Not really hitting my stride yet, any suggestions how to improve?

Take clones and you double your plant count

I rather have to lower my plant count ...


Sitting at 34 veglings in 1 gal veg pots right now.
Add the 15 G13 testers (8 of them above ground already) and it will be a tight fit. Might have to throw out some of the runts.

But clones will be taken when I first top them in a few weeks or so, depending how they grow now.
I want to wait until they have at least 2 or 3 fully developed nodes before I top them. Once topped and in the cloner, I will give them a few days rest and then start training them, using the holes I drilled in the top of the pots and some strings.



The soilmix is laden with worms, they really multiplied something fierce.
The soil mix was also a bit heavy/compact for my taste. Seems like the worms did a hell of a job in the few weeks. Might also have been a little on the wet side/slightly overwatered. When I pressed it in my hand, it kept its shape but didn't fall apart so easily anymore when I poked it with a finger. Now I wasn't sure if that was just from too much water or from the ongoing composting/worm work.
It also reeks... Like compost basically, something composting/decaying, I suppose that's a good sign (it also stank up the whole place a week or two ago, now it is only in the immediate vicinity of the bins). The worms love it for sure. The smell is dominated by the krill meal though. That stuff stinks man ... Even through all the other compost smells, you still, after more than a month, smell that krill meal over all else. Also found a pocket of soil, where an air bubble was encased against the wall of the bin. It was thick with mold (white/green) and slimey and it reeked even more of the krill meal than the rest.
Really unpleasant to the nose but like I said, if the worms love it, it should be good, no?



Since I have itty bitty seedlings and just 1 gal veg pots, I decided to cut the soil further with perlite to make it lighter.


Added some mycos during transplant, since the soil was wet, just gave them a light watering to settle everything into the pot.


Haven't turned on the 400w MH yet as some of the seedlings are still a bit runty. They are getting passive (not directly overhead) light from 8 T8s at the moment. Will leave them like this for a few days till transplant shock is gone and then fire up the MH.


Since the worms multiplied so massively, I was wondering if I have too many worms in the 1 gal pots ...
I did try to move the worms to one side of the bin and get as few of them into the pots as possible. The idea being to use the leftover worms in the soil bin to start a worm bucket.

Still ended up with like 10 worms per 1 gal pot ... Hope the poor buggers can make it in there. In my previous rounds, I only ever had a worm or two survive in the 1 gal buckets until transplant to flower.
We shall see.




Of note:
The Karma Squad crumbled lime are above and beyond all the rest. Already on their second set of serrated leafs, some are already working on the third node. Healthier and overall further ahead of the rest. Very pleasant surprise.
On the flipside, the King Mambas look the worst out of the bunch with the most runts and tiny stuff.






Will take some pics in a few days after transplant shock is over. Will also take some pics of the soil bins and the worms (should have snapped a few pics of that and uploaded before, what with all the talk about soil mix in this thread ... xD)

Quick update:


The buckwheat hulls seem to indeed have been the culprit.
Exchanged them for perlite, things are looking a looooot better!


Am close to halfway in flower and things are looking a lot better, seems like I will also hit "normal" weight this time around the way things look.
Also topped all plants once and did a bunch of bondage/LST afterwards and the canopy is a lot more filled in this time around.

Also, for the first time, added a straw/mulch layer and it seems to keep the top moist for a lot longer. I water about once a week at the moment, the plants seem happy and I don't feel the need to water every other day to keep the top layer of soil moist.
Also didn't have a fungus gnat breakout that I feared from the straw. Only using water from the tap that gets dechlorinated over night and otherwise untreated in terms of PH etc.
I think leaving out dolomite lime and oyster shell flower from my soil mix, since the water is so hard and high in Ca, was also a good move, the plants seem to like it.
Worms also seem happier/healthier and not fleeing the medium anymore. When I defoliated the girls a little, a couple of worms even crawled out of the top soil to say hi. Looked very healthy and happy and after a short stint in the air made their way back into the soil to continue their work.


Pics incoming, got a new camera a while ago and have some late veg/early flower pics, will snap a few now close to the halfway point and upload in the coming days.


Thank you all for your feedback and input, it seems to have done the trick!


