Blueberry forever! My second (and perpetual) grow

Hey all

Ok, so my first grow hasn't turned out as well as I would have liked, but I'm not letting that discourage me. About 6 weeks ago I got my hands on a couple of DJ shorts unreal blueberry clones, and they are going to serve as the basis for my new perpetual grow. Don't know about you, but I LOVE the way the strain smells and tastes. As of the moment I have two that have been moved into flowering, 7 that are vegging and 5 that are in the cloning box (one should be vegging, but the clone didn't develop roots and had to be replaced). The idea is to harvest two plants every other week, but I'm going to run closer to a 16 week cycle then the normal 12 week.

Anyway, lets start with the current set up.
I grow in soil, and us either ocean forest or happy frog (can't decide which I like better yet) potting soil. I've been using FF nutrients, but have decided to listen to Uncle Ben and Riddleme and use a mixutre of dyna grow and Jacks classic bloom booster for this grow. I'm also adding molasses to the non nutrient feedings, though I havent started doing that until they are in flowering. I may do some foliar feeding once i get a feel for these nutes, but for now i just give them a misting with water a couple times a day.

Environment is dry and hot. I keep the humidty around 30% with buckets of water and damp towels, but getting it higher then that is going to require a humidifier. Heat is the real problem, and if it keeps climbing up over 85 in the rooms I may have to relocate everything to the basement for the summer. That raises a whole host of other problems, which I'll get into some other time.

I'm using a pair of spare bedrooms on my second floor currently. The closet in one room is my vegging area, and I have my cloning set up on a dresser on the far side of the room. They vegging light is 400W HID from HTG supply with a MH bulb, and I use a cheap wallyworld flourescent ballast with two grow bulbs for the clones. The closet is on an 18/6 schedule while the clones light is always on. There is a bit of light leak to the plants in the closet, but it hasn't seemed to cause any problems.

I arrange the vegging plants 2 deep and 4 across, with the tallest plants to the outside edges. I'm using 5 gallon pots, and the current group thats under there will get anywhere from 4 -8 weeks of veg time before they move to flowering. I really should only do 2 clones at a time to keep the rotation steady and the sizes consistent, but I'm still experimenting with topping techniques and such so I'm giving myself extra plants and veg time to play with.

My flowering room is in the other spare bedroom, and the plants take up about a 4.5 by 4.5 foot space along one wall. I use a single 600w HPS for flowering, and instead of moving the light I arrange my plants on tiered benches made from blocks of wood with 1 x 8 boards laid across them. The tallest sit on the floor, while the shortest will sit about 2 foot above the floor.

Now on to the plants- All of them are blueberries, and the orginal clones that all my newer clones were taken from are now 6 weeks old and have spent the last 10 days in the flowering room. They were fimmed and cloned from about 10 days before they went in, and I must have got it right because I have 4 new branches in addition to the original main stalk. I certainly can't complain about the results or how they have grown- as of today they are 28 and 26 inches tall respectively, and very, very bushy. They are actually taller then the opiums from my first grow that are on day 55 of flowering, though I also didn't try to kill them with neem oil the way i did with the opiums. I did have a slight issue with spider mites on them a few weeks back, but one spraying at 1/4 strength got rid of them.

The vegging plants range from a month old to just a few days out of the cloning box. The oldest two were fimmed 3 weeks ago, and I took my most recent set of clones off them yesterday (5 total). Assuming my blasted opiums finish up like they are supposed to these two will move into flowering next week, and i'll fim all the other vegging plants the same day. They were all started on the same day, so 2 of them will get a 4 week veg, 2 will get 6 weeks, and the last will get 8 weeks. By then the clones I have rooting now will be into the pipeline so I should be running a 4 month cycle and getting some pretty good sized plants at the end of it. I have no idea what to expect out of the strain in terms of yield, but I'm hoping for at least 2 oz per plant.

I'll add pic's as soon as soon as possible-My brother in law is the one with the camera, and he always forgets to send the pictures to me so I can post them.

Ok, I'm not going to bother keep tracking of what day each part of the grow is on in this thread since the whole idea is to have a rotation of plants from clones to harvest that are all two weeks apart from each other. The oldest set have had just shy of two weeks in the flowering room, and started to put out buds a couple days ago. Just took measurements and both of them are right about 30" tall by 20" wide, so they have been growing at almost an inch a day since they moved into flowering. Not sure how much longer the serious upwards growth is going to last before they settle down and start putting everything into bud production, but at this point it wouldn't surpise me if they finished out somewhere around the 4 foot mark.

