Butters' 400w SCROG Perpetual w/ Coco Hempy Style - Various Strains

Hi everybody!

Welcome to my new grow. Okay here's what the set ups gonna be:

Strain(s)
Well, we're gonna be startin out with Blue Venom from g13 labs. Ooooooooh! Why Blue Venom? Cuz, it was a free fem'd seed that I don't care if I accidently f-up on

If it doesn't work out, I'll just blame it on genetics and stuff to keep my ego in tact

The other seeds that I have ready and waiting are White Rhino, White Widow, Hawaiin Snow, Super Silver Haze, Arjan's Haze 1, Arjans Strawberry Haze, Neville's Haze (all from GHS), Super Skunk, Thai Super Skunk, and Pure Gold (all from g13 labs...and free).

Basic Goal
Looking to keep 2 plants in flower in scrog with at least a month seperation in age. I would like to harvest a plant every month or so. That'll keep 1 plant in veg while 2 are in flower. Maybe even try my hand at cloning this round

A big focus here is to absolutely maximize my soon-to-be 400w hps light. I feel that scrog is a real good way for me to go in this department. Nice even canopy and all.

Set Up
It's a DIY grow tent that is still in the making. Dimensions will be roughly 3' x 3' x 5'. Already got the PVC framing all set up and I'm sure I'll be adjusting the dimensions as I get a better sense of how to maximize the light use. Just waitin on the poly film and some of the ventin stuff. I'll be making the carbon filter myself cuz those things are expensive

I'm not waiting for all that stuff to get started though. The Blue Venom is already germed, rooted, and a week old.

Vegging
No mh light so I'm stuck with good ole fashioned daytime spectrum cfl's from walmart/home depot.

Vegging for probably a little over a month. This will be my 1st scrog attempt so it's gonna be a bit tricky for me.

Lots of info about how great this technique is, but not lots of visual how-to info unfortunately

I'll learn as I go I guess

Flowering
With the exception of the very 1st plant, 2 plants will always be in the flower area (i.e. the grow tent). They'll be spaced about a month apart in age (although that'll get tricky as I work in the haze strains with their ridiculous flowering times).

Got a scope from Radioshack that I'll use to determine harvest date. Don't plan on flushing either. I want my plants makin mo' buds til the moment they die...

Medium
Coco

This'll be my 1st go-round using coco. I'm usually a hydro guy. But all the damn rez changes and algae and blah blah blah blah blah (don't get me wrong, I LOVE hydro)

I feel lazier this go round. Just want to pop in the tent, add water, and go do other stuff that Butters likes to do hump:......)

And coco IS essentially hydro. Just brown colored hydro that costs a little more and sounds tasty

Nutes
Ah...decisions decisions.

I still have plenty of Fox Farm hydro trio left. But...it appears coco does better with coco-specific nutes (go figure).

I'm probably looking at getting the Canna Coco A+B formula. It's cheap. It's easy. And i can get it over the net.

Grow System
It's a hempy bucket

Done alot of reading on what I wanted to do with this run. There's so much to choose from. DWC, Ebb n Flow, Aeroponics, bubblers, Aerogarden (hehe...this is where it started for me), soil, SOG, SCROG, trees, verticals, on and on and on and on.

Bottom line, with hempy, I can just water once a day (if that), and don't need to hassle around with pumps and bubblers and other goofy stuff thats gonna eat up my electric bill and force me to have to build/buy a buncha stuff.

That, and I have yet to see anything about using coco and hempy together. Seems a little counter-intuitive (Note: triple word score for Butters ).

But in my last grow, my simple little lowryder 2 drank a gallon of water a day..........(yielded over 3oz though)

Using the hempy bucket's smallish rez for the plant to drink from just makes me feel better... (totally scientific reasoning...i know)

Like it won't be too dehydrated or anything.


And that's it for now. Pics coming soon but it's hardly a site to see. Just a tiny little plant, with a buncha lights over it, and cat litter box next to it...with a cat crapping in it

Ya know, the typical set up

This journal will probably be real slow at 1st as I get WAY more enjoyment outta readin up on this stuff and checkin in on other's grows (Heath, Al B, MBlaze, GypsyBush...you guys are f'n heroes!). Plus, it's really boring right now. 2 tiny leafs, and the roots endless rather poetic search for water.

