99 more ways to kill your plant, Weekly.

[mage]

Welcome,

I've been in search of a small space to vent my thoughts of late, i think here looks fine [sweeps away the dust and prepares to settle in].

Feel free to add your thoughts if you feel the urge, everyone is welcome here.

I dub thee Waterfarm mk 2.1.

The last attempt to grow ended up being one epic learning curve. I ultimatly had to learn hydroponics and my waterfarm system on the fly. I made a list of mistakes and amendments to my system, all of which i have implemented this time around - some to great success others perhaps not. I am still trying to perfect my hydroponic gardening prowess.

The plant i grew resulted in being a 'hermie'. I was in no way upset though as i learnt a hell of a lot during those few months.

I dusted myself off and sourced a fresh batch of seeds. Of the seven seeds i germed i managed to get one in the system and unfortunatly the sex of the plant is male. I have decieded to grow it out as i now have no seeds and i wouldnt mind having a few hundred spare.

 

[Bobby Stainless]

Unless I am reading this wrong, you are also going to need a female to produce seeds.

What is your nutrient schedule?
Environment?
You have no way to get anymore seeds? SB?

I have a lot of experience with waterfarms and they can be a PITA, if not modified correctly.

If I were you I would go and find some seeds, get one bale of coco and a 3-5 gal bucket, and start there.

If you want to keep going with the WF, then make sure you clean the thing really well to start. The drip tube holes, usually need to be a bit larger, and the basket that hold the hydroton need to have more and bigger holes drilled in it.

I used a modified Lucas Formula with my WFs. Let me know if you have any more questions about the WF.

I was able to get 5-7 zips off each of my WFs under 800w.

 

[mage]

lessons learnt from waterfarm mk 1.0

Piss off waterfarm and make a simple flood and drain set up with pearlite as medium A winner is never a quitter and a quitter never wins. I'll make this waterfarm work even if it takes me 20 grows.

Im not sure my medium sized pots are capable of holding the roots for my 6 foot tall sativa with 3 weeks left for flowering. growing a 6 ft tall sativa was definatly an oversight. Next time i will tip/pinch flower earlier. Fixed

Dont use any clear pipes this time, they get dirty on the inside. i think this is cos of the light somehow. Fixed

Dont allow dead leaves to fall onto the medium and rot. The plants dont like it. Covered the base with panda film so the light reflects up and the leaves can't fall into the medium. Fixed

Do not use water heater when not in winter. Yeah that wasn't the greatest idea i've ever had. Fixed

Put the panda film up on the walls allready you lazy bastard. I built a 4ft x 3ft x 7ft timber frames with panda film around it. It is open at top and bottom to allow air flow. Fixed

Might be best if only growing one plant to switch from 600 watt light to 400 watt light. Sourced 400 watt light. Fixed

Use cannas rhizotonic and cannazym before problems arise over after they arise. Implemented, rhizo and zyme for the bomb. Fixed

 

[mage]

Unless I am reading this wrong, you are also going to need a female to produce seeds.

What is your nutrient schedule?
Environment?
You have no way to get anymore seeds? SB?

I have a lot of experience with waterfarms and they can be a PITA, if not modified correctly.

If I were you I would go and find some seeds, get one bale of coco and a 3-5 gal bucket, and start there.

Hey man welcome, I will get to those item in a few posts. I had no idea you need a female to produce seeds. So i may as well rip the thing now.

I was going to get to this in due time, but i have a friend who has 10 silver haze seeds. He's going to give them to me this weekend. I kind of wanted to get my grow sorted out before planting the good seeds.

But yeah i had no idea males only gave pollen ... gutted.

 

[Bobby Stainless]

You could grow the male out and save the pollen, but that just seems like a colossal waste of time. Get the SH seeds in water as soon as possible.

You should start the seeds in a Rapid Rooter with nothing but tap water. (Test the PH)

Then move them to a keg cup of coco, veg a little, then sex them. It is a waste of time to get a male into a WF.

Take the females and put them back into veg.

Once they have a nice root ball, put them in the water farms.

WFs can support big growth.

 

[mage]

It's going to take me a few posts to get up to speed so please bare with me

The area i am growing in is in my garage. I like growing int he garage as it can not be accessed via the house, which is good for when i have visiters i can just lock the door and all is good.