The set that moves into flowering the end of this week is shaping up nicely. The fim has developed into a nice new set of branches and the plants are both about 18" tall today, so they may hit the 20" mark before going to flower. As for the younger clones that were transplanted last week, all of them have rooted well and a couple are really growing quickly. However, i screwed up the end of last week and gave them water that had nutes ment for the older plants in it. Didn't hurt them too badly, but I definately have some nute burn on a couple of them that's going to take some time to recover from. Luckily those are plants that won't need to be flowered for at least another 6 weeks, so they will have plenty of time to recover.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what I can do with this strain. It's pretty common where I live so I've had a chance to sample it extensively, and I really love the taste and smell. I haven't always been as happy with the high, but I'm really starting to believe that's because the local growers are chopping their plants too early. When you look at the stuff from the dispensaries under a 50x scope/glass you don't see a whole lot of amber trichomes most of the time. I commented on that at the dispensary i go to most frequently, and the owner told me that it's mostly a matter of taste-According to him the plants are ready as soon as you see any ambering at all, and that you get a smoother smoke and a more uplifting high by harvesting just as the plant started to amber, while waiting until it was mostly amber would result in a harsher smoke and a couch lock kind of high. Now, I don't know if I buy into that, but I do know I prefer a "heavier" high as long as it leaves me able to think coherently. That being the case, I'm looking forward to growing these babies until they are nice and amber before harvesting them, because i suspect that I'm going to like the high a lot more that way.

Oh, forgot to mention that i welcome comments, so feel free.

I made it rain for all of the older plants today (all 4 of them ). The ones that are at the end of their second week of flowering are in 5 gallons pots, and I ran a bit over 2 gallons worth of water through each of them. Talk about some serious run off! If things go as normal they should wick this all up within a couple of days, at which point they should be ready for a good nutrient watering. They should also put an a serious growth spurt, so I'm hoping to see these babies hit 40 inches before "the stretch" ends and they settle down to bud production. The plants that are almost done with vegging (they move friday) are in 3 gallon pots and only took a bit over a gallon a piece. The rest of the younger plants are coming along ok, though their upper leaves still have some signs of nute burn. I've been sticking to straight water with them since screwing up last weekend, so hopefully they will have recovered fully by saturday and will be ready for fimming.

I really need to transplant the two that are in the smaller pots tomorrow. I've just been hoping that my first grow would finally finish so that i could chop it and reuse those pots instead of going out and buying another set of new ones. It was supposedly an 8 week flower strain, but it's almost the end of the 8th week and I still don't see but a few amber trichomes. I need to get more soil anyway, so guess I'm going to have to make a trip to the garden shop after work tomorrow.

Guess it's about time for another update. The last week has gone pretty well overall, but I had a minor disaster today. My 600w flowering lights hooks pulled loose and dropped the whole thing into my garden. I got lucky because i was home at the time and it only landed directly on one plant, so the damage was relatively minor. The one plant that took the brunt of the impace is in sad shape though. It didn't get burned since the light was on it no more then 10-15 seconds before i got to it, but the edges of the reflector sliced the heck out of it and took most of the branches off one entire side. This was a plant that was just moved into flowering on Friday so it still has some recovery time, but i'd be willing to bet that it's going to struggle from this point on and will produce half or less what the other plants in the rotation do. It has a few branches that were partially ripped off that i tied back up against the stalk in the hopes that they will heal, but I have my doubts as to whether it will work or not considering how much damage was done.

On the plus side, the two that moved into flowering 3 weeks ago are going strong, and are budding nicely. I have a couple of pictures of them to share, though they aren't quite as good as I had hoped. Im standing in the background on them so you have some perspective on the plants size. I'm 6 ft, btw.

Well, another 4 days have gone by, and not a lot has changed. Surprisingly enough the plant that got crushed seems to be healing itself, and all of the partially attached branches that i tied back tight to the stalk are still alive and green. It's definately slowing the plants overall growth down compared to it's twin, but I'm pretty sure it's going to heal up enough to put out some decent buds. I'll probably see a smaller yield then I get from it's twin, but that's to be expected.

I'm starting to think I'm going to have to add yet another light to my grow. These blueberries are getting a lot bushier then I had really expected, and it's obvious that I'm not going to be able to get adequate light to more then about 6 at a time with my 600w. The problem is that I can't add another HID without creating heat issues I can't easily solve. I know most of the common solutions, but I don't want to have to start modifying my house by knocking holes in things to install exhaust or AC systems. What i really need is something that can be mounted sideways on a wall, that doesn't put out much heat, doesn't draw much electricity, doesn't cost more then $50 to buy and install, and that can provide enough supplementary lighting to 2 or 3 plants (between 2 and 3 ft tall) so that being a bit farther from the HID for 2 weeks of their flowering cycle won't be an issue.