Once the screens come into play, pics'll be put up like mad. I'm gonna need some serious advice, suggestions, and coaching at that point.

This is an open journal so feel free to post away with comments/suggestions.

And if anyone's wondering (who am I kidding...no one's wondering), I live in a non-legal douche-bag state that doesn't believe in treating people with medicines that work, clear up pain and naussea, and don't cause physiologic dependence (Note: double word score for Butters).

Isn't scrabble fun

Butters

Ugh. Difficulties in the grow room already. Still no tent yet in that room. Taking my time in making up my mind on the specific 400hps light that I want (digital vs magnetic vs price).

Conditions are tough. Temp is at 75 which is a-ok as far as I'm concerned.

But the humidity...Ugh. That 59% you see in the 1st pic. That's only after a full day of using a 50 gallon dehumidifier on high.

Already experienced a brief mold problem in the coco before the dehumidifier made it down there. Went away the moment the top layer of the coco got dry luckily. Gotta watch out for that. Mold can and will kill me

So, the Blue Venom is about 2 weeks old (a little older). No nutes used yet but tomorrow will start that off. Switched from distilled water to tap water filtered through a britta and allowed to sit over a couple of days. No problems noticed on this yet.

The nutes I'll be starting out with Fox Farm veg nutes just to see how they react. I've got a ton of this stuff left so I figured I should try it at least. Any signs of nute issues and I switch to the Canna Coco A and B as quickly as possible.

That's it for now. Like I said, boring at 1st but the very beginning of a grow always is.

Butters

Flirting with the idea of doing this.

It'd require 3-4 plants which I feel is alot for my 3.5' X 3.5' X 5' flower space but the parabolic screen would allow for greater light efficiency. How to make this though

Sorry for the crude drawing. Microsoft picture manager doesn't appear to allow me to add text (screw you Bill Gates ).

What up man! Sorry i'm late. Dude i read your intro. I see you've thought this through. If you dont mind i just wanted to touch on a few things. First good call on the flush, i never flush and all of the bagseed that i've grown always came out better than the stuff was when ibought it, so never flush. I noticed that you have that little, itty, bitty plant in that five gallon bucket, that's gonna be a big ass plant man. Because the root system is starting at he very top, and those roots can find the nutes real easy in coco. And as far as feeding it every day or so,.....not. In that big 'ol bucket maybe once a week, maybe. Cause in my 3gal. Pots i only do it once a week gotta get a good drain though, not alot but just make sure some comes through the bottom. And in the beginning with that baby it may even be longer. Now if you are ever unsure if the coco still has moisture in it, just take your finger(s) and dig down about two to three inches, if it is dark brown then there's still moisture in there. But as time goes you will be able to determine that by the weight of the pot, trust me. You said something about mold, was it a greenish blue color, right on the top layer? That happens to me sometime, all you do is when it dries, get a business or credit card an just scraped the it off. As much as you can, but just the off colored stuff you dont have to dig into the medium. (if you do go to the cann a-b let me know cause i would like to tell you how i've learned over time how to introduce and gradully increase the strength).
As far as ballast, all i have is magnetic(on a budget)and they work just fine to me. but that is a personal decision.
and before i go here is just a suggestion. you said that you were getting a 400wt hps right.
well you probably already know, but if not, you can really do your whole cycle under that 400. just keep the light close cause the red light makes 'em stretch a little. so keep it close, but at a"safe" distance, and use your cfl's to give your sensative clones the light that they need.
so the can get a good gentle start to make the roots they need
but anywho i wont dwell on that because you might already know, and i dont want to insult you, but if not, holla!


PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

oh yea, i just wanted to say this that plant has the potential to be a monster in that bucket. so please don't forget to cut some clones off of it, as many as you can, cause it is an awesome plant and it is easy as hell for the clones to start rooting. just had to put that out there, i'm ok now,LOL
btw such skilled drawing, man i thought it was a12.0 megapixal photo.LOL.


PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

very nice strains did you happen to get those sativa mix seed package from Green house?. i will be checking this out i want to see what all the fuzz is about with the coco mediums.. good luck

liljheazy said:

very nice strains did you happen to get those sativa mix seed package from green house?. I will be checking this out i want to see what all the fuzz is about with the coco mediums.. Good luck

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hey what up man, look if you get a chance check out my journal. It's mostly about my grow, but i do touch a little bit on the benefits of coco.

liljheazy said:

very nice strains did you happen to get those sativa mix seed package from Green house?. i will be checking this out i want to see what all the fuzz is about with the coco mediums.. good luck

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Yep. They're the greenhouse seed pack alright. The others are just the freebie G13 lab ones.

