I guess Al B. Gone.
Anyway, I finally got 6 plants going. [Ca Legal grow with MMJ card].
I was going to replicate Al's setup, and had it all built & was about to go and get a selection of clones from some dispensaries when all hell broke loose. I have a crazy neighbor lady who must think I'm stealing her gas [LP] and called the gas co out to inspect my garage. I'm a plumber of 30 years experience and qualified to build nuclear power plants, and told the gas co idiot to go F-OFF and that there was no leak. "Come back tomorrow if you must look at it, but you get no admittance without 24 hour notice unless there is a REAL emergency." The little douche threatened to call the police, etc. He wound up F-ing off as I requested, and I wound up tearing down the setup before the cops came the next day. No cops ever showed up, and the gas co A-Hole never came back. I figure I destroyed about 100 hours of work setting up the op. Real pissed off at this point.
I let everything calm down and went about my business as usual. Then a neighbor gave my GF a plant he was growing in his back yard, and it all started again. This time, I only set up one 3x3 table. Won't be a perpetual AL B. grow so long as I'm living here, but I will be using everything I learned from Al to do the small op. That's why I'm posting it here instead of starting my own thread. Thanks AL, wherever you are!
I'm using expanded clay because I have 6 bags of it laying around. I want to try the STG cubes and or loose fill when it all runs out. I won't be shaking the plants to get as much clay balls back to be reused as I can. If it's stuck to the roots, it goes in the trash. I hope this will reduce the amount of cleaning I need to do to reuse some of the clay.
I took 9 clones off of the donated plant [strain unknown] with nice thick stems, and propagated them in a makeshift clone box I set up using some of the torn down panda film from the original op setup and a floro light. I followed Al's advice to the letter, and they began popping on day 7, and all but one popped by day 10. I cut them at 8" tall, and trimmed off all the lower stuff. I used rooting powder, and Growdan 1.5" rockwool cubes. None of the local shops had the ones Al uses that come with the wrapping. I think the ones I got are for seeds? Anyway, they take a little more watering than the others. Instead of just touching the corner to the water for a second, I had to touch the whole bottom for a second to last the whole 12 hours between watering. I used just plain water for the first 8 days, then added a weak mixture of CANNA Aqua [veg] nuts because they were turning yellow a little, and I figured it couldn't hurt since the roots had popped already.
My Mistake #1.
I didn't have a PH tester when doing the clones. They wound up for two weeks being watered with alkaline solution so high, that it was above the color chart on the test strips I eventually got from Home Dp. I have a real PH tester ordered and on the way now.
My Mistake #2.
After potting the plants, and filling the rez, I adjusted down the PH without checking first, and after putting in the CANNA Flora nutes. I forgot that the Canna nutes had stabilizers in them, and would bring down the PH by themselves a little. I used 1/4 cup of GH PH Down solution in 25-30 gallons of water with a PPM of 1100-1200. My water is 500 PPM out of the tap, so 11-1200 is a low #. Should be 1500 PPM. The PH soured down to below where the stupid little bottles color chart goes. It starts at 6.1, and I'm going for 5.8. TIP: You can go on line to find a better test strip PH chart than the one that comes on the little bottles. I figure I'm somewhere around 5.5 with what I wound up with. No big deal.
I also dumped about one gallon of the Aqua enriched water I was using with the clones into the rez. It brought up the PPM to where it floats between 1100 & 1200 PPM on my Bluelab Truncheon. Waste not, want not.
My Mistake #3.
I spent some time hooking up the overflow and drains for my 3x3 table under 400w HPS. I had the overflow set exactly at 1/2" below the Rockwool cubes in the 1 gal pots filled with expanded clay. Oooops! When I put the overflow tube back in the last time after cutting off another 1/4", I must not of stuck it in the bulkhead fitting far enough. The RW cubes got wet for 48 hours. Last night I corrected the overflow problem and broke out the tape measure and a unused cube. I also dug down to see how the roots were doing in one pot, and they are going crazy! Yippieeee!!!
The potted clones are STOUT! Leaves are sticking straight out to the sides, no wilting, roots taking off like a rocket. In the next couple days I'm anticipating seeing some good growth out of them.
This is where I should be adding some laughing gif's, but it cost me $10 USD so it ain't that funny. I took my GF to the local dispensary the other day, and had her pick up their "best" clone. Hahaha, sooo sad looking. I've seen happier sprigs of parsley next to my burger at Denny's. It's in one of the cubes Al uses, and it was SOAKING wet! The stem is as small as a # 14 wire, and the roots are so small that they are almost invisible. Only way I could even see them is because they propagated it on a flat surface, and they were all matted down up on the bottom of the dripping wet cube. It may survive, or it may be added to the compost bin? After 48 hours, at least it don't look any worse than when we got it.
This is my first Hydro grow. Thanks to Al's no nonsense threads, I can at least figure out when I screwed up before it causes damage to the plants. At least I have so far. It's really pretty simple this way. Follow the rules as listed by Al, and bad shart shouldn't happen. I will have to deal with heat issues since I'm only using my mother light 400w, and not my cook tube 100's due to the decreased space. I picked up a nice little portable AC unit, and redesigned it to act as a dual tube unit, but I never got the 240 run down to the grow area so I can use it. The crazy paranoid hunt neighbor lady makes that task impossible. It would involve construction noises like drilling joists, etc, to run the #10 wire, and I can't risk that after what's already happened, even though it's 100% legal now. I'll have to work around it with improved ventilation.
I'm running a 4" fan in the 3x4x9 area. I also have a couple 100mm pie fan [computer fans] running 24/7 to keep a negative pressure in the small space. The pie fans are connected to the duct with a y before going into the 10" carbon filter. At the top, I have two dryer vent dampener [draft blockers] set up so that when the thermostat starts the 4" fan, the pie fan one closes. When only the pie fan is on, the 4" fan dampener closes, and all the air is sent threw the over sized carbon filter. The 4" fan is wrapped up in an old sleeping bag, and insulation to quiet it down, and it runs threw a fan speed controller at about 1/2 power so the woosh sound is not so loud. The filter is enclosed in a 3x3x9 plastic air dumping enclosure I made out of panda film plastic. This then goes into a false wall I made that carries the used hot air up to the front of the space where it can leave the garage. I turned my work bench in the front of the garage [where people can see when door is open] into a air intake duct. I blocked up the front of the bottom bench with cardboard boxes. I just the face of the boxes stapled together so they still look like regular boxes being stored under the bench. The bench is right next to the door, and should get enough fresh air from down low. I hope. It's not ideal, but it's all I got. The front of the garage will mix some intake with exhaust, but I can't help that without causing obvious problems.
I'll update from time to time.
