Makeshift Greenhouse Problems

What worries me is the greenhouse has huge air leaks and I'll need to get those somewhat sealed so I can keep the plants warm enough in cold weather. Keeping them in those small pots until absolutely necessary to transplant allows me to bundle them close together and sheltered from the cold. When I transplant into fifteen 5-gallon buckets the heating requirement becomes very difficult this time of year.

Brown thumb, I'd transplant just to be sure into some clean new soil. The roots will be in a happier environment if its currently in one packed with salt and will instantly perk up. If you look at my log I fixed a couple overdoses and they're thriving now in huge pots. I have some strains that fill a solo cup in a week a 1 gal in 2-3 weeks so it might be time.

Okay, I'll transplant to the 5 gallon buckets but I've got to build a shelter around them to keep them warm. I think this spring I'll move my grow inside.

Wow, man you are making everything so difficult for yourself. It just isn't as hard as you are making it.
So many bottles, so much crap in your soil, why? Read some kiss threads, or lazy growing.
Seed into veggie compost and water. Nothing to mess with, nothing to get wrong.

I can't transplant until I have a way to keep fifteen 5-gallon buckets warm through the winter. Until then the plants must stay in their 4 inch pots. It'll be several days before I can transplant them.

The sick leaves have improved today, all being less droopy and most having much better color. I didn't snip as many leaves as I'd expected to. The only thing I changed was the temperature setting on the space heater under the plants. I can't be certain but I think I was overheating the roots.

I would try backing those lights off, LEDs are a bit deceptive with how intense they can be and you have plenty of light on them. Low temps are going to compound any over watering issues and your roots are prolly far behind at this point hence why you haven't seen much of a rebound. I have a hard time believing that with the amount of aeration material you are using that it is just from over watering. It sounds like the only thing you haven't tried yet....raise the lights.

Also if you keep making adjustments do them slowly or one at a time and wait a few days before you judge if things are improving or not.

Jason Voorhees said:

I would try backing those lights off, LEDs are a bit deceptive with how intense they can be and you have plenty of light on them. Low temps are going to compound any over watering issues and your roots are prolly far behind at this point hence why you haven't seen much of a rebound. I have a hard time believing that with the amount of aeration material you are using that it is just from over watering. It sounds like the only thing you haven't tried yet....raise the lights.

Also if you keep making adjustments do them slowly or one at a time and wait a few days before you judge if things are improving or not.

Click to expand...

I recently lowered the lights because of the stunted growth. Wouldn't the newest leaves at the top be the most affected if the lights were too close?

as whodatis said
dont try and micromanage everything it will drive you insane
you'll think you see every little thing as major lol
i've been growing for a few years now and i still consider myself a newbie
i got a whole lotta learning to do
but read the forums watch what others do while watching your plants
and learn from that
funny enough i seemed to grow better the more i stayed out of the room lol
good luck with the grow

I do intend to try a much simpler grow. My tall privacy fence will soon be up so I'll start some seedlings in mid January and transplant them to bare ground early February. It doesn't get very cold here and not for very long. My guess is those outside plants will do better than anything I've tried so far.

Ok I was reading along till I could find an excuse to start talking and here's what I see below, that I know a little about.

Like... you're not really permanently eff'd, you're having them shut down, when the root temps drop.

It doesn't create any form of poisoning per se, it's just that the chemical reactions slow down so far, that effectively, growth is nearly stopped.

If ya want to, look online for some google image searches about stuff like this. Let's see... ''root temp vs growth'' and this sorta thing will probably do it.

Since you might not know, there's a way to really, REALLY focus and intensify your search results, and that's to just do the same darn search, on 'web' and 'images' and 'videos'.

The images searches give you great variety in charts and things people put together so you can grasp it real quick.

Searching videos can give you super focused information on solving problems, associated with some kind of work like 'warming roots in a green house' -or whatever. I mean... I know this really isn't the answer at all I'm just saying, I know how it is to know stuff's out there and not really think about something like that as an answer.

