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Grandma's Spring 2020

T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
Hi everyone!


I have decided to start sharing my growing endeavors.


I figured this way someone might find something useful here, and if I'm lucky I might get some much needed advice!


Not my first time, but I'm not very experienced either, and this is my first time with this strain/cabinet/house/city, so everything will be exquisitely sub-optimal.


As soon as I figure how to post photos they'll start coming, in the meantime, some info:


-I'm growing in a homemade cabinet. It has two chambers, each with dimensions 57cm (W) * 50cm (D) * 158cm (H), plus a third chamber for the extractors and filter. I think it's pretty cool, if there's interest I'll make a thread on the build.


-Lights are 2x HLG65 Quantum Boards, one on each compartment.


-Plants are all from seeds I made two or three years ago. They are all F1 of Pakistan Chitral Kush (Ace Seeds) x Skunk #1 (Sensi seeds)


I hope everyone enjoys watching them grow as much as I do, it helps a lot with the quarantine!
 
T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
This is how the cabinet looks from the outside. The idea was to make it look as much as possible as an Ikea kind of thing. Multiple people have seen it and have actually entered the room without noticing, it's pretty stealthy I would say.






Doors open:





Each cabinet has a 10cm tube fan (I think they are like 100-110cfm) extractor. They are housed in this very imperfect, partially hand-cut MDF boxes:






The tube goes out the other side, and connects to a T joint, each extractor blowing into one of the sides of the T. The air then goes out and through a carbon filter that's sitting between the two boxes.






The air then exits the filter, and has to find it's way, between the boxes and sound insulation and cables, to these three holes I made in the roof:


 
T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
picture.php
 
T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
Hi @Medfinder ! Thanks for welcoming me! Welcome to the thread :) I'm glad to know someone's looking!


Is there anyway to post pictures in their big format without having to open them from the album and copy the BB code?
 
T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
I would have liked to have a thread going from seeds to harvest, but at the beginning I was so paranoid I didn't even take pictures, and it still took me a while to feel comfortable with the idea of posting this stuff online. Anyway, we're gonna just jump to the current situation in the cabinet.
 
Medfinder

Medfinder

Chemon 91
TheGrandmaGrows said:
Hi @Medfinder ! Thanks for welcoming me! Welcome to the thread :) I'm glad to know someone's looking!


Is there anyway to post pictures in their big format without having to open them from the album and copy the BB code?
Click to expand...

Start posting in the treads here in the forum...51 posts should unlock private messages and photo posting..

Hrres a pic of my Chemon 91 resized.. i open another page with the uploaded pic cut paste and delete the a certain portion of the bb code...there are other tools as u use more of the site


picture.php
 
T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
In the past I haven't defoliated much, but I used to live in the desert. Now I'm in what must be one of the most humid places in the world, so I have been researching defoliation quite a bit lately.


I've had very high humidity throughout the grow, and I have defoliated very aggressively a few times during veg. That I had done before, but I had never done it during flower, thinking that the shock would make the plant loose time which cannot be recovered once in the flowering phase.



I'm not really taking sides in what seems to be one of the most controversial topics surrounding cannabis indoor growing, but I have decided to defoliate because I'd rather loose a few grams than the whole harvest to mold etc.


I didn't want to risk my whole harvest at once, so after I decided to do a hard stripping during week three, I decided to first test it on a single plant a few days before to make sure my girls are ok with this kind of abuse.


I defoliated the girl in the middle of the three in the left chamber for this purpose, on day 10 of flowering. I was conscious that they were still stretching and thus I would have probably lost a bit of vertical growth, but again I considered it worth it.


Here are some pics of both sides after day 10.


Right side:


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Left side:


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T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
Because I had a big population of plants to start with (30+, the seeds were old and regular, so I popped more thinking of low germination rates and males), and because of them being regular, I waited quite a bit before going into flowering. I also used to grow in spaces extremely constrained in height, so I wanted to make use of my new setup and let them fill in vertically more than usual. This is why I started flowering when the right side plants had already filled 100% a bit back. The left side was lagging a bit behind, and I achieved a quite lower homogeneity in the canopy.



