DoubleAtotheRON
Well-Known Member
Im trying to pump you up here man.... I can relate tho. I get tired of seeing weed every fucking day, especially on our scale, but a small break with minimal effort will be worth it.
How long does it take to get good at this?
- Thread starter MonkeyRides
- Start date
DoubleAtotheRON
Well-Known Member
@PadawanWarrior ... refocus, and send your energy to what you need to do outside of this. It takes minimal effort to keep 1 mother alive. You got this bro.
PadawanWarrior
Well-Known Member
I bought my Green Crack as a clone. So it's not like I'm doing any pheno hunting. I can get more clones, but not of that because they don't have it anymore. But the true strain will still be floating around, so all hope is not lost, lol.
MickFoster
Well-Known Member
And another thread gets derailed. 
speedwell68
Well-Known Member
The thing is that it is actually the expensive nutrients that cause half the issues IMHO. I just feed mine Seaweed based Tomato feed and just change the ratio depending on which part of the cycle I am in. If I need to add anything extra for flower a simple pre mixed PK48 will do nicely.
I bought into the whole fancy "cannabis" nutrient lines, grow charts and fancy soil mixes, just like most noobs do. The Covid and Brexit forced my hand I couldn't get my usuals as I could find none in stock anywhere. So I used the wife's tomato feed and some garden centre compost and manure. It worked perfectly. So I looked at the whole question of fertiliser and off the shelf soil mixes. I decided there was nothing in these "cannabis" products other than marketing hype, fancy packaging and labels with cartoon characters on the bottles.
I have done a lot of research and tried various different soils and off the shelf feeds. I am now using a peat free mix from a local supplier called Westcountry Gold and have decided upon a seaweed fertiliser called Big Tom. My plants have been in the West Country Gold for 11 days of veg and quality of growth is superb.
My point is that becoming a good grower is about research and looking for value for money in the products you use.
Sure, that will work but using fertilizers tailored to MJ will give you better ability to control the dosing than say "tomato food" and will probably give u better results.
My point is that I see a lot of people on here trying to grow MJ in bags of topsoil from the hardware store, using junk lights from amazon, trying to save cash by making their own co2 or calmag etc. Then they wonder why their plants look terrible.
It's almost like there isnt an entire MJ industry that provides these things
xtsho
Well-Known Member
No longer than it takes to learn to grow a tomato. Which can be done successfully on the first try.
People make it much more difficult than it needs to be. It also doesn't help that there is an entire industry built around growing cannabis that does everything it can to convince people it's complicated and that you need this or that product to grow weed. You don't. One of the biggest pitfalls awaiting a new grower is getting sucked into the cannabis bullshit.
You have people fiddling around with soil runoff pH flushing and dumping 4.0 pH water through their plants because the runoff was 7.2 and they thought it should be 6.5. Some do this kind of nonsense even when the plants are perfectly healthy and not experiencing any symptoms of anything being wrong. Then they wonder why their plants are whacked out a week later and they end up running around in circles and start dumping this and that on their plants to try and correct a problem that they caused. No amount of advice will convince them that there isn't some product in a bottle that will fix everything. They fail to realize that their problems stem from dumping too much stuff on their plants and screwing around with things that don't need to be screwed around with.
Keep
It
Simple
Stupid
That philosophy works much better than complicating things with all the ridiculous cannabis broscience and bottles of additives.
Growing cannabis is easy. Avoiding all the unnecessary crap people do seems to evade many.
People make it much more difficult than it needs to be. It also doesn't help that there is an entire industry built around growing cannabis that does everything it can to convince people it's complicated and that you need this or that product to grow weed. You don't. One of the biggest pitfalls awaiting a new grower is getting sucked into the cannabis bullshit.
You have people fiddling around with soil runoff pH flushing and dumping 4.0 pH water through their plants because the runoff was 7.2 and they thought it should be 6.5. Some do this kind of nonsense even when the plants are perfectly healthy and not experiencing any symptoms of anything being wrong. Then they wonder why their plants are whacked out a week later and they end up running around in circles and start dumping this and that on their plants to try and correct a problem that they caused. No amount of advice will convince them that there isn't some product in a bottle that will fix everything. They fail to realize that their problems stem from dumping too much stuff on their plants and screwing around with things that don't need to be screwed around with.
Keep
It
Simple
Stupid
That philosophy works much better than complicating things with all the ridiculous cannabis broscience and bottles of additives.
Growing cannabis is easy. Avoiding all the unnecessary crap people do seems to evade many.
speedwell68
Well-Known Member
There are no such thing as fertilisers tailored to MJ. There are fertilisers and there is marketing hype aimed at stoners. I can control the dosing with Tomato feed, it is mixed with water and I can control the level of concentration. Mine is NPK 6-3-9.5, which works well for veg. Then for flower I can mix it at 2-1-3 and then for weeks 3 of flowering I can add PK 4-8 at 50% giving me 2-3-7, then I can add it at 100% giving me 2-5-11, or any permutation of that. Really "Big Tom Tomato Feed with Liquid Seaweed" is just a Liquid Seaweed plant food with pictures of Tomatoes on the label. The only difference between it and a MJ grow nutrient is that it has the contents of all of those little bottles in one bottle and it priced to be attractive to home vegetable growers. A group of people that aren't silly enough to buy into a load of hype and open their wallets accordingly.
