NeerGreen: New Era grow #1

Bravo, sir! Any ideas about your setup/strains? I was going to start a thread for my perpetual, but for some reason I haven't...Glad to see you are starting to grow again!

I discovered the enthralling properties of Cannabis as a teen, back during the glorious Carter interregnum.
One fine spring I borrowed a 6" flowerpot from the back yard and filled it with dead ordinary garden dirt. I planted two bagseeds. One sprouted and made it to planthood. I grew it on my windowsill, where it achieved the towering height of fourteen inches. It actually ended up on the windowsill of momma's utility room, where through a sort of benign semi-neglect it turned into a girl with a few wispy buds that became bone-dry after someone simply stopped watering it.
I ended up giving the two grams or so of bud to a friend. I'd in the meantime been forced to promise my mom that I wouldn't smoke any more. (An "accidentally" read diary was involved.) I kept that promise for over twenty years ...
... My friend, who was a seasoned "head", was blown away. "Best weed I've ever had", he enthused.
It was quite cool to see the fan leaves develop. Iirc the plant was nearly odorless, being bagseed from the "colombian" that was the standard dope available in that time and place. cn

Fast forward to the year of our Lord Two Triple-ought. I'd made a very good friend (I wonder where he is now ... he hasn't returned my twenty phone messages) who suffered from a variety of ills, including depression and a propensity to panic. He smoked modern pure sweet seedless bud, and on a trip to visit him on Oregon I broke my promise with great ceremony.
This was also the heady time when California's Prop 215 promised to be the sharp end of the wedge that would sunder the darkness of the Anslinger era. I listened to my friend's supply woes, and i decided that I was going to make a go of this. At the time I was married, and I'd enlisted the spouse's support. (That story ended up turning slowly and irreparably sour.)
After converting a homemade back compartment of a garden shed into my secret lab OAR a 'try (cue Frankenstein laugh) and becoming a member of Overgrow (still have the t-shirt!!!) I started with soil ... big cheezy plastic pots from Home de Pot filled with garden-variety (sic!) potting soil. I wish i could remember what seedbank I used, but I ordered 10 beans each of "Kimo Sno-Bud" and "Northern Lights #5". My Google searches for Kimo Sno-Bud are coming up dry, so i can't even find out more about it.
Nine Sno-Bud germinated, and five of these were girls. Only one NL germed, and fortunately she was a girl also. After about five months I discovered the oh so special joys of trimming a harvest and ended up with about four ounces of rather nice smoke. I assayed a Sno-Bud nug. It was 11% THC by extraction and gravimetric analysis (weight, basically) of the refined THC. The crude heated extract (essentially bho) was an honest 89% by weight THC. The NL#5 didn't yield much, but oh did it smell hashy.

I then decided I wanted to try hydro. I lived close to a rather good hydro store ... thse guys were mega helpful, and they steered me toward NFT. I set up an ebb&flood table for veg under a 250W MH lamp with the combo hood/ballast. The flowering room, about 4x7 feet, got 2x600W HPS in glazed hoods. For a strain I selected Bros Grim "Cinderella 99".
The other thing that I did was research hydro nutrients. I bought a lovely book, "Plant Nutrient facts for Hydroponics & How to make your own Fully Formulated Plant Nutrient" by Jim McCaskill , published by Foothill Hydroponics, N. Hollywood CA 91601. Using formulae in that book, along with individual nutrient ppm guidelines for cannabis gleaned from web searches, I devised my own salt fert recipes for veg and flower. I compounded these out of entirely ACS reagent salts, available to me because at the time i was still a pro lab chemist. My experiment was to grow a thorougly controlled non-organic crop from seed to bud. I used deionized distilled water and MES (morpholinoethanesulfonic acid) as a non-metabolizable buffer.
All ten beans popped, and they did well in veg for about 6 weeks. They took to my 100% artificial nutes like seals to surf. I transferred them to the NFT gutters, veg'd them a little bigger under the HPS, then flowered them. I was left with 5 femmes, four nice ones and a runt. I kept a small male branch alive and chucked pollen at a pair of lower branches for my very own cindy F1 seeds. Those buds seeded while none others did. I still have the seeds, although after several HOT Rednekistan summers I doubt their viability.

