Zen master's northern light-n-blue venom grow journal

THIS IS JUST AN FYI:
I think that the next mother plant i do I'm gonna let it get about six or seven nodes high and then i'm going to top it. Reason being is that i noticed that with all of the heads on the canopy all of the branches get more light, thus producing thicker stalks. As opposed to growing it the traditional way and taking cuttings of smaller side branches. here's a little side by side to show you what i mean.
The first is the roots of the thick stalk(WOW), the second is a cutting of a thinner side branch, like i said decent but no awards.

The difference is definately noticeable between the 2. I remember reading in Al B's thread about cloning to take cuttings from the thick stalks and they'll succesfully clone quicker and with greater success rate so that makes sense.

Are you vegging with a MH light or flouros. My BV is taken forever to start going and am wondering if the silly CFLs I'm using aren't cutting it.

Well to be honest right now i'm using my 400 hps. The only reason is because i had bought one of those hortilux blue daylight bulbs for like 96 bucks and the old ass ballast that i have kept getting too hot and i think it blew the bulb. Luckily the hydro shop i visit gave me another one for free(being a loyal customer goes a long way with your local shop owner). Needless to say i refuse to potentially blow another bulb with that ballast, so i'm using my hps till this weekend. And just a side note: Dude if you decide to get an mh man the hortilux blue daylight(6500k) bulb is the bomb man, i have personally used about three other brands, and this one is just amazing. And for flowering the hortilux hps are very good bulbs. Yes they cost a little bit more, but the difference is amazing.

Now as far as your other question. Dude i've seen a few guys in here do some marvelous things with cfl's, but most of the time they have a whole crap load of lights, and they are using a whole lot of different nutes, and they are tottally dailed in on their nutes,...all of them. You know, a tsp of this , 5ml ofthat two tablespoons of this, a cup of molasses,some of this some of that, and so on and so on. I mean damn, i thought we were doing this to save money. But hey to each his own. Me personally i'll use those two floros for my clones only, cause hey we are trying to mimic the sun as much as possible here. So unless you have about 15-20 lights around about two or three plants then yea i think its the cfl's, just my opinion ok. I just don't think they kick out enough penetrating light. Yea they are bright as hell, but just in that spot that's why "i" think those guys need to use so many. Where as one little 250wt light can light up a room. Of course only about a 3x3 space is all it can grow, but the whole room will be lit up, not just whatever part of the room the cfl's are in.

I gotta tell you this though my bv is about three weeks into flower. Ok, before any pistils started forming i would rub my fingers on the little hairs on the stalk and and quite honestly, dude it had the funkiest smell, not skunky. But like a funky old leather shoe, so for the past two weeks i been wondering what i was gonna need to do for odor control. Well since then the pistils have formed, and last night i was looking through the leaves checking for bugs, burns, and what not. And when i rubbed the pistils and smelled my fingers. Holy jesus, dude it smelled so freaking sweet, i mean really like i unwrapped a piece of that cream flavored hard candy . I mean it didn't smell like blueberries per say, but more like those blue popsicles, like candy. I mean wow, really.
Now the sativa nl has some what of a spicy cinnamon smell, and the indica nl really had no smell at all. I mean i rubbed several bud sites and nothing, a definite good choice for odor issues.


Peace!!!
-zen-

So Butters. What made you go with the cfl's. Space, heat, cost???

ZEN MASTER said:

So Butters. What made you go with the cfl's. Space, heat, cost???

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Cost and availabilty. I basically just take 6 spiral cfls (daylight spectrum), put them in 3 light splitters, and then plug them all into a power strip Finally got my lazy butt to make a make-shift reflector for it too (crappy pic cuz i forgot to turn off the lights). .

I forget how many watts/lumens each bulb is so I don't even know how many lumens I got in there.

I should be using the aerogarden hood lamp but it can be a bit of a pain working with that thing and it's design makes it impossible to fit in more veg lighting.

The other pic is my BV at about 2 weeks. Transplanted to coco about a week ago (started in a humidity dome). No nutes yet but it's time to start. Struggling with some of the environmental factors, mostly humidity. That 59% you see is after a full day of a 50 gallon dehumidifier in that room on high.

And with a scrog grow, this veg is gonna take some time under those lights. But at this point, MH may just not be an option for me. Still gotta get TONS of stuff to get for this grow.

Last pic has nothing to do with my grow but I just couldn't stop laughing when I saw it

If i may be a little nosey, what all do you need? Because maybe i can offer some alternative suggestions, maybe, i don't know. But dude i know i dont have a huge grow area, but i do have more available space than alot of the guys and girls around here(a 10x11x8 room used for absolutely nothing) and i dont think i even invested $600 to get it up and running and that's with the lights(not the bulbs), veg closet,pots, everything. And, it 's a possiblility it's because i'm a cheap mother#@%$*!, but i would like to think it's because i just refuse to break myself in an effort to save money, you know. So hey, holler at me.

Hey check it out i did a little digging and i'm looking at the lights in your pic and i think that those four cool bulbs shoot out anywhere from1600-2100 lumens, and that big one more than likely about 2800 lumens. So you are probably getting somewhere around 9200-11,200 lumens, that's just a good guess. But look here i'm going to try and send a link with this msg.http://www.greenmanspage.com/guides/ If it goes through check out the lighting types and intensities section, very informative, for me at least. Actually the entire page is real good. I keep it in my favorites, and i printed the entire page, and saved it on a disc just for back up. So let's hope it goes through.

Hey. Thanks for that link. I had been to various specific pages within that site a bunch of times but never the main page there. Oh boy, another site to read up on. As for my grow, I finally got my lazy behind to start a grow journal and added it to my sig.

