Chevy's blumatized organic soil LED mini grow

[Chevy cHaze]

The terror, the terror...

The terror, the terror...

Dear Cannabis Enthusiasts,
today I bring you terrible news from my little tent.
As I'm mostly absent during my grows, desaster is never far.
I believe by planning correctly and using common sense I have been able to steer clear of any major catastrophies so far, but during my last stint away it caught up with me...
Because of cold winter temps I have, once again, used my trusty little heater to warm the tent sufficiently for flowering to finish off while away. Or so I thought.
Temps were warmer than expected and maybe I set the temp too high, but instead of being away for three weeks and coming back to a perfectly timed end of flower and harvest time I came back to the Sahara desert, with all plants dead.
The res had run dry very quickly in the heat and what normally can last up to a month (see my last 4-week stint away)maybe lasted for a week or ten days.

temp log show temps in the mid 30C for most of the time and RH between 10-20%. In the UK. You go figure...





Sad times not only because I only have a couple jars of smoke left, but because the Acapulco Gold and the Qleaner I've grown very fond of are now gone as well.
Behold, the horror:



The coco is bone dry...Looking at the buds I'm thinking they must have stopped developing roughly 3 weeks before calculated finish time (as I've flowered these exact plants out the round before) Everything's crispy fried and brittle oh no!
Tried to smoke some last night and while it certainly does get you high like a proper sativa, it tastes like hay and the effects are too unrefined to consider smoking more of it.
I'll make the whole harvest into oil shortly.


Not posting this for pity, but to show another facet of growing cannabis that rarely is presented here: How to fuck up in a major way.
You play, you pay.


I've now invested in a way bigger res and will continue to report about my ongoing ongoings in the North.


Next seeds are in the root riot plugs:
- Bubblegum/TH seeds
- Acapulco Gold/ Barney's Farm
- Blueberry (don't know where from)
- Purple Urkle X Chem 91 (from mack10!)
- Sour Blueberry/ humbold seed company


Fuck Fuck Fuck but the show must go on.


Cheers
CC

 

[GOT_BUD?]

Ouch. That sucks.

Oh well, own it, learn from it, move on is all you can do.

 

[Boocoodinkydow]

Sorry to hear of your plight, Chevy. We absentee gardeners are always just a step away from disaster but for many of us it’s roll the dice or don’t garden!!

I, too, found you can’t out guess Mother Nature. While away for the holidays, I retarded my exhaust fan speed in an attempt to maintain some cabinet heat in the face of expected cold weather. Instead, the temps went unseasonably high and rained like a bitch resulting in a loss of several fine colas to bud rot.

Feel your pain,bro!

 

[Facelesdoll]

Almost did similar without being absent. For heaters you need to dial them in and hot glue\superglue a tab and block so they can't be turned past dialed in. Sorry to hear

 

[Fitzera]

It can be a catch 22....run a small res and potentially run dry or run a larger res and come back to a flood!!

 

[Hermanthegerman]

That´s bad Alter, but as you wrote, the show must go on! Good luck for the future.

 

[Chevy cHaze]

Danke Hermann!
The seeds seem all to have sprouted well, some have already grown their roots through the plugs so they are showing.
Update coming soon


Cheers,
CC

 

[El Tigre]

Hi Chevy, sorry for the inconvenience occurred... shit happens!
Looking forward for the next round

 

[Chevy cHaze]

New Round

New Round

The next round is in the pipeline.
Bunch of different seeds from different sources.
At the time I sprout the seeds I mix soil and amendments to let it cook until the seedlings are ready to be transplanted after normally ca 2 weeks.


The amendments are :

• the old soil from the last run plus perlite
• fresh worm castings
• dolomite lime
• blood meal
• bone meal
• kelp meal
• liquid karma to water

Here are the seedlings:




And here transplanted just a week later


This time there was not enough time at hand, so I had to transplant extra early. Not great, let's see if/how it goes.
The absent gardener crosses fingers.

 

[Chevy cHaze]

Update Flower Day8

Update Flower Day8

Hi all,
All the ladies doing fine despite the low temps. The Sour Blueberry has some severe lockouts but getting better now that I adjusted the heating.
I was gone for almost a month, as you remember I left just after early transplanting the seedlings.
So one month of really low night temps and that also caused the relatively stunted growth.
They have been in flower for a bit over a week now and so far no sign of sex on the two PUxCem91 which were the only regular seeds in this run.


The bushiness is not a bad thing in my tiny tent, but now I can hopefully keep the temps right for the rest of the flower cycle.


The lockouts on the Sour Blueberry are showing, but already getting better after 24h of nicer temps.


Cheers
CC

 

[f-e]

That's a bugger about the heater. Time to invest in one with a digital thermostat. Or buy a thermostat wall wart. The height of cheapness, is an old central heating room thermostat, when someone has a new boiler fitted. You can chop an extension lead in half, to give it a plug and socket. While it's a bi-metal strip like the one found in a heater, it has a preheating coil that improves accuracy enough to be able to have a calibrated dial.

I got a 500w ceramic heater for Christmas, with digital display and a remote... But it reset's if there is a power failure. Worth knowing before you buy one, that.

It's good that you are making leds work with compost, and doing so to such a standard. Even a reveg... that's shocking.

