Top Dawg seeds "NYC OG" - High Pressure Aeroponics (HPA) Grow Journal

Welcome to my grow journal, I first heard about high pressure aeroponics (HPA) or true aeroponics (TP) about a decade ago at a forum, it was like some mythical rocket science, sounded too true to be real.

So few years past and took the liberty and to try it out, more of a research or "learning the art" thing.
I conducted a test between aeroponics and DWC. I wanted to see which grow environment would provide the most optimal fastest growing healthy resilient plants. To my surprise it indeed was the Aeroponics, plants grew like a shooting rocket.
I stopped the research at the prime vegetative phase and never grew again for personal reasons.

But now I got my hands on some premium Top Dawg seeds, "NYC OG" strain. 11 regular seeds in the pack.
Bought it about 6 years ago, never opened the sealed pack until last week when I germinated it.

Genetics of "NYC OG" = Tahoe (F) x ONYCD (M)

"ONYCD" stands for: "Original NYC Diesel", it's genetic lineage is: Chem '91 (SkunkVA) (F) x Tres Dawg (M)

Hybrid Strain

Flower Cycle: 56-63 days

I'm going to grow this strain from seedling to harvest and will share as much details as possible and would also like to learn new details as well from others.
Hope it would be helpful and something I can check back into as reference.

Would like to point out that this grow journal will be based on maintaining a sterile tank.
I do have plans to explore organic growing in HPA systems at a later time.

So I will do something a bit of an odd strategy for planting the germinated seedlings.
Since the seeds were sitting in a sealed mylar bag at room temperature for a long 6 years, I can not risk losing the seedlings, therefore I will plant them on soil to make a mother plant and will get clone cuttings from it and will then transfer them to the high pressure aeroponics system.

In few weeks from now I will thoroughly layout the HPA system, it's fairly easily and straightforward, 100% homemade and tested.

Throughout this journal I will design, modify and update a custom built microcontroller system board which will control, records and monitors the following: the solenoid misting irrigation timings, temperature A/C, humidity, pH, PPM, fertilizers, dosing for sterile reservoir, light scheduling with dimming capabilities, camera recording for time lapse or real time viewing, fan speed, water top off and I'm sure there are few more things I haven't mentioned but I think these are the most important aspects that needs to be taken care of.
Everything mentioned will be 100% controlled by the microcontroller and through time of the grow I will develop an App software interface to allow adjusting all the parameters. It will work on any device which has WiFi and a web browser.
I will share all the details and how to make the control system from scratch and will explain thoroughly.
This is a complete DIY grow project with some soldering.
You can buy similar devices/parts from certified tested reputable companies if you do not wish to solder. I'll post source links for everything.

So now the introduction of the grow journal is taken care of, lets start with the grow, shall we?:


Day 1 (December-12-2021):

Germinating 6 year old seeds that was sitting in my drawers :




Day 8 (December-20-2021):

Yes I know, nothing fancy or professional, but it was an unexpected quick and easy emergency build. On Day 7, out of the 11 germinating seeds, one of them sprouted wild and needed to be planted ASAP. So I had to build this tried and true cardboard box with aluminium foil. Notice how I built the custom light bulb switch .
I want precision temperature readings, so I'm temporarily using my precision digital multimeter with it's K-Type Thermocouple probe to monitor the temperature manually.
I'll build a proper wireless temperature monitoring device using an ESP32 microcontroller with a NTC thermistor soon.
The light bulb is a 23 Watt CFL type with a color temperature of 6,500 and Lumen output is 1,600. I believe this will be suffice for the seedling to grow and develop its roots for 1-2 weeks until transplanted to a larger environment.
The max temperature reading is 84.5 F and lowest is 80 F. This is so far stable and consistent readings I checked every 2-4 hours or so.
The sprouted seedling was in its new soil home for 24 hours right before this picture was taken, I'm impressed how it reacted instantly to it's new environment and just grew close to an inch.
I'm a little worried however, the seedling is showing signs of burning or yellowing spots, this could be due to the fact I am using fertilized soil which have those green tiny ball capsules which slowly dissolves and fertilizes the soil with time.
I first sterilized the soil in a microwave to 200 F and let it cool to 70 F until I planted the seedling.
I am using soil from the backyard's show plants since it is the only best soil I have with me available.
I will continue to monitor the seedling's health and if it continues to yellow in the following day, I will transplant it into the high pressure aeroponics system. I just want the seedling to develop its roots for the time being.
Lasty, lets hope this hardy seedling is an all time sensi female.




