "permanent drought" that we're having).

It wasn't enough, so sayeth Captain Obvious.

The pisser is that I've been checking the trichs daily which means that these two buds went bad over night.

Current plan is to chop the plant, wet trim, and put into shopping bags. There's a bathroom off my office which stays in the low 70's. I've got a drying "rack" but I want these buds in bags to try to reduce the spread of the bud rot.

 

[Delps8]

I chopped Juliet mid-afternoon yesterday and left everything hanging in the garage.

Checking the buds today, many of the larger buds were damaged and I considered cutting away areas that were damaged and keeping the rest. That could be a viable strategy but I decided against it, the primary reason being that unless the situation demands a different course of action, my preference is to err on the side of caution. Based on that, I binned everything.

That's a lousy way to finish off a grow but there are some "lessons learned" and I will heed those in future grows. With the summer heat coming up, the next grow will start in September.

 

[Delps8]

I didn't start a grow journal for my next grow here on 420 but I do keep one in Excel. Below are the entries from the Commentary tab for grow 2302.

I've settled on doing two grows a year, Spring and Fall. That's driven by weather here in SoCal. I did buy a Winter 14k BTU AC unit but it burns 1200 watts and it works by cooling the corner of the garage where the tent is located. Sure, it gets me another crop of weed but it costs at least $100 a month to run and I've got plenty of inventory without it.

The Fall grow should start NLT 1 Oct. If it starts late, that means my Spring grow might not finish until late May but that's when it can get hot and that's close to when thrips start to abound. All in all, 1 Oct is a good start date.

This year, I had to attend a conference in Atlanta in early October and I decided to hold off until germinating seeds until I got back. I dropped three "Back to the Future" seeds into pH 6.0 tap water and they all germinated within 48 hours. Then it was into Rapid Rooters. Per above, one seed closed, the stem of one grew about 1" and then separated from the seed, and the other grew really nicely. That's really poor - my processes are pretty well worked out + only one of three sprouted after all three seeds opened to reveal a root. That makes me suspect that the issue was seed quality rather than how the seeds were germinated. Back to the Future and/or Tastebudz are on my no buy list. :-(

The rat/mouse (I'll refer to it as a "rat") also chomped through the power cord from my Bluelab monitor. I repaired that yesterday and rerouted the wire do it doesn't run near the shelf. And I'll be setting up rat traps today.

Two days ago, I ordered seeds (NASC is my go to seed vendor) and then decided to drop some Gorilla Glue seeds that I bought when I started growing in early 2021. They've been kept in a fridge in their shipping container since then but only one of three ("Bravo") has grown a root. The NASC order won't be here until Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm going to the sprouted seed into a Rapid Rooter and see how that goes.

Rather than try to come up with names for my plants, I've decided to go with the phonetic alphabet. It's easy to remember (I used it daily for the 8 years I was in the US Army) and it's got just about enough "digits" to last — I'm 67 years old so, at 2 grows/year, I'll be 80 when I have to go to double digits. Interesting — that's about the time I'll need to refresh my supply of Jacks 3-2-1, as well. Funny that!

"pix or it didn't happen", right.

Alpha was tall even though she was getting 200+ µmols (24/0). I had hopes.

Nice roots for a 3 day old.

And then…

 

[Delps8]

Human 1, nasty little f'ers 0.

Went into the tent just now to check on "Bravo One" and "Bravo Two" (two seeds popped).

When I stepped into the garage, I heard a clattering as a rodent scurried across the garage floor with the rat trap closed across its snout. I froze in my tracks and very slowly reached into my left pants pocket for my phone. Gotta get a picture of that NLF ("nasty little f…"), right!

He (yes, a sexist assumption) was too quick for me and he made it to the rear corner of the garage which I assume is the access point. Hopefully, he will get out the same way he got in. If not, I've either got to find him or find the remains or I'll just have to wait till he rots and the smell goes away. That happened to me in my house in Santa Fe - we could hear a mouse scampering in the walls, until we couldn't. And then it started to smell. And it smelled for a while. Hopefully this one won't be as bad.

My Fall grow should have started in early Oct. Checking my Grow Planning worksheet (Excel), this grow will finish on 2/13/24 which means my Spring grow won't finish till 6/2/24 (110 days/grow). That's well into high temps and prime to thrips. Shit. It's looking like short veg time for one or both grows. A 10/1/23 start would have my Spring grow done by 5/9/24 so I've got to lop about three weeks off of my grow time. Can't speed up flower so gotta cut back on veg.

Veg time for last grow was something like 41 days. Does it make sense to flip after 30-34 days?

41 was too long, BTW. I used a lot of blue during seedling phase and ran the Growcraft veg light. I got a very compact plant but it was a bit of a PITA to work in - it really was a bush vs a "normal" cannabis plant. Perhaps 4-5 weeks of veg will work out for the better.

"There are no problems — only challenges and opportunities."