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GP's muffbox goes aero with Vanilluna!

greenpenguin

Active member
Hey folks, I got a late start this year due to a couple of factors.

1) I stupidly didn't keep F13 genetics and my poorly stored last seeds didn't make it.
2) I just moved into a new place so I had to hold off while I moved and completely took apart and put back together my cabinet.

Last grow I did was a top feed drip system of F13, scrog'ed and under 250W CMH. Here are some shots from that grow which I didn't have a diary for.

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For this run I've got new genetics, and a whole new DIY hydro system. So I picked up DJ Shorts Vanilluna which I hope will provide me with colorful exotic flowers, a very smooth smoke, great vanilla flavor, and a nice relaxing high that enhances the sense. I also ordered some Panama and Deep Chunk seeds from seedboutique but it's been a few weeks and nothing has shown up...


So for my hydro system it's a low pressure aeroponics system. I'm using a bunch of Rubbermaid 10gal rubbernecks for a reservoir and for the actual aero system. It was actually pretty easy to make. I had to cut off the handles of my rubbernecks, I got a Fein multimaster knockoff from harbor freight which made that super quick and easy. Bought some vinyl tubing, a new mag pump which is rated for I think 280 gpm and some 330 degree micro sprayers. I've also got the pump on a cycle timer at a schedule of 1minute on and 4 minutes off running 24/7. Below is my testing of the aero system:


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So a big dillema for me was how to start my seeds, most other aero grows I saw started with clones or they started in rockwool. I wanted to be mediumless when I did my aero so I wanted to start in perlite. The only perlite I could find was in huge 10 pound bags... a bit over kill for starting a few seeds. So I found some vermiculite to start my seeds in. I figured I'd start them there and once the stems got long enough to fit in my neoprene sleeves I'd wash the vermiculite off the roots and transplant.

I started 4 vanilluna seeds. Germination using a wet paper towel in a ziplock bag on top of a thin towel on a heat mat. Took about a day for the first seed to be ready and 3 days for the rest of them to grow a long enough root tip.

18-20 days after planting I felt it was time to transplant from vermiculite to my aero system. I knew it was time because the two of the clear plastic cups I was growing in were showing roots at the bottom. All I can say is... next time i'm using perlite cause vermiculite sucked to wash off. The roots had actually grown through the center of some of the vermiculite, i figured out I could crush the vermiculite easily between my fingers and free the roots but with soo many little pieces I lost a lot of roots. I was pretty sure my plants were gonna hit major shock and wilt.

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So the next morning I checked on the babies expecting to see wilting plants and here's what I saw

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And two days after transplanting, the roots have really started to grow
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And here's the group shot.
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It's a been only a day since I took those pictures and the roots have already grown a lot more and I'm seeing new growth on the babies.

I also just started them on nutes two days ago at 560ppm (0.5) and 5.4 pH.
 

greenpenguin

Active member
Sleepy: Thanks for dropping by!

I thought I'd talk a little about why I chose to switch from my top drip system and go aero. The primary reason is because I was sick of grow medium. When I was using hydroton or rockwool, I couldn't see the roots, I would get crazy pH swings, and washing hydroton sucks. Plus it makes sense.. what do plants crave? Brawndo! j/k. Plants want air, water, nutrients and light and I guess CO2. And the roots want air, water and nutrients to pull. All systems provide these three things but I felt aero provides easiest access to oxygen.

Now that I've been running my aero setup for about a week and a half, I'm quite impressed. My root growth has been excellent, I haven't had ANY pH swings. The only time pH changes is when I top off my reservoir with water to lower the EC. The EC is also pretty stable. And I feel I'm loosing a lot less water in my reservoir due to evaporation above.

Anyhow, it's been about 38 days since I started from seed, 9 days since I started them in aero and a week since my last update so here's some more pictures.


Below is the family
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here's VL#1
This girl is my fastest growing and I hope she's a she.
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here's VL#2
This girl is my most variegated and mutated.
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here's VL#3
has ok growth
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here's VL#4
The runt. I'm unfortunately not expecting much from this girl but we'll see.
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This is my cycle timer, I have it 1 minute on and 4 minutes off 24/7
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Here's a group shot of the roots:
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Roots of #1 and #2
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Roots of #3 and #4
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greenpenguin

Active member
Bondage begins!

Bondage begins!

Had some downtime today so I decided it was time to begin training these girls. The way I approach training is very simple, I just tie down the apial tip, and try not to block new growth from the tie down. I feel LST helps a lot not just by manipulating auxins but by allowing new growth to gain access to more light.

I used binder clips that are now clipped around the lid of my aerotub and string to tie down the girls.


Here is the before shot. You can see #1 Vanilluna is almost 7 inches tall.

