SolKing's Second Try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy/DWC - Coffee Kush - Amnesia - Budget Grow

[SolKing]

Well 420 I'm back and after my abysmal failure first time round I am determined to get to harvest this time so fill up a bowl get yourself comfy and start praying to the ganja God for some blessings I am already 2 months into this grow and on the cusp of flipping lights to flower but will start from the beginning

Strain? Coffee Kush / Amnesia
Indoor or outdoor? Indoor
Lights? 5 23w cfls / 1 led bulb
Light cycle? Veg - 18/6
Medium? Started in jiffy pucs now in perlite/vermiculite
Temps? 65-82
Rh? 45-65%
Nutrients? Hesi hydro grow/Bloom
Pests? None but caught a ladybird and now she patrols my jarden

Ok so I built a grow box out of a sturdy card board box that I lined with white plastic, I have a pc fan for exhaust and another pc fan for circulation and passive inlets and with all lights on my Temps are ok but night time gets a bit cold for them so will invest in a heat blanket at some point now onto the seeds.

Had some beautiful smoke a few years back that contained about twenty seeds all from one bud, none of the other buds had seeds and this gear was top notch for black market quality, the stuff was called coffee Kush and it smelt like a cross between rich coffee beans and the infamous UK cheese (skunk) needless to say this stuff smells delicious.

Week 1 - 22/10

So at the beginning of October I decided I would start another grow so I started building my box and getting some supplies and the day before I took the plunge and germed my seeds I found 4 ripe seeds in a bag of Amnesia I was smoking so when I germed my coffee Kush (ck) seeds I decided to chuck a couple of Amnesia (am) seeds in as well. All seeds were germed using the paper towel method and three CKs and one am popped, a day later and their tap roots were searching for water but no other seeds had popped, I wanted to plant the popped seeds but I was waiting for my order of rockwool to show up so I could plant in that but alas no news. The next day I had to plant the popped seeds as the roots were so long it would be impossible to plant them if I waited any longer so I bought some jiffy puc things from B&Q and soaked them in Ph'd water and planted my beans. Two days later and all have broken the surface so I placed them under a single daylight cfl on a 18/6 timer. A couple of days later and all have grown their first two nodes which brings me to the end of week one

 

[SolKing]

Re: SolKing's second try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy cu/DWC - Coffee Kush/Amnesia - budget

Week 2 - 29/10

So all four seeds are doing well working on their third true set of leaves, I am only feeding plain ph water at this stage but when I see some note Def or slow growth I will start with a weak nute solution. Not much else happened in week two.

Week 3 - 5/11

As less seeds had popped then I had hoped for I decided to germ some more, out of these three more CKs and one more am popped which gives me a total of 6 CKs and 2 ams so hopefully a girl in there somewhere. First seedlings had started to slow down in growth so was about to start a nute solution when I had a feeling that it was something else so I decided to investigate, I took the least promising ck and started digging into the jiffy puc as I thought it was strange that no roots were showing, I found that the root had barely grown which I put down to the jiffy puc being too compact and not letting the roots breath so I transplanted all the first seedlings to Hempy cups with a perlite to vermiculite ratio of 4/1, the test subject did not survive the procedure but the other three did and after a week of shock one of the CKs (ck1) and the Amnesia (a1) both bounced back and grew about 2 inches in one night! The other ck (ck2) did not recover so quickly and was very poorly for a few weeks putting out three finger leaves for about a week before it too bounced back. I weigh the cups before I water them to find out when they need a drink again which turns out to be once every 5 days or so at the moment. A1 is more thirsty then the CKs and needs about 100ppm more nute then the CKs every watering, at this point a1 is having 700ppm feedings and CKs are at 600ppm with no signs of nute burn or Def. I started to heavily lst all three of them and topped/fimed as well

 

[SolKing]

Re: SolKing's second try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy cu/DWC - Coffee Kush/Amnesia - budget

Week 4 - 12/11

So at this point the three first seedlings are a month old and doing very well considering the problems they had in the jiffy pucs, the second lot of seeds are doing well also so I decided to transplant them out of the dreaded jiffy pucs into the same Hempy mix, all of them survived the procedure this time but as I did it earlier to these ones I put them in slightly smaller cups so they can reach the reservoir at the bottom quicker. By the end of the week all the second lot of seeds have recovered from the transplant and are growing their third set of true leaves.

 

[SolKing]

Re: SolKing's second try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy cu/DWC - Coffee Kush/Amnesia - budget

Week 5-6 19/11

Second Amnesia (a2) didn't take the transplant well and went full retard on me growing some weird distorted leaves all out of the same point that all merged together into one monstrosity!! So a couple of days later I was gonna pull it when I saw that the lower node points were not points anymore but fully formed seedlings with the first serrated leaves (sweeeet got two plants for the price of one) a2 now looks like a Y and will become my "flux" experiment so I chopped all the nasty growth off and lst'ed both sides down. I also lst'ed ck 3,4 and 5 and continue to lst the three amigos.