Anyway I used to grow out in a little porch attached to my house; and I was growing some Super Silver Haze that kept going, and going... and eventually, it started getting cool. As soon as the temps started getting down to the 50s, stuff like this - the growth drops off,

and the thing is, you can go through even a whole day and not have the root temps get high enough, that the plants can kick off again.

There are umpteen dozen ways to warm a root set, or a group of root sets, and I don't really have a so-called ''THE ANSWER'' picked out for you cause I don't know exactly what kind of setup you have working.

Hopefully, some people who have warmed roots like this, will come in and offer you a good tip on keeping the roots warm, using some kind of standard product for that - they do in fact sell whatcha call a root mat or a rooting mat.

I used to grow completely fixated on using the cheapest, most guerrilla methods I could concoct/contrive for everything, and the method I finally relied on for warming my roots, was to sit the plants in some low tubs - these were hempy buckets - and the low tubs, I used to catch my run-off, I just laid those onto some styrofoam board I had, 3/4ths inch thick, and I ran - lol please don't laugh at me - some clear christmas lights, all around the outside of the tub, and then I just surrounded it all with blankets. Over the blankets, I layed some black & white panda plastic, which is one of those grower things that when you've got it, you just say 'Oh, I just fixed that shit with some PANDA plastic, and it was FINE!'' Everybody of course at that point says to themselves, 'Yeah, as soon as I blow a hundred bucks on a huge roll of black & white, I'll black out and reflectively align all my shit till it's perfect. Thanks.''

But in real life I'm not sure what the best answer is for you. You want to have those roots at about 65, 68 degrees F. If it gets up to be at about 70 and stay there, and it's hydroponic, unless steps are taken, (or if it's a hempy bucket which doesn't suffer root rot because the water gets drunk out, replenished, drunk down, replaced, and fungus can't grow in that) you could and will get root rot.

But when you get those roots, to where they're at about 65, 68, 70 degrees, the machines are gonna turn on, and they'll keep ticking along until you drop em again.

So get a thermometer and stick it into your media and I bet you come out with cold root temps man.

brown_thumb said:

I'm not panicking nor am I afraid... I ain't a-skeert o' nuthin'.

POTS: My starter pots are 100mm (4") coconut fiber.

SOIL: I started with Victory Sea Blend with no amendments but that stayed far too wet. So I amended it with a 1:2 mix of the same soil with a mix consisting of 2 parts rice hulls + 2 parts perlite + 1 part vermiculite. That mix still held too much moisture so the latest seedlings are in a 1:3 mix of the same amendments (only 25 percent of the bag soil).

TEMPS: This is mostly at the mercy of nature. During the summer temps are 100F day and 80F at night. I was probably growing the wrong strains during summer... lesson learned. Now, during winter months, temps are 75-85F day (in the greenhouse) and 40-50 at night. I use a heater if the temps go below 45F.

Click to expand...

15 5-gallon buckets to keep warm is a big frickin' deal, and I don't think you're going to be able to keep that many, very warm, without a lot of hassle.

One thing to try to figure out, is if there's a way to put multiple layers of something around those buckets.

Listen to me: The first foot or so air down at the ground, is always among the coldest air in the region at night. It's a big reason why all these green house gurus tell you to get the plants, up onto some stands. Ok? You gotta understand how hard you're fighting the natural cooling potential of the night around you when those buckets are down low like that.

I feel like you're probably on a fairly stretched dime so I'm trying to kinda lay low on the 'you ought to' this and that.

I might not have read close enough but I assume you're kinda broke here so don't think you're not among friends.

There's... a lotta ways to add warmth, but the old electric lights, and a bunch of layers of plastic, blankets, this sorta thing - it's a kind of first-thoughts go-to kind of solution but you might not have that available.

It's possible for you to get your hands on old cardboard, I'd imagine. Cardboard has got a half-assed decent insulation capacity because the fibers are often woven with air spaces inside, in between the layers.

