Smells like LouDog inside the van...

Welcome to the search for the stink. There's lots of funny smells going on in this van. I've missed sharing with my friends here at IC. Hoping to reconnect with a few and make lots of new ones, sharing our journey of growing top quality cannabis.

Join us here in the van, and soon the treehouse as we try to pump out the volume and produce the stickiest medical dope we can. We're 100% legal medical patients here, so abiding by some restrictive number limitations. But restraints breeds ingenuity, and there's certainly a drive to make it work.

So we're going to pick up some tried and true methods from the old heads and maybe overcome some issues that will help someone else down the line.


So, I hope you'll join me, smoke a fat j, and join the discussion. This ain't no funky reggae party, this is the search for the sticky and stinky.


Let's kick it off with some pics of a couple of favorite cuts:

It all starts with a seed...



OG Chem from Ganja Rebel


Gorilla Bubble BX2 from Tony Green




Good vibes all!
LD

The Van

The Van

The van is cramped. It's a little damp and funny smelling. But it can grow some decent ganja.

We mainly veg in the van, sometimes we'll flower a small little round for whatever fancies us at the moment. Here's what we're working with:

3'x3'x6' Tent
3'x3'x7' Panda Poly Room
and a couple other little nooks and crannies where we stick clones


Lighting
Running a 400w ballast on a flip between the tent and the panda poly room, with small cfls or leds to extend photoperiod as needed for veg.

We're running an open batwing in one tent and an air cooled reflector in the other. MH for veg, HPS for flower for now.

I just finished running a round with a couple of Mars Hydro SP150 lights in a 3'x3' with lots of success. Those lights were passed along to a fellow medical patient in need since we had the flip flop and batwing sitting in storage anyways. More cannabis in the world can only be a good thing


Methods
Drain to waste coco
Jack's A & B
Root bennies, hydroshield, and EWC teas
Regalia and cal-mag foliars

If there's enough headroom, I like to run trays plumbed for drain to waste. In a perfect world, corrugated poly with gutters and a pvc run could get to a sump basin, but here in the van we have to deal with draining to a condensate pump which pumps to a small wastewater res that is emptied by hand. It works well enough. We found maxi garden trays for about $15/ea, where two fit a 3'x3' just about perfectly and are cost effective to throw a bulkhead in and tilt the tray accordingly so it drains into the pump for removal.



Here's a couple of shots from the last round in the van, and some new ones with vegging girls.




And the current status of the van, we've got some OG Chem from Ganja Rebel and SUSQ Chem from the man JM vegging and waiting to make their way to the treehouse.



Here's a few girls on Day 6 of flower. Double Strawberry Diesel clones from Ganja Rebel's f2 of Rez's gear, and a New York Candy Orange (NYCO) from Catnip Seeds. Hope you are doing well out there Dr. P!

The Treehouse

The Treehouse

Coming Soon...



I'm looking forward to this. We're building from scratch starting with the framing and going till we have buds in the jars. I'd like to document and share, and hopefully a few can learn from any mistakes or problems along the way.

Three Flower Rooms. Five Plants. Ten 600w Vertical Bulbs (maybe 14 with expansions). Nothing huge, but planning to make good use of a low plant count, 7' ceilings, and cheap mortgage rates and property. Flip those bulbs vertical, muffin fans, air exchange 2x per minute, dialed humidity. Babyshit, as some might say

The point isn't to be the most efficient in The Treehouse. This grow will be far from it. The point is to push yield from each plant with the space we have to work with. Five plants, 7' ceilings, weird interior concrete walls that split up the space, and a desire to run things on a flip flopped schedule to regulate electrical usage, environment, etc. This limiting design criteria is what is guiding this idea.

More to come as we proceed with the build.

Big shout out to the guys rocking it for years and their willingness to share and help others learn and in some way inspired The Treehouse. DJM, DHF, gettogro, julian, heath, eric2028, gman, krusty, RB26, and too many more to name with great threads full of info. Days worth of what should be required reading, and too much good stuff lost to the internet.


The Design
We've got weird concrete interior walls and no-go zones due to existing features that make this a challenge. There's a relatively small footprint, but a decent electrical panel to work with.

Here's some prelim sketches. 2-plant flower rooms have trees drawn on ~66" centers (but we're not running RDWC, so flexible with hooks in the ceiling). Three rooms total (Two 2-plant rooms and one 1-plant room), each with a dedicated reservoir. Intake and exhaust to keep that air moving and muffin fans under each bulb. We'll probably start with 4 bulbs per larger flower room and may upgrade to 5 or 6 once we see how the rooms are running and any future upgrades (AC/CO2). Right now a larger unfinished basement area is planned to serve as a lung room with the option to recirculate exhaust air from the rooms or dump it outside. Free cooling for the next couple months, so what better time than now.

