I've been a fan of the hexapus from Day 1. I have a pile of seeds to go through too! Have you tried rockwool cubes in them? I only ask because I'm thinking maybe a recirc type system. Possibly top feed or flood and drain. I know you've gone back and forth between the various soilless systems. Thoughts on rockwool?
 
Ha ha. I was busy posting over at your place.
No I haven't tried rockwool yet. In the solo cup run I did one in RW but it died in an accident.
For a long time I cloned, or tried to, in RW- before I moved in to using straight coco, then the perlite system I'm using now. I had a ton of failures in RW and I saved those 1.5" cubes and bleached them for future re-use. I figure I have enough for a five gallon pot full when I get around to it.
Skybound is the guy to check out. He grows in it, plus has some extremely interesting stuff going on.
 
Yeah, I grow in RW, top feed, but I know another guy that also did the F&D with RW and had the same great results. That aside though, I am thinking of getting into a different media. I currently use mini cubes (1cm x 1cm), and though fantastic to grow in, once roots penetrate the cubes, they are no longer usable and at roughly $45 per 2cb.ft. expenses can grow. I saw another grower (maybe Hiker?) that did F&D with hydroton and had great results, if not better than what I see. I am also thinking about straight perlite, though I presume this too would also have roots embedded into the irregular structure of the perlite and make a lot of it not reusable. That aside though, I love growing in RW. Very easy to prep, maintains the right amount of moisture and drains excellent. Is also very airy which improves O2 availability. I don't chill or aerate my nutes either and haven't suffered the slightest.

Edit - I haven't experienced any transplant shock either, but this can also be attributed to using beneficial bacteria regularly.
 
Yeah I found it impossible to reuse the RW- except for scraps. Perlite can mostly be re-used I believe- though it may make more sense to just dig it into the compost pile or whatever.
Perlite tends to give not much stability to the plants- especially larger ones, but that could be easily solved by putting some sort of reinforcing structure in the pot. It's nice stuff to work with and the plants love it. Needs lots of watering, obviously.
 
Hey! What a pleasant surprise to see you back around here again. I never did get any further down the road to organic soil ;). Always too busy dealing with what I've got in front of me. Ya back to stay a while?
 
Yeah I found it impossible to reuse the RW- except for scraps. Perlite can mostly be re-used I believe- though it may make more sense to just dig it into the compost pile or whatever.
Perlite tends to give not much stability to the plants- especially larger ones, but that could be easily solved by putting some sort of reinforcing structure in the pot. It's nice stuff to work with and the plants love it. Needs lots of watering, obviously.

Rockwool shouldn't be reused. Horticultural rockwool is purposely spun vertically, and it'll trap salts over time. Perlite is an amendment that helps oxygenation of the growing medium, not a sole medium. Coco coir can be (@ a mild > great pain in the ass) washed, but 5.5kg bricks are inexpensive & make great additions to flower beds, compost heaps & outdoor gardens after use indoors. All in all, reusing mediums indoors generally isn't worth it if you value your time.
I garden as efficiently as possible, in fact I pride myself on my efficiency, but empirical data over the years has shown me that recycling indoor growing mediums is pretty much a zero sum deal.
 
Yeah I have to agree with you on the recycling thing. Because I live in a tiny place at the end of a long road, things here tend to get recycled to the max. I can't just go to the store and pick up coco or rockwool or perlite when I want. And even here it usually makes the most sense to just use it to increase my outdoor gardens a little each year. That seems like perfectly good recycling to me.


As for the perlite as a medium- sure you can use it as such. Hence hempy pots. But it works great on its own in a regular pot as well.
 
Hey! What a pleasant surprise to see you back around here again. I never did get any further down the road to organic soil ;). Always too busy dealing with what I've got in front of me. Ya back to stay a while?

I am back on the road again in the mountains but should be finished in a few weeks and done travelling.

Not sure I will have time to start a journal but will be popping in to see how you and other friends are getting along when I have time :Namaste:
 
-The rest of the hexapus plants...

One thing I forgot to mention about these plants is that they all had quite a few nanners. I think I know why. Because of circumstances in the last couple weeks I've been going in there in lights-out quite often with the green led headlamp. This means shutting down the veg light- as access to flowering is through veg and the lighting overlap isn't always right.
This in itself I think is fine. But I clued into something recently- which is that my veg light glows red for quite a while after I turn it off. That's obvious and I knew that already- but I hadn't really been paying attention to how long it takes to dim, because I have to crouch down to see it.
I hoped the plants weren't watching - but I think they were. The hex plants are closest to the door, with the view of that faint red glow.

This will be the end of the hexapus for a while as I want to make room for other things.

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I'm considering next time I use it- to maybe add a T to split each 1/4" line, if that's practical at all. Then I could run a dozen small plants instead. Obviously just for fun mainly. That way I could use up twice as many seeds. At this rate I'm gaining random weird seeds way faster than I can use them up.




