Dstroy's first grow journal

cuddlesthesheep said:

Your plants look like death and it's like a 3x3. That's what I'm getting at.

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Ah yeah the three dark ones are pretty fucked, not sure why they stayed that way after I fixed my nutrient solution. I'm not sure what's up with them because the newer plants look fine, I'm still pretty new to growing, but I think I'm doing pretty good. It's a 4x4. Got 8oz of bud and 2oz of trim my first run off of two plants.

Those three dark plants got started flowering at 3" tall just to see if they hermed, the seeds came in bud from a dispensary here in RI. I've cloned them successfully.

I've got everything set for my veg tent that gets here tomorrow. We'll see how I'm getting on in a couple months after I've had time to get the harvest cycle I'm looking for.

If you've got any tips for growing I'm all ears.

If you are new to growing I'd recommend getting away from hydro. Or just top feed/handwater Coco in smart pots. Can't get much easier. I mean if you are into the pumps and res changes and clogged lines. But for newer growers just hand water.

Nice Avatar btw.

cuddlesthesheep said:

If you are new to growing I'd recommend getting away from hydro. Or just top feed/handwater Coco in smart pots. Can't get much easier. I mean if you are into the pumps and res changes and clogged lines. But for newer growers just hand water.

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I haven't had a clogged line yet, got pretty good filtration and my nutrient concentration is very low (200-260ppm) when compared to other methods.

Coco and hand watering aren't for me. Mixing water and keeping the ph where it needs to be is easy.

It's a waste of money to change my reservoir more often than once a month. But it only costs me about $10 to change.

High pressure aero is very unforgiving though, I've been making tiny changes that wouldn't have done shit if I was doing dwc which almost killed my plants several times.

I've got it where it's good now though, these plants are all at different stages in flowering and aren't exhibiting any deficiencies that I had before except for the slightest bit of tip burn and a couple leaves I messed up moving the ties around. One of these was a mother plant vegged in dwc and I cut a ton of clones from her.

The funny thing is that I started on the nutrient concentration that I'm using now at the very beginning of putting plants into my tent, and ran into trouble when I started trying to up the concentration. It's at about the maximum that they can handle.

Also, I burned the shit out of my last run with the lights. Gotta keep them at about 20" or more.

6/14/17
41 days of flowering for three grape ape
19 days of flowering for one grape ape
14 days of flowering for one grape ape
8 days of flowering for one grape ape

Transplanted my blueberry plants into the veg tent.

Set up the veg tent, lights are at 70% and 20", I might dim them and move them closer. Does anyone do that?

Swapped totally to a 44 gallon reservoir. The runoff is getting pumped right back into the res now. Ph drops by about .1 every 12 hours. I think it'll drop more with more plants feeding from it.

The monstercrop dark pheno grape ape clones look super sad and crispy but they're throwing out roots.

Aero res
Ph 5.8
Ppm 240

Cloner
Ph 5.8
Ppm 220

6/15/17
42 days of flowering for three grape ape
20 days of flowering for one grape ape, stretching a little.
15 days of flowering for one grape ape
9 days of flowering for one grape ape

Another day, couple of problems. One of the spray heads in the veg tent popped its diffuser out so it was spraying a lot of water, no big deal. I had a vacuum leak so not all of the water was getting sucked out. Fixed that too.

Made 10 gallons of premix and added it to the res, up to 35 gallons now.

6/16/17
43 days of flowering for three grape ape, they're pretty close to being finished. 70% cloudy, no amber. As soon as I see some amber they're getting the chop. I don't know why they are finishing so fast, but I hope the other plants move as fast as they are.
21 days of flowering for one grape ape
16 days for another grape ape
10 days for another grape ape, root shot is from this plant. I'm going to cut monstercrop clones from this one when the buds are about marble size.
I'm not going to count how long the blueberry have been vegging because they were under a 2ft 4 bulb t5 until a few days ago. I'm going to fim them today.

Aero res ph was 5.6, I made 10 gallons of premix and added that to it. It's full now, both tents are feeding off of the same res, both tents runoff goes into the same res.

Aero res
Ph 5.95
Ppm 240

Veg tent light is pulling 380w which is about 70% of 570w that the flower tent light uses. Not sure if I should keep it here or dim a bit more. I used a killawatt to get the wattage.

My control box is looking pretty disorganized and I was thinking I could use my hole saw and cut a few holes in the plywood to move some of the cabling behind the board to clean it up a bit.

I don't like the vacuum chamber hanging the way it is so I'm going to make a little shelf for it to sit on.

The reservoir gets mixed when the vacuum chamber is emptying. Right now that happens every hour for four minutes. That's enough to keep the water at 1/4 inch or less in the bottom of each bucket.

The dark pheno monstercrop clones are going into the veg tent as soon as their roots are at the bottom of their net pots. They still look crispy as fuck. I might put a screen over them until they get bigger when they are in the veg tent.

6/17/17
Cut the whole flower tent down, the light pheno grape ape that I have is a hermie for sure, didn't see any male flowers on the 44 day dark pheno. The scissor hash from trimming those three dark pheno is really good, but they were really small plants so they're not going to yield a lot. I'll get some pics of the bud later after I'm done cleaning.

Veg tent is fine.