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And here are my POST LST shots:
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Check out how these roots are doing.
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Helis

Member
Growth looks very nice! I have the same rubbermaid in a similar setup but with an internal res ("hybrid" aero/swc) that I have been thinking about to veg some seedlings... That growth is explosive! Well, I guess I'll be pulling it out of the shed over the holidays.
Is that a temp sensor hanging into one of the pucks? Very nice idea.
 

greenpenguin

Active member
Helis: yeah that's a temperature sensor in there. The growth since I put the plants into the aero system has been excellent, but i feel like I wasted a lot of time when they were growing in vermiculite. I need to figure out a better way to start seeds for aero since I want to grow yet another strain after this vanilluna. I have some thunk seeds I'm thinking of starting off now since my seed boutique order seems to be MIA. Sucks since I spent over $100 on those :(
 

ethanp7111

New member
Great start. I have been thinking a lot of the past few months lurking...and how you are growing is what attracted me to the idea as well. Being able to grow without any medium and using an external res. to control quality of solution, it just makes sense. Lothar had a nice set up on OG years ago, just on a larger scale. I often wonder what would happen if instead of using one rubbermaid, you take a 3 gallon bucket, flip it over, drill a hole to put the neoprene puck and plant and then hang a heavy duty trashbag around the open bottom. Set a drain back to the res and set a few spray heads to water...you could get a 6 foot clear root drop, so the roots would never 'sit' in the bottom of a container, but would hang and hang and hang. Not sure it would improve yeild or anything, but just a thought.

Great work, I'm tuning it for this grow!

e-
 

greenpenguin

Active member
ethanp7111: Interesting thought. I'm not sure how my roots sitting at the bottom of the container really affects things. My drain is not flush with the bottom so there's always an extremely shallow pool of nutrient solution there. Your idea however would require a great amount of vertical space. Six feet of root space is a lot, I'd need a ladder just to see my plants!
 

ethanp7111

New member
Greenpenguin,

Absolutely, that would be the only drawback is that you would need a ton of vertical space, but constantly you see roots that eventually end up sitting in that shallow pool or solution. I have seen designs that use the square or round pvc and those roots again trail down the interior of the tubes. In my strange brain, I imagine 5 gallon buckets around 6 feet tall with an external res to pump it out to. Spray heads and white root porn. LST the buds down and grow on the sides. Skies the limit. Ha Ha...you are doing good with your grow. Enjoy it.
 
Amazing work, you're gonna have some killer medicinal grade head stash!

Mmmmmm... anyone else getting high off those leaf shapes and serrations...!

I am!

Great work!
 

greenpenguin

Active member
tragedies

tragedies

The last week has been INSANE. I've been soo busy taking care of things that I'm a bit backlogged on my posting. Well here's part of why I've been soo busy.

A few days ago I was switching out my reservoir and I usually unplug my pump when I do this. Well guess who forgot to plug it back in? Me, and I didn't realize it until 24 hours later when I opened the door to find this:

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My jaw dropped :jawdrop:

Well if you've read my previous diary, you know I don't really freak out when shit hits the fan. I know the worse thing you can do is panic and do something drastic. So I plugged the pump back in and closed the door to my cabinet and walked away.

The next day I came back and opened the door and found this:

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my #3 survived. I figured if I gave it more time, maybe more would bounce back. So another 24 hours later I come to find this:

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Ok well I guess all I have is #3. While checking out the wilted ones I noticed some stems were super flimsy and others weren't so I decided to trim dead shit off and see what I had left.

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After trimming you can see there was something left on #1 and #4. Lets look closer:

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To me, I see clone candidates. I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket with the lone survivor, what if she is a he? So I decided now was the time to clone.

I put together a system very similar to my veg room system for cloning. In fact, I'm using the actual lid as I was using in veg room. I built an all in one aerocloner.


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I put in water pH'ed at 5.3. I've really simplified things since my last grow. I had a lot of stuff in my cloning setup last time, here's all I have this time, rubbing alcohol and a razor blade.

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I was able to get 3 clones for #1, #3 (survivor) and #4
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And now that all the other plants are out of the picture, I can really tie down #3.
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I think the lack of watering really shocked the plant (you think? duh!). Growth has definitely slowed, I hope she bounces back well and doesn't let the death of her sisters be in vain.

Anyhow, as a backup plan and for variety after this grow, I picked up some clones. I found this dispensary that only sells clones and moms so I picked up some strawberry diesel clones.

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I noticed that these rooted clones actually have pistils showing already, some of which were red. I mentioned this to the guy at the dispensary, I was like, hey this looks like these were taken shortly after flipping to 12/12. The dispensary guy was like "no, that's normal".... I dunno.... anyways. Shit happens, you just gotta deal with it. I'm confident that I'm still gonna have a great harvest, give me a few days and i'll hopefully have Vanilluna clones. I'll flower 1 of each plant and see what sex they are and then decide what to do when I get there.
 

greenpenguin

Active member
Time for another update. My lone survivor is doing well, well enough that I felt it was time to move her into the flower room, though I still have the lights set to 16/8. I rebuilt my scrog and yet another aero res/tub combo for the flower room, lots of help came from my MultiMaster Pro knock off. I swear, if I had this thing for my first grow when I originally built my cab, it would have saved me a TON of grief. I love this tool.

Here's an action shot:
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Gotta cut off these handles so I can actually fit these things into my cab.
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Built my scrog table, you can see the notches in I cut out using the multimaster knock off. this allows me to fit the tubs on the table under the screen.
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And finally vanilluna is in the flower room, still vegging. I'm gonna let this indica dom fill up most of the screen before switching to 12/12... I actually still have NO idea if this is a female or male but I'm hoping fate will provide me with a female.

