bigbadbiddy
Active member
Howdy folks,
so my third harvest is in the jars and I am quite pleased with the quality, yet again.
But I feel there is some lack to the potency.
I harvested maybe a little early this time... My sporadic samples with the microscope showed very few clear, mostly cloudy and a few heads BEGINNING to amber. No true amber at that point.
I think I just let them be a bit longer next time until I see at least the first true amber trichs.
But what irked me more was the low yield. The plants looked fine all through but I didn't lollypop them enough and had a lot of "larf" and useless tiny buds on the lower half of the plants. Lots of trim for hash but that surely took away valuable energy from the tops. I plan to remedy this in the current grow as well by defoliating more aggressively and making sure the plants are truly lollypopped and no tiny bud sites develop later in flower.
What I am most looking for is tips regarding my soil mix...
I ran coot's mix during my first two cycles and had a strong N deficiency and later on issues with fungus gnats and total nute lockout that forced me to completely reset everything.
This last round I top-dressed generously with EWC and introduced a clover type cover crop as well as throwing a bunch of worms into each 5 gallon smart pot.
Like I said it produced good quality buds and fixed the N-deficiency but less than a pound dry from over 20 plants under nearly 1k watt cmh is not exactly spectacular ...
I also started to PH my water during that round to avoid the whole nute lockout and fungus gnat spreading issue.
The gnats have shown back up but never more than a hand full of flyers which are caught by yellow strips. And usually I see none. Matter of fact I'm quite sure now that I only see them whenever I take clones and a few of them have trouble rooting. If I don't remove those clones from the growspace, I will find the hand full of fungus gnat flyers soon after. But ever since I started pulling such clones early, have not seen any.
I water with tap water that I let "breathe" for 24 hrs before watering the plants with it and I use PH down that is advertised for swimming pools (but I made sure it has no added chlorine or the like).
I think I will switch that pool PH down for apple cider vinegar or something like that in the future.
My water is PHed to 5.8-6.2 as I felt the plants reacted the best there. I start out close to PH 7 and noticed issues when I don't use PH down.
My water also clocks in at >300ppm which I know isn't great but I have not yet felt the need to invest in an R/O system as the buds themselves were always great, while the yields were not.
What also really irked me was that the worms always escaped the 5 gallon smart pots after I watered. I thought that they just tried to get to the wettest spot due to instinct and that the pots were just overpopulated with worms so they looked for more living space.
But after transplanting the current round to the flowering pots, I noticed a clear absence of worms.... Should have been way more of them. I also noticed that neither the mulch layer nor the died off covering crop (which is technically mulch at that point I suppose) were processed/eaten by the worms.
I didn't let the soil in the pots completely dry out before I transplanted the next set of clones to them but I may have not watered it enough as well ...
Also I found a worm or two in a few of the 1 gallon pots from veg and they looked alive and happy ...
Really not sure what to make of it, doesn't really look like the soilmix is uninhabitable for the worms or anything but also seems they try to escape any chance they get ...
I also believe that it is time to topdress or otherwise re-amend the soil mix and without any additional information would probably top-dress with a mix of kelp and EWC and make a microbial, aerated tea with molasses and malted barley to re-inocculate the soil mix with beneficial microbes.
The plants have been in the 5 gallon pots for close to a week now under a veg light-cycle. I planned to flip them as soon as the canopy is filled in. I implemented supercropping and LST techniques this time. Overdid it with some plants, could've gone more agressively with others. But overall they are very low/short and much more bushy than they were in the past so I hope this will improve yields considerably.
Another factor I was going to tackle is the humidity there.
It is constantly between 30 and 40% RH, which is apparently a bit too low for big yields. I heard/read that I should aim for 60%RH or higher, depending on how high I dare to go.
Only problem I see with this in my situation is that I would have to put the humidifier in the lung-room so all 3 chambers get the higher humidity air (this seems to work quite well as I have had a massive improvement in both veg and flower ever since I put a radiator in the lung room to keep temperature swings within a 5°C window). And the lung room also houses all the electrical stuff, particularly the ballast for the 400w MH veg bulb (will soon replace for an LED I believe). So I would be worried that the higher humidity would mess with the electronics. But maybe 60% is still fine?
Sorry for the long-winded post and thanks to everyone reading until the end and of course thank you in advance for any feedback. Negative or positive, all welcome, just looking to improve here, particularly yield-wise.
Mostly concerned/interested in potency and taste though and so far am pleased with the results in that regard but obviously would be happy if I can improve those factors as well, particularly potency which I hope will be better when I harvest later next round.
Thanks to all
BBB
/Edit
Another thing I noticed during transplant was that my root balls weren't nice and white but a little beige/brownish. Not to the point where they were rotting, they were intact and everything. But not white as I saw in the past. Could be though because I left them in those 1 gallon pots for over 2 months, they were definitely rootbound.
The plants from this third round were also topped once and in my first round I had only 7 females under 630w cmh, untopped, and they yielded about half what the 21 topped plants yielded under the close to 1kw cmh... I used mycos mixed into the soilmix directly in that first round with the 7 girls...