No update??

Hehe, Guess I'll go ahead and post my update now. I was going to do it yesterday, but held off because i was supposed to have a new set of pictures ready to post by last night. As usual the camerman forgot to send them, so I guess I'll post them whenever they finally show up in my email.

Another week is down, and they are coming along great. The oldest pair are about mid way through flowering now, and the fimming must have worked since I have at least 4 good sized colas on each plant. They didn't grow quite as much as I had hoped before the settled down and focused on bud production, but they are both getting close to the 40" mark. They are also bushy as heck, and now that a third set have rotated into the flowering room it's becoming very, very obvious that my 600w just isn't going to cover a wide enough area to handle 8 plants this size. There isn't a lot I can do right at this moment, but like it or not I'm going to have to get another 400 or 600w light in the next month or so, and will also have to relocate my flowering room into my basement because of the heat issues adding a second light will create.

The set that are 2 weeks behind the oldest are looking like they will surpass them-they started to put out buds at day 9 of flowering and despite being two weeks younger and being in smaller pots they are only an inch or two smaller then the oldest plants. The one that had the light dropped on it healed up almost completely, so all I lost were the couple of branches that were totally sheared off. Didn't even really seem to effect it's growth, though it is not quite as bushy as it's partner plant. The latest set that moved into flowering has been there for one day, but are likely to be my largest plants yet since they had an extra two weeks of veg time. Of course the set that rotates into the room in two weeks will have nearly two months of veg time, so they should be even bigger.

My vegging plants are coming along fine, and the next two rotations will both end up with between 6 and 8 weeks of veg time. My last set of clones had a problem and only 1 of the 4 rooted, so I'm going to have to take some more in the next couple of days and will end up with one or two rotations that only get a months worth of veg rather then the two I was shooting for. Ah well, shit happens, and no plan ever runs perfectly. I've got plenty of time to get new clones going, so It's not like i really have any reason to complain.

The problem with relocating is that my basement is an unfinished concrete box that lacks a lot of important features. There isn't any way to close it off and keep my pets out of it, there is only a single two plug electrical outlet available for the entire area (30 ft by 15 ft), it has a crawlspace that lets bugs in from the outside, and there is no sink down there for me to draw water from. The ONLY good features about the space are that it is cooler then the rest of the house and won't require air conditioning to stay under 90, and that with concrete floors spilling water won't matter. My biggest concern is the pets (cat in particular), since it wouldn't take them long to totally ruin a grow if they decided to act stupid. Last thing I want to do is come home and find a half dozen plants knocked off the shelves and dying on the floor because the cat just had to jump up and mess with them. And of course the basement is the only room where I can put the cat box without it smelling the whole house up, so putting in a door and evicting the cat isn't an option. I've been toying with the idea of gluing a frame of 2 x 4's to the floor and running chicken wire from there to the ceiling to block off the pets access to part of the room, but haven't had the spare cash to do it yet.

Anyway, thats about it for now. I'll add the new pictures as soon as I get them.

Glad your ladies healed well!!

The basement sounds nice if you can really scrub and clean it to insure there aren't any more bugs then make sure it's completely sealed off, ya know? Or have you thought about getting a 1000 watt HPS instead of another 600 watt? Maybe you could just run the 1000 and it would help cover all your plants. How hot do you think it will get? If not above 85 then a little air conditioner and a few extra fans might help control the heat...

MZ,

I already have problems keeping it under 85 with the 600w, and that's just going to get worse as the days get longer and warmer. The room starts off cool in the morning, but as my house starts aborbing heat it creeps up until it's in the mid 80's by 2pm, and hitting 90 for a few hours a day hasn't been that unusual for the last month. We have very variable weather here and temperatures changes of 50 degrees in 24 hours aren't uncommon, so while the room may never get above 75 (even with my furnace going) today, it could be sitting at 95 tomorrow. Of course once summers over and it start getting cold again (around Sept 1st) the basement will be dropping into the 40-50's constantly, and I'll have to relocate the whole grow back to the spare bedroom again.

The real issue right now is that I'm out of money to upgrade or redo my grow areas with. Sure, i can come up with $20 here or $50 there, but coming up with several hundred at one time to do everything that needs to be done is going to be tough until I've had a few more harvests and my bank account has started to recover from paying dispensary prices for the last several months. The whole reason I started growing in the first place was that my sister and I could not afford to pay dispensary/dealer prices any more, and it's taken pretty much all the spare cash I had available to get this far. I'm pretty sure i can swing another 400 or 600w light from HTG supply (I love their prices) by the end of this month, but not a 1000w or the other stuff i would need to add along with it to control heat problems. Ideally I would just leave the grow where it was at and put in some air conditioning, but after taking a look at prices over at home depot thats not something I'm going to be able to afford for at least a couple months.

