Help-a-newb! CFL/Rubbermaid/Soil [First Grow Ever]

[bleezie]

remember to give your plant a good flush through even when you are using organics sometimes during flowering (some may say you never need a flush using organics but i disagree). just flush it through with water and leech out all the old nutes/salts buildup in the soil and you'll have healthier soil. your ph will fluctuate with that "old" soil if you always water and never have a run off from the bottom. It cause those "nute burns". things will collect within the soil over time. this is especially needed for those longer flowering plants i'd say. it's kinda like a middle flowering stage mini flush. just do one day or two of water flush and go back to normal feed, it might stress it a little to jump on nute levels, but itll be better in the long run. good luck

 

[clay]

I'm putting that on the schedule for tomorrow
thanks for the suggestion bleezie

 

[clay]

Well i'm back with picture updates finally.. been awhile..

I'd like to thank Bleezie again for making the (somewhat obvious, but for some reason it hadn't occurred to me) suggestion of giving my girls a good flush . I ran some good clean water through.. and since then I've stopped with the Schultz and SuperThrive altogether and gone to just water with a little molasses. I don't really know why I tried the Schultz/Superthrive since I had already added organic ferts to the soil in the first place.. so I guess these are 100% organic buds since I cheated for a couple weeks in the middle. But I burned my girls, learned my lesson, switched back to plain water and here are the results:

*You may notice that one pot/plant is missing... I was feeling cramped working in the box with 4 pots, and one plant was doing terribly, so I yanked it. It was about 6 wks old, the buds were pretty small, but there were some..it was the "experiment" plant that I used soil from outside my house (mostly sand)... it turned out the roots werent able to move around in the sand, so the whole rootball was only about the size of a golfball..pretty sad). Anyway....

**These pics are from this morning, 12/28, which puts them at about day 42. I'm hoping that means its all downhill from here. Now I need to swing by a RadioShack for a hand held microscope so I can get on trich-watch!~

The three survivors:


This was my favorite as I think it is mostly sativa, but it also seemed to get the worst of the burn. But she's come back a long way and looking much better:

And a close-up of her (I've noticed the flash makes the frost stand out significantly):



This one is filling out bigtime in the last couple of weeks.. top cola is thick and super hard..no airy CFL buds here:

Close-up of the same one:



Finally....the freak..
This one is a 'sister' of the plant above.. bagseed from same bag. This must be some crazy pheno or something tho.. I dont know if you can see from the pics, but this thing hasnt really developed a top bud. I LST'ed it pretty hard, even into flowering, and I must have confused it. There ARE buds, but they are tiny, and each has its only tiny ugly little branch..even up to the top.
The first time I heard "growing under CFLs makes airy worthless buds" I think this is what I pictured... HOWEVER.. you may notice from the pics, that it is still frosty as hell... so even if the buds dont come together for smoking on this one, I should still be able to pull some decent hash from it. You may also notice little pod looking things..I'm pretty sure this are just humongous female calyxes..I've been watching them and they all seem to eventually shoot out white(sometimes red) hairs

Close-up of the freak:




To finish, I have a question for all the experienced growers out there....

so as you can see from the first plant, I made a mistake, and she got burned.. so far i've been trying to clip off the ends that have turned "Point Of No Return" brown, as you can probably see by the pics.. My question is, do I need to stay super diligent about cutting those ends off? i'm a little worried about the leaves dying and shriveling into the bud and causing bud rot just as I'm about to finish..

help please?


And thanks for looking@!!

 

[clay]

what day am I actually on? I dont know..

So I got my mini-microscope cause I figured since I don't know the real days, I could watch the trichomes and tell when to harvest. Even that is a little confusing

for me however.. I have definitely noticed the trichs turn cloudy, but the "amber" part is weird. Some things look 'amber' but I dont know if thats actually just

some sort of burn from my previous issues.

Let me show the pics I have now, and I think I have at least one, maybe two, followup questions.


The girls in the box:



The good ones, and a bulb for scale. If you notice the lower buds on the right-side plant, this morning I counted about 10 larger-than-thumb-sized buds. I hadn't checked them awhile, they look good:



A close-up of the top of the plant on the right in the pic above. Notice the odd single-finger leaves at the top. Keep in mind this plant is the "bag-sister" of the freak in the next pics:



The Freak:



A Freak side-bud close-up. See how they seem to be confused. Even the top-most cola looks like this. And note the single-fingered leaves at the top. There are a ton on this plant.



ok so..

the cloudy, and possibly amber, trichs have got me super excited.
Also, a few days ago, I broke off a tiny test bud, which was actually duct-taped onto the plant when i broke it a long time ago, and it kept growing. So that's the

one I tested, let it do a full dry for 2 days, and tested. Tasted great, good high from the tiny bit I had.

I am already considering chopping in the next couple of days cause im off work til sunday. If I dont' do it by Sunday, I'll have to wait til next Weds, but:

- Most of the "last week" pics I see, the leaves have turned yellow as the plant saps the energy from the leaf.. I'm not really seeing much of that here.. how

come????

- I've heard the buds swell up the most in the last couple of weeks, so i don't want to chop a week early, and not get full potential.


Lastly, I think the "freak" is not going to make a good smoking plant. The buds "just ain't right" so i'm trying to determine what my alternative methods of thc harvest will be. I like bubble-hash but I dont think I wanna drop $100 into the bags. I could make dry-sift, but I would need to also obtain tools for that. I suppose I already have everything I need to make butter, so thats my best idea so far..


So to recap:

Why aren't my leaves turning yellow before chop?