I yielded a bit over a pound of meticulously-groomed bud from that grow. I presented it to a San Fran dispensary where i had an "in" thanks to an Overgrow acquaintance. Even after I disclosed my zero-organic policy, my bud still got top marks, as evidenced by the fact that I sold that pound at their highest purchaser rate.

Very soon after that grow finished, I lost my job and had a full-scale nervous breakdown that led me to where I am today ... a shadow of my former self, relentlessly depressive after every med (incl. green) failed me, alive only by grace of SSDI.
Now that I am really truly alone for the first time since college, that gret pioneer spirit (fuck it, got nothing to lose) kicked in, and I'm almost finished completing my new grow facility. More about that anon. cn

Originally Posted by Metasynth

Bravo, sir! Any ideas about your setup/strains? I was going to start a thread for my perpetual, but for some reason I haven't...Glad to see you are starting to grow again!

hello Metasynth! Thank you for visiting my journal!
I tried germinating about twelve of my old Cindy F1s, but no dice. Dead beans.
I bought two strains from Nirvana: Raspberry Cough and White Widow, both feminized.
I set one bean of each to sprout on October 4th. Both popped and are now on a windowsill, slowly unfolding in Oasis cubes kept in a pie-tin humidity chamber. i am currently leak-testing my rDWC buckets ... one had a slow leak on the bottom hose barb, but a bit of attention with a needle file fixed that. cn

Quite the wall of text there...It's not often that I sit and read a post that long, but it seems you've had an interesting journey to get to where you are now. No place to go but up, right? rDWC, eh? What size buckets, and how many? Whatcha doing about lighting, I'm interested in seeing how this plays out. I run DWC as well, though I run individual buckets due to the nature of my perpetual...I've been playing with the idea of creating a micro-rDWC setup from 4 quart containers for the roots, with maybe a 5 gallon bucket to serve as the control...Anywho, whatcha working with? I'm itching to know! rDWC for just the 2 sprouts at the moment?

Yes, just the two for now ... with plans to expand to four. I want to have a grow that is big enough to be worth the effort, but small enough to be affordable in terms of power consumption. I set up my tent (4x4 Secret Jardin) in the spare bedroom last week ... hoooo doggies does that thing stink! It's still outgassing plasticizer stench, and sometimes at night I run an ozone generator to knock the stink back a bit.

Lights:
Lumatek dimmable ballast for 600W HPS
Bulbs: Ushio "Hilux Gro" HPS
........ Ushio "Hilux Gro" Super MH conversion bulb
Hood: Sun Systems "XXXL" with 6-inch ports
Fan: CanFan "Max Fan" with built-in variable speed control

Buckets: 2x 5-gal "Domicile Autocrat" brand standard buckets, spray-painted white to hide offensive logo
Lids painted, cut to accept 6-inch net pots
Each fitted with a high (drain) and low (fill) 1/2-inch hose barb, and a 1/4-inch hole for air tube
4-inch flat "puck" air stone cemented to bucket bottom with bathroom silicone caulk.

Ok, quick question. I run a 400w currently, as well as about 600w actual of CFL's, but I'm on the verge of replacing most of the CFL's with a dimmable 600w...I assumed that when you lower the wattage to 75% or 50%, it reduces the heat...So if you run at 300w, the heat should be considerably less than when you run at 600w, even maybe less than that of my 400w?...Maybe the ballast stays the same temp, but it's going outside of the room so that doesn't matter...Can you confirm my suspicion?

I am sure it reduces the heat. (The ballast runs very nice and cool regardless.) What I don't know is if reducing the power yields a linear reduction in light. I do know that if you dim a regular light bulb by 1/2, you get 1/2 the heat but much less than 1/2 the light. I don't know how HPS "maps" light v. power.
Ironically I got the dimmable feature for an app I can't do. I wanted to run a lower-power MH bulb, but the ballast won't allow that. My conversion MH bulb says "run only at full power". I'll take the power hit and do as the equipment reccos say. Kind of a waste on a pair of seedlings ... I hope they bush out fast with all the scientifically perfect nutrition I'll be giving them, lol! cn