Day 8 (December-20-2021):

The other 10 seedlings are slowly making their way out from their shells. I guess this seems to be a success due to the fact the seeds are 6 years old. My $200 investment for these seeds does not seem to go down the drain.

Alright so I have transplanted the germinated seeds into soil.

Day 15 (December-27-2021):



Sadly all the seedlings except the bottom most right, died due to "damping off"... I did sterilize the soil but I assume during the germination process with the paper towel method it got infected. I always assume the seedlings have "damping off" to be on the safe side and always try my best to keep them alive to my best abilities.

Over the past years I have always tried to figure out what is the most best and proper way to germinate seeds. Never found a good method.
I took some time to thoroughly research in this "germination" topic and finally know a perfect germination protocol that will save time, effort and money. I strongly believe that every gardener should follow this protocol because its the same protocol used by professional agriculture and scientists when they germinate seeds.

I was reading George F. Van Patten's (A.K.A "Jorge Cervante") book "Gardening Indoors with Soil & Hydroponics" and was trying to find some kind of "scientific" approach to overcome the crucial germination phase. He mentioned about the beneficial fungi called "Trichoderma (002/003)" and how it helps to eradicate pathogens, prevent diseases and promotes root growth.

This got me thinking of the idea that I can use this "Trichoderma Fungi" to my advantage during the germination phase. I did some googling and found out that scientists actually indeed do use Trichoderma to germinate seeds. They call it "Bio-Priming", its basically coating the seeds with Trichoderma Fungi and start germinating the seeds. What this allows is to provide a healthy germination process right from the get go and seedlings will be pathogen and diseases free, damping off will be highly unlikely.

The beneficial Trichoderma is so god damn effective that it is literally classified as a "Bio-Agent" and a "Fungicide".

Trichoderma is somewhat similar to Mycorrhizal. But Trichoderma is more effective as a fungicide than Mycorrhizal, so it's better to bio-prime the seeds for germination using Trichoderma. Later when the roots grow big its best to use Mycorrhizal.

However I did not have Trichoderma on hand and will experiment "bio-priming" for another grow. I bought all the required tools needed and they should arrive in two weeks from now. I also bought some classic old school "Skunk #1" beans from good old "Sensi Seeds", will experiment "bio-priming" with these seeds.

Here is a link to buy "Trichoderma Harzianum" fungi:

Here is a link of how "bio-priming" is done using "Trichoderma Harzianum" fungi, done in a lab setting, Jump to time stamp "19:30"


Luckily I had some GA3 (Gibberellic Acid) lying around my seed stash box, I bought it 10 years ago to make feminized seeds but it turns out GA3 is an effective growth hormone as well and works great, it is well documented with many papers. So I took this "expired" GA3 and hit it to my seedlings at 100 PPM strength. Rumors says that you'll see results in 24 hours in plant growth., lets see...

I would also like to point out that after doing some thorough research about GA3, I would highly and insanely advice in not to use it, only use it as a last resort. The reason is that GA3 promotes the plant hormones to induce to become a male/hermaphrodite. This has nothing to do with stress related to the plant, it's just signaling the plant to become as a male than a female. This is because "GA3" is the male hormone for the gender based plants. While "Ethylene" is the female hormone. I found this out after applying GA3 to my seedlings .
But hey having a healthy plant weather it is a male/female is a million times better than having all dead plants. I consider GA3 a live saver.
I can reverse engineer the male cannabis plant to produce feminized seeds using Ethephon. It's a tried and true method done already by cannabis breeders back in 2008.

There are even scientific papers way back in the 80's of how they used different kinds of hormones to promote the cannabis plant to either become male or female, it is an interesting read.

But hey, I paid $200 for top notch genetics, I'm sure the breeders took care of their seed genetic lines of not turning into males/hermies with regardless of the situation.
These genetics are premium and should withstand of any hormone or stress related problems that induces the female plant to become a male.
I have seen breeders that goes through the massive trouble to make sure their seed genetics behaves this way.
Only time will tell if any of my seeds becomes a hermaphrodite. I would be extremely astound if any of the seeds are actually female.

Pink bottle spray is the GA3 solution at 100PPM, sprayed them for the first time on Day 15 (December-27-2021):




Day 20 (January-1-2021):

Oh wow, GA3 really is a life saver, made my seedling into rocket growth mode. All of the other seedlings were not growing at all and after 5 days since the last update, all seedlings died except for this one. It's growing really rapidly after spraying one time with GA3 on the last update:







Day 21 (January-2-2021):

Jeeze... growth after 24 hours since last update...