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As for my clones... well they are actually doing well. The leaves have yellowed but all but two of my cuts rooted!!!

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Pretty darn successful if you ask me, I really like this aerocloner, works soo well and I can tell immediately when roots are growing because I dont have any medium hiding them from view. I will use this technique from now on.


Lastely, I decided the strawberry diesel needs to go into the veg room so I setup a new res and put the strawberry diesel in. I'm using the netpots for this but I may use the old veg lid with the 2" neoprenes and put the clones in with them in a day or so. :smokeit:

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greenpenguin

Active member
Flowering!

Flowering!

Two days ago I flipped my survivor Vanilluna to flower. Nutes are currently going between 750-900ppm and pH between 5.7 and 5.9. My SCRoG is mostly filled up so I figured it was about time to flip. Vanilluna has about a 55-60 day flowering period so I expect to harvest by the end of March... if this is a female plant even...

Now onto pictures.

Below is my flowering plant, these were taken at day 2 of flower (currently it's day 3). I'm constantly pushing things back below the screen, also tied a few branches up to the screen so the lower shoots could get more light. My roots have getting pretty thick too.
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As for my clones, they are doing really well. I'm starting to see good growth in all of them, roots are starting to build up and I already started training the two strawberry diesels. I'm thinking I should do a seperate grow diary for those so I may end up with two diaries going at once. Also I have at minimum two clones of 3 of my original vanilluna's, so even if my current vanilluna I just threw into flower is not a female, I have two other vanilluna's to hopefully get females out of (plus 6 extra seeds).

Here are the shots of my clones, the bigger ones that are tied down are the strawberry diesels, the rest are vanilluna clones.

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In other news, I recently just purchased a 1st generation demo unit of LEDGirl's 126W Led penetrator. I plan on using it for the summer time when my temperatures usually prevent me from growing. However since it's supposed to be comparable to a 400W HID maybe I can even replace my 250W CMH with it? it's definitely something I'm considering. I should get it at the end of this week.
 

greenpenguin

Active member
FUCK!

FUCK!

IT'S A FUCKING BOY!

blurry pics but I know a male when I see one.

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Anyhow, I have no breeding plans and don't have space to just keep males around. So I'm killing this one along with the associated clones.

That's life, I made a mistake when I forgot to plug the water pump back in way back when and was left with this one plant. Luckily I was able to get clones of two other vanilluna's so lets discuss the game plan going forward.


Currently my most developed clones are the strawberry diesel, so I'll be working towards getting those big enough for me to grow that out first. However I need to figure out if my two vanilluna genetics are male or female so I know whether to dedicate time to them so here's the plan.

1) I'm gonna kill survivor plant and it's #3 plant clones
2) I'm gonna move two clones from #1 and #4 (one each) into the flower room and just flower those to figure out if they are male or female.
3) while those clones are flowering, I'm gonna train and grow out my strawberry diesel clones which I know are females.
4) In hopefully a month or so I should be ready to flower one of the strawberry diesel's
5) once I harvest that one i'll be flowering a vanilluna if one of them turns out to be female.

I got my led lights by the way, so I gotta figure out what my plan is for that too.
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greenpenguin

Active member
So the deed is done, I've killed the #3 male and it's associated clone, but this grow is far from over, it's just gonna be extended. I've got one of each of the #1 and #4 clones of my Vanilluna in flower right now to determine the sex of them, if I have a female I'm gonna veg that out nice and big so I can flower it after my Strawberry Diesel.

Anyhow since I love posting photos, here's some photos of what went down today.



This is just before killing the #3 vanilluna
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And check out the roots that I had
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It's such a shame cause #3 was growing so well...


Here I have #1 and #4 clones in flower, I have the CMH light raised high so I dont shock these clones with the light intensity. In about two weeks or less I should know if I have any females at all.
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Finally I have the two remaining #1 and #2 clones in the veg room under my new Hydro-Grow LED lights that LEDGirl has been pushing, they're sitting there next to my strawberry diesels which are being trained.

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I think I've decided I'm going to use the LED light for flowering my strawberry diesels. It should provide me better results than my 250W CMH would provide... supposedly. Anyhow I'm going to start a new thread today for my Strawberry Diesel LED grow while continuing this diary as well.
 

greenpenguin

Active member
I've been lazy about updating for this thread. My Vanilluna's all ended up being male. I tried germing 4 more seeds but the tap on those just didn't want to come out. I have 2 more seeds I believe, I'll give those a shot before giving up on this grow. I have my Strawberry Diesel grow going on track though so I've been keeping myself occupied.
 

greenpenguin

Active member
A localish dispensary had some Vanilluna clones so I went and picked two clones up. The leaves on this look a bit thinner than the Vanilluna I'm used to but we'll see how this goes, I still have I think 2 Vanilluna seeds so I'm going to scarify them and attempt to germinate them.

Anyhow here are the new clones, I'll be removing them from the rockwool and into my aero system very soon.

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