It's really difficult to come up with REAL inexpensive answers. One answer that always will beg though, to be put into effect, is to get the buckets off the ground: either sitting on an inch of so of styrofoam you cull from somewhere, or better yet, find some way to pick each bucket up off the ground about a foot.

If you could get them all off the ground a foot, you could probably gain 4, maybe 5 degrees F, right off the bat. Then there will be the mechanism to warm all that stuff up to the temp where the roots will turn on effectively enough to gain weight.

If you're in a house you own, then run a 1/2 inch gas line out there, and put in some kind of natural gas heater. I realize of course you probably can't... just saying.

Natural gas is about as cheap as it gets unless you scam up some kind of way to heat a bunch of water each day using solar power, but that would require the amount of water in a swimming pool to warm your green house well, and be good to go in all but the very coldest weather.

Once you get the old half inch gas pipe into your green house, it's kind of a matter of just running a water pipe out of the little ten gallon water heater you put in there, put a pump on it, and pump the water around the base of your buckets in an insulated box.

If you're seriously low dollaring it, go to the cheapest place you can get it, and buy that ultra thin painter's plastic, and try to find some way to seal the place up. Mainly you gotta stop that heat from going out up top, and one way is to build tents, inside the green house.

This can be handled a variety of ways but when you're super-cheaping it, it's typically with a string: run lengthwise, and your cheap plastic, just drapes over it. Prop into a functioning tent shape as cheaply as possible and hey - make m.o.r.e. than o.n.e. layer of tent if you can.

Typically you can't, but if you look overhead, and there just happens to be two places to tie a string, a couple of inches higher than each other, two individual air packets is better than just one. You're trying to stop large vertical distances from invoking, because this increases the velocity thus mass of air turnover in the rising/falling convection cycling that goes on.

To get all those buckets off the floor I dunno what you're gonna do. You might go so far as to try to get some pieces of firewood, stand them on end, they're usually about 20 inches, and put the buckets on a board, you string across all that somehow.

I doubt it's possible to like... hang each bucket, right? (By the way this is a good thing about perlite hempy buckets: even watered the whole thing only weighs like ten pounds, so you can actually hang those buckets if you have the infrastructure.

Another way you can sometimes cheap out, is heavy as hell but it CAN be free if you got a bud with a truck: pallets.

Like - Wal mart, they give way all those whatcha call 'half-pallets' where I live: Not plastic, they're wood, but they're half size pallets.

Well, in the specialty seasons, valentines day, thanksgiving, XMAS, etc - halloween - there are all these little 'specialty' pallet loads of candies, clothes, toys and stuff designed to be just set out on the pallet in the middle or ends of aisles, this sorta thing: and they throw em away where I live: the guy told me take em.

Now; over time of course - I got myself and my wife, about twenty of these things and they're hot shit with gravy on it for some applications due to their perfect small farm size and the fact they're so - free.

Obviously, you really need to go get some clear plastic and seal the roof over those plants some, even if it's just to build a tent, inside the green house, and better yet, sealing the roof holes AND a tent.

Can you get bubble wrap from somewhere? That stuff's a top quality insulation due to the fact the little air bubbles don't build up a lot of individual energy moving capability due to lack of convection creating huge rivers of air - thus heat - flow. When it's got the aluminum foil on both sides it's expensive of course. However that's the stuff with one of the very highest insulation ratings for the dollar,
out on the commercial market.

But just plain old clear bubble wrap is nothing to snort at brown thumb. (You probably know this, I'm just suggesting you use this busy christmas season to see if you can score lots of it)

I don't know if you know about this but one of those 'household tips for insulating in a pinch' ideas, is that - you cut a square of bubble wrap out
the size of your window pane,
and you just stick it to the glass,
using the water of condensation or you spray it yourself: kinda squeegie the water mostly out ya know, and it just sticks there.

It adds... pretty significant insulation, I don't remember how much but it's very much measurable, maybe in low double digits' percent.