1500 lumen, or say 2000 with the cover off. 10 over 4 foot, 11 foot in a meter, say 50,000 lumen. It seems to be hard to get more than half of them on the canopy, 25000/65ish gives maybe 400ppfd. Or my struggles to turn Lumens at the light, to lux at the plant, are not shared by everybody. That is good with compost. I have struggled in hydro.

 

[Chevy cHaze]

Thanks f-e
The are really coming back to life now with the temps in the mid 20Cs.
It's always a bit of a pita to put this to use halfway through a grow, but I'm switching off the radiator now and going to rely on a 10m heater cable that's put in between and around the fabric pots. With cold temps it's not so much the temp at the leaves but at the roots, so I will be using this technique to keep the roots warm without having to heat the whole room.
It eats 150W, so can stay on all day and night without too much cost and therefore much more efficient than a radiator for this use.


Happy with my soil I have to say, but intreagued by hydro... just not so much into salts...

You mentioned hydro wasn't for you, why?

 

[Fitzera]

I've got a couple cheap honeywell heaters I picked up last year for some makeshift hoop houses to get the gardens going early.

Basic dial control without any actual temperature settings. But what I found using one in my tent this run was that whatever thermostat the dial controls, it's way out of whack and was getting worse on its own. Was running hotter and hotter. Swapped it out with the other one and it's much better. I'm running it on a separate timer now to only run when lights are out as it's pretty chilly around here still.

 

[f-e]

Thanks f-e
The are really coming back to life now with the temps in the mid 20Cs.
It's always a bit of a pita to put this to use halfway through a grow, but I'm switching off the radiator now and going to rely on a 10m heater cable that's put in between and around the fabric pots. With cold temps it's not so much the temp at the leaves but at the roots, so I will be using this technique to keep the roots warm without having to heat the whole room.
It eats 150W, so can stay on all day and night without too much cost and therefore much more efficient than a radiator for this use.


Happy with my soil I have to say, but intreagued by hydro... just not so much into salts...

You mentioned hydro wasn't for you, why?

Argos sell a small electric blanket, like 120x80. On just a low setting, it raised my pots from 20-21 to 22-23. Stopping the light green growth that comes from cold nights, and increasing water consumption around 25% iirc. The grow is about that size, but blanket under a gravel tray, and the pots above that in guttering. The pots still tracked the tray temperature though. I was happy with that, and with the blanket on No1 it's barely a cost. Just a nice even distribution of heat where it's needed.

I was too tight to buy a wire. The blanket was about £8 and ideal under the tray.


I have struggled with hydro and LED's but still carry on. Many have moved back to HID very quickly, while others have found 20 years of experience suddenly seeming irrelevant. It mostly revolves around them eating all the food, long before drinking all the water. So it's been about making the water leave, and more regular feeding. With air pots and higher temperatures a great help, and feed increases of 40% common. My diary is all about ec and water volume, in and to waste, 3 times a day. Trying to nail it down. Plants look good now, but I have a lot more data to collect and mull over still. Pinning it down to the elements that need changing for an LED feed.

Rant mode: ON
Stats without calibration, track room temperature. Not in a nice linear fashion though. As the room warms, the gap between the room temperature and your setting increases. You might find in a 5 c room, you can have the heater regulating 5c higher, so you have 10c. Then as your room gets to 10c, your setting is somehow 7c higher. Then as the room gets to 20, the heater now thinks you want 30c. The stats on most heaters are really something you set again, every bloody hour at times. If it aint calibrated, it don't work. If it did work, they would write the numbers on it.

 

[Chevy cHaze]

Hahaha I hear you!
I found amended soil, LEDs and blumats and water only until harvest pretty good for me.
I travel often sometimes for weeks and this way all is taken care of. Unless the idiot's (me) reservoir runs dry, but that should be sorted now with the new 60L one (was around 20 before)


Here's the cable I've just put in:




I just loosely go around the pots with it, not wrapping it around individual pots at all.





This one shows it better...




That should do it and I have now switched off the heater and monitoring temps at the plants with a thermometer to see if it'S enough.

 

[Chevy cHaze]

Update Day13

Update Day13

Here we go, all looking much better now


The PUxChem91 front right ran a bit dry with the heater cable so close but opening up the blumat one marking will sort this I hope


Cheers
CC

 

[Chevy cHaze]

PU91#2 is a male

PU91#2 is a male

Just noticed that the PurpleUrkleX Chem91 is a male and culled it.



CC

 

[mack 10]

Fingers crossed for some fat ladies.
Looking proper fat indica style.

 

[Chevy cHaze]

Fingers crossed for some fat ladies.
Looking proper fat indica style.

I' dying for some heavy couchlock right now!
All I have left now is crazy intense racy ass sativas that have all become somewhat psychedelic over long term storage and the slightly seeded F13s which I'm smoking on right now.
Ahhh the bliss of a proper indica from time to time!

 

[Chevy cHaze]

Update Day 18

Update Day 18

It's day 18 isn't it? Oh no I'm getting confused as of when I switched to 12/12, i think it was the 12th?
Anyways here some shots.
The second PUxChem91 turned out to be a dude too, so had to cull him.




a bit more room in here now but really a shame I'm not going to have some of those tasty PUxChem91 buds :-(


Might put a trellis in soon as I will need to perform some hardcore LST in order to keep the SOur Blueberry (back left) in line.