600w Organic Bubba Kush Grow Journal~ First Grow

Hardygrower, I looked more into Ph'ing. I did not think it was as curcial as I do now. Your right I suppose... I'm going to get a kit. But I stand by everything else. I am no expert, just trying to help. I hope you get this problem figured out! Happy smokin'.

No problem Big...I do what i can when I can I'm also learning myself....

good man hardygrower. thanks for all the input buddy i appreciate it. so i was gone back for a few days while my roomate was babysitting the girls, i pretty much flushed all the plants right before i left and they looked so much happier.. disregard the 2 on the left those are my not-doing-so-well clones







Thank you to everyone who helped me out that little slump, i'm glad i got this grow journal up for the simple needed help

QUICK QUESTION.. in the last pic, the plants on the right are not drooping so should i not water them until they drop down a bit or should i maybe give them less water than the others?

Good Job Fat, From what I can see and from what you've done, This would be my educated guess as to whats up. During the time before the plants were able to be flushed, some of the nutrients became Locked out only because the concentration of nutrients was too high, and by the time you flushed them some of the Nutrients became available, but not all of them, which means u need to go through the flush process just once more and we'll make some correction, in that process. When I flush I usually weigh the pots when they are dry. In your case the 5inch dry pots average about 4.30 ounces when soil is dry, so what I do then is I'd pour 8 ounces of RO water, (if you can,go buy 4 jugs of Purified Reverse Osmosis water, your doing so, because most brands ph their water to pH 7(this will be 1 less thing you'll need to worry about pH'ing). More importantly if you havent purchases a ph meter there is a cheaper alternative but not the best; go to a home and gardening and asking for a Ph test kit for pools. it'll cost no more than 25 bucks, we'll need to know the ph reading of the runoff once you've poured that 8 ounces RO water into the plant pot(I suspect your Soils pH is very low, around the 5.1-5.3 range when it should be No Lower than about 5.9pH, you'll read or hear about how ppl have grew in Soil with low ph and still got the plant to harvest with no problems But imagine if they'd Dialed'in to the plants Targeted ranges they'd prolly get a higher Yield. Anyhowzers While you're at the home and gardening store also Ask for "Lime" for soil, 'Sunniland' makes Lime that is grinded up to a consistency similiar to sand which is what we want, u dont want pellets. Anyhowzers Buy the Lime which will come in a big bag for very cheap, I'll explain what to do with it later.If you had a ppm meter we could accurately measure EC which is relative to the amount of nutrients is in the soil. In your case I'll try and help you with a 2ndary method that doesnt involve a meter, This method is very simple you'll judge by the color of your run off, If your runoff looks that brown color of Tea, then the EC is still too high!, so AFTER you've poured the first 8 ounces of water which we used to give us some bearings, You'll now TAKE Some actions, start by pouring 2wice the wet-weight of the POT and since wet-weight is roughly 10-12oz, then that means you'll pour about 20-22 ounces of water, down the plant again. After you finished with that good your done with phase one, now, Phase 2, you'll grab another 1 gallon of RO water you bought earlier, and in this one you'll Pour a tsp of Lime in the jug shake it up, Then we'll pour 20 ounces of that into your 5inch pots which will bring your soil's ph up where it needs to be(roughly a 5.9 - 6.1). Now with that out the way you're done! YOU dont have to worry about feeding the plants nutrients because there are still a lot of it in your soil!! Give it a full DAY before you start making anymore changes. We let mother nature take over from here. I should mention that after finding out how to raise ph with Lime I suspect that if the Soil's ph is in the 5.9 - 7.0 ph range(and keep in mind that your Soil's ph is not the same as your Nutrients PH), I'm talking about the PH of soil, but to continue with what I was saying If your soil's pH is in that target range your plants MIGHT be able to uptake Nutrients EVEN at a higher EC. This hasnt been fully test yet. But what I did was I took two plants, repotted them in some New FFOF soil after a few days I ph'd the soil then I flushed one to .8EC and the other was Flushed to a 1.8 EC here it is 2 days later they BOTH have their leaves pointing up and are happy.(So this leads me to believe with the right soil ph it gives you some flexibility with the plants uptake) Which I can go into more detail but as of right now things are just speculation. Let me add: Dont just blindly do what I told you to do...YOU should know What your doing and WHY you are doing it. Quick Notes for that very last pictuer you posted: I will just randomly pick plants and speak on them as the leaves grab my attention 1. THere is a plant that is Top Rightmost and its mostly out of picture EXCEPT for its clawing leaves, that plant has received to much nutrients or hasnt been flushed enough, flush her(Look at the clawing in the leaf tips) 2.To the Left of the plant is another plant, which looks like its ok for the most part 3. Then you have a plant to the Left of that plant at the top which has drooping leaves but most importantly it looks like it suffer so much nutrient lockout that it Appears to be having a Mg/zinc deficiency, but look up Magnesium deficiency and also lookup Zinc Def. to familiarize yourself with it.....But even if it is one of those deficiencies, You wont have to do much to the plants because we've just unlocked them from Nut lockout by flushing them, so these plants should show some improvement after a week as long as you've what was stated in this post.

