Grandma's Spring 2020

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Here it goes!


This grow started a looooooooong time ago, and looking at my notes I realize there are so many fuycking entries referring to additions to the soil (what a fucking nightmare), so I may forget something but basically:
Soil:
-50L Janeco light mix
-5L 'old soil' (that's what it says in my notes, not sure about where it came from
-2L some random ecological substrate someone was using for our basil or something

-~10L perlite were added at some point (I think in the last transplant before flower)
Fertilizer solid mix:
-170g Dolomite lime
-150g Diatomaceous earth
-~100g Azomite
-1L Mega Worm (plagron)
-1.2L Bat Guano (plagron)
-1L Supermix (plagron)


This list is what I did originally, I made like 65L of soil and about 4L of this nutrient mix. Of course, I should have left the ingredients separated to allow me to correct specific deficiencies, but I'm impulsive like that so I just mixed everything together and hoped for the best. I originally mixed about 500-600ml of the nutrient mix with the soil.



After this I needed more soil so I vaguely remember buying perlite+peat moss+ hummus to make my basic mix and I think I added like 15 or 20 L of that in the pre-flower transplant, with more nutrients mixed in.


At the beginning during veg they were perfectly fine, they didn't have a single problem until late in veg, when they started showing some cal/mag things, which I corrected mainly with foliar sprays containing Dolomite.



I think late in veg at some point I top dressed a bit of the mix in the soil to help them a bit, but then I had lots of flies so I ended up covering the soil in vermiculite to keep them from getting to the soil, so top dressing seemed kind of inefficient.



At this point I started experimenting with teas, and oh boy! I'm so glad I did. I discovered a whole new world! What I've been doing is I get ~10L of water and put a naylon net with a handful of soil, 50ml of my nutrient mix, and 15ml of Dolomite lime, and leave it bubbling for ~24h. During late veg I used it a few times, both for watering and for foliar sprays, and now in veg it's all they get! once a week, 10L of the tea.



Also, I had old bottles of BioGrow and BioBloom from BioBizz, and someone gave me a bottle of Nirvana by advanced nutrients, so I've been using those as well. The last few waterings I've added 20ml Nirvana, 15ml BioGrow and 15ml BioBloom.


Kalbhairav - yes! they went from the 4000K HLG65 to this 3500K qb288 running at twice the power (65W vs 135W). I saw some tops yellowing and thought it was for the more potent light being almost at the same height (the light was at about 15cm and is now at about20cm from the canopy, and there are other signs of light stress. Do you think I should add more Dolomite to my next tea? My intention was to leave the BioGrow and add some cat ashes to the solid part (my cat died recently, I thought she would have liked to become one with the dank)


noknees Sorry to disappoint! I'm not water only... I used to, but since I started covering the soil in vermiculite top dressing was not an option, and now I'm doing teas but somehow I feel safer adding a touch of bottled nutes (better than throwing them away, but profoundly shameful I know)

 

[troutman]

Just know that each time you grow you'll get better.

 

[Kalbhairav]

Hey Grandma,

Firstly, if you’ve just switched the light and the plant is receiving double the intensity, it might be an idea to dial it back a little.

I would also raise the QB. For optimum PAR, the closest I would let the QB is 35cm from the canopy. You can have it closer, it just won’t be optimal and the plant won’t be able to use all the light efficiently.

I would suspect that’s is the reason for the yellowing on the left hand plant.

- New light at double the power
- Light a bit too close to the plants

If you decide to alter the light distance and power you might still find the plant isn’t returning to normal.

Dolomite Lime will help but if you have soluble Epsom salts, or an organic liquid CalMag supp, that will work quicker in getting the leaves healthy again.

Unfortunately I don’t have room for mixing my own soils and teas. I buy organic soil and use organic plant based liquid feeds.

Hope this all might help. Good luck

 

[noknees]

noknees Sorry to disappoint! I'm not water only...profoundly shameful I know.


135W. I saw some tops yellowing and thought it was for the more potent light being almost at the same height (the light was at about 15cm and is now at about20cm from the canopy, and there are other signs of light stress.

naw nothing shameful here.

given the clues, i figured maybe you were using tea, but thought you'd have mentioned it.

your light jumping from 21 to 43W/ft at less than 8" is a lot.

do you have dimming? i'd shoot for 100 watts. if not, raise the light.

if you don't have a kill-a-watt and a lux meter, they're worth the money.


p.s. maybe save the ashes for a new batch of soil? something you'd use, re-amend and keep going?

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=53792

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Just know that each time you grow you'll get better.