Tell you, I'm not someone that ever considered doing this commercially, but the part of me thats an accountant is throwing a fit about the idea of not recoupping some of the expenses I've wracked up getting myself going. Based on what I've seen out of this grow so far I'm pretty sure that I'll end up getting an ounce or so beyond what my sister and i need out of each harvest, and if that turns out to be the case I'm going to have to find something to do with it just to keep myself on the right side of our states silly ass 2 oz possession limit (how they can allow 6 plants but no more then 2 oz's of dried bud is beyond me). Never figured I'd be in a position where i had to become a dealer to keep from breaking the law. hehe.

I totally understand. We have invested a lot into this but we have saved so much money in not having to buy medicine from dispensaries. Also, we sell our extra medicine to dispensaries and other MMJ patients and it gives us some extra money for our hard work we put into the herbs!

I'm more likely to sell to other patients then i am to the dispensaries. Most of the one's around me aren't interested unless you've got those tight ass buds that only a 1000 watts or better is going to produce. I shared a bowl of the results from my last grow with a guy I know at one of the local dispensaries and he was satisfied with the quality of the smoke, but he said my buds were too loose. He more or less told me that unless I started using a pair of 1000w (basically 1 light for every 4 plants) that I wouldn't be able to produce anything they were interested in buying. On the flipside every other smoker I've shared a bowl with has wanted to know where I got it, and if I had more to sell.

Right on, you know you are on the right track if patients are asking for more and wanting to know where you got it! Just keep up the hard work and put a ton of love into your herbs and you should have the finest smoke around!

I can hope bud, I can hope. My sister and I have been talking about what to do with any money we happen to make selling the excess, and we pretty much agree that once I've been repaid for all the expenses that I racked up getting us going that we're going to plow most of it back into upgrading our equipment and perfecting the grow areas. We're just going to have to be patient for a few months while we get a few harvests in that have excess available for sale. Doubt getting rid of it will be a problem, since we're talking about selling for about $225/oz when the cheapest dispensaries we know of sell that for at least $300. I may even be able to go lower then that, but i won't know for sure until we can get a harvest in and I can run all the numbers through my spreadsheets and calculate what our cost to grow each gram was. I'd really like to get my sale price down into the $150/oz range, but that's going to take some doing.

EdGreyfox said:

I can hope bud, I can hope. My sister and I have been talking about what to do with any money we happen to make selling the excess, and we pretty much agree that once I've been repaid for all the expenses that I racked up getting us going that we're going to plow most of it back into upgrading our equipment and perfecting the grow areas. We're just going to have to be patient for a few months while we get a few harvests in that have excess available for sale. Doubt getting rid of it will be a problem, since we're talking about selling for about $225/oz when the cheapest dispensaries we know of sell that for at least $300. I may even be able to go lower then that, but i won't know for sure until we can get a harvest in and I can run all the numbers through my spreadsheets and calculate what our cost to grow each gram was. I'd really like to get my sale price down into the $150/oz range, but that's going to take some doing.

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At least you are on track with prices! That's the goal - FREE UP THE HERB!!! We run in our flowering room alone 6 1000 watt HPS light systems, 5 ft. carbon filters, 6 fans, AC, heater ... and right now at charging $10 grams and $250 an ounce for our extra medicine - all of the money goes directly back into the garden. Nutrients, electric bill, soil, ect ... so it really is going to take some doing to get it down to $150 an ounce but I have faith it will happen! Keep on growin'!

MZ,

Have you seen the spreadsheet I created for tracking grow costs? It's not a perfect yet, and needs some supplementary sheets to handle a perpetual grow properly, but I'll be upgrading it in the not too distant future. When you plug in full business style costs (rent, insurance, labor, etc) the price per ounce goes up a lot, but if you just plug in home grower numbers (nutes, lights, equipment and minimal labor) you can get your cost down under $50 easily. My last grow would have ended up costing me right in the neighborhood of $35/oz if it had yielded anywhere close to what it should have, and I was even figuring in labor at $15/hr (though i only charged 25 hours for the entire grow). As it was my price ended up being almost $150/oz, which is still low enough to sell at a profit. I'm not selling any of it because there's probably not going to be enough to last until the first of the blueberries are ready, but if I wanted to I could definately undercut dispensary prices and still make a profit out of it.