I see i see, once again thank you man. Your plethora of information has teached me a lot .

I have a ph test kit already, just a super basic one that you drop in a tube and compare the colors.. and today will be the day i do the next flush and i will definitely be getting that "lime" for soil next time im at the grow shop. I noticed the clawing leaves and wasn't completely sure if that was what you were talking about in your last post.

when should i be looking to transplant and am i going to want to use ffof as my soil for the new pots or i've been told to do parts Light Warrior, perlite, and ffof.
I will be posting update pictures a bit later today after the flush

** Ended up doing phase 1 of the flush with 8 oz's of water and the run off was completely clear. im holding off on any more flushing if a clear run off is a sign of neutralized ph.

Update pics.. 11 days from clone!

Its funny that you asked me about the mixture, because I am actually in the process of experimenting with that. But I'll explain the mixtures i used and why I used them. After noticing how the Ocean Forest drained to well I wanted to make a 50%FFOF / 50% Coco Coir, which would be most effective with mature clones(got a clone that is in this mixture and It wasnt really cared for much, and it somehow rooted very well in this 4.5 Gallon planting pot and I got high expectations for this plant come harvest, but her sister plant was disappointing(BUT THIS MIX MAYBE JUST THE MIX YOU SHOULD go for, but if you already have the FFOF and FFOW purchased I'd do a 50%FFOF/50%FFOW. But if you are looking for a mixture for seedlings I'd go with 25%FFOF / 25%FFOW /50% Coco coir] this combo has great aeration, great retention, and packed with organic nutrients and Microbes, EC for this mix is still on the high side, about 2.4EC but at least its not 4.5EC which I had with one of my FFOF only pots. I went for a transplant when the roots look like the picture I posted of my root base....That was about 18 Days before I selected the plants in which I knew were females and transplanted ONLY Them to my bigger pots...I have a few plants I think is male and I figure....why waste good quality soil on a plant that might not be female. So with those I leave them in the 5incher just chillin, gettin water .4EC nutes one feeding and then fed at the higher 1.0 EC on the next feeding.All while this is happening I'm waiting for their clones to root and then I can through them in 12/12 to show sex. By the way the clones of yours are coming along fine...I expect them to make a full recovery.

Awesome! keep me posted with that soil mixture and let me know how it goes. a friend of mine told me his plants loved a light warrior, perlite, and ffof mix can't remember the ratios.

also.. when will i know when to start feeding the girls nutes and should i bump my light up from 300w to 450w and raise it up a bit? ( i have a dimmable ballast)

soooo got a new problem i think.. some weird yellowing on the leaves, not sure if its from nute/light burns.. any help??



Here are all the girls at day 20 from clone =)

Hey Fat; I have to say that at this point we are still dealing blind, and that ADDS more guest work in. But here is how you'll determine your next move. Scenario; If you flushed them 1day and the next day you notice the leaves are looking happy but the very next day the leaves dont look so happy and are starting to curl again, then we KNOW for a fact that soil has replenished its high-EC potency.


But If you've flushed them and the leaves perked up the next day and then was perky the next morning too, this says to me...them hoe's eatin!! and whatever that Soil's runnoff EC is...THATS what you feed them at! , I would start giving them .5EC Mixture on next feeding, I will say tsp=teaspoon sometimes AND I will say Tblsp=Tablespoon.(get yourself the right measuring device, AND KNOW THE DIFFERENCE.)

