[whythefnot]

I'm up to my old tricks again. It's been almost a year and a half since I left California, and it has taken me this long to get into a place where I can cut loose a little.
I found myself a house with a basement, and what a basement it is. I've never had a grow room that didn't require a massive a/c, dehumidifier, and a close eye on the environment lest it get out of control. But here, with the combination of a very large basement to provide plenty of air to exchange, and the fact that I'm running less than 1000w of lighting, and the mild temperatures we have here in the mountains, all I really need is a small 200-300 cfm fan to clear out the 5x5 tent and a couple of controllers to keep things in check. The basement has a dehumi installed already, and I have a small humidifier on the floor in the tent just in case things get out of line.
I've put about 12 hours of work into this project total so far. Not too shabby for what I consider to be my most stable grow space yet.

The specs:


2x400w hps

5ftx5ftx7ft high tent

2:1 FFOF x FF Light Warrior
compost tea/tap water

Seeds from purple platinum harvest 2 years ago -- herm seeds, so we'll be rolling the dice
Fabric pots, still my from my last grow.












I'm waiting on a carbon filter and larger vent fan I have coming in the mail before I start flowering. I'd also like to take some cuttings before flower, and I have a cloning tray and heating mat on order as well.

I had some issues with high ph that I had a really tough time diagnosing. I guess my well water is super duper hard and alkaline. This soil pH meter sucks apparently, it usually just says 7 no matter what. I have a ph and tds/ec meter coming in the mail as well, and I already got my ph up and ph down, but in a pinch I was able to successfully use 20,000mg pure vitamin C crystals in 2.5gal tap water (pH ~6.7) sometime last week and they have greened back up in a very big way. Normally I wouldn't just give it a shot in the dark like that but this time I'm very glad I did.


I almost forgot the best part. I'm going to be doing some experiments with simple sensors for temp, humidity, maybe co2, etc. that are capable of interfacing with an arduino so I can program some of the more complex logic I'd like my grow to be capable of. My coding skills had never been there in the past but ... if you had been wondering what I've been up to in the last year and a half, it has been balls-to-the-wall skill-building and it looks like a pretty easy task at this point, provided I can get through the crash course in breadboarding. Arduino and simple controllers are next up on my shopping list.

I think I can have my room fully controlled for about $100 plus an old laptop I have running a linux cli, although I may find I'm way off base on that dollar figure. Either way, I'll be detailing it all here in this thread and open-sourcing whatever code I write to make it happen .

So stay tuned for that!

[iTarzan]

This should be interesting. Still a legal state?

[whythefnot]

Originally Posted by iTarzan

This should be interesting. Still a legal state?

...

[whythefnot]

Got pH/tds meters in today. Tap water is actually pretty good ... about 6.8 and 64 ppm. So no problems there. But my plants are showing the first signs of beginning to suffer again after making a strong comeback, so I checked the runoff from distilled water, and it was ~7.5 at roughly 220 ppm!
I mixed up 3 gal of ~600ppm ph up/down solution buffered at ~6.15. It is time-releasing into the pots right now. I'll keep going until all 3 gal has been dispensed between the 8 plants. Maybe they're in for a flush in the next few days, I don't know. We'll see how this plays out.

I have no idea what's causing it to run so high. My soil is 2 parts ocean forest, 1 part light warrior, with a few Tbsp blood meal and about a dozen pellets of seabird guano mixed into each 4gal pot. That's it, nothing fancy. This looks like what was happening to my plants in California, too. Good to finally know.

[Phases]

I hate dealing with ph problems it's such a pain in the ass to fix sometimes. I had super low ph in both my promix and coco this run. I used some dolomite lime to bring it up but it took a good week or 2 before things got back to where they should be.
Just be sure to gradually bring it down don't wanna go from really high ph to low ph super quick. The girls hate that!
Good luck I ll tag alone see how she goes for ya -

[whythefnot]

I was just reading that foxfarm generally comes buffered at ph 7 - 7.5, sometimes as high as 8. Seems crazy. I'll probably switch to a local brand next time I buy if I don't build it myself. For now I'll just stay the course by buffering their waterings and ph adjusting their compost tea, while monitoring the runoff.