Hey troutman!! Happy to see you pass by My first grow I pulled 200g off a 250HPS, the second one I over-amended (first time making my soil) and completely burned the plants in mid flower to the point of having to kill them and start over. So... there is a tendency to improve for sure, but...

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Hey Grandma,

Firstly, if you’ve just switched the light and the plant is receiving double the intensity, it might be an idea to dial it back a little.

I would also raise the QB. For optimum PAR, the closest I would let the QB is 35cm from the canopy. You can have it closer, it just won’t be optimal and the plant won’t be able to use all the light efficiently.

I would suspect that’s is the reason for the yellowing on the left hand plant.

- New light at double the power
- Light a bit too close to the plants

If you decide to alter the light distance and power you might still find the plant isn’t returning to normal.

Dolomite Lime will help but if you have soluble Epsom salts, or an organic liquid CalMag supp, that will work quicker in getting the leaves healthy again.

Unfortunately I don’t have room for mixing my own soils and teas. I buy organic soil and use organic plant based liquid feeds.

Hope this all might help. Good luck

Thanks a lot Kalbhairav!


I followed your advice and raised the lights a bit. They are at like 25-30cm now.



I'm interested in your mention of 'optimum PAR'. My reasoning has always been that I should get the lights to the point where plants start complaining a bit and then raise it up a bit, to have it as close as possible without causing damage. However, with this qbs I've been wondering if maybe raising it a bit could improve spread to the outer highest colas. What are your thoughts on this?

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

naw nothing shameful here.

given the clues, i figured maybe you were using tea, but thought you'd have mentioned it.

your light jumping from 21 to 43W/ft at less than 8" is a lot.

do you have dimming? i'd shoot for 100 watts. if not, raise the light.

if you don't have a kill-a-watt and a lux meter, they're worth the money.

p.s. maybe save the ashes for a new batch of soil? something you'd use, re-amend and keep going?

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=53792

Thanks a lot for the tips noknees!



I'm keeping the lights at full power because I have the two HLG65s on the other side running with an inverted schedule so that there is not any possible 12h regularity in the bill to attract attention (probably unneccessary/useless but I'm paranoid like that), and actually the two hlg65 suck a bit more Ws from the wall than the hlg135!


I do have a watt meter but not a lux one. I may get one in the future.


I'm going to slowly add the ashes to the teas I'm making from now until harvest, and every time I water, afterwards I add the contents of the bag to a container full of soil that I have around. I'm a bit worried that it might be too hot by the time the grow is done, but I'll think about that in the future

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Humidity stuff

I realized something quite obvious yesterday.



Of course upgrading my extraction may help with humidity. But it also may not!



I'm exhausting the humid air to the same room I'm taking the 'fresh' air from!!!



So, adding more CFMs would just recirculate the whole thing faster, while exhausting to another room would probably solve the problem. I wish I would've thought about this before!


Now the problem is I don't know how to do this. There is kind of a glass screen on top of the door of the room which I guess was put there to allow light to enter the room. I'm thinking maybe I could cut a hole in it (can that be easily done with glass?) or replace it (don't know exactly how) with an mdf board and just run a tube from the extraction, maybe with another 100cfm fan blowing to/from it?

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Left side

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Right side

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Left side's buds

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Right side buds:

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Humidity stuff

After hundreds of hours of stressing over the humidity situation, after several glass-cutting tutorials and searches online for glass cutting supplies, after hours of discussions on the stoichiometry of photosynthesis vs. respiration, and on the possible explanations as to why on earth would one side of the cabinet reach 90% every night while the other stayed in the low 70s, after having painstakingly wrapped all the pots in saran wrap to stop some evaporation, and specially, after one or two weeks of my plants suffering this, I had the genius idea of checking the fucking exhaust system.



Of course, the 100cfm fan on the right side had failed, thus leaving all the work to the two small computer fans that I have attached at the beginning of the exhaust on the right side, which, with their 30 cfm total were definitely not able to exhaust and push air through the filter, as was to be expected. Fortunately I had a third 100cfm fan lying around, otherwise I would've been pretty fucked. It took me like 10 minutes to solve the problem that has been causing me headaches for weeks.



Botrytis



After the huge release of solving the ventilation problem, I felt very liberated. After weeks of worrying over the too high humidity, I finally felt like everything was under control and I could just sit back and chill and see the girls growing.



The same day, I was inspecting the girls and I saw a twirled leaf. I spend a lot of time looking at the plants, just because I love to. If I didn't I absolutely wouldn't have noticed this. This was a small leave on one of the bigger buds in the plant in the back left on the right side of the cabinet. Couldn't even see the petiole inside the bud. But I saw it twirled in a way that made me suspicious, and when I pulled on it to check it came off too easily and was a bit brownish on the bottom.