The one thing my spreadsheet has really shown me is that it's not possible for a small-medium size commerical grower to grow for less then a home grower can, because they have a lot of extra expenses the home grower really doesn't. It's going to take large scale commercial operations that take advantage of economies of scale and natural sunlight (think large scale greenhouse grows) to be able to get their costs low enough to make growing your own unattractive.

EdGreyfox said:

MZ,

Have you seen the spreadsheet I created for tracking grow costs? It's not a perfect yet, and needs some supplementary sheets to handle a perpetual grow properly, but I'll be upgrading it in the not too distant future. When you plug in full business style costs (rent, insurance, labor, etc) the price per ounce goes up a lot, but if you just plug in home grower numbers (nutes, lights, equipment and minimal labor) you can get your cost down under $50 easily. My last grow would have ended up costing me right in the neighborhood of $35/oz if it had yielded anywhere close to what it should have, and I was even figuring in labor at $15/hr (though i only charged 25 hours for the entire grow). As it was my price ended up being almost $150/oz, which is still low enough to sell at a profit. I'm not selling any of it because there's probably not going to be enough to last until the first of the blueberries are ready, but if I wanted to I could definately undercut dispensary prices and still make a profit out of it.

The one thing my spreadsheet has really shown me is that it's not possible for a small-medium size commerical grower to grow for less then a home grower can, because they have a lot of extra expenses the home grower really doesn't. It's going to take large scale commercial operations that take advantage of economies of scale and natural sunlight (think large scale greenhouse grows) to be able to get their costs low enough to make growing your own unattractive.

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Where can I find the spreadsheet? We just have all our reciepts in an envelope so I'm sure your spreadsheet would be helpful. My husband and I combined put in 70 hours a week at least towards the garden, which still isn't enough but we have a newborn so we had to cut it back a little bit. I'd love to see what numbers I come up with and see how far off we are with our prices.....

Mz,

You can find it here: https://www.rollitup.org/general-marijuana-growing/313524-there-app.html

Just make sure you download the updated version, because the original had a couple of formulas that had to be fixed.

How many plants are you running? I've only got 11 at the moment, but i average less then a minute a day spent with any given plant, and less then 15 total even on watering days. I've spent most of my life either managing operations where every second counted, or (like now) doing accounting, so I tend to be very good at time management and minimizing labor costs. The key is to be very stingy about what really counts as labor. If i'm just up looking the plants over, it doesn't count. Only when I am physically doing something to a plant will I count it as a labor cost, and I keep careful track of exactly how many minutes I actually worked. What I've found is that the growing itself requires very minimal labor, but that harvesting and hanging for cure tend to eat a lot of hours, especially if you can't keep your harvesters focused on trimming instead of smoking bowls and yakking. I'm sure some methods have a lot higher labor costs (Scrog comes to mind), but all I do is fim the plants once and give the pots a half turn every day. Water every other day, and once a week a light neem oil dose to head off spider mites.

Thought I'd give a quick example- I just went up to do my daily check on the plants. I went up at 3:52 and was done at 3:54. 120 seconds divided by 11 plants = 10.9 seconds of labor per plant for today.

We have 50 plants in flower and 49 in veg. About 85 of our plants are in 3 gallon pots at all times. We flush our flowering plants with water then nutrients every two days and they take about 3 hours alone to flush because we have to make sure each plant is flushed through - we don't want them just sitting in old nutrients. The veg plants are flushed with water then nutrients ever 4 days and they take just as long. We are down there taking clones every week off of each veg plant - we are transplanting every week as well. This evening I am going to clone, transplant and flush the veg so I will let you know how long from start to finish it takes me.

Ah, ok. With the number of plants you're running the amount of labor required isn't surprising. The flipside is that the labor cost tends to be proportionate to the number of plants you're growing, so adding more plants doesn't really increase your average labor cost per plant, and can even result in a cost decrease under the right circumstances. The trick is to determine exactly how many plants you need to grow to hit that perfect balance between cost and reward. I'd be willing to bet that if we used identical methods that your labor cost per plant would actually be lower then mine, because your operation is about 8x the size of mine.

Our methods really aren't that different. I only make it rain (flush) about every 6-10 days depending on the plants age. My flowering plants usually get watered every other day, so the rotation is rain, nute, nutes, then another rain. The vegging plants and those that have just moved to flower don't suck up the water quite so fast, but they are on pretty much the same rotation. The one advantage I have is that my grow is small enough to do my flushing in the bath tub, so I don't really need to spend any time on the draining part. I just water them until I see them running through pretty good and leave them in the tub to drain for 10-15 minutes while I go do something else.