 

[SolKing]

Re: SolKing's second try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy cu/DWC - Coffee Kush/Amnesia - budget

Week 7 - 3/12

At the end of week 6 I accidentally broke a branch off of ck2 so I decided to try my hand at cloning, I stripped the lower growth off cut the stem at a 45 degree angle and scraped the stem then dipped in cloning gel and into a churned up jiffy puc. Two days later I decide to clone the rest of the three amigos also into jiffy pucs. Typically the next day my rockwool finally shows up so I took 4 more clones one each from ck1,2 and two from a1. At the end of the week ck1 and a1 clones both have roots showing

 

[SolKing]

Re: SolKing's second try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy cu/DWC - Coffee Kush/Amnesia - budget

At the end of week 7 now as we stand and I am really happy with how things are going. The three amigos have all started growing alternating nodes and the other four plants are growing really well. I can see a mass of roots at the bottom of each Hempy cup (didn't tape up the underside so I could check on roots) the three amigos are on a feeding schedule of once every 4 days at 1100 ppm 5.9 ph and the others are on 800ppm at 5.9 and are thriving, the first round of clones started showing nute Def so I started them on 350ppm nutes which they have taken very well. Once I finish my pc case I will move the first clones in and find out the sex hoping for girls!

I will upload pics as soon as I figure out how to do that from an android phone. Any questions or tips are more than welcome and happy growing!

Peace!

 

[SolKing]

Re: SolKing's Second Try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy/DWC - Coffee Kush - Amnesia - Budget G

Hi 420 finally realised why I couldn't upload pics I was on the mobile site which doesn't have the upload function as far as I can see but oh well.

Ok so I'm half way through week 8 I believe and things are going really good, didn't feed any of my babies for 8 days because I wanted to completely dry out the Hempy cups and I think I may have let them go too far as the three amigos all had nute Def and ck2 had really droopy sad looking leaves but hopefully the starvation helped build some stronger roots as I've noticed root development has halted on the three amigos from what I can see.

I have the first round of clones from the three amigos in my incomplete flower pc case atm on a 12/12 schedule to induce flowering so I figure out the sex of the little buggers. Whiles I was waiting I saw a thread about veg pre-flowers so I decided to have a lil look at the three amigos, couldn't see anything at all on ck2 but on ck1 and a1 there are tiny little pear shaped blobs in between the new node point and the pointy things (stipules?) which I have been led to believe are baby calyxs, is this the case and if so can anyone post a pic of what a vegging female pre-flowers will look like? I know to look for two lil pistols but my crapy magnifying glass is just too shit to pick out the pistols as it barely can be classed as a magnifier.

So onto pics.
This is my view inside the cab of my extremely "ghetto" setup, a1 is taking up all the pic at the front and behind you can just make out ck1 & 2, to the left you can see the second round of seeds and on the right just make out the second round of clones.

This is a1 the bud-zai monster of my garden, you can just make out the little bud sites popping up everywhere there is an even a mm of space, can barely navigate inside that one, if I found out its a girl I will be able to take about 10 clones without making much difference

This is ck1 also looking very bushy, this one and a1 have such thick branches it's incredible and getting quite hard to train now as they are more likely to snap then bend!

This is ck2, don't like this one as much kinda hoping it's a guy so I can chuck it without remorse, it is not as resilient as it's sister (please be a she!) and is growing really lanky with hardly any branch structure even though it has had the same conditions as it's sibling, it also has hardly any smell even when you brush it.

This is a group shot of the second round of seeds, all the CKs are towards the top, as you can see the LST is working as all the side nodes are becoming terminal and overtaking the main shoot. At the bottom is my frankeinstein a2 that grew retarded for a couple of weeks before starting over again on its own.

This is a better shot of a2 the monstrosity as you can see the main growth was terminated due to retardation of the main shoot and the nodes under the main shoot promoted themselves to main shoots which I have trained and will hopefully turn into a 'flux' grow if it's a girl.

And here are the second round of clones in rockwool, question...when do I start feeding the clones? No roots are showing but the a1 clones are showing nute Def (no discolouration when they were cloned) should I give them a light feed? The first round of clones were sleeping when I took this pics so will post a pic of them at lights on.