I've never had bud rot, but somehow I immediately understood the bud was rotting. I opened it up and saw some mycelium near the stem, along with some brownish flowers at the base of the two inflorescences stemming from that point.



Of course my stress levels surpassed by a lot the ones caused by the humidity situation. I could imagine my whole crop dissolving in front of me. I read a bit on Botrytisand then proceeded to sterilize my scissors, cut the cola an inch or two below the infection, defoliated all the plants pretty heavily, unwrapped the pots (yes, more evaporation and more humidity this way, but I didn't want to have water droplets trapped in there which could nurture various pests), and unplugged the dehumidifier's timer to run it 24/7. Humidity is now in the low 50s most of the time, rising to low 60s sometimes in the night in the right cabinet (still, more plant matter = more humidity).


It's nice in a way that this happened, because it shows that there is a difference in rot resistance in this small population, which shall be selected upon! It's a pity though, the plant that got infected was all funky. I found three or four leafs with a bud on them, the leafs are all weird, and it has some funky smells to it.



Light


As was rightly pointed by kalbhairav and noknees, my lights were too close, specially on the rspec side. This caused some light bleaching and some foxtailing, and now I raised them as much as it is possible given the height of the compartment.



The light toxicity symptoms mostly stopped, and then some discoloration started to show in the plants, very correlated with the stage of development of each one, which makes me think that it has to do with their maturation and not the light levels. The purple plant in the back left of the left cabinet has the thickest buds and you can tell from afar it's the most mature individual, and it's the one that started loosing chlorophyll the earliest and in the most dramatic way (it went really purple in a short time and leafs have started to dry). Does it look like normal senescence or might this be related to the increase in Mg requirements Kalbhairav mentioned? If that's connected to the change in spectrum it wouldn't make sense because this is the side that kept the 4000K spectrum.

 

[noknees]

After hundreds of hours of stressing over the humidity situation, I had the genius idea of checking the fucking exhaust system. It took me like 10 minutes to solve the problem that has been causing me headaches for weeks.

______


After the huge release of solving the ventilation problem, I felt very liberated. After weeks of worrying....

Of course my stress levels surpassed by a lot the ones caused by the humidity situation. I could imagine my whole crop dissolving in front of me.

______


Does it look like normal senescence or might this be related to the increase in Mg requirements Kalbhairav mentioned?

congrats on putting out some fires.

my overwhelming thought on this epic novella you've crafted is, you gotta relax! the juice has to be worth the squeeze! i've chased a similar ghost in a grow once, it was also an annoyingly simple+critical thing.

the color looks like normal senescence to me, other issues aside. how many days into flower are you?

don't sweat the rot too much, sounds like your eagle eye has served you well, and it was caught early. have a puff and keep on truckin.

best wishes for the finish!

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

my overwhelming thought on this epic novella you've crafted is, you gotta relax! the juice has to be worth the squeeze!

As I predicted in my OP, posting here has helped getting some much needed advice! Thanks, I definitely need to relax! I have channeled quite a bit of stress through this cabinet, now that I look at it a posteriori... but you have to admit the novella is coming along quite nicely isn't it? hahah

the color looks like normal senescence to me, other issues aside. how many days into flower are you?

46 days. The rest of the plants are where I would expect them kinda, the purple one is farther ahead but still like 40/60 clear/cloudy trichomes with no ambers

don't sweat the rot too much, sounds like your eagle eye has served you well, and it was caught early. have a puff and keep on truckin.

I come from the desert, so high humidity wasn't even a thing for me. But actually it's been a couple of days and I don't see any signs of rot so yeah, seems that dehumidifying is enough? I forgot how cannabis sites can be as catastrophistic as health sites when googling illnesses

 

[techattack]

My first grow ever was on a cabinet like urs. 100cmx50cmx150cm and was extremely fun.. On those times i managed to fit 10 ou 12 squarepots and did a great scrog. U are doing very great, will subscribe the thread. Keep it up

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Hi Techattach! Thanks for dropping by and for the kind words! I'm thinking next run I may split the left side in two to have a small mother compartment and a small veg one, and run a continuous SOG with 30 plants or so in the right side

 

[Mars Hydro Led]

Plants look healthy, Keep up the nice work.

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Hi Mars! Thanks for passing by!

 

[TheGrandmaGrows]

Trichomes:

Not much amber going on, mostly clear/cloudy. Many purplish trichome stems (?)