I'm going to give the monster crop dark pheno clones a chance, but I pulled the rest of the grape ape clones.

I'm wondering what strain I should get now.

Almost done cleaning, running plain water through the flower tents plumbing, I redid some stuff to make it easier to adjust the pressure.

I would have liked to harvest these when they were totally ripe but they were close.

Blueberry plants are doing fine, no preflowers yet though.

Nug from the last run

6/18/17
One of the blueberry plants has a bad P deficiency, probably caused by damage to the roots during transplant, another has slight P deficiency I think caused by the same thing (these were the two tangled together). It was really tangled with it's neighbor, and lost a lot of its' lateral root system. The other blueberry plants look fine, except for some leaf damage caused by transplanting, and slight P on the one. One of them is totally fine (it was the smallest, and it's caught up and surpassing the plants with the damaged roots). All of the plants are growing lateral roots like mad.

The 3 surviving dark pheno grape ape monster crop clones got moved into the veg tent today.

I changed the recovery timer again, since we dropped down to 3 buckets, then went back up to 6. It's on every two hours for two minutes. That keeps the water at 1/4" or under in all the buckets.

aero res:
ph 5.93
ppm 232

Disassembled, cleaned and sterilized the cloner. It's drying now.
Transplanted 3 monster crop grape apes. Last chance for the grape ape, if these ones herm I'm getting grape ape from somewhere else.

Veg tent is costing me
34.88 light
8.44 control
10.00 nutes
18.36 fan (assuming 24/7 operation)

71.68 total

with the flower tent light/fan/control

124.92 total

The cloner/t5 and chiller only cost me about $8/mo, got that by using kwh from the killawat for a day and multiplying.

Lessons learned:
Don't plant seeds if you've got nowhere for seedlings to veg. (durrrrr, should have known better)
Don't let seedlings get tangled with their neighbors in the cloner
Transplant to veg tent as soon as roots hit the bottom of the netcup.
Larger reservoirs are better for my setup, because they don't fluctuate as much (the brute 44gal trashcan we are using cost us $40 with the lid, have had to spend much less time fucking with water)

6/18/17

aero res
ph 6.02
ppm 222
added 5ml grow (to 44 gallons) and it raised ppm to 238

Roots on the grape ape clones are about twice as long as they were yesterday, and are developing lateral roots (fishbone)

Roots on the blueberry plants have recovered nicely, the plant's aren't droopy and it doesn't appear that the P deficiency is progressing so I think root damage from transplanting was the cause. As soon as the damaged leaves feel crispy I will remove them.

Not seeing any tip burn, going to wait a couple more days and if all is well I'm going to up nute concentration to 260ppm with grow only, and I'll use protekt to ph up if it needs it.

300ppm total (80-is what I consider "full strength" for my setup and is when I would expect to see slight tip burn.

@cuddlesthesheep the pic is from one of those shitty little grape apes, we'll see if I can do them better this time around.

6/21/17
aero res
ph 6.03
ppm 260 (added grow to increase ppm to 260)

blueberry plants are looking ok, removed some leaves. The P deficiency has stopped progressing, it made it up 3 sets of fan leaves on two plants, and two on another (the one with the least amount of transplant root damage was least affected). Branches seem unaffected, removing the fan leaves let some light down to the lower part of the plant. The bluish tint has returned to the tops of the plants, and growth is continuing. I'm expecting new growth to continue unimpeded now.

Grow room stuff:
Cleaned out the chiller (not normal filter vacuum cleaning) and the chiller res.
Put an airstone in my res (why not?)
Plumbed the chiller into the aero res (separate loop)
The cycle time for recovery has been changed again, it's now every hour for three minutes. More water than I liked was in the bottom of a couple buckets.
Jarred up the grape ape that was drying, still not sure I'm going to run it again, hate wasting time on a plant that could herm at any time.
still have to cycle a few gallons of plain water through the flower tent's plumbing every so often to stop yucky shit from growing in the lines.

Blueberry tonight, look a lot smaller after removing the fucked up leaves

6/22/17
aero res
ph 5.9
ppm 260
Added ph up to get to 5.9

I hope we have a female blueberry. They're doing pretty good all things considered, going to veg for a while.

grape ape is really good. (Pic is jarred grape ape)

6/22/17
I think the blueberry are 35? days from sprouting. (not sure, can't find my journal)
The monstercrop grape ape clones are showing a lot of roots but haven't started growing any new leaves yet. I'll take some pics of them when they do.

aero res
ph 6.04
ppm 260
The res is about 5 gallons light, I'll make some fresh nutrient solution and add it.

There's room in the veg tent for the cloner, so when it's time for clones I'll just put it in the tent.

The blueberry plants are doing well, starting to pick up steam again.

I don't have anything else to report really.

6/24/17
Plants are looking really good. Topped them today, I read that topping works better for blueberry? There was some side branching when I fimmed them but not as much as with the grape ape.

aero res
ph 5.9
ppm 260

6/25/17
Day 38 for the blueberry (I think)

Nothing else to report

Aero res
Ph 5.9
Ppm 255

you should build a trimming robot

TheAngbadang said:

you should build a trimming robot

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If I was pulling enough weight out of my space for me to need a trimming machine, I'd be pretty happy.