/edit
regarding the worms, soil etc:
It looks like I overwatered one of the soil bins and it went slightly anaerobic ... There was standing water in the bin (not terribly much) and I noticed that some of the plants I transplanted into soil from that bin had a bit more of a transplant shock than others and fell a bit behind in terms of growth. Chiefly 2 star plants in veg, a G13xAfgHz and a G13xSkunk. They still look great now after recovery in flower but the crumbled lime grew considerably bigger in that time.
One of the King Mamba also looks really good as well as another G13xAfgHz that didn't look terribly impressive in veg but really took off in the 5gal pot after transplant. The only Blueberry from PeakseedsBC I decided to flower still looks the most sickly out of all plants (although it did bounce back once in the 5 gal pot) and also looks the most disappointing in flowering so far.

Alright, let's get some pics going, long overdue.


I guess it's all in the attachments... Struggling with the pics here.


We have the gang in late veg, early flower, around the mid way point in flower before and after the final defoliation.
Also one of the "stars", a Karma Crumbled Lime after defoliation.


The remaining three pics are of deficiencies, I think these are from 2 Karma King Mamba and one MRN G13xSkunk.


By now I think these deficiencies mostly come from being root bound in the 1 gal pots. These pics are just a few days after transplanting from 1 to 5 gal pots.
After removing the sickly growth from the bottom (which I would do anyway to lollypop later on), the new growth looks healthy and the plants seem to snap out of it once there is enough soil mass.


But any feedback or ideas are welcome, if anyone can guide me in the right way to adjust my topdressing or soil mix that would be aces.


Hope with some pics we can get this thing figured out for good now.


I can get a few more shots of deficiencies from a few plants if desired.



All the best

BBB

I do not know why people strip their plants like that. The flowers receive energy from the fan leaves. This is simple plant physiology.

Yeah I regretted it after...


In the past I have been very timid with defoliating and lollypopping which ended in me having a lot of larf and popcorn bud which I didn't like.


I have been told before to "be brave" when defoliating and thought I just do that.
But I was quite late going into week 4 of flower and was thinking I might have killed my plants or hurt them or something but a day later they looked very happy and already grew a lot of new foliage.


In the future, if I continue with this practice, I will tone it down a notch and not do it after week 2 of flower, as I did in the past.


I will take a pic end of the week or so to show how they bounced back.
So far it looks like it wasn't a terrible move but I will definitely tone that down in the future.

A friend once visited and I allowed him to be in my indoor garden unsupervised for 30 minutes. To my horror during this time he had defoliated/lolipopped half of my plants. I chewed him out but it did provide a side by side test and the non-foliated plants produced much larger floral clusters - colas. IMO the defoliation practice is 100 percent myth.

Continue to amend and aerate soil.

Microbeman said:

A friend once visited and I allowed him to be in my indoor garden unsupervised for 30 minutes. To my horror during this time he had defoliated/lolipopped half of my plants. I chewed him out but it did provide a side by side test and the non-foliated plants produced much larger floral clusters - colas. IMO the defoliation practice is 100 percent myth.

Click to expand...

I'll defoliate but it's hard on a plant to sever severely. branches....SCROG/SOG/LST a better way to grow....just my opinion.

aridbud said:

Continue to amend and aerate soil.

Click to expand...

hmmm, how do I aerate the soil going forward?
Aside from giving it time to "fully" dry out in between waterings?




How would you suggest I continue amending?


For now I was planning to give them plain water and in 2 weeks or so (with about 3-4 weeks of flower left) I was going to give them an ACT with EWC, molasses, kelp and krill meal and topdress some potash.


Any other/further suggestions?



Otherwise next topdress was going to be a mix of the base nutrients (kelp, krill meal, neem cake, epsom salt and some rock dusts) after harvest to prepare for next round, water that in and let the cover crops and worms do their thing for a week or so before planting the next plants.


IF I plant a next round. The workload of so many plants in "small" containers is killing me ... I went that route mainly for pheno hunting purposes but it is just so much damn work.
Am strongly considering (as I have in the past) to get a few 15 gal or larger pots/beds in there and reduce the plant count to 6 plants or so. Just need to find a way to arrange the beds so I can reach everything during flower...




@MM
I will see what this round brings but I take your feedback to heart and tend to agree.
As it stands I am considering to stop defoliating after veg. But in veg it has done good work for me because along with topping and training, it helps me shape the plants.
The plants currently have also grown a bit wild as I became ill during late veg/early flower and had to stop training them, just couldn't do it with the fever n all.


Basically they were heavily trained in the 1gal pots and then left to grow/flower unsupervised in the 5 gal pots. Going forward (if I stick with the 5 gals), I would continue training them for a week or two in the 5 gal pots before flipping them.
I will take a pic of the G13xSkunk #5 I have going that turned out "perfect" with regards to shape. Has that "grail" structure to it. Basically what I tried to achieve overall in terms of plant structure but only the one plant grew into that shape even after I had to stop training.