Smoke quality was about the same, I attribute the low potency of the current round to the slightly early harvest, as mentioned above. Thoughts welcome.
so my third harvest is in the jars and I am quite pleased with the quality, yet again.
But I feel there is some lack to the potency.
I harvested maybe a little early this time... My sporadic samples with the microscope showed very few clear, mostly cloudy and a few heads BEGINNING to amber. No true amber at that point.
I think I just let them be a bit longer next time until I see at least the first true amber trichs.
But what irked me more was the low yield. The plants looked fine all through but I didn't lollypop them enough and had a lot of "larf" and useless tiny buds on the lower half of the plants. Lots of trim for hash but that surely took away valuable energy from the tops. I plan to remedy this in the current grow as well by defoliating more aggressively and making sure the plants are truly lollypopped and no tiny bud sites develop later in flower.
What I am most looking for is tips regarding my soil mix...
I ran coot's mix during my first two cycles and had a strong N deficiency and later on issues with fungus gnats and total nute lockout that forced me to completely reset everything.
This last round I top-dressed generously with EWC and introduced a clover type cover crop as well as throwing a bunch of worms into each 5 gallon smart pot.
Like I said it produced good quality buds and fixed the N-deficiency but less than a pound dry from over 20 plants under nearly 1k watt cmh is not exactly spectacular ...
I also started to PH my water during that round to avoid the whole nute lockout and fungus gnat spreading issue.
The gnats have shown back up but never more than a hand full of flyers which are caught by yellow strips. And usually I see none. Matter of fact I'm quite sure now that I only see them whenever I take clones and a few of them have trouble rooting. If I don't remove those clones from the growspace, I will find the hand full of fungus gnat flyers soon after. But ever since I started pulling such clones early, have not seen any.
I water with tap water that I let "breathe" for 24 hrs before watering the plants with it and I use PH down that is advertised for swimming pools (but I made sure it has no added chlorine or the like).
I think I will switch that pool PH down for apple cider vinegar or something like that in the future.
My water is PHed to 5.8-6.2 as I felt the plants reacted the best there. I start out close to PH 7 and noticed issues when I don't use PH down.
My water also clocks in at >300ppm which I know isn't great but I have not yet felt the need to invest in an R/O system as the buds themselves were always great, while the yields were not.
What also really irked me was that the worms always escaped the 5 gallon smart pots after I watered. I thought that they just tried to get to the wettest spot due to instinct and that the pots were just overpopulated with worms so they looked for more living space.
But after transplanting the current round to the flowering pots, I noticed a clear absence of worms.... Should have been way more of them. I also noticed that neither the mulch layer nor the died off covering crop (which is technically mulch at that point I suppose) were processed/eaten by the worms.
I didn't let the soil in the pots completely dry out before I transplanted the next set of clones to them but I may have not watered it enough as well ...
Also I found a worm or two in a few of the 1 gallon pots from veg and they looked alive and happy ...
Really not sure what to make of it, doesn't really look like the soilmix is uninhabitable for the worms or anything but also seems they try to escape any chance they get ...
I also believe that it is time to topdress or otherwise re-amend the soil mix and without any additional information would probably top-dress with a mix of kelp and EWC and make a microbial, aerated tea with molasses and malted barley to re-inocculate the soil mix with beneficial microbes.
The plants have been in the 5 gallon pots for close to a week now under a veg light-cycle. I planned to flip them as soon as the canopy is filled in. I implemented supercropping and LST techniques this time. Overdid it with some plants, could've gone more agressively with others. But overall they are very low/short and much more bushy than they were in the past so I hope this will improve yields considerably.
Another factor I was going to tackle is the humidity there.
It is constantly between 30 and 40% RH, which is apparently a bit too low for big yields. I heard/read that I should aim for 60%RH or higher, depending on how high I dare to go.
Only problem I see with this in my situation is that I would have to put the humidifier in the lung-room so all 3 chambers get the higher humidity air (this seems to work quite well as I have had a massive improvement in both veg and flower ever since I put a radiator in the lung room to keep temperature swings within a 5°C window). And the lung room also houses all the electrical stuff, particularly the ballast for the 400w MH veg bulb (will soon replace for an LED I believe). So I would be worried that the higher humidity would mess with the electronics. But maybe 60% is still fine?
Sorry for the long-winded post and thanks to everyone reading until the end and of course thank you in advance for any feedback. Negative or positive, all welcome, just looking to improve here, particularly yield-wise.
Mostly concerned/interested in potency and taste though and so far am pleased with the results in that regard but obviously would be happy if I can improve those factors as well, particularly potency which I hope will be better when I harvest later next round.
Thanks to all
BBB
/Edit
Another thing I noticed during transplant was that my root balls weren't nice and white but a little beige/brownish. Not to the point where they were rotting, they were intact and everything. But not white as I saw in the past. Could be though because I left them in those 1 gallon pots for over 2 months, they were definitely rootbound.
The plants from this third round were also topped once and in my first round I had only 7 females under 630w cmh, untopped, and they yielded about half what the 21 topped plants yielded under the close to 1kw cmh... I used mycos mixed into the soilmix directly in that first round with the 7 girls...
Smoke quality was about the same, I attribute the low potency of the current round to the slightly early harvest, as mentioned above. Thoughts welcome.
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