I'm not saying that's the answer up on the roof of the green house, I'm just saying, that it's commonly done by people who have the stuff around, and - hey - in the christmas season, dumpsters ALL OVER YOUR WORLD are gonna be FILLED with all kinds of damned good ideas for stuff you can use, to

get the plants off the ground about a foot

insulate the plants down around the roots

stick bubble wrap, wherever that sorta thing might be applicable.

If you want to stick the stuff up to the roof of your green house to insulate it, or cover up a place where part of the glass is broken, go to some dollar store and get a can of hair spray, clean off the glass, spray with hair spray and stick the bubble wrap up. It might hold for awhile till you can get some kind of "outstanding in your field, game winning punt/play" going.

They're not gonna drink much and you're gonna give em root rot, ok? So watch it like you have been, I've been seeing you saying how you were lightening the mix, more... and more... and that's EXACTLY the right answer in those slow-grow, low water-usage periods like this where it's too cool for them to get goin' well.

I don't really know where you are, but there are a couple of other true ghetto answers for insulation if you're really just bad broke.

I can not personally say I have done precisely what I'm gonna describe but I have done half of this: wrapping each and every bucket into a clear plastic bag. The theory is very clear, if the buckets are black, the bags around each bucket, enforce a lack of convection so there's no wind setting up, just stripping energy off the surface of the bucket: and (I already said it but anyway) if the buckets are black, then a LOT of light, gets absorbed: black absorbs most all colors of course - and this in turn gets whatcha call 'thermalized.' Ok? Absorbed, turned to heat, in infrared light, and if the bag's around the bucket, the immediate temperature is kept up by the bag as noted and you get some definitely noticeable heat containment; you probably can get three or four degrees F, a degree or two C, just from that.

Now the other half of this is VERY real and it's VERY frequently resorted to by small green house people. IF those buckets are black, you just plug in a darn infrared heater light bulb, in any kind of socket you can contrive (and obviously protect with a metal surround so you don't set the damned place on fire - I'm not talking about daring Murphy's law to burn down your place here - typically you want a clamp/utility light with those big, lightweight, sorta cone shaped aluminum surrounds/reflectors)

and you just direct three of four of these bulbs' infrared output - using your aluminum foil reflectors - onto the black buckets, with the clear bags around them. Now - this, I've actually seen in books; but I figure you probably don't have black buckets, and then you probably don't have a whole lot of spare cash around for infrared light bulbs, OR clear bags.

Whenever you are fighting energy transfer within a column of gas, particularly here we're talking about atmospheric air, so nothin' special about it - the main thing, it's your job to do, is stop conduction losses, to physically cold objects, and this includes the air around the buckets too -

and secondly, you should deprive the air column the movement in convection, that makes every clump of warmed air molecules start to rise up, up, up, far from the roots of your plants.

You need to use a fan to keep the constant separation of air - that stratifying that goes on, puts the hot air up top where you don't want it,

and it puts the coldest air down where you don't want THAT.

This means you should put a fan in the place and try to keep pushing the hot air at the top, down to the floor, and this can take a LITTLE off the bad temps ratio, regarding all your hot air leaving out the top,
vs your plants freezing on the bottom.

But once again you need the fan: you need the room to put that shit; and the electrical plug to run it, and you gotta pay for power. So I'm not saying ''do it'' I'm saying, there's sort of principles for fighting cold spots inside a structure.

Oh - and here's another one you need to know. You probably do but here goes anyway: through the years people have repeatedly checked out the green house scene at universities, and - you know - just all over. And one of the things that's very common sense once somebody tells you a bunch of people have checked, and it's true - is that the lowest three feet of your green house are far, FAR better off insulated, so the cold can't come in, than clear, so early/late sunlight can get in.

So if your place has clear stuff all the way to the ground you REALLLLY need to get them off the ground because you can bet your ass it's getting as cold as my ex wife's lawyer's heart in there on the floor of that thing at night.