Gotta say I'm liking the coco medium and the rather hands off approach to it. Just water here and there and it all looks good. That last hydro grow would eat up about 45 minutes a day for me. Ugh. Still tempted to go ebb n flow on a sea of green grow. But that'll be down the line.

That's what i love about it, but 45 mins. Day, damn. You know when first decided that i wanted to grow indoors i was real hyped up on using some tank basd type of hydro(nft,dwc,ebb-n-flow among others. But everytime i would go to th ehydro store for some info on a different type of system, the guy at the store would always go on, an on about this coco stuff, now i won't lie it did fall on deaf ears. But the more i calculated and compared cost, the more the guy started to make some sense. And since i have been on this site iv'e learned that it is somewhat time consuming. I'd rather spend 45 mins. In my room smoking a "j" and looking at my plants, you know. But i do want to try that aqua mist system. If you've seen those"see more buds" series
you'd know what i meant, but if not
http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpOl3uqn7Oc, OR JUST SEARCH "SEE MORE BUDS" ON YOUTUBE. IT IS PRETTY COOL, BUT THAT'S ABOUT THE ONLY TANK BASED SYSTEM THAT I WOULD TRY.


PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

Btw here are some updated pics of my blue venom.

wow i must say very nice setup, i could tell your hands on. i will be checking this out those are some great strains, good luck

ZEN MASTER said:

Btw here are some updated pics of my blue venom.

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Now that is looking nice.

Well i got good news. i was able to wrangle up on a metal ballast for my veg closet, so out goes the 400 hps and in goes the 400wt hortilux blue bulb. man i am so ready to get these clones going now. just for fun i'm going to put up the pics of when they first went into veg up until now with the hps(about 2 weeks), and we'll see how they look in another two weeks with the hortilux blue.

fFYI if you are in need of a ballast, but don't have the dough here's a suggestion. Find an electrical parts store, there they have ballast kits from 250wt allthe way up to 1000wt metal halide or sodium ballast, some of them might even have the housing for the kit. now i already had the housing(i'll try to put up a pic)but the actual ballast kit cost me $67 total. that was for a 400wt metal halide kit, the 400wt sodium was like $75. better yet a 1000wt metal ballast was like $105, and the 1000wt hps was $120 something, brand new. and if you don't know how to put it together in the housing, more than likely they would be glad to show you since you are buying it from them. now i did tell them that my place was broken into and i wanted to put up some serious lights in my back yard. because the first thing they asked was "Son what are you gonna need this big 'ol light for", and i was ready with a small back story just to seal the deal. now they are magnetic, but hell for a magnetic 400wt ballast in the store is going to be almost $175 at the least, not to mention the cost of an electronic ballast, so i only paid $67 brand new, so i'm satisfied. but yea, IT"S ON BABY!!!!!!!
The black is the hps.
The white is the metal halide.


PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

Nice MacGuyverness there Zen.

For God's sakes man first your growin weed and now you're making lights!

Can't believe they actually ask you what you'll need the lights for!

How many products do we buy where they do shit like that! Can't remember the last time I went to the store, bought a big ole role of toilet paper, and had the clerk ask me "so what'll you need all this toilet paper for?"

You run an electric parts store and you're getting much needed business...DON'T ASK ANY QUESTIONS!!!

That was a HUGE concern of mine the 1st time I went into a hydro shop man. Similar to the 1st time I bought condoms...I was ready for ANYTHING!

Sure enough, they didn't ask any questions (with the hydro stuff and with the condoms...not sold at the same stores).

But that electrical store worker needs a smackin'. Good thing you had a cover story ready. How the heck would anyone come up with a story on the spot in that situation without preparation.

"Ugh. I just like to...ugh...see a lot of...ugh...stuff. Like in the dark and...stuff".

Well done my friend.

What do your temps look like in those rooms?

(Butters) said:

What do your temps look like in those rooms?

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well my friend i reside in texas, enough said. the foecast for the next four days is 99, 102, 100, and 101. on top of that the house i live in is like 60 years old, so that should tell you you wht kind of insulation is in the house. so with the lights off(between 5:45am-6:45pm) it stays around 78 degrees, and when the lights are on its between 84-90 degrees. but as it gets around 9 to 10 at night its starts to drop to about 81-82 degrees, and my humidity STAYS between 43-51%. check your thread i left some ideas that may help on your humidity problem.
btw the toilet paper thing was hilarious. but you gotta expect questions like that when you go to places like that, or home depot, or where ever you go to buy some DIY stuff. i would "like" to think that they are just asking so they can help me a little bit better, but i have noticed that when i wasn't prepared for any questions, and stumbled on telling them what i had planned for whatever, that they seemed to put 2 and 2 together. but maybe that's just my internal paranoia kicking in.(NOTE TO SELF:dont get high before you go to buy DIY equipment for your illegal grow,just a note.) anyway i'm out. gotta look up and try to find out why some of my clones are a lime bright greenish color, instead of regular or dark green. got any ideas, holla at me.


PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

Brilliant "cheapo" style.

We're up to around $240 an oz. here in New England. Granted, that's good smoke, but still...YOUCH!!! Supply and demand I guess (and of course the grower to distributor to dealer mark ups of course).

240!!! DAMN!!!!so 120 for a half, 60 for a quarter. that is outrageous! it would have to be the most exellent smoke in the world. oh my god man i think i might have to stop if it was that much down here. but i guess for quality's sake i probably would go ahead and buy it, if i wasn't doing anything for myself that is, just to be honest. but again 240, damn "ok, shit, I'll take it,..................but can you put a little k-y jelly on it first." LOL.


PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

ZEN MASTER said:

I'll take it,..................but can you put a little k-y jelly on it first." LOL.


PEACE!!!
-ZEN-

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LMFAO!

Permission to borrow this line and use it frequently?