~Mystery Critical Cheese cross~


Not much to say about this one and I didn't even get much in the way of photos of it. It was kind of like a small Critical Cheese, only not as good. Didn't really stand out in any way. In the end the only way it could get attention was to say 'Wah! F--k it I quit!' And collapse in a heap near the end of flowering.

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Catastrophic limb failure. :laughtwo:


~Pineapple Chunk x Mama Thai~

Because my grow room is constantly overcrowded and I'm busy, the plants in flowering are never fully experienced till they're dragged out at the end. Bright yellow lights make it harder to see what's going on in the jungle or take any worthwhile pics of it. So I never know what I'm going to get in the daylight and it's usually a surprise. These two were both better than I expected- especially since they both experienced a couple mini mould attacks during flowering. Somehow I nipped that in the bud each time, most literally. Usually it's a case of finding more mould than you think. But there was no mould to be seen at all at harvest time.
Also both plants were just better- much stickier and higher quality than I'd thought they were.
These seeds seem like a good cross, if you don't have high RH like I do.





~PCMT 1~

Both plants were identical up until early flowering then this one shot up taller- about 36", which was rather tall for a one gallon pot...This pheno obviously took after the Mama Thai more- a similar structure, the same foxtailing at the end, and more of an MT smell to it- though much ranker from the PC influence. Also it was much stickier than a Mama Thai.


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Thai style foxtails


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~PCMT 2~

This was a surprise- the best one of the six. I had expected nothing much from it. It lost three main buds to mould enroute to harvest. At first glance in daylight I thought the whole thing was infested with mould- but it turned out to be a natural tinge of dark purple in some of the buds. This stuff had a crazy liquid frothy sort of appearance which I loved- like fine green cotton candy. My finger tips were caked in resin by the time I was done trimming this one little plant. It definitely took after the PC more than PCMT 1. More gooey, more stinky, shorter, and structurally much more like P Chunk. Just much prettier.

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Love being a fly on the wall here, you all bring so much to the table:thumb:and Weasel you do an amazing job at "ringleader" too this wicked awesome journal of yours! Thanks for all your insight and inspiration buddy:high-five:
And there goes another post I wish I could "like" more than once ;)
 
Yeah I found it impossible to reuse the RW- except for scraps. Perlite can mostly be re-used I believe- though it may make more sense to just dig it into the compost pile or whatever.
Perlite tends to give not much stability to the plants- especially larger ones, but that could be easily solved by putting some sort of reinforcing structure in the pot. It's nice stuff to work with and the plants love it. Needs lots of watering, obviously.


Dude. I've been topping all my gardens with it.... handing it to neighbors to do the same. Hard to separate the Osmo from it, so I just toss it instead of bleaching and reusing.
I don't have too much problems supporting the 2Ls, but anything bigger and plant size will generally require some support.
 
Thanks for the compliments. I'd make a horrible ringleader :laughtwo: You cats will have to run free at this circus I'm afraid.

~CBD Therapy~

I forgot to check the marker to see how long I flowered it for. I put it in a couple weeks before I started this journal anyway, so I think it was around 100 days or so. Kind of weird this one, how it was such a strong looking plant but ended up producing small buds. I don't think I screwed it up enough to take the blame- so I guess it just wanted small buds.
I didn't see a reason to trim this one up perfectly since I'm going to be making oil and maybe hash and I don't know what else from it. So it was a joy to trim! Or a joy to not trim, more accurately.
It's a bit yellow :) which was the plan as I wanted this plant to go as long as possible and make me as sleepy as possible. She was on water only for quite a long time.

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~Grafted Sativa~

She's been kind of crumpled up in a corner of veg for the last few weeks. I put her in flowering tonight. No idea what the future holds with this plant or how challenging it will be to get her through flowering in non-ridiculous fashion. There may be issues with the different strains stretching different amounts. Or there might not. I think it will take quite a lot of training to keep her even. We'll soon see.


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A little hydroton to dress her up a bit...
 
~Pineapple Chunk~

Ugh.. Wtf am I supposed to do with this strain? As you may recall I just went through and tried to tidy this creature up - stripped a ton of foliage out in an effort to make it look like a normal plant. This is what I get repaid with.

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I'll have to don a moon suit and try to hack a bunch more out.
 
Ok a couple more photos and I'm done for tonight.

One of the Honduri sexed as female so I grafted it into a Panama stalk. I'm pretty sure both GTs are going to turn out female. The other Honduras is a male.
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I lashed the pots together to help avert disasters. The smaller one is the GT I last did - which should be about ready to cut free now.


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I'm not sure what the Hondurans or Panamanians would think of this. :rofl: Who knows...
I think as long as the two flat surfaces (on the join that the arrow on the right passes through) make good contact and stay that way for a week or so- your graft will probably work out fine. The plant will do the rest.



~Bonus Shot~

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Peyote Purple
 
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