I'm on my first run with a full room under 2k. I'm pretty inexperienced with this whole thing. I haven't actually been serious about growing for that long, but I've known for a while that I intend to largely dedicate my life to cannabis. I've been busy finishing my degree and really just got around to getting all this right.
I grew in my last apartment a little, but my apartment wasn't climate controlled, and the temperature in Georgia is anything but mild. I had heat problems and cold problems, and only had one successful grow. I was just using Fox Farm in Ocean Forest soil. After moving, I didn't grow for about a year, but has a bedroom set aside for the project. I cracked some seeds about 6 months into that year, and then just left those plants alone for that long.
I guess you could say that I started growing in June. I switched to coco on the suggestion of the guy at the hydro store. I treated it like soil, mixed it 50/50 with perlite and fed it fox farm. I grew about 3 oz on a 1000w light. I learned all about spider mites during that first crop. It took forever to eradicate them. My clones were infected. They were stunted. As a result, I only had 6 plants ready to go in come next flower time. I got 1 oz off of each one of those. I've had maybe 6 more plants come through and have yielded just enough to get the 2k up and running at a good temperature.
Prior to starting this project, I read a book on growing. That didn't even slightly prepare me. I realized that I had no idea what a cannabis plant likes to eat, and that I didn't really know anything about coco as a medium. I finally researched coco as a medium and figured out what the deal with that was. I found and read every word written by Lucas currently available online and also the canna stats project page. All of this information was very useful but slightly misleading. I didn't fully understand how light the feeding in very low runoff coco applications worked. The concept that, in grow rocks, you feed nutrients at the concentration you want in the root zone made sense, and the idea that, since coco accumulates nutrients, you want to feed weaker concentration. The idea of pH's spreadsheet appealed to me, and I learned to use it, but I was still missing a couple of important pieces of the puzzle.
When I calculated a nutrient profile similar to H3ad's formula, using Botanicare Triflex Micro and Bloom and CalMag+, I came up with something that was in fact about twice as strong as I needed. I just added water to the reservoir until I got 850ppm on my pen, the concentration that I had been feeding with the fox farm. They loved the profile, but I kept train wrecking. I came in one day and everything looked terrible. I was couldn't believe that I was over feeding at 850. I thought, "I'm going to get to the bottom of this--I'm going to feed these things exactly what someone else does." So, I purchased a gallon each of GH Flora Bloom and Micro. I mixed a 6-9 reservoir and was blown away when the ppm was 670. I soon realized that my pen was using .5 conversion, and that different conversion makes a hell of a difference in the concentration a given ppm. This really clarified a lot of what I read on the internet.
I started reading about how ph down actually changes the profile, so I decided to try using no pH down with H3ad's formula. That put me at a 6.2 ph. I started seeing varying degrees of leaf down curling, phosphorous deficiency necrosis and yellowing. I changed my ph back down to 5.8, and things are looking better, but the damage is done to the ones already in flower.
I've finally figured out (somewhat) what I'm doing, and have a generally healthy batch of plants that will go in on Dec 17. I'll re-pot them from 1 to 3 gallon containers and veg under flowering wattage for a week to a week and a half.
Soon to follow: what's currently going on!
I grew in my last apartment a little, but my apartment wasn't climate controlled, and the temperature in Georgia is anything but mild. I had heat problems and cold problems, and only had one successful grow. I was just using Fox Farm in Ocean Forest soil. After moving, I didn't grow for about a year, but has a bedroom set aside for the project. I cracked some seeds about 6 months into that year, and then just left those plants alone for that long.
I guess you could say that I started growing in June. I switched to coco on the suggestion of the guy at the hydro store. I treated it like soil, mixed it 50/50 with perlite and fed it fox farm. I grew about 3 oz on a 1000w light. I learned all about spider mites during that first crop. It took forever to eradicate them. My clones were infected. They were stunted. As a result, I only had 6 plants ready to go in come next flower time. I got 1 oz off of each one of those. I've had maybe 6 more plants come through and have yielded just enough to get the 2k up and running at a good temperature.
Prior to starting this project, I read a book on growing. That didn't even slightly prepare me. I realized that I had no idea what a cannabis plant likes to eat, and that I didn't really know anything about coco as a medium. I finally researched coco as a medium and figured out what the deal with that was. I found and read every word written by Lucas currently available online and also the canna stats project page. All of this information was very useful but slightly misleading. I didn't fully understand how light the feeding in very low runoff coco applications worked. The concept that, in grow rocks, you feed nutrients at the concentration you want in the root zone made sense, and the idea that, since coco accumulates nutrients, you want to feed weaker concentration. The idea of pH's spreadsheet appealed to me, and I learned to use it, but I was still missing a couple of important pieces of the puzzle.
When I calculated a nutrient profile similar to H3ad's formula, using Botanicare Triflex Micro and Bloom and CalMag+, I came up with something that was in fact about twice as strong as I needed. I just added water to the reservoir until I got 850ppm on my pen, the concentration that I had been feeding with the fox farm. They loved the profile, but I kept train wrecking. I came in one day and everything looked terrible. I was couldn't believe that I was over feeding at 850. I thought, "I'm going to get to the bottom of this--I'm going to feed these things exactly what someone else does." So, I purchased a gallon each of GH Flora Bloom and Micro. I mixed a 6-9 reservoir and was blown away when the ppm was 670. I soon realized that my pen was using .5 conversion, and that different conversion makes a hell of a difference in the concentration a given ppm. This really clarified a lot of what I read on the internet.
I started reading about how ph down actually changes the profile, so I decided to try using no pH down with H3ad's formula. That put me at a 6.2 ph. I started seeing varying degrees of leaf down curling, phosphorous deficiency necrosis and yellowing. I changed my ph back down to 5.8, and things are looking better, but the damage is done to the ones already in flower.
I've finally figured out (somewhat) what I'm doing, and have a generally healthy batch of plants that will go in on Dec 17. I'll re-pot them from 1 to 3 gallon containers and veg under flowering wattage for a week to a week and a half.
Soon to follow: what's currently going on!
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Rather than trying to impress an online crew and lie about results, as some do.)
