garlicnaan
Member
First time posting, long time lurking on this fabulous website. I'm a pretty concise fellow (sometimes too concise) so ask questions, give advice, tell me I'm singlehandedly ruining marijuana for everyone, what have you. This is mostly just a personal record of a semi-massive undertaking, anything else that comes with is just biscuits on the gravy. SO, that being said...
I have recently come into a unique opportunity to manage a legal grow. I provided some advice and assistance to the owner here throughout the year, but they have found running a full scale operation with absolutely zero prior experience is an incredible challenge. The first harvest was very good quality with abysmal yield, but predictably so. These plants were kept in a shed for several months with inadequate light and ventilation, moved into a greenhouse to flower late in the season, moved inside to more inadequate lighting after a week of ~40 degree temperatures, fed only a handful of times with inconsistent soil additives, etc etc. Basically, they were his Lewis and Clark expedition of uncharted territory, where he was expecting more of a futuristic metropolis right off the bat. So he has gone to pursue more fruitful ventures in his previous line of work and is letting me keep this afloat. Although I am nowhere near the level of knowledge I need, I have grown a few times on a very small scale, and have poured through information for months at a time.
I did not develop the growing infrastructure, so bear with me and try not to have a stroke from what you see. I have a year to redo most of this before license renewals. I do give the owner much much credit for pulling through the license process itself with nothing other than his own blood and sweat, he basically fabbed this whole thing together with things that were lying around his property.
The Basics
Everything is housed in a large 2 story log cabin which makes temperature stability a breeze. Vegging/clones upstairs, flowering downstairs. It's a little awkward with the light schedule, but from a safety/efficiency standpoint it seems the less heavy loads to carry up and down the giant flight of stairs the better. Growing area walls and floor have been covered in 3mm PE film and some reflective bubble wrap stuff. Water is pretty hard but pH neutral from a large well pump.
FLOWERING
Soil- local organic indoor potting blended with kelp and guano, various size containers
6 600W HPS (probably overkill) over 2 4'x8' plastice lined beds
2 6 inch 440cfm can fans circulating from top to bottom
Temperature stays around 70 degrees, 40-50% humidity
Most of the plants have already been harvested and are now curing but there are still 20 survivors from the first generation, as you can probably tell they have been through a bit of a struggle.
VEG
3 600W MH over 2 beds, going to order some T5s and T8s for the babies and moms.
1 1000W MH over the mothers right now
Everything has fed with various molasses/guano/kelp/alfalfa/worm casting tea blends depending on the stage of growth. Feedings have been inconsistent throughout this cycle but I plan on every other watering once they are established.
There has been no pH monitoring or buffering! I could be wrong but it seems like there are definitely some pH issues on top of the nutrient problems.
If anyone is still with me here stay tuned, I'll be uploading pics today. I'm not prettying anything up beforehand, just to have a reference of where I started.
I have recently come into a unique opportunity to manage a legal grow. I provided some advice and assistance to the owner here throughout the year, but they have found running a full scale operation with absolutely zero prior experience is an incredible challenge. The first harvest was very good quality with abysmal yield, but predictably so. These plants were kept in a shed for several months with inadequate light and ventilation, moved into a greenhouse to flower late in the season, moved inside to more inadequate lighting after a week of ~40 degree temperatures, fed only a handful of times with inconsistent soil additives, etc etc. Basically, they were his Lewis and Clark expedition of uncharted territory, where he was expecting more of a futuristic metropolis right off the bat. So he has gone to pursue more fruitful ventures in his previous line of work and is letting me keep this afloat. Although I am nowhere near the level of knowledge I need, I have grown a few times on a very small scale, and have poured through information for months at a time.
I did not develop the growing infrastructure, so bear with me and try not to have a stroke from what you see. I have a year to redo most of this before license renewals. I do give the owner much much credit for pulling through the license process itself with nothing other than his own blood and sweat, he basically fabbed this whole thing together with things that were lying around his property.
The Basics
Everything is housed in a large 2 story log cabin which makes temperature stability a breeze. Vegging/clones upstairs, flowering downstairs. It's a little awkward with the light schedule, but from a safety/efficiency standpoint it seems the less heavy loads to carry up and down the giant flight of stairs the better. Growing area walls and floor have been covered in 3mm PE film and some reflective bubble wrap stuff. Water is pretty hard but pH neutral from a large well pump.
FLOWERING
Soil- local organic indoor potting blended with kelp and guano, various size containers
6 600W HPS (probably overkill) over 2 4'x8' plastice lined beds
2 6 inch 440cfm can fans circulating from top to bottom
Temperature stays around 70 degrees, 40-50% humidity
Most of the plants have already been harvested and are now curing but there are still 20 survivors from the first generation, as you can probably tell they have been through a bit of a struggle.
VEG
3 600W MH over 2 beds, going to order some T5s and T8s for the babies and moms.
1 1000W MH over the mothers right now
Everything has fed with various molasses/guano/kelp/alfalfa/worm casting tea blends depending on the stage of growth. Feedings have been inconsistent throughout this cycle but I plan on every other watering once they are established.
There has been no pH monitoring or buffering! I could be wrong but it seems like there are definitely some pH issues on top of the nutrient problems.
If anyone is still with me here stay tuned, I'll be uploading pics today. I'm not prettying anything up beforehand, just to have a reference of where I started.
Luckily saved 4 white widow females that are springing back nicely, and will be mothers here in a month or 2. Forgive me if this is confusing, I can clarify anything. Posting this between setting up the transplant, tie downs, and cleaning up/organizing. The black PE film lightproofing between floors is pretty rough, it works fine but falls apart every couple of days. This had been remedied with excessive helpings of duct tape, lol. I'll be redoing that this weekend. 
