Diary PCBuds mini-grow

[PCBuds]

So there's plenty wrong with my window plant...

It's cold, and dry, and my plant is twisted up, wrinkled, pale, and has a purple stem.
She is getting too much light with no dark period (except for when the lights are off during the day, but she still gets daylight.)


But I figure that she'll be OK.


I am giving her tons of light, figuring that she will grow accustomed to it and I'm hoping that the bright lights will keep her short and bushy so that she doesn't outgrow the window sill and hit the ceiling.

We'll see how it goes.
I think she looks OK. She's not exactly thriving, but she doesn't look like she's dying.

I'm going to toughen her up. Lol

 

[PCBuds]

yeah, sounds like a completely different calibration system. Mine is set up to use solutions of 4, 7, and 10. Maybe its a European thing?

Hmm ??

Well, as long as your instructions say to use 4, 7, and 10 then you should be fine.


I'm glad I didn't buy the liquid stuff.
I just noticed all this.

 

[PCBuds]

The closet plant looks OK, but she's loaded with foxtails...
She's 11 weeks old today.

She's got a lot of dead leaves so I decided to remove them.

 

[PCBuds]

I was bending the branches to reach in and I split a branch.
I wasn't pushing on it very hard.

I fixed it. Lol

 

[PCBuds]

I still don't know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to take a sample from deeper inside the cola to check the trichomes.

 

[PCBuds]

 

[f-e]

I thought all meters used 7 then either 4 or 10 to set the slope. A search shows 6.86 is out there though. I bet it's a simple salt.

4 lamps around a seedling is a bit much. People use 2 or 3 per foot. The meter says 35,000 which for that meter is 1050ppfd.

 

[PCBuds]

It looks like mostly clear, but I suck at trying to judge the trichs.

So either way she needs more time, but I'm almost positive that she will keep sprouting more foxtails until I chop her.

I figure that I could probably just turn the lights down for two weeks and the new growth will stop and it will mature? (I've never tried that, but I figure it might get rid of the foxtails?)

Or I could just cut them all off when I trim the plant.

Or I could just ignore them like I've always done and just smoke it the way it is, the new growth won't be as potent, but it just gets blended in.

Or I could just let her grow for another month or more to see what happens.
She'll start sporting huge dreadlocks.
Flowers on top of flowers, on top of flowers.

My only concern with just letting her grow is that the flowers underneath may get "over ripe" but I'm not convinced that will happen or if there even really is such a thing?
(I remember reading that the buds turn into CBN after they turn amber and the plant can become garbage if it goes past ripe, but I'm not convinced about that.)


The good thing about just letting her grow is that all her energy now is going into flowers and resin, and she's huge now. She's pumping out resin by the gallon. Lol

 

[PCBuds]

I thought all meters used 7 then either 4 or 10 to set the slope. A search shows 6.86 is out there though. I bet it's a simple salt.

Yeah it is.
The 9.18 is just borax.

I was trying to be a cheap ass and just buy my own buffer powders off the shelf, but I couldn't find out what they use for the 6.86 so I bought more buffer powder packs.

It sucks to spend $5 for 2 cents worth of borax. Lol

4 lamps around a seedling is a bit much. People use 2 or 3 per foot. The meter says 35,000 which for that meter is 1050ppfd.

Oh Yeah !!
I'm Way Overpowered !!

It's what I do !!

You guys have your LST methods and I have mine.
Light Stress Training. lol

Here's what I think is going on...
She has so much light energy available that she is reducing her chlorophyll so she is pale and doesn't absorb as much light.
And she's warping and bending her leaves to hide from the light.

She's also curling her leaves to help create an air cushion to help keep the stoma from drying out because of the 30% humidity.
And she's keeping herself small to reduce her overall profile.

I think the roots are flourishing because she doesn't need to waste time and energy growing leaves and making chlorophyll above ground.

I'm tempted to dig her up to check her roots, but I'm trying to LITFA. LOL



She almost has two full sets of leaves, so I dumped the tray and refilled it with nuted water at about half strength.
It might be a bit early, but she has to wick the nutes up through the media to get at it, and that will take some time.

 

[aliceklar]

I was bending the branches to reach in and I split a branch.
I wasn't pushing on it very hard.








I fixed it. Lol

She'll be fine

 

[f-e]

I have seen the UNI grow shows where they talk about these light levels straight away. With seeds carrying a lot of food, and more at the root, any unhappiness is likely that 30% RH that we know is very low. Looking at the leaf as a bit of wet leather, it's going to curl towards the side that looses moisture the quickest. This can't aid the plant getting the food or air it wants, so it will be forced to shut down to some degree.

Do you have another one of them plastic trays it's stood in? One over the top would increase the RH around the cut, as it's stood in all that damp substrate. It need not be sealed, though you could mess about a bit as there would be room for an RH gauge under there.


