Sensa's First Grow Journal - 250W HPS & LED Setup - 2016

[sensamillia]

Hi there guys,

A while ago i found a bagseed in a bag of what was supposed to be kush. Since it was end march, start of april i decided i'd give growing it a go.

I wasn't in for too much of a hassle thinking it would just be a plant on a windowsill, being watered daily and iven no nutes and so on, using a prepackaged pot with soil (Compo Sana Universal) thinking to myself i'd get a good 20-50g. However as i started to do research i found out i would be lucky if i got 5-10g of low grade bud if any at all..

Reading this stopped me in my tracks.. I have an attitude where when i start something i want to achieve the best results i can manage within my power. so my attitude at that point changed drastically, i realised i needed a growing tent for airflow control, humidity, lighthours and so on.

At that point my "kush" plant had been a week old or so. it was clearly overstretching to get the most out of the little light that was available. she was drooping a little (i had also forgotten to open up all drainage holes and she had a few days of overwatering so i think she started off with some root problems). The weather at that point did get a little better with more hours of direct sunlight which did seem to help but i knew that if i wanted decent results i'd have to invest in a decent operation, The details of which i will release in further posts.

I'll also include some photo's as i go, and i'd gladly get some advice on how my plants are doing and so on, you may all ofcourse ask questions which i will try and answer too

 

[sensamillia]

Re: First grow journal, HPS + LED set-up

Let's get to the basic set-up details.

Grow Tent

a 70x70x160cm Mars Hydro growtent

Lighting

For lighting i'm using a 250W Phillips MASTER SON-T PIA+ lamp as well as several small grow LED's bought at a sharp price from AliExpress. (since pricing is a relative big issue for me, everything needs to be as low cost as possible, while sacrificing as little quality as possible.) They're 30W and have the various red, blue and 1 yellow LED even 1 UV LED i think, but i can guess they probably won't be at the exact spectrum that the plant needs. None the less i thought it couldn't do much harm since they cost me only 4 euro's per bulb..

Also underway from Ali is a 50w LED from another reseller, a larger bulb, for about 11 euro's.

Ventilation

At the time being i have installed a Renson 150mm 300m3 ventilator which i wired myself. (as i also did with all the lighting components, all to spend as little as possible, and have a bit of a challenge, because i love fiddling with electronics and so on ) The main problem with this vent is that it's sucking waaaay to hard. the underpressure it creates is desirable, but it turns into a small tornade when i fully close the tent. Hence i always have to leave the tent open for a bit, but depending on how much i close the zipper i can have semi control over the airflow in the tent so that's not so bad.

But in the long run i ofcourse want a completely closed tent that i can manage electronically. For that purpose i started looking for vent controllers, but those bastards costed 50-70 euro's a piece, which i can't afford.. so again i turned to Aliexpress for help, and i think i found what i was looking for. A voltage controller for 4 euro's! but i suspect that since the vent is driven by a motor it might just completely stop working once i start lowering the inputvoltage. however this is just speculation and i'll just have to wait and see

Environment

At the moment i don't have a Hygrometer, and only a cheap thermometer, so i'm left guessing for the humidity at the moment, but i am looking into some other indirect methods to determine it to some point (temp, towels etc...) I can't check the Ph of my tap water at the moment and i don't really know what's inside it, so my method up until now is to boil the water for 5-10 minutes, let it cool and then use it to mist and water the plants.

Luckily a hygrometer, Ph meter and other appliances are underway so i won't have to stay guessing much longer .

Genetics

For starters i have my bagseed "kush" so i have no idea which strain is in there, whether it's female or male, if it has ruderalis genes? i do suspect a large part of indica if i look to the leaf structure, but i'm far from an expert so i really can't tell.

The other 3 seeds where bought in a seedbank. They're Royal Cheese Automatic seeds, praised for their ease of growing and high thc/cbd ratio's and yield, in my mind the perfect starter seed

Grow Medium

For the first seed i used Compo Sana Universal, it contains about 20% perlite and other values seemed acceptable at the time. What i didn't notice at first was that the soil tends to keep water very well. so i started overwatering "kush" in her first week without even knowing it. It was a prepackaged 5l growing pot with drainage holes and so on, and just the right amount of soil to get you started.

For my later seeds i chose 10l pots and Compo Bio soil with sheepwool? it's supposed to keep it airy and contain nutes for the plant. this was by far the lightest soil mix that they had available, and after some deliberation i chose that one. I noticed that it drains far beter, which is good since the that means i won't be able to overwater the seedlings in that large pot as easily.

I also had another Compo Sana Universal prepackage pot so i mixed it with 1/3 of the Sana Bio for extra aeriation. so i have 3 different types of growing medium for my 4 plants. i guess the future will reveal what is best for them .