The concept about insulating the lowest two and a half to three feet is that even in good sunlight availability conditions, and most certainly in average conditions in a yard, etc: it's actually, coming up on about 10:00 am before the plants start turning on from sunlight, because the fences and trees around, almost always limit the sunlight till that hour.

So if the sides of the green house can be insulated well up to about the two and half to three foot mark over the next - however long - you'll be stepping out ahead in your game some, for next season. Most certainly, try to figure out how to get those buckets off that floor, and by at LEAST a foot. It's been eons since I reflected on the actual numbers but I think the typical coldest blanket of air on the ground at night is like.. from 9 to 14 inches deep? And then the temp breaks some and rises a few degrees right there.

Something you REALLY need to think about is the temperature of that water you're douching those roots with. If that water is 50, 55 degrees and you pour it all through the roots on a day - that day's growth is about done. It's just gonna take too much energy, to raise that much water, that many degrees, such that the roots can start functioning.

That's all I can think of at the moment. I'm far from the sharpest tool in the shed so there might be someone who'll come along and help you get that place's temps in better shape than anything I can think of, I know it's hard on ya when you're money short.

Cannabis, the amount and time, thought and care you put into your post is heartwarming and I'm truly thankful, as I'm very thankful to all who are helping. I'll respond thoroughly as soon as I can.

At the moment, I have to decide on health insurance because the deadline is at hand. Then I have to sell some things to raise some funds.

Within a couple of days, you can bet your last dollar that I'll be implementing every suggestion that I can.

Health insurance issues are out of the way (for now) but I still need to spend time selling some things.

The plants have definitely perked up but the damaged leaves are not improving much in color. I guess I'll be trimming more but it's a shame because those are the larger leaves collecting the most light. I may wait another day or two before trimming the sick leaves.

I'll continue with the feeding regimen with added CaMg+ but won't water until the leaves begin to droop from mild dehydration. When I water, I always saturate the media and allow some run-off through the fiber pots.

The good thing is, I think the lights (being closer now) are causing the plants to bush out wider with more growth sideways.

Sounds like they're recovering B.T. well done.

^^^ Maybe... we'll soon see. I watered this afternoon because the leaves were drooping a bit.

here's an idea for ye b.t., get ye out of the cold, here's some pics of my very first grow and I had to be extra stealthy, its a closet that held the hot water tank for the house, ye can just about make out the tank painted white in one of the pics, I cleared it out and built a shelf above the tank, during lights out the tank kept the plants warm, I had 5x11watt bulbs over each plant, I think it cost about 15 euro a month to run and it was my most successful and enjoyable grow I've done, I got a few ounces of lovely smoke from it, ye don't need a big space, check out the micro grow section, goodluck.

Thanks, al70. I'm nearly convinced that I need to move my grow inside but it's not going to happen until springtime. Perhaps the greenhouse should be relegated to summertime growth of fresh vegetables.

don't give up, ye got them this far, if you get them to flower I find that they really toughen up, I had a crop of autos recently and I had cal mag issues with the water at my new location, practically all the leaves were dead by the time I got it dialled in and I still got a great yield, you'll be surprised at the knowledge you'll gain just by nursing this crop back to health, goodluck.

Thanks, al70. I'm not giving up. I have too much invested to give up now, plus I and others need the medicine.

I have alot of experience with the purple or burple leds. The spectrum isn't rite. They can cause slow growth, low yield and the taste is off. You want white leds. I always refer to mother nature when I have a question about my environment. Is the sun purple? You biggest problem is probably the temps. The roots are very sensitive to temps. In the ground root temps are like 68 degrees constant! Fluctuations in temperature will cause nutrient lockout. The nutrient salts wont be available to the plant and can build up in the rootzone. You defiantly have to do something about the mold you can't have that in your meds! SM-90 will help kill mold and promote a healthy rootzone. I bet if your temperatures were in check the mold wouldn't be an issue. One thing leads to another. I been growing for a lil while and I can tell ya I know 100 different ways to kill a plant haha. Hang in there man!