Ppl say they grow in soil all the time with no measuring devices; Thats good for them, but in YOUR case UNTIL you can accurately Leafread, Dont fall for that Blind growing fallacy. (what most growers wont tell you is the Fail's they had BEFORE they were able to Blindgrow. One guy said he think he had dumb luck his first grow..cuz things went fine...then his second grow things went AWAL....and you could tell by his post he was so stressed out. The true test of a grower is what he is able to do when things DONT go right. Always keep a mindset of & I will start this, I will figure it out, and I will finish this;

Somedays I go and sit with my plants and as myself questions like WHY THE F--- arent my plants growing faster, what could I be doing wrong, what could I do better, and this gets me in a process of thinkin that improves my grow everytime. Sometimes i notice things about them just from sitting with them, they talk to you if you listen.
Now back to the task at hand. I would first do 3tsp of Bigbloom and 1ml of Calmag+...put them into 1 gallon of RO water, this would give you a really low EC of .5 But thats cool cause right now we wanna get ya girls eating which these plants are more than adequate to handle that. and pour only enough to see runoff of this mixture. (We choosethat mixture becase BigBloom on a basic level is fast acting when it comes to leaves responding to it, and I can go into more details but that stuff aint important right now, But in the case of the 1ml of Calmag+ we use the Calmag+ because in addition to its 2-0-0 of Nitrogen, it also has Trace minerals in it too! which is what your plants need Remember that in some cases if you only pour enough Nutes in the pot to moisten the pot and not have runoff some times the .EC can become accumulative meaning if you have a .7EC runnoff of soil in your pot but you go and add a .5EC but you dont pour enough of it to get a run off, then you are likely to get an accumulative .EC of .9 - 1.0 thats not what we wont. This is a mistake that I'm sure alot of ppl make and in a case like that, Unless you're a good leaf reader, you wont know you've given your plants too much nutes until the following day when Lights comeback own if they arent perky YOU KNOW they now need to get a flush. MORE IMPORTANTLY THAN ANYTHING MY FRIEND. is YOU NEED SOME TYPE OF ppm or EC meter. otherwise all these flushes could seem insane specially if you dont know what your NEW EC is after a flush or if we dont know what our Base ph is for the water, that could ruin things too.

I see, i definitely need to get on that ppm meter. well decided to do some late night transplanting and found some good stuff

new pics =)

Fat; the plants are coming along just fine...and when you look at roots like that...its always a good feeling that says YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT....SO that Transplant was definitely needed!!

In regards to that, I'm noticing those 5inch pots are not the play. Plants dont get much usage out of those before you have to transplant and seeing you have to do the same so soon lets me know I better stick with the 2.7 Liter rounded pots.

** EC meaning**: For the ppl that read this and may not know what I am refering to when I use the term ;EC. EC refers to the Electical conductivity within your Nutrient mix. Since we cant measure Nutrients directly, the way we measure it is by the conductivity of the elements within the Nutrients. So when I say something like "I gave my plant 1.4EC I'm refering to the concentration of the nutrients, The more Nutest you give the higher the EC.

here is one observation I know we've been having this on going discussion about pH, well here is some interesting results from a test I didnt know I was doing until I compared some data. But anyhow got 6-7 plants in redcups and some of them I used different amounts of Dolimite Lime, some I didnt use Lime(Dolimite)They were fed what I thought was very High EC of 1.4EC ( which translate to about 1400+ppm on the .700 Scale) from the Foxfarm supposidly Organic Nutes Line. Most of my pots has a soil ph of 6.2...when I flushed them and tested the runoff, the Runoff from a previous feeding, I was averaging .2EC - .3EC in my pots(lower runoff EC imply that the plant gobbled 1.4EC down to about .2EC - 3EC as run off) But this only happen with plants who had a soil pH of 6.1 and up to 7.1 soil pH. Then I had 2 pots that where at the soil's natural ph which one pot was around 5.4ph (not good), and this other pot I added a very little amount of Dolimite Lime, which didnt bring the pH up high enuff to atleast a 6.1, but did bring pH to 5.9. And in those 2 pots with a 5.x ph, the runoff pH was .5EC - .6EC, indicating that those two plants didnt uptake As much as the other plants who's Soil pH was in the correct range.So This goes to show you that For these various strains AK47, Chronic, Euforia(this plant is amazing to watch grow) Malawi Gold,(eats heavy)Sour D IBL,(light eater) Bogglegum (hardyvegger), Spicy White Devil(hardy vegger), Alquimista(Hardy Vegger), wit the exception of my Light eaters, They all up took roughly the same amount AS LONG AS THE PH WAS IN THE RIGHT RANGE. but if you are .1 point out of the range...YOUR PLANTS COULD have deficiencies coming later down the line. In my Case it was Calcium. Some plants will have a smaller margin of error, so I can see why its so easy for ppl to destroy their vegging plants and then they come online and say ( Oh the plant just up and Died and I dont know why...lol)