Do your own research by all means. There are plenty of people using general purpose nutrients with excellent results. I have read plenty of blogs, journals and forum posts by people using stuff like Miracle Grow and Jacks 321, neither of which are MJ specific. AFAIK know Calmag is just a mixture of Calcium Nitrate and Epsom Salts, so why not mix your own? The nutes I was using (Plant Magic Old Timers) was selling me "Organic Magnesium" at a big price, it was literally Epsom Salt in a fancy tub, 100% Magnesium Sulphate. Will my weed be better if I buy it in a fancy tub for 5 times the price?
speedwell68
Well-Known Member
Spot on, you made the point much better than I did.
I'm not disagreeing with you. But yes, nutrients are tailored to MJ because they include dose specific information and feeding charts. Miracle grow or whatever does not. In fact a lot of garden ferilizers have dosages to mix with garden sprayers or amounts to use per foot of soil. Of course it can be used, it's all made from the same stuff, and if u like experimenting until u find the correct ratios then that's fine. Or u can use too little or too much and have subpar results.
And yes, there are a lot of gimmicks in this industry...a lot of b.s.
Over 10 years I've used many ferts and have had better results with some over others.
Same is true with lights, in particular LEDs, but cheaper HPS lights don't hold there lumens or spectrums as long as the hortilux bulbs. I've had them tested, I know that for a fact.
So there is something to be said with buying quality equipment, especially if you are doing this for commercial purposes.
DoubleAtotheRON
Well-Known Member
Hey man, it happens when you jump into a thread, at 10pm and start up a bowl. .... we're all human. Sorry to the OP.And another thread gets derailed.
I agree, too many people drinking the koolaid on these cartoon bottles. My cost all in on one plant for soil, amendments and fertilizer is about $10. If I can’t buy it in at least a 25 lb sack for less than $40 I don’t even look at it. In fact the more plain and non descript the packaging is the more apt I am to buy
Cartoons are for kids and baby daddies, lol
Cartoons are for kids and baby daddies, lol
hotrodharley
Well-Known Member
Sucker on the line.
speedwell68
Well-Known Member
Those feeding charts should be considered complete works of fiction, they are guidelines at best. I have grown with Bio Bizz and Old Timers being so naive I religiously followed the charts. All I really did was waste a whole load of fertiliser. Those charts totally overdose because the company behind it wants to sell you more fertiliser.
With working out your own ratios you just need to do some basic research and then use some commonsense. Read what others have done before you, there are no prizes for reinventing the wheel. Do some research into basic horticulture, don't be cannabis specific. As I said on another thread today, Weed is the adult version of those beans school kids grow on paper towel, it should be virtually impossible to fuck up. Afterall it is called weed for a reason, as in it grows like one.
People need to get rid of this fantasy that weed is hard to grow and that it has specific needs that no other plant has.
lusidghost
Well-Known Member
While I agree that people overcomplicate things, I don't think growing quality cannabis is easy. There is so much to learn and so many variables that often change. Growing some buds is easy enough, but growing dank, and consistently doing so, is too much of a challenge for a lot of people. Look at all of the shiny newish equipment on Facebook Market. These are from people who really wanted to grow, gave it their best shot, decided it wasn't for them and bowed out. Also so many desperate questions on here, which usually gets a wide spectrum of possible solutions, does say something about the difficulty level of growing cannabis. Most of the people aren't complete idiots, they just can't grasp the intricacies.
Rurumo
Well-Known Member
I don't think many people stick with it long enough to become good growers. There is such a large time, $$$, and effort commitment to growing, if you mess up your grow, it's a pretty big waste of all of those things. One big screw up and a lot of people just give up-look at the massive amount of used grow equipment on the market now from the start of the pandemic. Very few new growers have a perfect first grow, and a large percentage don't end up with any smokable crop. Some people take to it right away and have a natural feel for watering, light distance, all of the little things that make for a good grow, so it's really up to the individual. Best thing to do is to take notes/make a grow journal, and document things like your nutrient mix, light height, feeding schedule, etc, and just pay close attention to your plants. Get your first successful grow in, then do it again and repeat the things that gave you good results, while always trying to dial in every aspect of the grow. Do the same thing with harvesting and drying-never stop trying to improve everything.
BFERG
Well-Known Member
lusidghost
Well-Known Member
Make a bonsai mother. Put it under a small light, water every few days and prune once a week or so. I wish I would have done this with every standout pheno I've found that was eventually replaced by a new strain. If you let it go now there's a good chance you'll never grow it again. At least the pheno that you remembered.
Ok man, I take down 30lbs every 8 weeks...if I'm dropping a grand on nutrients then so be it