The main plant will keep putting out flourishes of new growth if the food or more often the light level is too high. The main body of the plant looks done to me. Pulling more feed through it might not improve it's flavour. It's had quite a few weeks now. I can't imagine it doing anything more. You could reduce the day length if you want to see it all finish, but I'm leaning towards chopping it down.

 

[PCBuds]

I have seen the UNI grow shows where they talk about these light levels straight away. With seeds carrying a lot of food, and more at the root, any unhappiness is likely that 30% RH that we know is very low. Looking at the leaf as a bit of wet leather, it's going to curl towards the side that looses moisture the quickest. This can't aid the plant getting the food or air it wants, so it will be forced to shut down to some degree.

Do you have another one of them plastic trays it's stood in? One over the top would increase the RH around the cut, as it's stood in all that damp substrate. It need not be sealed, though you could mess about a bit as there would be room for an RH gauge under there.

I did this...

It's working.

I did have the hygrometer sitting on the soil at the edge of the planter earlier and it was reading around 60%, so the soil is evaporating enough to bring up the RH, but the RH an inch above the soil, where the plant is, could have been much lower.

Now the moisture is held within the dome.

I've got 4 holes around the circumference with one at the top.
I'm wondering how many holes I should have?
I figure once the lights come on and it heats up, there will be some convection to bring in some CO2.

The main plant will keep putting out flourishes of new growth if the food or more often the light level is too high. The main body of the plant looks done to me. Pulling more feed through it might not improve it's flavour. It's had quite a few weeks now. I can't imagine it doing anything more. You could reduce the day length if you want to see it all finish, but I'm leaning towards chopping it down.

I set my lights to 12/12 and will let her go for a week or so.
The trichomes don't have much amber yet, so I want to give her more time anyway.

I kinda want to finish her up so I can get to work on the closet and install the new contactor and investigate the current one.

I also want to raise the lower rung of strips because the are below the planter, and also add a row of 5000k strips at the bottom as well.

I do have some issues with my current contactor but it's not just a bad connection in the contactor.
There is also some bad connections in my wiring making the walls different brightness.

I was swapping wires around and realized that I have a few things going on.
I've got the circulation fans blowing unevenly around the closet cooling off some strips more than others, which is also affecting the brightness.

It's not that big of a deal but the plant grew up leaning because of the uneven light, otherwise I would just ignore it.

It's too bad that I didn't have the front and back walls on one circuit and the side walls on the other circuit, then the difference would be balanced and my plant would have grown straight instead of leaning towards the brighter corner.

 

[PCBuds]

f-e ...

This potentiometer is fricken annoying!!
It's as twitchy as Hell!!

I was wondering if I could desensitize it by adding a series resistor before the potentiometer and a resistor in parallel across the potentiometer.

I'm thinking that if both the resistors are set at about the resistance of what the potentiometer is at to get a 4.2 amp output, then I should be able to get more sweep out of the dial to adjust the current?

Does that make sense?
I think that it should work, but it's been 40 years since I took electronics. Lol

 

[brickweeder]

is that an audio pot. or linear pot.?

 

[PCBuds]

Yeah, it's working...

The readings are a little erroneous because the hygrometer is sitting on the damp soil and I don't know what kind of scale it uses to generate its numbers, but I think I might need more holes in the dome?

I'll see what the numbers look like when the lights come on.

 

[PCBuds]

is that an audio pot. or linear pot.?

I don't know?

It came with one of my power supplies as a secondary remote voltage adjustment.

I didn't take any resistance readings of the potentiometer.

I know that I don't need it to go from 0 ohms to infinity, but I don't know if it does?

I figure that I need to get a resistance reading for when my supply is putting out my minimum and maximum current.

 

[Frosty Nuggets]

Well done putting a dome over the seedling, I would say you have enough holes in it.
Your closet plant could come down now or you could wait until all the leaves die off.

 

[PCBuds]

is that an audio pot. or linear pot.?

Thinking about it now, I should have done a parallel and/or series resistor with the original potentiometer that came with my power supply.

I bought a 24 volt PSU that was 10% adjustable, but it wouldn't adjust down far enough for my 19.5 volt LED strips, so I replaced my potentiometer with a spare that worked but it's probably a 0 to infinity one.

And I have no idea what I did with the original potentiometer. Shit !!

I'll see if I can find it so I can at least measure it...

 

[PCBuds]

Well done putting a dome over the seedling, I would say you have enough holes in it.
Your closet plant could come down now or you could wait until all the leaves die off.

I'll give it a while and wait to see more amber trichs, then chop it.

I've got lots of work to do on the closet now. Shit.

Maybe I can just spray down my potentiometer with contact cleaner to make it less annoying. Lol

 

[PCBuds]

Well done putting a dome over the seedling, I would say you have enough holes in it.

I didn't want to fuss with the window plant too much because it's pretty much just an ornament for the kitchen and I don't want to turn her into a fussy diva.

If it starts needing more attention than my cat, then I'm just going to chop it. Lol