NeerGreen: New Era grow #1

I have finally begun my first grow in a long time. I will use this thread to document it: my hopes and fears, my deeds and misdeeds, successes achieved and lessons learned. cheers 'neer

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

Metasynth said:

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!

Click to expand...

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

This picture was taken on October 09. The beans were committed to the water glass on October 4th. They were then transferred to Oasis cubes on the evening of the 6th, where the skinny one (White Widow) took hold at once. The fat one looked dead, but i gave it an extra day before digging into the Oasis cube to perform a post-mortem. I found a happy healthy taproot, so back into my ultra high-tech germination chamber (formerly a Claim Jumper pie tin with plastic cap) they went!

I swear, that Widow seed was a runty one. When I received my five-pack from Nirvana, I raised an eyebrow ... then decided no conviction without a fair trial. Acquitted! Would it not be awesome if she turned into a half-pound tree! (Hey, a bear can dream, no?) cn

Today has been a momentous day in the Weasel Works!
My babies finally pushed their taproots to the bottom of the foam cubes. Yesterday i spent an hour cleaning Hydroton, and today the little pretties were emplaced in their net pots. (Raspberry Cough is featured on the left.) The first two pictures are taken in the sunlight of the windowsill I was using until my light got set up. Yesterday i finally received my T5 bulbs in the mail ... I purchased a 4-bulb 2-foot T5 light and specified bulbs after readong Pr0fesseur's very informative "LED without LEDs" thread. I intend to do early veg under this light until the plants outgrow it ... then it's the 600W MH not shown in the picture.
Bulbs: 2x KorallenZucht "Fiji Purple".
1x UVLighting "Super Actinic"
1x UVLighting "454".

The net pots are being top-fed through trickler lines from a reservoir filled with my veg nute at 1/4 strength.
It's a hot day in Rednekistan! It's 83 degrees in the grow room, but the sun will go down soon and I anticipate temps normalizing. cn

I compounded my micronutrient stock solutions today.


They are in two bottles because acidic and alkaline micros would precipitate each other. This problem is not present at final dilution.
Acidic micros:
Fe from ferric nitrate x9H2O, (final conc) 2.5 ppm
Mn from manganous sulfate xH2O, 0.75 ppm
Zn from zinc nitrate x6H2O, , 50 ppb
Co from cobalt nitrate x6H2O, 20 ppb
Cu from cupric nitrate X2.5H2O, 10 ppb
Ni from nickel sulfate x6H2O, 10 ppb
Cr from chromium(III) sulfate x12H2O, 10 ppb.

Alkaline micros to yield:
Si from K2SiO3, 20 ppm
B from borax (sodium tetraborate dodecahydrate), 0.2 ppm
Mo from potassium molybdate, 0.2 ppb
KOH to stabilize solution.

When I opened my jar of cupric nitrate that had sat on a shelf for nine years, I found this accidental sculpture ... cn


<edit> The logo on the bottles is something from my lab days ... the Cheshire Bat.

They are growing so slowly! Today's pics under the T5s. cn

Here's the White Widow from her runty little bean. 11 days since I committed the bean to water. Over the last 2 days under the T5s I swear she hasn't grown one millimeter. Am I doing it right!??


Here's the Raspberry Cough from the fat bean. Same basic issue. No apparent growth.

Comments are welcome ... cn

Hey, Neer! I just noticed your journal under your sig. Have you read through Heisenberg's Microbes thread? https://www.rollitup.org/dwc-bubbleponics/361430-how-breed-your-own-beneficial.html. I also grow DWC and it's made all the difference for me: my ladies grow bigger and faster than ever before, with almost none of the problems I was previously experiencing. It's a long, great read I think you'll thoroughly enjoy...

Good morning tyler!
One of my hobbies/specialties is to go entirely non-organic. My old Cindy grow was like that. I will try to stay the course, even avoiding such things as humic acid. If I run into trouble, it's good to know Heis' thread is there. One thing I'm trying is to add small amounts of "Physan 20", a benzalkonium chloride, to my nute mix to suppress algae and other opportunistic microbes. I've seen web pix of awesomely healthy root systems kept ivory-white by using Physan. Can't really recommend it until I've gone further with this grow. cn

<edit> I jostled the net pot with Little Widow in it, and the Oasis cube was being pushed up too high. I reset it last night, and was gratified to see an inch of happy hairy taproot emerging from the bottom of the Oasis. I set it into the Hydroton with much care, and went to bed feeling a little better about my planties.