As for photo's i'm currently compressing and uploading the images for you guys, so hold on tight, and i'll try to upload them as fast as possible

 

[sensamillia]

re: Sensa's First Grow Journal - 250w HPS & LED Setup 2016

While imgur is painfully slow at uploading my pictures i thought i'd please you guys with some pictures of "kush" when i didn't even think of a growing room yet.

It looks somewhat healthy, but quite stretchy and droopy in my opinion. it looked so sad to see a gorgeous little plant like that not get to it's fullest potential, in the picture below you can see how stringy and thin the stalk is.

and in the picture below you can see that once the overwatering had cleared up a little, and the more direct sunlight reached the plant it started growing again, this was a few days before i got my set-up

as soon as i get the damn pictures uploaded i'll add them to the thread with some extra info. but i suspect that that might be tommorow or so, and from there on i'll keep this journal updated if people seem somewhat intrested see you soon!

love,
Sensa

 

[sensamillia]

re: Sensa's First Grow Journal - 250w HPS & LED Setup 2016

While imgur is painfully slow at uploading my pictures i thought i'd please you guys with some pictures of "kush" when i didn't even think of a growing room yet.

It looks somewhat healthy, but quite stretchy and droopy in my opinion. it looked so sad to see a gorgeous little plant like that not get to it's fullest potential, in the picture below you can see how stringy and thin the stalk is.

and in the picture below you can see that once the overwatering had cleared up a little, and the more direct sunlight reached the plant it started growing again, this was a few days before i got my set-up

as soon as i get the damn pictures uploaded i'll add them to the thread with some extra info. but i suspect that that might be tommorow or so, and from there on i'll keep this journal updated if people seem somewhat intrested see you soon!

EDIT: in hindsight I'll have to take care of those image sizes aswell, i'll look into that tommorow but i have to go now so sorry for that, i'll solve it !
love,
Sensa

 

[sensamillia]

Grow tent

lighting

at the moment i'm running 2 of these 30w AliExpress LED's, they don't seem all that powerfull, but they have a good shine, and they get hot, but not so much that i can't touch them, even after a few hours.
2 more of these and a 50w bulb are also underway from Aliexpress

My main lamp is the Phillips SON-T PIA+ 250w

I bought it in a set with a reflector which i then had to wire to the ballast and further on to the electrical outlets, which wasn't that hard, but saved me a few extra bucks

completely installed light in growbox

Ventilation

the Renson 25w 150mm 300m3, a very fine model, but without the controller i've ordered (which i hope will work ) it pulls way to much are, i think i've even noticed some leaf cupping due to overtranspiration caused by the strong underpressure. i usually leave my tent opened up a bit as in the first picture to manually control airflow untill there is a better solution.

Genetics

Working with the bagseed "kush", which is i think dominantly indica when looking at leaf stucture, this picture is actually the first day i put it into the room, you can see how droopy and small it still is

The other ones are store bought, i've picked Royal Cheese for the desirable traits of the strain.

Growing medium

"kush" - Compo sana Universal

2 Cheese seeds - Compo Bio Universal

1 Cheese seed in Compo Sana/Compo Bio mix

 

[sensamillia]

Hi guys,

So to finally officially start off the grow journal, here are my plants. it's day 5 since potting the seedlings. i sadly can't tell for sure how old "kush" is, but i'm planning to start scrogging it or something and keeping it in veg untill the other ones catch up.

I found a timestamp, and appearantly the 16th of april i had the tent up and running, but that was only with kush

So this was day 3 in the growbox for kush, you can clearly see it evolving quite rapidly in the new lighting conditions

and this is today, the 8th day or so in the box, she's clearly enjoying the straight light patterns and good environment i hope. It's not so clear on the image, but the past 2 or 3 days i've noticed some leaf cupping, it's affecting newer growth too, and i can't really pinpoint the exact issue there, so i hope someone in this forum will have some info on that

and here's a close-up on the cupping, and i've already thought that it was the light being to close (i placed on of the LED's on kush first, before putting them both on 2 seedlings.) so i removed the LED, and placed the HPS is at a distance of about 27-28cm,where it was first around 24cm and i thought you should keep the lamp a minimum of 10% the power in cm (25cm in my case) away from your plants. but it appears the cupping continues. It's not very severe but it has me wondering so i'd really love some input on what is happening there.

its not that visible but if enlarged you can see it better. in this image below it's on the upper row of leaves, again not very extreme, but it troubles me a bit.

and below you can quite clearly see it on the bottom row of leaves.