Those GH seed mixes are perfect for my purposes. Very high germ rate. Problem is, they look so tasty in the package that I have been tempted to eat them when I'm stoned...expecting them to taste like skittles

Gotta say. So far, coco has been good to me. Relatively hands off. Just occasional watering and no goofy rez changes or pumps needed. Very curious to see differences in yield from hydro but I still need to find more ways to standardize the side by side comparison and such.

Thanks for stopping by.

Butters

Whattup Zen?

Thanks for checkin the grow boss.

The container is only 3 gallons but I'm still anticipating a serious size plant here. I was shooting to give my 1st go at cloning with this girl as you mentioned that this strain seems to clone pretty easy.

I do have a 5 gallon tub waiting for the next strain, White Rhino. The sweet deal about the scrog technique is that I'll get to force all that huge growth, that would normally be growing upwards, on my horizontal screen.

I didn't show the screen yet as I'm really racking my brain about the best way to go with this. For this 1st plant, I think I'll just go with a regular scrog and prepare for the parabolic design in the next go.

Funny you should mention the hps for the veg idea. I was just kickin that around. I do have a 150w hps that is finishing my auto ak47 x auto blueberry seed grow. I'll probably be using that as my new veg light, combined with cfls, to speed the veg process up a bit.

The mold issue has gone away since the dehumidifier has got it down to 40-50% in the room. Man, once that coco hits that range of RH, that top layer just dries right up.

I kind of thinking that I could get away with watering like a once a week too. Especially when the root hit the 2" hempy style rez at the bottom of that bucket. The only reason I'd water more than that given the hempy-style of this grow is to get more dissolved oxygen in there for that rez. But that's a ways off for me. Gotta wait for them to hit that 2" mark 1st.

Okay. So she got some nutes today.

I did this is the worst possible fashion that I could've though

I am currently using Britta'd tap water that sits for 24 hours to let everything dissapate. That and I've found the water generated by the dehumidifier is only 30 ppm so I'll start using that as well.

I normally would use distilled water but the 3 Walmarts in my area are constantly out of supply...looks like we've got alot of local growers here

Sadly, with the bottle of h20 that I used today, I failed to check the baseline ppm. Normally it's like 40 or so. But in the early stages of growth, that 40-50 ppm become important.

I followed the Fox Farm hydro schedule. Finall ppm came out to be just shy of 500ppm which is too high for a 3 week old plant in my opinion.

So I just basically added an equal amount of the DI water that I had left to get it down to about 250ppm. That still may be a bit high for the first feeding but at the 1st sign of nute issues I'll flush and bring it down to 100 or so.

It finally dawned on me that I'm gonna need a much cleaner "catch" tray for the runoff to accurately measure ppm. Measuring differences in ppm has been crucial to me getting good results in the past and was a very nice and easy part of hydro. Not so easy now with the coco.

With hydro, I'd just put the ppm meter in the rez for a minute, and would know what ppm changes were happening each day to determine the perfect ppm for my girls. Easy.

Now it's gonna be different. My only way of getting ppm (with my cheapo digital meter) would be to test the run off right?

But I'll only get the runoff by adding more water into the system until it floods over my 2" rez mark in that bucket. Which in turn would naturally dilute the actual ppm reading that my plants are getting.

How do you coco and/or hempy bucket growers go about measuring ppm changes within the system?

Sounds like its goin to be a good grow man ill be watchin

dude i' gonna tell you as long as i have been using these canna nutes i have never had to check my ph. like i said i just use tap water, unless you know your tap water is hard, has too much chlorine, etc. but i understand you still have that in you to feel the need to check all that. so hey man "do it to it". but as time goes along you'll find less and less of a need for it.


PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

I'll be tagging along! Looks good so far!

Thanks for the support fellas. Pics coming soon. This plant is starting to look pretty freaky. It's leaves are huge and a bit malformed. In fairness to the BV, it may just be the difficult grow conditions (temps up to 87 and humidity that occasionally exceeds 60%...YIKES). Can't wait to get that black/white poly to get better control over this.

cant wait to see sum pics!!!