It also has a man hole in the roof. I cut a sheet of 12 mm MDF to the size of the man hole and put another 6" hole in it which i duct to from the cab. I will upload a photo soon.

It's not quite as messy as it looks

The frame is made out of light timber. It is quite flimsy until you wrap the panda film around it and it becomes a stable unit. The light however is hung from a large hook that i have screwed into the roof truss, therefore i do not need the cab/tent to have good structural properties. I use one side of the tent flap as a door.

 

[mage]

Before i head out to the garage for a few more happy snaps, heres a few snap shots of the modifications i have done to my farm. It is a farm i built myself, not a GH one.

I bought a second more powerful air pump and 3 more flat type air stones and tubing. I now have two pumps pumping into the bottom pot. This thing cranks like Niagra falls when i turn the pumps on, I figure the more air the better.

I have mod'd the top pot by drilling a thousand more holes in the base. For this grow i have also created a second drip ring to go about 1.5" under the rockwool cube. I am 4 weeks into my grow and i am questioning weather this was a waste of time or not, i am definatly leaning towards only using a top drip ring next time.

Last time i didnt even have a top drip ring, check out the one i created in the pics, it does an uber job. Unlike the pic it faces downwards.

 

[mage]

Heres a picture of the setup from the outside in action

Heres a picture from inside the setup

This is where the air ducts into the roof

 

[mage]

The plant is exactly four weeks old from seed.

Let me show you the roots and bubbles xD

And finally here's a picture of the male ... man now i know how couples who do not want female babies feel like when they have female babies ... o_0 Can't believe this thing is completly useless to me

 

[mage]

I think this is enough information for tonight. I still have loads more i want to get down, and i will do that tomorrow evening.

In the mean time i am going to have to get a hold of those silver haze beans and start planning to trash this grow ...

*EDIT* the seeds are kali haze. I will trash my plant tommorow. I guess this plant is of no use to me ...

devo ...

 

[mage]

I trashed the plant today, binned all root matter and what not in a bin that is not mine.

I spent a few hours getting all of the system clean by cleaning it in my laundry tub in hot water with half a cap full of bleech.

I need to figure out how to clean inside the tubing, if in fact it needs cleaning at all. You can see residue on the internal face of the hoses. Do most people bother to get this out? seems kind of a waste of time cleaning the rest of the system if inside of the pipes are still dirty.

Going to pick up my Kali Haze on Friday night and will kick my grow off again next week. Pretty excited.

The grow space still needs to be swept out and mopped with a bleach solution to clean, i will get to this in time. Maybe a job for the following weekend.

My action list is as follows

* Pick up seeds.
* Buy new clay balls, Canna veg/flower A+B, humidity meter from hydro shop.
* Clean the pipes in my setup.
* Sweep and bleech grow space.

This to discuss

* Delivery stratergy and the nutes/additives i am using.
* Security

 

[mage]

Well .. first things first i need to get just a little high...

Bubble, bubble, bubble ... xD

I think it would be hilarious if someone had a kid and named it "New Folder"

The nutes i am using are Canna

The flowering additives i am using are
* A sample bottle of Canna Boost. I am saving this for my Kali Haze when i get a female. This is expensive shit and my hydro store guy gave me a sample for free. happy days.
* MegaBudPLUS. My hydro guy recomended this product. He believes it is better than MonstaBud and is only to be used for the first 4 weeks or so of flower.
* CYCO Swell. This is to be used from 5 weeks onwards.

To be honest i am starting to wonder why i dont run Canna PK-13 to keep it all canna products but on the other side i have paid good money for these products and i may as well use them. My hydro guy said that they pretty much all do the same thing, add extra P and K.

During the course of the grow I run Canna Rhyzotonic and Canna Cannazyme for insurance against root rot primarily. Rhizo is amazing for getting the roots to explode and also helps out with stress i have found. I managed to push my last plant to about an inch from its death and i am confident the reason why the plant didnt die was because i was running Rhyzo and Zyme.

Rhyzotonic is expensive shit.

To get better efficiency from my rhizo i created a smaller resiviour out of a spare bottom pot. During the first 4 weeks i only run 15Lt of solution. I change this weekly to allow me to incrementally up the nute strength. Running only 15Lt allows me to run full strength and not go through so much rhizo.