 

[SolKing]

Re: SolKing's Second Try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy/DWC - Coffee Kush - Amnesia - Budget G

Week 9-10

Had some issues over the last couple of weeks, firstly as I was parking up outside my house a week and a bit ago I got the strongest smell of skunk, didn't think it was me as I live in an area where people love bud but as I got into my house I realised it was indeed coming from my jarden, it fucking stinks!! Haven't even got buds and my house reeks of it as if I had just smoked a pound in there! Needless to say my better half was not happy with this and was all for culling my grow which I was not gonna let happen so I hastily contructed a make shift carbon filter (works really well considering I built it)

I saw a post where someone else had made a filter like this so used that as inspiration. I bought a cylindrical pen holder made out of metal mesh, then I got a plastic cup and cut many small holes into it, (the original plan calls for two different sized metal mesh pen holders so one fits into another but could only find one size) then I liberated a pair of leggings from my girlfriend which will keep all the carbon contained within my filter. I pushed the cup into the leggings right down to the end, then placed the cup into the pen holder which had a small layer of carbon at the bottom, then I sifted carbon around so that it completely incased the cup inside the pen holder then used the leggings to tie it all together. Then I simply taped the filter to my exhaust fan and hey presto home made carbon filter, only problem is that with the filter on my exhaust fan is now not able to expel the hot air in my cab quick enough and within an hour the cab was over 90 degrees!

I realised I needed to reconfigure the cab so I replaced the exhaust fan with my circulation fan which has much more power and then used the exhaust fan as circulation, this almost did the trick but was still a few degrees over what I wanted so I removed a couple of lights and moved the remaining ones around for better light distribution.

After all was said an done it was well past midnight and shattered I collapsed in bed thinking my babies were now safe and smell free....

Woke up the next day and when I went to check on my babies I opened the cab to find to my horror that the curse of the light fixture had struck me again! One of my hastily repaired light fixtures had come loose and had spent the majority of the night burning all kinds of shit out of my two favourite plants, a1 and ck1 were both reduced to something resembling tumble weed with about 90% of the plant structure on both plants being completely shrivelled up, there are a couple of branches on each plant that weren't touched but both plants are looking worse for wear. Ck2 typically didn't get burned but still looks rather down as it spent most of the night right next to a very hot bulb and now has heat stress along with the other seedlings although they didn't suffer as bad.
I repaired the offending bulb and then double checked all my other lights just to make sure nothing else like that happens.

The silver lining here is a couple of days before all this went down I took a load more clones from a1 and ck1 so at least if they die now they've left a legacy, also one of the a1 clones from the round that first went into rockwool has exploded with roots popping out all over the bottom of the rockwool so this one will be moved into my new DWC setup as soon as the first round of clones finally show me some sex (taking a while as conditions are far from ideal not to mention my cat decided to push the pc case over the first night I had the clones in there which meant they were violently thrown from their Hempy cups so I'm assuming it's taking longer for these reasons, the a1 clone has new growth forming but it is a very sickly green/yellow colour, does this mean it is hungry?

So to sum up not been a great couple of weeks and taking into account Christmas and how busy I've been I came very close to ending this grow also but the defiant streak in my character refuses to admit defeat and so I will soldier on as really want some premo home grown bud especially for 420 which means if I start flower in the next couple of weeks I can have a cures harvest just in time for our favourite day which was my original goal and reason for doing this grow.

Anyways I'll post some picks of what's left of my plants later. Have a merry Christmas 420 and may your endeavours be more fruitful than mine!

Peace ✌

 

[SolKing]

Re: SolKing's Second Try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy/DWC - Coffee Kush - Amnesia - Budget G

Hello 420 lurkers hope you all had a merry Christmas filled with joy and a happy new year. The last month has been a bit of a roller coaster for my grow as I battled with smell problems, lights destroying my favourite plants and clones dying left right and centre but there is a silver lining.

Two of my babies decided to give me a late Christmas present, checked on the flowering clones on boxing day and joy of joys ck1 and a1 both had bud sites forming with many pistols showing, was so happy to have some females I kinda forgot the reason I checked on them in the first place which was to water them as I had neglected my jarden over Christmas, so my crispy clones were sitting there dying for a drink which I had torturously (not sure if that's a word but fuck it) left right in front of them, next day I checked on them again and ck1 is dead (pour a drink for our fallen homie) ck2 didn't look much better but my lil star a1 took it like a champ and already has frost forming on the sugar leaves and is still stretching.

Unfortunately though the damage a1 mummy sustained during its encounter with the light bulb was too much and it has gradually been dying and I fear it is now dead, gonna keep it around though as it may well decide to bounce back, hoping it will as all but one of the clones I took from it are also dead, the one live clone (other than flowering clone) is now in my DWC setup which was doing very well the first two days with the plant nearly doubling in height (about 2 inches in two days) but now growth has stopped, a slimey residue has formed in the res and the ph constantly rises to over 8 no matter what I do, I've changed the res three times now and cleaned and cleaned the air stones (only foreign element in the res) but it keeps rising, can anyone give me some advise as I really want to save this clone, may possibly have to transfer it to a Hempy cup as I can keep on top of that.

Any help greatly appreciated i'll post pics later tonight.

 

[David Bowman]

Re: SolKing's Second Try - CFL/PLL/LED - Hempy/DWC - Coffee Kush - Amnesia - Budget G

Hope all is well in your world.

Is this grow still alive?

We would love to be updated with some pictures and info.

How about posting a 420 Strain Review?

If you need any help with posting photos, please read our Photo Gallery Tutorial.

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

Sending you lots of love and positive energy.