(Butters) said:

Thanks for the support fellas. Pics coming soon. This plant is starting to look pretty freaky. It's leaves are huge and a bit malformed. In fairness to the BV, it may just be the difficult grow conditions (temps up to 87 and humidity that occasionally exceeds 60%...YIKES). Can't wait to get that black/white poly to get better control over this.

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Dude i really hate that, freaking humidity. look here i dont know how much or if this will help but here goes. i once had a storage space, and i was worried about the moisture molding my furniture. well they had some kind stuff that came in a little white plastic bucket that looked like rock salt(but it wasn't).well anyway the crystals absorb moisture in the air. works really good too, and after all the crystal dissolve into some kind of liquid you just go to grocery store, or lowe's, or home depot and buy some more crystals and re-fill it. just go to any public storage or a storage place and ask do they have the crystals that absorb moisture in the air. also, when the guy that worked there noticed that i was buying it on a regular basis, he informed me that i could get the same results from charcoal. so if you want to try that(the cheap way first) just get a bag of charcoal, cut it open wide, let them just lay out(possibly on something as high as the plants are) and see if that helps in addition to your humidifier. you know i just thought "this dude has a humidifier" and your humidity is still that high, WOW, i'd be pulling my hair out. what part of the U.S. are you in? Or did you score that nice little condo in Atlantis that i saw on craigslist.LOL. But hey try it. like i said the cheap way first, just get a big 'ol bag of cheap charcoal at the grocery store.



PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

You can try Damp-Rid .. They sell that at grocery stores. hardware stores.. Or if you lower you overall temp, that will bring the humidity down as well.. Good luck!

Yeah, I got those DampRid buckets in there too WITH the dehumidifier. Physics is a beeatch. See, since I chose to grow in my basement (cooler), all the humidity (heavier air) settles in down there. Now, as you can see from the next posts pics, with the dehumidifier running 24/7, the humidity is able to be kept in check.

But, the dehumidifier works by using heated coils to extract moisture outta the air, subsequently raising my temp above 80 degrees. It's no win for the time being, but 80 degrees with RH of 50% ain't the end of the world...especially in veg. Come flower time though, I'll need to have this under better control.

Fortunately, I live in new england and the cooler fall temps are just 45 days away (provided global warming doesn't keep screwing us too badly here...we have tornados now...THEY SUCK!!)

Alright. We're about 3 weeks in now ( a little less) and here's how she looks...
It's like a Frankenstein plant or something. The shape of those leaves...just weird

That being said, color is fine. Growth is coming along quicker since the addition of nutes last week. And she seems relatively happy.

Only about 3" tall though. That's what I get for that lighting though. I got time to wait and plenty of smoke left from my last grow to hold me over for a longer veg period.

There appears to be a tear in one of the leaves. Not sure about the cause. Coulda just formed that way, coulda been hit by a light when I was moving stuff around, coulda been my cat taking a bite (the dogs know not to touch it).

I'll probably wait a week or 2 before I FIM her to get more bud sites and bush her out a little.

Thanks to Mohawk, I may have found an ideal screen for what I'm trying to do here.

I won't germinate the White Rhino until I put this BV into flower though. Need to get the timing of this perpetual so that they end up being about 1 month apart.

You can see the white mold that I am dealing with. It's appearance is highly dependent on my humidity level. If I bring the humidity down to about 40%, it's gone. But if I leave that dehumidifier off (or the rez gets full and auto shuts off), the top layer of the coco gets moist and it's back again. Ugh

Fortunately, the mold doesn't seem to have to spread to the plant and is very easily removable. And it definately beats having to deal with my old arch-nemisis...ALGAE

I'll have to start looking at making a veg-cab soon for when I have to seperate my flowering ones from my veg ones. Lots of tag sales around here so I'll probably pick up an old chest and dresser and flip the thing. Gonna need a big one as I just harvested over 2200 Auto AK47 x Auto Blueberry F2 seeds .

10 weeks seed to harvest with complete 18/6 lighting cycle should serve as one helluva back up for supply.

Thanks for checkin in.

Butters

sounds good man !!! i just posted sum new pics check em out https://www.rollitup.org/hydroponics-aeroponics/205127-zona-mid-aero-cfl-grow-42.html#post2850256