What should I do with this weird, yet very crystally plant?

 

[Lollypop Man]

My best guess on question 1 would be too much N present in the soil from the get-go. The plants just never used it all up, and so they're still pulling it in. There's an interesting thread going on over in another forum here that presents the idea that tropical sativas will only go full-on into flower when their supply of N has vanished. For that reason, a lot of grows using these genetics will take forever to "finish". So make sure you're sure about those trichs before you chop!

 

[clay]

So make sure you're sure about those trichs before you chop!

this is my first-ever grow... im not sure about ANYthing..

 

[clay]

AND THEY"RE DOWN!!

I cut a test bud from each of the two good plants a couple of days ago, and tested last night. The trichs have been looking cloudy and I liked the test buds so I decided to chop yesterday.

Most of my pics have been with my phone-camera under the grow lights, so these girls look like theyve been to GlamourShots after some pics with a real camera, a flash, and a quick Photoshop auto-contrast/color/level. Flash really brings out the frost.


Here they are all together for the last time while alive:



The first victim.
This girl is actually the bag-seed sister of the Freak (if you havent been reading along, and dont know The Freak, see below). But this one produced normal buds, so I am still confused by them. However this one has several similarities to the Freak that was evidence they were related. For instance, huge calyxes that were so big for a couple weeks I thought they had hermied and seeded themselves..but then the calyx would just burst open to reveal female hairs. Another example is the single-fingered leaves at the top of the buds:



I pulled her out to have a look at the root system. Its much smaller than I expected, only about the size of my fist. Which means that almost the entire bottom half of the container/soil was not being fully utilized. That seems bad.. i had lots of perlite so I don't think soil-compaction should have been an issue. Dunno about that.. but there it is:



Finally, after a slow, tedious, newbie haircut... she's ready for the hangar:





My favorite.
This one has been my favorite all along and had the best test bud. It's got tons of frost going. And it has the best tangy smell. Can't wait till its cured and ready to smoke:



And after her trim:





Last, and least,

The Freak.
I don't know what the deal is with this thing. It just never made real buds..just these weird looking stringy things..and lots of them. However this plant was pretty well coated with crystal, so I plan to make hash from it. I can't invest in bubble-bags, so I've been checking into some cheaper methods of hash production...so far I'm going with blender/icewater process. I had also consider just cooking this thing into some butter. But i think I prefer smoking to eating. So hash it is unless I get some really bad reviews about the blender idea. Anyway, I left this thing mostly intact. I pulled off any of the yellowed, loose fan leaves you see here, and hung the rest to dry:




And finally, the full harvest:

 

[smokin 2 live]

how's it hangin clay
nice closet grow ta have man. looks like you have been doing some reading up on your teks before you took the weel! nice one
most people would just throw some seeds in soil, and water/"try" to feed em, and then wonder why the fuck your shit is'nt growing to your expections!

but as far as the last plant, the one you want to try and make hash from, i found a pretty easy method on youtube. go there and type in the search bar "GUMBY METHOD FOR HASH MAKING" it will pull up a video, a kinda how-to video.

i tried it with some hash plant that was just LOADED with trichs!! like i said earlier, it's fairly easy and little matieal is needed.

so good luck on you trial run man!!!
best wishes
S2L

 

[clay]

how's it hangin clay
nice closet grow ta have man. looks like you have been doing some reading up on your teks before you took the weel! nice one
most people would just throw some seeds in soil, and water/"try" to feed em, and then wonder why the fuck your shit is'nt growing to your expections!

but as far as the last plant, the one you want to try and make hash from, i found a pretty easy method on youtube. go there and type in the search bar "GUMBY METHOD FOR HASH MAKING" it will pull up a video, a kinda how-to video.

i tried it with some hash plant that was just LOADED with trichs!! like i said earlier, it's fairly easy and little matieal is needed.

so good luck on you trial run man!!!
best wishes
S2L

I checked out the Gumby method. I think the version of blender hash i was going to try is basically a scaled down version of Gumby's methoed (I noticed that gumby started with about 30ozs of White Rhino trim)

This is the blender-hash method I am considering:
1. dry trim
2. fill blender with cold water and a couple ice cubes
3. add trim a cup or so at a time
4. slight Mix action on blender to stir goodies
5. remove plant material
6. pour liquid off into bowl/bottle
7. wait hours for trichs to settle
8. siphon/turkey-baster the water out
9. pour remaining sludge thru paper coffee filter
10. dry, collect, roll a ball


The main differing point here is the method used to extract the last bit of water. Apparently gumby just lays it out on wax paper and lets it heat/air dry, whereas the blender method says to filter thru coffee filter. A lot of people complain that filtering thru the paper filter loses a lot of hash, so maybe I'll make a minor change to the blender method and switch out paper-coffee-filter method for the wax-paper method

Thanks for the idea though!

 

[smokin 2 live]

hey buddy!
yea gumby's method was with like 300 grams or so of trim, we all know that a shit load of trim! and ya, it was a bit messy as well. all that stirring with a paint stirer attached to drill. not to mention your hands being frozed nearly OFF!! huhhuhhuh!

but i will say that on a smaller scale, that method sounds like less hassel. ANYTHING for less hassel is fine with me!
about using the coffee filter for filtering, if your worried bout lossing a good bit of your trich's, try stepping down after using the coffee filterto a silk pair of lady's panty hose, queen size works well for me. hehehehe!!just keep running your wash first through the filter, than from there on, use the stockings..
just a tip that has helped me in the past....

good luck clay
S2L