Prior to this i would change the tank fortnightly for first month using a 50Lt solution in the res. This uses 400mL of Rhizo for first 4 weeks.

Using a 15Lt Solution and changing weekly only uses a total of 240mL for the first 4 weeks.

After the first four week Rhizo drops down to 0.5mL per L which is allmost nothing compared to 4mL per L at full strength.

I will discuss PsycoVeg in next post.

Shit i will probably never use again are ...

* Some shitty seedling solution that burns the crap out of my seedlings everytime garenteed. I think i'd prefer to keep them on Canna from start to finish anyway.
* SuperThrive. I read a long winded thread somewhere on here that it is basically useless unless sprayed on leaves, and even then the working ingrediant is in far too dose. I guess what can SuperThrive do that Rhyzo can't do ten times better.

 

[mage]

I'm a bit undecieded as to if i will use this PsycoVeg product again.

As you can see in the following picture it clearly does what it says it does with regards to shortening the space between nodes.

My plant was 4 weeks old and 16cm tall. The stem was like a tree trunk and the nodes, with the exception of top one, had about a 12mm/half inch spacing. When i stopped using it the new node space was at 1".

The leaf edges did curl up when i was using it. When i stopped for about 4 days after this effect started to stop in the new growth. It was not a heat/light/nute burn/temp issue as i ruled all those out.

I think the leaf curling may have somehting to do with using it conjunctionw ith full strength Rhizo, some sort of conflict between the two.

The only downside to having such a short and bushy plant was that the leaf matter was extreamly dense. This would be awesome if growing in a confined space, however with the amount of room i have i can see myself dropping this product.

I think I will stick to a purly Canna type schedule for my KH.

 

[mage]

I have created the following image which displays my planned ppm, feeding, lighting schedule and lumen/sq ft info.

I used this last time and it worked for me well.

 

[w2008]

fella, that remark about the indians was so wrong, wouldn't help you if i could.

 

[mage]

fella, that remark about the indians was so wrong, wouldn't help you if i could.

Fixed, But yeah it's true. The families keep trying until they get a boy because the females get married out of the family afterwhich they do not recieve any benifit from the daughter. Whereas if they have a male they do.

Personally i do not like the notion however that isn't to say it doesn't happen. I used to be quite ignorant of it, however i feel like i have walked a mile in their shoes after putting so much time and effort into growing a male, something which is completly useless to me.

 

[lil~greensprout]

fella, that remark about the indians was so wrong, wouldn't help you if i could.

Dude this place is for stoner's to discuss weed, not too express your bad opinions !

 

[mage]

Actually i ment the Asian sub continent. But it's all besides the point now because about 2 days worth of effort has been reduced to a ill thought out comment which is a stain on my thread.

So i apologise.

Moving on.

 

[Rysam]

Is it me or does his thread not make sense with the missing posts?

IMO the OP needs to slow down and so some research before blowing more unnecessary cash!
not knowing the function of a male is K-school stuff..

10 different feeding products is a bit overkill and expensive. ~most~ use 2-3 at the max.


Good Luck! keep learnin'

 

[SirTOKESalot]

Looking like there is passion here, thats great.
Just a few things that have not been said yet, or fixed by your self.

Ok sooo your grow box may be why you got hermi.
is there anyyway you left a light on in your garage? or there is light poking threw somewhere that can get into your grow space. "if you know there is not already NVM" But yeah if there is a light leak you will have a hermi in flower evvverytime!

And Nice charts for feeding, I did the same thing. It will be ok for the first run, but every plant you grow needs something different. I had 3 White widow and in 3 plants i had 2 pheons that liked there nutes alot stronger. So yeah now i don't follow a spread sheet you get a feel for what the plant needs PPM wise and go with that. And i dont see a two week flush in there....

Just learning what the Cannabis plant needs in different stages will save you alot of greeff.

Ill be hanging arownd, My first few grows were Bubble bucketsss and I had heat issues "hahhahahha as did you lol due to your own mod .... lol you must feel red in the face on that one"
Then I decided to go Soil for a while as my basment was to warm. And im supper happy with soil, I kinda hate working with all of the water. It was a huge mess for me. Now In soil i have Stressss freeeee growing! You will take a shit load more off hydro..


Anyywayyy good luck You have ALOT OF READING TO DO! i will be kickin around.