MrEDuck's journal

Mag ballasts do last forever.
Summer growing isn't ideal but it can be done. I'll probably take next summer off. I have a seed making project I want to start when we get home.

I'm learning how much I took for granted with regular outdoor crops. Really had it very easy for a long time there. This place, RIU, is pretty amazing I have to say. Feeling I'm getting pretty prepared for some serious challenges ahead. I have to say again that what you are accomplishing here is truly mind blowing. I'll be taking the time to give it all a very thorough read tomorrow

Wait till you try fucking with an outdoor plant

MrEDuck said:

Wait till you try fucking with an outdoor plant

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HAHAHAHAHA you mean like my Jack47 outdoor SCROG? Ended up being bit of a headache that one I can tell you lol... Had to expand the screen to the level that I couldn't really work it any more.

I cheat a bit. I veg them indoors in winter, come springtime I take clones outside, they go into flower and finish before proper summer, clones taken out in November will grow to be full-term, but anything taken outside from about mid December will also go into flower. So I get 3 crops every summer, or used to at least, the first one not the best they do stretch a bit and tend to be a tad more fluffy, the second one is the December clones, they flower through Jan and Feb usually to end early to mid March, and then May the full-term plants come down with around a kilo of bud each

So I actually don't have that many big plants. I plant the early and late clones quite densely and keep them a batch to a patch so it's really just a carpet of colas.

Conditions right now simply do not allow me to do this. So seeing so much done with this little room is seriously an eye-opener to me. Running perpetual harvests I can see the road forward a bit more clearly. Going to take a lot more research and DIY though. At least I LIKE research

We're going home tomorrow! My lungs can't wait to give Stella a giant hug. Also my family can pretty much all go to hell.

Family gatherings one can only stomach for a day. It's all downhill from there lol... I get that every christmas, christmas day is great, boxing day it starts to unravel, by new-years, it's a warzone... Repeat every year lol...

Ironically the family issues were all with people we weren't seeing. I actually get along with my wife's family pretty well.
We're on our way home so I should have pics up pretty soon.

Nice journal Duck. Love the look of those harvested buds, nice and dense. When you dim your 400w do you just run your 400 bulb at 250w? I did this with my MH 250 and ran it at 150w and got a really strange green glow. I quit running it and talked to lumatek and they said it was designed to run a 150w bulb rather than underpowering a 250. They said it wouldn't hurt the ballast, but would shorten the bulb life and possibly effect the light spectrum. I have yet to try out the superlumens setting, but I may put my old spare HPS bulb in and give it a try.

Looking forward to the update, great job so far. Peace

Good to have you along. My ballast just runs the bulb dimmer, the spectrum is definitely off. Temps are better with the AC in the room so that never needs to happen again
I'm home the girls look really good for having been neglected for a week. Cu packed on a ton of bud and frost, I gotta scope her but she's coming down soon. One of the tops on the mainlined clone grew into the light so I'm going to just remove it. I'm probably going to throw her into flower with the seed run because I don't have space for her.

Bushy is looking rough but packed on a lot of bud while I was away.


Cu packed on some bud as well and is looking close. She'll be coming down this week. Not exactly sure when though. She's coloring nicely. I used the flash with the HPS to try to get it visible, I like how the pic turned out.


The mainlined clone had a top grow into one of the lights. Figuring out how to best use my veg space for a perpetual cycle will be a little tricky. She dried out and had just been watered when this pic was taken. The branch with the burned top will be coming off and the smaller branch in the middle is going to get taken for a clone. I'm probably going to do this plant in a small pot because she's an experiment and I want to play with controlling plant size with container size.

The AK x JH was getting shaded and didn't really grow much after being topped, hopefully she starts doing better now that she can get some TLC. The top rooted and is now in flower to sex. If it's female I'll let it finish in the party cup it's in being bottom watered to see what happens and get an earlier sample of the smoke. If it's male I am going to be sad because that would be 5 in a row.

Still can't believe how much bud you've got so neatly packed together on one plant, with a profile THAT low. It's amazing.

I chopped the rest of Bushy today, I got 440g untrimmed, when I finish trimming I'll post how much and some pics.
250g untrimmed dried to about ~45g so this should be about 80g dry.

So I got 266.2g of wet trimmed bud and 90.0g of wet trim. If the bud dries similarly to what I chopped before that should be about 80g dry which would bring the total for the plant to 125g. In a 3 gallon pot with less than 4ft of height I see why there's so much Blue Dream in some areas.
Here's the main stalks after everything was cut off:

Here's everything laid out on a full page of newspaper.

And everything once it had been trimmed.

I chopped most of Cu this morning. I left the little popcorn that would have gone straight to the hash pile to see what an extra week will do for it because I have the space at the moment. More pics and weights to come later.

I finished trimming Cu, I got 443.28g trimmed, I would have beaten a pound wet if I wasn't getting sick of trimming and throwing a lot of smaller buds into the hash pile. I should beat a qp from this plant though. Internet is going really slow so I'll have to get pics up later.

haha sweeeet! Gratz man, I wonder how much it will drop in weight after drying..

70-80%. I quick dried one of the smaller buds and had a sample and was pretty impressed by the potency. Though I imagine that anything but Stella will have an extra kick because I've been smoking her so much.

MrEDuck said:

I finished trimming Cu, I got 443.28g trimmed, I would have beaten a pound wet if I wasn't getting sick of trimming and throwing a lot of smaller buds into the hash pile. I should beat a qp from this plant though. Internet is going really slow so I'll have to get pics up later.

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Popcorn also goes onto the hash pile here lol. I used to trim outdoor as a seasonal worker, man, after 4 weeks of 8-hour workdays doing nothing but trimming you never want to do it again. And if it's work you HAVE to trim the popcorn :/ Taught me to take a 'zen' approach, one nuglet at a time, just get through that pile... But yes. I love my bubble bags.

The flower space was looking so empty, so I had to fix that. This plant is going to be the mother of my Blue Dream S1 seed run. She was cut 3/9/13 and was used as a mother after that. I was actually really impressed with the roots for a plant that's been living in a party cup that wasn't even full for 4.5 months. So today is day 0 of flower for her. She went into a slightly smaller pot that Bushy was in because I was worried she would take over the entire space if I used the same size pot as Bushy was in since she's considerably larger than Bushy was going into flower. Even so I expect she'll be massive. As soon as STS gets here I'll start flowering one of the clones I have in a 1 qt container and hit it with the STS for pollen. I want to get a money shot of the pollen release like Doobie Duck has in the shots in this thread http://forum.seeddepot.nl/showthread.php?4019-Monkey-Haze-F3-x-Old-Moonshine-F3 She'll be called Stella as she's going to be the only female Blue Dream in flower this run. After I put Stella into flower the veg tub looked really empty, so I started soaking some beans. I've got two of the Rare Dankness Midas, two Dark Rainbow's from a private breeder in CO, and two Jack Herer F2s from a private breeder in CA. Hopefully we get some girls this time.

The buds from Bushy are about where I like to start putting them in jars to slow the dry heading into the cure zone. They weighed 90g when I checked this morning and I expect they'll lose a bit more, maybe 5g, 10g at the absolute max. so I'm very confident the total plant yielded 125g. The harvest from Cu was like 202g but will still probably lose 20-25% of that based on the feel of the buds. Still 150g from her is really impressive and 275g from 2 plants in my space is like 2.5oz/sqft which is damned good with a bigger light and more headroom.