Overall, like I said before, it looks good to me. Especially before the defoliation I was very happy with how things were going, the canopy, for the first time, was like 80-90% filled in, there were very few empty spots where the light reached the soil.
If I could have a do-over, I would leave it like that and only take off stuff from the bottom.
Maybe that will be enough in the future to get rid of some of the unwanted popcorn/larf bud and direct more energy towards the bigger buds further up the plant?
Or is that also a myth?


I just always looked at the lower nodes while trimming and though "man, that's not even worth bothering with, even if I make bubble hash or butter out of it ... Would much larger have a couple bigger buds up top and use the trim/sugar leafs for concentrates".
So I tried this method.

bigbadbiddy said:

hmmm, how do I aerate the soil going forward?
Aside from giving it time to "fully" dry out in between waterings?




How would you suggest I continue amending?


For now I was planning to give them plain water and in 2 weeks or so (with about 3-4 weeks of flower left) I was going to give them an ACT with EWC, molasses, kelp and krill meal and topdress some potash.


Any other/further suggestions?



Otherwise next topdress was going to be a mix of the base nutrients (kelp, krill meal, neem cake, epsom salt and some rock dusts) after harvest to prepare for next round, water that in and let the cover crops and worms do their thing for a week or so before planting the next plants.


IF I plant a next round. The workload of so many plants in "small" containers is killing me ... I went that route mainly for pheno hunting purposes but it is just so much damn work.
Am strongly considering (as I have in the past) to get a few 15 gal or larger pots/beds in there and reduce the plant count to 6 plants or so. Just need to find a way to arrange the beds so I can reach everything during flower...




@MM
I will see what this round brings but I take your feedback to heart and tend to agree.
As it stands I am considering to stop defoliating after veg. But in veg it has done good work for me because along with topping and training, it helps me shape the plants.
The plants currently have also grown a bit wild as I became ill during late veg/early flower and had to stop training them, just couldn't do it with the fever n all.


Basically they were heavily trained in the 1gal pots and then left to grow/flower unsupervised in the 5 gal pots. Going forward (if I stick with the 5 gals), I would continue training them for a week or two in the 5 gal pots before flipping them.
I will take a pic of the G13xSkunk #5 I have going that turned out "perfect" with regards to shape. Has that "grail" structure to it. Basically what I tried to achieve overall in terms of plant structure but only the one plant grew into that shape even after I had to stop training.





Overall, like I said before, it looks good to me. Especially before the defoliation I was very happy with how things were going, the canopy, for the first time, was like 80-90% filled in, there were very few empty spots where the light reached the soil.
If I could have a do-over, I would leave it like that and only take off stuff from the bottom.
Maybe that will be enough in the future to get rid of some of the unwanted popcorn/larf bud and direct more energy towards the bigger buds further up the plant?
Or is that also a myth?


I just always looked at the lower nodes while trimming and though "man, that's not even worth bothering with, even if I make bubble hash or butter out of it ... Would much larger have a couple bigger buds up top and use the trim/sugar leafs for concentrates".
So I tried this method.

Click to expand...

I am at the beginning stages of my first ever no till, home made dirt grow, and I researched the bejeezus out of it before I made the commitment.

From what I have gleaned from the innerwebs is bigger is better when it comes to no till LOS. I had the room for it, so I have 8 25 gallon grow bags with my dirt cooking right now. I remember reading somewhere that 15 gallons is about as small as you want to go.

My room, like yours, is only open on one side (but 8x8 with a 4x8 growing area). So I need a way to move these big containers of dirt around without too much effort. So I am building some 24" square carts with swivel casters, adding a 3" tall lip, and lining it with plastic.This will allow me to move them about as I need to for maintenance of the plant hopefully pretty easily, as well as keep any extra water off the floor.

The casters I bought on Amazon for a dollar a piece. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06VVZX3JS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02__o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 My bag of soil fully watered weighs 125ish pounds. With 5 casters (4 in the corner, one in the middle), each caster will be supporting 25-30 lbs.

The wood for the platform and lip, as well as the plastic all procured from the Home Depot. My HD will cut up full sheets of plywood however you like if they're slow. Otherwise they make precut pieces that are about twice the price. And if worse comes to worst, I have a table saw I can drag out and cut my own plywood.

Eyy that's actually a good solution to the issues I would face with larger pots/beds!