Anyway, the fact is that I didn't really account for all the branching of this strain when thinking about these strategies. Except for the girl in the front of the right cabinet, who has a bigger internodal spacing and always grew faster and thus took up more space to herself, all the other plants are quite crowded.



Right side before defoliation:


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Bud in the right side, to show the state of bud formation before the defoliation:



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Right side after all girls got stripped, on day 14 of 12/12:


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Looking back I can say I left a bit too much upper foliage at that time:


picture.php
 
T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
My intention was to do the defoliation on day 16/17 in one side and in day 21 on the other. After reading up a lot and looking at some videos, I decided to try different moments myself to see the difference. Shot out to GreenGenes Garden in youtube, very enjoyable videos with lots of sexy plants, and helped me be at ease with the idea of heavy flowering stage defoliation.


Anyway, at around day 14 I saw this leaves looking ugly/falling:


picture.php



I've never had any mold problems or anything, so I didn't really know how it'd look, but seeing those leaves and knowing that the right side was getting on the high 80s in RH pushed me to defoliate all the right side on day 14. When I started flowering I separated the girls based on size, so the right size, which had the bigger girls, has always been more crowded and has had higher humidity. The defoliation I gave them in the right side included taking out about 25 or 30 small shoots that didn't even have a flower on them and were obstructing airflow/light.



After another day, the situation started to get crazy in the left side as well, so I decided to not risk the whole harvest out of greed, and defoliated the whole left side as well instead of waiting a few days more to allow more bud formation to happen before the trauma.



picture.php
 
T

TheGrandmaGrows

Member
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]That last picture is the left side after defoliating on day 15 or 16, right when the lights turned off.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The plants all reacted quite well, given the conditions.
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]However, this didn't solve my humidity problem. Both cabinets were still getting into the high 80s, and I knew that was going to be a problem down the line, so I started stressing out about the whole situation not knowing what to change in the setup to solve the issue.
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In the following days I took a few more leaves trying to reduce evapotranspiration in order to reduce humidity further.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Then it struck me. I was the one causing all that excess humidity!
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]This grow has been a constant process of adaptation and improvement of the setup (expected for a first grow in this cabinet).
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]When I made the soundproofing boxes and setup the filter in the end of the ducting (one 100cfm fan extracting air from each side, then both go through a T connection and push those 200cfm through the filter), I was worried that the boxes might be compressing the fans a bit, thus maybe reducing their efficiency, and also that the drop in pressure from the filter would be quite higher because of the pushing air instead of pulling through it.
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Also being in such a small space forced me to have more duct bends than I would have liked.My solution for this was... to add a bunch of fans inside!
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]My reasoning was that air movement would help with growth, also because with such high humidity the plants were not really drinking much. I'm using organic soil, so I suppose this is a bit less of a problem because hopefully nutrients are available all the time anyway, but I figured if they drank more they would develop a bit faster anyway.
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The fact is, as usual, I overdid it! I added about 200cfm in each side, pointing directly at the canopy from below. Of course, this was causing insane levels of evapotranspiration, raising the humidity through the roof and making me fatten my electricity bill by having the dehumidifier 24/7, and specially making me worry over the whole situation constantly, visualizing how I would loose my whole harvest to mold (I lost a good harvest in the past due to nutrient burn with organic soil, which means I saw my plants slowly die in front of me, and that was some of the saddest times, so this was really worrying me, as you may imagine).[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Well, of course once I realized I took out all of the computer fans I had blowing on the plants, and took a couple of them on each side and connected them to the extraction in series, knowing that fans in series don't add in cfm, but do improve the ability to push through stuff, if I understand correctly, meaning the airflow will never raise above the biggest fan in the line (in this case 100cfm), but the drops in efficiency caused by the ducting, filter, and boxes, might get alleviated.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I don't know if there is an affordable way to measure airflow, but my hand-meter says airflow has improved quite a lot in the extractions. Humidity is now stable in the lower 70s, and I'm planning on buying a more potent dehumidifier to lower it further during late veg. Also, humidity levels should start dropping a bit around here, which should help.[/FONT]
 
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