Foam insulation board up against any existing concrete. 24" OC 2x4 framing with reflectrix. New wiring. I'm thinking of leaving bare concrete floors just because I don't want to deal with the hassle, time needed to resurface, or any potential offgassing so things can get rolling and we can get a round down.

We plan two of these 2-plant flower rooms, sized 8' x 12'



We plan one of these 5.5' x 7.5' rooms housing 1 plant



The target is a unit per plant out of the gate. Everything over is gravy, anything under is disappointing. Once dialed, we hope to hit 25-30z per plant. The headstash hash doesn't count towards that total[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]

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Itching to get started! [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
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The Strains

The Strains

OGC - Ganja Rebel, OG Chem BX v1.1, notes say (OG/Chem) x ((OG/Chem x 5G's Yellow)), based off a killer OG Chem plant. He was generous enough to share a few tester packs during his refining process, and this was the winner. Denser flowers with an OG stretch and carrying that potency that smacks you in the head. Just a funky, earthy smell. Awesome plant. I had a similar ECSD x OG/Chem but she got mislabeled and lost years ago.



SQ - From a generous friend. The seeds were given to me as Suzy Q. Not related to the CBD plant. She's a sour leaner made up of 4SD x Chem DD. Another great plant, with deep fruity early smells that turn into a gassy sour come harvest. Sour type structure and a vigorous plant.



GB - Gorilla Bubble BX2 from Tony Green. A very sour bubble leaning pheno from Tony's GB line. GG4 x Sour Bubble and backcrossed back to the glue. She could be mistaken for branchier sour bubble, with almost all SB structure, growth, flowers, smells, with a bit of extra branching and frost from the glue. Dense golfballs.



DSD - Double Strawberry Diesel F2 from Ganja Rebel. 8 weeks, done, frost, funk. She's quick to flower and pretty much stops eating around 6.5-7 weeks. Seems strikingly similar to the mom used for the cross if you dig through Ganja Rebel/D's subforum. Annual production rounds with SOG for max yield and quality, she might be the ticket. Great smells and super frosty with a fairly easy trim/post.

Roaches in the pot

I'm in! A van you say??? . Looking great so far!!

LouDog420 said:

Welcome to the search for the stink. There's lots of funny smells going on in this van. I've missed sharing with my friends here at IC. Hoping to reconnect with a few and make lots of new ones, sharing our journey of growing top quality cannabis.

Join us here in the van, and soon the treehouse as we try to pump out the volume and produce the stickiest medical dope we can. We're 100% legal medical patients here, so abiding by some restrictive number limitations. But restraints breeds ingenuity, and there's certainly a drive to make it work.

So we're going to pick up some tried and true methods from the old heads and maybe overcome some issues that will help someone else down the line.


So, I hope you'll join me, smoke a fat j, and join the discussion. This ain't no funky reggae party, this is the search for the sticky and stinky.


Let's kick it off with some pics of a couple of favorite cuts:

It all starts with a seed...
View Image


OG Chem from Ganja Rebel
View Image

Gorilla Bubble BX2 from Tony Green
View Image
View Image


Good vibes all!
LD

Click to expand...

With a start like that! Don't fuk around with my dawg.......love it lou I've grabbed a lawn chair

Oh here we go!

Good to see you running a grow thread.

Beautiful!!

Very nice ideas Lou...!!!... that OG Chem looks tric’d out like a mother... ... ...

Will you have any AC units in the tree house...!!!... at first, I was thinking that you were growing in an actual tree house...!!!... but after thinking about it a bit I see it’s just what’s being grown inside there... ... ... TREE’s. . .

I’ve yet to run any vertical rooms but I’ve always wanted to give it a try...


I’ll be watching and learning what I can from you bro... ... ...

Sorry to disappoint, but yes we are talking a metaphorical van and treehouse here. Thanks all for joining along, hoping we can put on a show worth following...

nickman, we love the OG Chem, straight chemmy funk and great full melt hash. It was one of Ganja Rebel/D's earlier OG Chem releases, I think v1.1. He was generous enough to pass along a bunch of packs to test a few years back. Still have another pack of the 1.1 and a Double OG Sour that has been itching to pop. I think 2021 is the year

No AC at first. Winter is coming. We'll limp through the first two rounds running heavy air exchange and muffin fans under each bulb. We're treating a larger basement space as a lung room and will have an exterior air intake on a temp controller into the lung room. Exhaust is carbon filtered from each space and either recirculated or dumped outside depending on how warm or cold it is in the lung room.