I even went as far as raising ppm's even more just to see at what point will it receive Nute burn...I took it up to 1.8EC still no Nute Burn but it seems that 1.4EC is the sweet spot to get them all perky., so this led me to start thinking differently about Foxfarm's soil. If you know what you're doing then FFOF soil IS THE Beez KNEEZ!.

fat: The next thing for you is to go ahead and Either Topp or Fimm your ladies.(assuming that this is one of the strains that is ok to top.) Then again sometimes you just have to experiment regardless of what others might say. but your ladies are the perfect height to Top so that your plant can Yield more.

ok! any instructions on the best of way of topping and causing the least amount of stress to the plant?

Some sexy ladies bro keep it up

thanks
i'll have update pics up today!

hardy are you sure they're big enough to top? i'm looking into it but a lot of the plants im seeing be topped seem much more mature than mine.

Those girls are definitely ready I've topped many a plants at the 4-5inch height, all because they had atleast 4-5 nodes at the time, and I can tell by looking that your plants are atleast 8 inches or better, and as far as your approach I would search either RIU or icmag on Topping and Fimming then If I were you I'd top 3 plants then FIM three plants. My outlook on Topping vs. Fimming is like this. I would Top my plant First, then later'on down the line say..maybe 8 days later I'd FIMM. Topping will give you at the least 2 Colas AND IT WILL ALSO trigger growth among the 2ndary stem's that grow from the main stem, all of those shoots will begin to grow as if they were the top of the plant. Now if you FIM and you do it right you can grow more that 2 Tops, as many as 8, From what I've seen Fimming didnt promote the kinda secondary growth that you see when you TOPP a plant. Now if you DO TOP...if you're smart and you have the space, I would use those cuttings u have from TOPPING your plants as clones.
Or throw me one of those tops...lol j/k.

OK Here is some more important things that came to mind when you mentioned 'Least amount' of stress. No matter how you TOP it will cause some form of stress, and all the plants I've seen that were topped, immediately after the Topping I noticed the leaves give kinda a slight droop for 1-2 Days. Under NORMAL circumstances TOPPING alone will not cause a plant to go hermie on you later in flowering. BUT it's when you have More than 1 compounding stress related issue happening to the plant that can cause Stunted growth and later in flowering sex problems where the plant is MORE LIKELY to go Hermie Keep in mind that some strains are more resilient will typical plant related stress issues than other.

...Say for example you're plants have NOT been fed on time(stress)...so this made the pot dryer than usual, then you overfeed it trying to compensate(stress) and you have bugs in your soil that you didnt know about, then you go and try to TOP the plant ontop of all of these compounding issues, THIS CAN cause your plant stress, that WONT turn it Hermie in Vegging, but will most likely STUNT your plants growth and you'll see your leafs start to grow like miniature leaves...lol Its not funny but its equivalent to a midget...so imagine how your other Plants laughing and picking at the Little Plant...lol now this is why I try and TOPP my plants so early on.

I've read that a plant from seed chooses it's sex somewhere around the 4-5 node. So my thinking is, if you Top the plant just before the 4th Node is growing or AS the 4th Node is growing in you win. My philosophy is, EVEN IF I HAD compounding issues to stress my plant in addition to me TOPPING it. I would Like to think that I wouldnt have to worry about the plant going Hermie later on in its Life cycle because the stress that was cause to the plant, WAS caused BEFORE the plant had the hormones within it to make it's sex choice to be either male or female.

Dont let this discourage you from Topping or FIMMING. Topping is super simple, But Fimming takes a little practice but causes less stress( or atleast I would like to think so)

so i just decided to go ahead on top em all.. here it is day 19 from clones






they were all fed today also so i'm expecting some changes in the next couple days for sure. i'll eventually have my roomate take better pics