As for the others, it's day 5 after potting, and they're looking quite dandy and happy i think, no stretching or damping of any kind that i've noticed, i had some second thoughts about starting the grow under HPS light, but again i was trying to go low cost, and a big LED or a second set of ballast, bulb etc for MH wasn't an option. i think that if there would have been some issues with that, that the ruderalis genes counter the effect a little? ofcourse this is pure speculation from my end, important thing is that they look healthy

#1

#2

#3

So there you have it, my growtent operation funny thing is that less than a month ago i had already flirted with the idea before but never went through with it. and then within the matter of a small week i was set to go as professional as i could go.

I'm learning everything as i go and try to keep close attention to the ladies, i keep a detailed grow journal waiting for all decent meters (temp,ph,ec) to really start documenting and i'd love some input from the outside, reading from the internet is always good, but i'd love some real info from growers that already have a few under their belt to give me an idea of what i can expect with this kind of set-up. if there are any questions i'll try to answer them, and i'm looking forward to being able to keep my journal on here.

Cheers, Sensa

 

[sensamillia]

re: Sensa's First Grow Journal - 250W HPS & LED Setup - 2016

anyways, since i'm not doing much than waiting for a reply <3 and not having any of di herb to consume i'll please you guys with what i think would be a perfect themesong for growers

[video=youtube;fFqzYvusebY]

[/video]

Oh, and a small sidenote

Watering

At the moment my watering pattern hasn't been perfectly timed. and i started off with normal tap water, which then i read isn't that good for the plants temperaturewise, and with fluoride and chlorine that it has. so my tactic now is to boil a liter or 5 of normal tap water, let it cool off and then proceed to use it for a day or 2. i also bought a sprayer to humidify my plants, which i've been doing once or twice a day for the seedlings and kush. all with the normal boiled tap water.

since my fear of overwatering again, i've been adding water to what i think was just enough, i do water them twice a day, but for kush that would be around 600-700ml water daily in total at most i think. could me leaf cupping be related to that ? as for the seedlings, i've made sure they have enough water but the soil isn't muddy or so so they don't seem to be doing bad.

 

[sensamillia]

Hi guys,

So a few days have passed, i thought i'd give an update about how things are going.

The bagseed "kush" has been steadily growing ever since the change to HPS lighting. It is starting to give off a slight odour as well. it's not really strong enough to start thinking about a filter but still, when you enter my appartment you can start smelling a wierd smell.

So anyways i've just realised what a nooby mistake i made going for Auto's with one photoperiod plant... if i change to 12/12 to induce flowering on the first, the auto's will be seriously crippled in their growth. so my plan now is to veg "kush" till she shows signs of being male or of preflowers turn out female then i'm thinking about keeping her in veg a month or 2,3 then take clones and veg them up to decent size while LST'ing the main plant. then put them all in 12/12 and hope i don't turn out with something my little tent can't handle anyways that's speculation since there haven't been any preflowers that i've seen yet.

Here's a look at kush a few days ago when first LST'd the main stem down. the idea is to bend the main stem along the perimeter of the pot or atleast make it bend into a circular fashion to keep it down a bit and make it more bushy then 1 long stem. also i don't want to increase the height of my HPS light too soon since i'm only running 2 30w LED that are pointed towards the auto seedlings. i want to give them as much light as possible while reducing the light stress on the "kush" because it seems it's a bit sensitive to that.

and here after a few days the foliage along the main stem is densening to the side that i bended towards the light. it's now growing a second main stem, you can't see it clearly in the images but the middle part of the foliage is actually an arm of a node that is now growing to be a main stem.

so much for the progress on "kush" let's take a look at the cheese auto's

#1
She's doing quite well, i've raised the soil level a bit by adding fresh soil and it's one of the 2 that has a LED pointing right at it

#2
from the looks she is the biggest grower, but i thinks looks are a bit decieving as she started out in the SANA and BIO soil mix unlike 1 and 3, and didn't need added soil.

#3
cheese nr 3 looks like she's also doing quite well.

What also surprised me is that there was not so much stretch, even though i used HPS lighting right from germination. and also that all three cheese auto's started developing 3-fingered leaves right from the second node. i suspect this to be from much more ideal lighting settings than the "kush" seed, which only started developing those after being put under hps lighting at week 2 i think.

Anyways, that's about it for this update, suggestions are more than welcome since this is still my first grow, and please call me out if i'm bullshiting on any of this since i'm still waiting for the measuring material from aliexpress and i don't think i am on par with most of the growers in here, i'm just trying to do my best here

Cheers, Sensa

 

[David Bowman]

Hope all is well in your world.

Is this grow still alive?

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I am moving this to Abandoned Journals until we get updates.

Sending you lots of love and positive energy.