Vertical rooms are great for low ceilings (where a hood just eats up too much room and is a giant heat sink which makes cooling problematic and damn near impossible to grow large trees effectively). I used to run vert, mainly donuts with higher plant numbers, about a decade ago but got away from it due to grow space and compliance requirements. But we're back, now going less plants and more bulbs, and we've decided vert is definitely the way to go in the treehouse with limited ceiling heights and needing to maximize yields per plant.


Just because posts without pics are boring, let's share a future tree... Tony's Gorilla Bubble BX2, the same girl in the first post:

Gone sifting...

Gone sifting...

I need a bumper sticker that says I'd rather be sifting. There's something special about turning a big pile of larf and trim into some fine, fine concentrate without the use of solvents.

Mechanical hash is a favorite of mine. Whether it's dry sifting, water hash, or enjoying that gooey goodness that is fresh scissor hash. Getting as close a hit to pure glandular heads as possible. Full spectrum, melty, clear dome, hash. Throw it on a bed of ash, and rip away.


Snapped a few pics after a day of sifting. Here's how I do. Hand sift, then off to the tumbler.

Hand Sifting
Brought to my attention originally by the drysiftwizard. Lots of people have picked up the tech since, and I seem to remember bubbleman having a nice video called 'filling your dry sift quiver', or something of the sort that went over the method..

Google those ^^ and you'll find better videos and explanations than I can provide.

The short and sweet is two screens, 60 and 85 lpi, gently work material on the top 60lpi screen (very gently, no vibrations). The stalks/contaminants and heads fall through the first screen. The stalks, due to aerodynamics, turn sideways in the air and are caught by the 85lpi screen. Meanwhile the heads fall through and since they are nice and round, tumbling down below the 85lpi screen to the collection layer. With the right techniques, you can end up with that 95%+ pure heads dry sift.

I use this tech to do a very quick first run of all trim for headstash. It let's me pull out any stems or things that might damage the screens on my tumbler too, but really it's just an excuse for that really great dry sift head stash that rarely leaves my personal jars.





The Tumbler
The concept is nothing new. Spin something, wrap it in fine mesh, and let the heads fall out. I use a larger bin that houses the entire setup. I stick a piece of large posterboard paper under the tumbler for an easy collection tray.

The tumbler itself is just a five gallon bucket with gamma seal lid. Most of the bucket was cut away and silk screen is attached (~110 mesh). This was made a good 4-5 years ago and is still standing strong, despite being attached with glue, popsicle sticks, and gorilla tape. Not much likes to stick to your standard 5-gallon bucket.

At the end opposite the gamma seal lid, we drilled a hole and inserted a nice bolt with washer and a few extension arms. These are all connected together in such a way that a motor attached to the threaded rod can spin the entire bucket. Thread it on and off, and the entire bucket/sifting mechanism comes out for easy loading/reloading and cleaning.

I run it for a few minutes, with longer and longer runs until the material starts getting too green for even food grade hash. Generally 6-7 runs for a cumulative total of 4ish hours. Of course, everything ends up a bit cleaner and nicer quality if you can keep everything cold and dry.

Winter sifting is what it's all about, but everything operates just fine at standard room temp as long as starting material is nice and dry, and equipment is kept clean. I have a brass card the size of a business card that I use and can clean with alcohol and also freeze when necessary to keep everything extra cold.

Here's some pics

Full tumbler



External motor (from Monster Guts, LLC, wiper motor, ~ $50 with power supply) that connects via threaded rod to the tumbler




Threaded rod connection and some extension arms that let's that single point rotate the entire apparatus




Collection tray and some cheap wheels that support the front end of the tumbler

And I forgot how much I love the 5 pic limit and 0.1mb resolution limits!! Really makes creating good content difficult...

Here's the end result of a few runs through the sift process

Need official testing? Lmaop wonderful setup.......my local messenger service delivers dry Ice......I may try a dry ice run on my next harvest

Wow thats impressive real nice work

Damn I just threw out a working window motor. Had to replace a regulator and the regulator/motor combo was cheaper than the just the regulator.

Love the tumbler. Very cool

Testing is taken care of in house

But, I've never run dry ice. Never had the need as trim/larf generally sits around for quite some time until it's stockpiled and then everything is run. So always nice and dry and ready to rock. I'd worry about dry ice in the tumbler and the effect on the screen via damage/moisture.

But... There's an empty space in the bin. The 5-gallon bucket is only so tall, so essentially a few inches of unused extra space where the bin is wider than the bucket is tall. Seriously thinking about throwing a little container of dry ice in there, which should keep temps way down with the lid on (motor is already exterior mounted, so no heat source either). Nothing inside the tumbler itself, but frozen material and temps way down in the bin where it's like we're winter sifting year round. Definitely plan to try it next round... It's never dawned on me to try until now.

Great inspiration there sunshine, thanks my friend