I totally forgot about rolling boards!


Looked into them when I set everything up but scratched them as I would need too many for the 5 gal pots and they were quite pricey, even if I DIY them.


But if swapped to 15gal or larger, I wouldn't need 20 of them bad boys anymore but could probably do with half that or sth.


Will definitely consider that again!


The problem for me is that I mounted the light (630w CMH) in the middle of the room. By all accounts it is absolutely enough for it. If I would want to use large beds/pots, and still be able to work the plants, I always thought I would need 2 315w CMH fixtures to hang one on each side of the room so I can walk in the middle.


But with rolling boards I could just move the plants to the side walls to work them and put them back in the middle under the light when done. Problem solved.
Probably would also have some extra space I could use to flower clones for sexing and could stop always vegging the extra few weeks until they throw preflowers (that's how I currently sex them, having great results so far).



Will definitely consider!


Regarding the container size for no till and living soil:
There is lots of conflicting info out there, lots of arguments, too.
I also researched the hell out of the topic beforehand and was told it can be and has been done in containers as small as 3 gallons...
I figured with 5 I am still on the low end of the spectrum but not at the very edge. It was the smallest size I felt comfortable to try it out (because my main goal was/is pheno hunting, I aimed for as small as possible for max seeds to hunt through).
From my experience I would say 5gal is definitely doable but I wouldn't try it in 3 gal and would definitely expect things to be a lot less work intensive and smoother in larger pots/beds.

For me, indoors, the 8gal GroPro square pots work best for the size/mobility trade off. Outdoors, 15gal is pretty much the minimum and they rarely, if ever, get moved.

Wet

bigbadbiddy said:

Eyy that's actually a good solution to the issues I would face with larger pots/beds!


I totally forgot about rolling boards!


Looked into them when I set everything up but scratched them as I would need too many for the 5 gal pots and they were quite pricey, even if I DIY them.


But if swapped to 15gal or larger, I wouldn't need 20 of them bad boys anymore but could probably do with half that or sth.


Will definitely consider that again!


The problem for me is that I mounted the light (630w CMH) in the middle of the room. By all accounts it is absolutely enough for it. If I would want to use large beds/pots, and still be able to work the plants, I always thought I would need 2 315w CMH fixtures to hang one on each side of the room so I can walk in the middle.


But with rolling boards I could just move the plants to the side walls to work them and put them back in the middle under the light when done. Problem solved.
Probably would also have some extra space I could use to flower clones for sexing and could stop always vegging the extra few weeks until they throw preflowers (that's how I currently sex them, having great results so far).



Will definitely consider!


Regarding the container size for no till and living soil:
There is lots of conflicting info out there, lots of arguments, too.
I also researched the hell out of the topic beforehand and was told it can be and has been done in containers as small as 3 gallons...
I figured with 5 I am still on the low end of the spectrum but not at the very edge. It was the smallest size I felt comfortable to try it out (because my main goal was/is pheno hunting, I aimed for as small as possible for max seeds to hunt through).
From my experience I would say 5gal is definitely doable but I wouldn't try it in 3 gal and would definitely expect things to be a lot less work intensive and smoother in larger pots/beds.

Click to expand...

Glad I could remind you.

One thing I did learn as a roadie, wheels are our friends.

The other thing I learned is there are people out there who can consume an alarmingly large amount of hard drugs and still behave somewhat coherently.

GOT_BUD? said:

Glad I could remind you.

One thing I did learn as a roadie, wheels are our friends.

The other thing I learned is there are people out there who can consume an alarmingly large amount of hard drugs and still behave somewhat coherently.

Click to expand...

Ya, know what you mean. In a previous life I put on concerts/dances with Hells Angels. It went smooth as silk down the raging river.

You have had better experiences with the honor the plant pots h.h.?


I am running root pouch at the moment.


Wasn't sure if I would try out another brand/manufacturer if/when I make the switch to larger pots/beds.

h.h. said:

https://www.honortheplant.com/collections/all

Click to expand...

:jawdrop: Those are pricey.

Pricey but nice.
Not your dads grow bag.
You only buy them once.
I prefer the 12 gallons. The 15's are too heavy for me. Not much difference in plant size. I actually did better in the 12's.
Compared to ordinary grow bags, the sides aren't wicked dry.
I usually just slide them around.

Microbeman said:

Ya, know what you mean. In a previous life I put on concerts/dances with Hells Angels. It went smooth as silk down the raging river.

Click to expand...

I have different memories of the HA's.
Not so smooth.