The planties seem healthy enough, but I had to go all geeky and put up today's pics next to yesterday's pics to discern any change.
The bad news is things are ssoo ssllooww.
The good news is that in terms of healthy appearance, they are not losing ground.
Here's "Runter Alice", my widdle Widow. Compared to yesterday, the leaves have grown a thunderous rampaging millimeter. In a drag race with the San Andreas, she'd clean up ... eventually.

Here's my rompin stompin "Halle" Raspberry. Second set of true leaves is displaying breathless head-spinning vegetative velocity ... this one shows real actual change compared to yesterday's image. Note the nutrient solution feed on the left.


Some random stats ...
nutrient reservoir holds 80 liters of 1/4-strength veg formula, but ppm still read at 450 using my Nutra Dip. I use an Oakton meter to keep the pH honest; maybe I should get a standalone ppm/EC meter as well. Ime redundancy in instrumentation is NEVER a bad thing.
pH was 6.1 yesterday evening. I adjusted it down (with dilute sulfuric acid) to 5.1. Now, about 26 hours later, pH is 5.7 (Nutra Dip) and 5.85 (Oakton, freshly cal'd against 7.00 buffer). I will adjust it down to maybe 5.4 ... to give it "headroom" for the upward creep that seems to be occurring. I wonder if the Hydroton is doing some ion exchange.
cn

cannabineer said:

Good morning tyler!
One of my hobbies/specialties is to go entirely non-organic. My old Cindy grow was like that. I will try to stay the course, even avoiding such things as humic acid. If I run into trouble, it's good to know Heis' thread is there. One thing I'm trying is to add small amounts of "Physan 20", a benzalkonium chloride, to my nute mix to suppress algae and other opportunistic microbes. I've seen web pix of awesomely healthy root systems kept ivory-white by using Physan. Can't really recommend it until I've gone further with this grow. cn

<edit> I jostled the net pot with Little Widow in it, and the Oasis cube was being pushed up too high. I reset it last night, and was gratified to see an inch of happy hairy taproot emerging from the bottom of the Oasis. I set it into the Hydroton with much care, and went to bed feeling a little better about my planties.

Click to expand...

Oh, I see. I attempted to run a sterile rez for the first half dozen grows, but I always had some root problems even with Physan 20, SM-90, H2O2, everything but bleach. The beneficial bacteria has worked better than any of those product for me, but I hope your grow is problem free. I'll be watching

Tyler, that is a bit scary. I will definitely read Heis' thread.

My planties are in so-so health. Halle (the Raspberry Cough from the fat bean) seems fine, growing a little bit every day, but Runter Alice, my tiny White Widow, is sickly. The cotyleda show yellow in their outboard half, with brown tips, and the real leaves are barely growing. So I just dumped a fresh 10l bucket of water into the res, knocking ppm back from 470 to (heh) 420. She makes it, or not. Survival of the fittest.
I also hung the T5 light fixture a little higher.
I took two pix of Alice, one under the weird-pink light of the T5s and one in natural sunlight on my windowsill. (I took the net pot out of the bubble bucket lid for that, and took the opp to flush the Hydroton with tap water.)

Here's Alice, the poor dear.


Here's Halle. cn


A series for Alice, October 15, 16 and 17. Should it be this slow!?

If you'd like a reference point, take a look at my grow journal in sig. It does seem like your plants are moving VERY slowly. I've never done a hydro grow so I'm not exactly sure what could be wrong, but if I had to wager a guess I'd say it has something to do with your roots not developing, or developing VERY slowly. What is your light cycle like and how often are you watering?

Hello witelightnin
Light cycle is 24/0.
Watering is constant, thin stream from trickle tubing. It'll show in the side of some of the pics.
I checked your grow. That is the sort of response I was expecting. Your plants seem to be outperforming mine 10x.
cn

<edit> I've removed the nute feed line from Alice. I'll simply top-water with tap a few times each day. I just flushed her net pot with water to clear out most of the salts.