Day 22 (January-3-2021):





Day 23 (January-4-2021):

Not too sure what it is, the plant's tips is showing some kind of gray spots which later became yellow dried spots.
After skimming through the book "What's Wrong with My Marijuana - By David Deardorff, Kathryn Wadswor"...
It seems that it is more of a nutrient deficiency problem rather than a disease or pest problem.







Day 27 (January-8-2021):

Well the mycorrhizal fungi arrived. I made particularly sure not to get the mycorrhizal fungi product which contains Trichoderma. This is because the two can not be together in one go. The Trichoderma will consume and eradicate the mycorrhizal fungi. I have no idea why companies are mixing the two fungi together and selling it to customers. I guess they just want to make more sales since majority of people does not know about the fact and thinks "more fungi is better".

I found a mycorrhizal fungi product called "DYNOMYCO".
It only contains two mycorrhizal fungi species, Glomus intraradices (A.K.A. Rhizophagus intraradices) and Glomus mosseae (A.K.A. Funneliformis mosseae).

Here is the link where I bought DYNOMYCO from Amazon for $15, a little goes a long way: Dynomyco Amazon

I plan on inoculating DYNOMYCO to the plant today and then 2 weeks after the mycorrhizal infects the roots and is established, I will then inoculate Trichoderma Fungi, this is the proper way two have two different fungi species of mycorrhizal and Trichoderma to coexist in the soil without one trying to consume another. Both will symbiotically work together to help boost growth and protect the cannabis plant.

Day 29 (January-10-2021):

Well, well look what we have going on here... I think this bad girl is really a female plant. At this stage this plant already smells like fire.
I hope I'm not talking too soon about "its" gender. But from my "trained" eyes this is definitely early signs of female pre-flowers.
Lets sees what happens in another few weeks or so... better not see any pollen sacs. . But its no biggie I can still turn the male plant to bud female flowers and produce female seeds using "Ethephon". It induces the male plant to produce female flowers using hormone manipulation and is a non-stress manner protocol.

However I will stick on calling her a girl cause she clearly looks like a female plant as of now. Shes gotten real tall and stretchy... I guess I have to change the grow box into a bigger one and I need to transplant her into a bigger pot, I guess her root mass is covered all over that tiny half cut soda can.

This is an aeroponic setup?? Im confused.

I concur about Aero?
Also if it were me I would remove the cover on that led it will really increase light for free
Nice to see your seeds popping

Goodshit97 said:

This is an aeroponic setup?? Im confused.

Click to expand...

Yes, this grow journal is based on HPA Aero. But since I only have one seed survived and the seed strain is very rare hard to obtain and expensive, I will play safe and grow a mother plant on soil. Once the mother plant has developed with many nodes, I will take cuttings and place them into a true aeroponics system. Hope that explains why you see soil as for now.

In a few weeks you'll see a True high pressure aeroponics system which uses NASA misting nozzle technology.

Goodshit97 said:

This is an aeroponic setup?? Im confused.

Click to expand...

Looks like dirt to me...

Aww thats a bummer. I'm glad you had one survive though.

And I agree with Herbs. Take that cover off. Seedlings dont need a humidity dome in my experience and it creates a perfect enviorment for pathogens to take hold (damping off)

Hoping the one the survivor turns out fire.

Herb & Suds said:

I concur about Aero?
Also if it were me I would remove the cover on that led it will really increase light for free
Nice to see your seeds popping

Click to expand...

Yes it an Aero grow journal, I am trying to show how I obtain the strain from seed, the strain will be a mother plant grown on soil, then I will take cuttings and place them onto an aeroponics system. Thought it would be useful to show the entire experience from Day 1.

That is actually a CFL light bulb, it does not have any cover.

You think at the last photos, the plant is a female?

Tangerine_ said:

Aww thats a bummer. I'm glad you had one survive though.

And I agree with Herbs. Take that cover off. Seedlings dont need a humidity dome in my experience and it creates a perfect enviorment for pathogens to take hold (damping off)

Hoping the one the survivor turns out fire.

Click to expand...

Thanks. I took out the cover few weeks ago and helped a lot. Now I will transplant the plant into a bigger pot and move it to the closet with a fan circulation.

In few weeks I will get cuttings hopefully and place them into the HPA Aeroponics system.

linuxman said:

You think at the last photos, the plant is a female?

Click to expand...

To early to tell...