Kauai Grower
New Member
Aloha All,
Just harvested my first crop in the new grow room. There were four mostly sativa strains. Blue Dream, Utopia Haze, Sour Diesel and Girl Scout Cookie (I think).
Room: 13'X15' sealed room. Air conditioned with de-humidifier. Temp at 75 RH 50. At the back of the room is a 4X8 grow tent for veg.
Lights: Two 1200 wat LED's for flower and two 4' T-5's for veg and clone.
Pots: 5 gallon smart pots.
Soil: Foxfarm Ocean Forest with worm castings, perlite and hydroton.
Nutes: All organic. Kelp for veg with Great White Shark and Recharge. For flower I added a bloom formula and sometimes a little molasses and some bat guano. I would water (5.8 PH) every other day and feed every other day.
For the last week of flower I stopped feeding.
Pests and issues: Spider mites and caterpillars are a huge problem in Hawaii. Never saw one bug. All plants had good color start to finish. No mold.
Vegged for 30 days. Flower for 60 days exactly for all plants. 20/4 for veg, 12/12 flower and 14/10 for last week. At the end of veg I installed a SCROG net. The Blue Dream got pretty tall and it became hard to keep the lights two feet away. I think this caused bleaching in some of the top buds. At first I thought this was good but it's not. I used a camera to check trichomes. When I viewed them real time with a magnifier I missed a lot. With a photo I was able to blow it up and really study progress. LED light can be pretty hard to photograph. I fixed this by setting up a custom white balance. This does not work with RAW only JPG for some odd reason.
Cloning: Put cuttings in Root Riot with Clonex and had close to 100% success. I started with mother plants but have since decided to get my clones from vegging plants. I am getting mixed messages on if this is a good idea.
Drying and curing: Drying takes about a week. I don't wait for the stem to snap. I can pretty much tell by feel if it is ready. I would rather under dry than over. Once dry I put the buds in mason jars and air them out once a day. The jars are kept in a dark closet with a small de-humidifier which keeps it about 60% RH. I probably have never smoked properly cured buds.
I don't want to talk too much about yield but can say it was great. Nice tight buds. Blue Dream was the biggest producer. For the next crop I will probably go with the best two.
After five years of poor results I finally think I have this figured out. Studying forums and Youtube has really helped. The big game changer I think is being able to control temp and RH. Those two things are huge.