[whythefnot]

the 6.15 solution had no immediate effect, and in fact the plants looked noticeably, albeit minorly, worse this morning. Runoff was still ~7.5. I checked the first batch of low ph solution with a good ph meter (remember I thought it was about 6.7) and it was actually around 3.5 and 220ppm. So I mixed up a small batch similar to that and dosed it out according to which plants looked like they were suffering.
I have a big pile of wood chips in my front yard I think I'm gonna bring into the mix. I didn't have time before work this morning, but tonight I'll test the ph on it and provided it's sufficiently low, I'll mulch my pots with it. I was planning on doing that anyway, but I've been kind of lazy about it.
I wish there was a quick fix for this. :\

[whythefnot]

Runoff from the wood mulch was ~ 7.2, so that's a no-go. But I rummaged around through the woods and collected about 5 gal of pine needles and pine bark. It was enough to mulch 5 of them, and I'll go back for the other 2 (and the little one) tomorrow.
I'm hoping my carbon filter and cloning tray get here tomorrow. I had a LEO stop by today asking about the neighbors. Scary stuff.

I checked runoff from the test plant and it was still really high so I took my tap solution down to pH 2.5, and watered everyone again pretty thoroughly, taking note of the pH of the runoff from each plant. Once I had them all in the 6.4 - 6.8 range, I called it a day. Let's hope that actually works.

When I hit them with the ~3.5 pH vitamin C mix they perked up within a few hours. They were dry then, but this time I think there's still just too much liquid still in their xylem, so it's just taking more time for them to transpire it all out. I really just want to get this all squared away so I can flip the lights on them. They're already as big as I'd care to let them get before flower. Gonna be a pretty full room.

[whythefnot]

Well, carbon filter and fan are installed.



Here's the worst-looking plant out of the bunch. Also the oldest, and slightly stunted from pH issues.


Here's the best-looking plant out of the bunch. She's been the most hardy through tough times.


Looks like it's about time to flower, don't you think?

[whythefnot]

I took 22 cuttings today, and labeled each plant and cutting with colored string, as well as doing a little more thinning.

Since the plants were getting dry, I decided to check the pH of their runoff just to be sure things were in place. It seems they must have stabilized because they were all in the range of 6.0 - 6.7. I gave them all a heavy watering/light flush to bring up the lower pH plants and generally clear out whatever salts were left behind from the pH stuff I had done in the past. I have a bucket of compost tea brewing right now. It's pH-ing at about 8.0 right now after a day of bubbling, so I'm not sure I really want to put it on my plants after what's been going on. I'm going to let it bubble for another day or two until the pH comes down into a more reasonable range.

I managed to rig my fan so it attaches to the ceiling support bars of the tent. The only thing left on the floor is a small humidifier, and I have a 5-disc fogging unit I plan to set up as an external humidity delivery system, similar to how I used it in my last grow. Until then that small fogger fits well in the corner. Next up, I'll need a cheap veg tent to get my clones up to speed.

I decided on the seeds I'm going to buy to try out during the next round.
Big Buddha Blue Cheese (provided that I positively determine that what I grew last year was, in fact, from Big Buddha, and not the Barney's version)
Blue Lemon Thai (the best producer from my outdoor gorilla run 3 years back)

That's it for now but I'm thinking Alaskan Thunderfuck and Belladonna will be coming around before too long, and I would have grabbed Blue Monster Holk but I'm already getting two strains with 'Blue' in the name and it would have just been weird. If I can ever get my hands on some GG #4 I'll let it dominate my space, but I have my skepticism about the seed version that was released recently. It's got to be hard to stabilize seeds that produce that kind of quality.