Doc Crow's Medicine Cabinet. 420 W CFL powered Perpetual Micro SOG PPK

[DocCrow]

Here is my experiment for your viewing pleasure. It has been a while since i have grown. I used to grow guerrilla outdoors back in the day. I have recently decided to set up a grow to supply meds for myself, my wife, and to share with friends, etc. I need to produce quality smoke, about a half oz a week. I also would like a variety, and need to keep a small stealth footprint. SO I came on here and started to do some research.

I have decided a DR Bud style SOG Flowering Cabinet should fit my needs quite well. I have found and taken ideas from many here in designing and building my cabinet. I have a little over 2.5 sq feet lit by 420 watts of CFLs. I have enough sites for 36 plants. This first test run has 15, since I will be growing them all at once. Putting 4 in a week on a 9 week cycle will let me fit more in once i select moms and start going perpetual.

Once finding Dr Buds cabinet threads and seeing the work being done by such members as Anti, TexMex Mcdirt and others I kept diggin aroung and found the PPK threads with D9 Imaginary Friend OldOne and others. I figured I could come up with a way to adapt the PPK to my micro SOG Medicine cabinet. So I Did.

The Cabinet:
As previously stated just over 2.5 sq' lit with 420W of CFLs


THe PPK


The Control Tank is 14"W x 27"Long and 6"Deep. It has 36 holes in the top to accept the pots. The pots are ~1L 3"x 8" Mini tree pots from Stewe. They come with a hole perfectly sized to accept the 1.5" tailpiece. There is a float valve inside to control the water level in the reservoir. I also added a pump to allow for pulse feeding in the future, I still need to make a manifold and get tubing to hook it up. It is auto topped off via the float valve from an 18 gallon Rubbermaid tub that is my bulk reservoir. I should be able to leave this setup for a week or two with no problems.

Plants, Medium, Nutes

I am running a variety this first test grow. 15 total. they are 8 Regular Safari Mix from Mandala, 4 Female Seeds AK-47, 1 Kandy Kush, 1 Black Domina X OG Kush, and 1 White Widow X Blueberry. They are a few weeks from seed and the lights just went out for their first 12 hour dark cycle for 12/12. I will take as many clones as possible from each, and at the end of the run decide which ones to keep as moms, and start filling up the cabinet. 4 in and 4 out every week is the goal. I will keep a stock of clones ready to go, so I will just run it to have one ready to go in every time a plant is ready. If I get 4 in and out every week then each 9 week cycle will be 36 plants. an average of 7 grams per cut will give me 28 grams per week, which will cover my needs. I think I can double that once dialed in.

I am growing in General Hydro CocoTek Coco. Plants are being fed Jacks Hydro plus Calcium Nitrate. I feed 2 tsp of jacks and 1 1/4 tsp of Calcium Nitrate per gallon of water. This should be ~360 PPM of Jacks and ~240 PPM of calNit which should put me right on the money. I don't own a PPM meter of a PH meter. I don't think I will need one.

All plants will be lolly popped and grown straight from clone to 12/12.

Once I get running I plan on getting more genetics and hope to have a stable of 8 or so top quality moms to supply this.

Come On in and enjoy the show. Hopefully it is boring. And Beautiful. Beautifully boring. I am purposefully trying to do this as simply as possible. Once set up I want to be able to completely tend my garden once a week. Top off reservoir, take 4 clones out for harvest, put 4 new ones in, trim the rest. Done.

 

[DocCrow]

And a couple more shots of Day 0 of Flowering

Inside the Cabinet


Left Side


Right Side

 

[DocCrow]

Can I cut all of the big lower fans off now, or should I wait until after the stretch to take clones and remove fans?

 

[5th]

Tagged

 

[bloyd]

Interested to see how this works out. I like the idea of a small scale low maintenance ppk sog for searching through seeds.

Plants are being fed Jacks Hydro plus Calcium Nitrate. I feed 2 tsp of jacks and 1 1/4 tsp of Calcium Nitrate per gallon of water. This should be ~360 PPM of Jacks and ~240 PPM of calNit which should put me right on the money. I don't own a PPM meter of a PH meter. I don't think I will need one.

.

I mix my jacks with a meter but I use a scoop when mixing and pay attention to how much I add of each. I think you are going to want to add more calc. nit than you are planning. It turns out to be about equal volume if not a tad more calc. nitrate to get the 1/.66 ratio. If you get in the ballpark of this ratio you will have success and shouldn't have pH problems provided your water is good.

 

[DocCrow]

Any tips on defoliation would be appreciated. I have about 15" from the canopy to the glass. Should I pop off the big lower fan leaves to open the canopy up and slow down the stretch, or just let em go naturally? I plan on clipping all lower branches and keeping them for clones to select a mom with. I am thinking if i cut the fans it will help these grow so i can take as many as possible within the 1st 21 days of flower. If there is enough room once I cull males I will keep my best clone from each as a potential mom, and start throwing the rest into my cab to start my perpetual cycle of 4 in per week.

What do any of you think I should do? I am trying to get 15" colas from each plant. The goal is to figure out what size clones I need for each strain to get them to grow all the way to the glass (~21" from the top of the pots) and develop as a single cola. Any insight anyone can provide me would be much appreciated.

DC

 

[DocCrow]

Interested to see how this works out. I like the idea of a small scale low maintenance ppk sog for searching through seeds.

That would be an excellent way to use this setup, just fill all the cups up and put a seed into 4 each week. You could run it 12/12 all the time and pheno hunt quickly. The 1l pots are like 20 bucks for 50 of em or something. I got 16" double flanged tailpieces for a dollar each, so that is about 75 cents per pot.

Thanks for the insight on the jacks. I did have a bit of what looked like calcium def in one AK right after the initial coco trans. I also burnt some of them. None of the Mandalas burnt though. I am impressed with them so far, they are very vigorous which is good since I don't necessarily baby them. I want tough plants, so that is part of my selection process, haha.

If you could take RO water and add 2 tsp of jacks and 1.25 tsp of cal nit to a gallon of water and take the ppm readings of the diff levels I would appreciate it. I am searching for a truly easy system that can be as close to set it and forget it as possible, with as few gadgets and gizmos needed as possible.

I am on a quest. A quest for the most epic and boring marijuana grow ever. I want to be able to crack this thing open once a week and with 4 hours of work once a week pull 1 gpw every 9 weeks out of a 2.5 sq' area. I think it can be done. I don't know if I can do it yet. I need phenos that will finish in 9 weeks tops, and I need to average 12 grams per budsicle. I am using just under a liter of coco for each, so I think the numbers are achievable. I think once I can get dialed in I can do better than that. Hopefully we will find out.

DC

 

[DocCrow]

Did a little more work on the cabinet today after lights came on.

The new bulk reservoir on top of the cabinet


a better shot of the control reservoir. The fill line is the clear hose on the left side. The black hose is the line from the pump.


Inside the Control Res. see the pump and the float valve. as simple as it can get. Box is coated with a 24 hour epoxy resin. (west system 3)



I hooked up the bulk reservoir, now I am just waiting for glue to dry before I can fill it up. I still need to make a manifold for the pump so I can run saturation pulses. I am going to use a 27" long piece of 2" pvc. I am going to cap off both ends, and run the inlet from the pump into one end. I will mount it horizontally on the wall of the cabinet just above the air inlet. I am going to run 36 lines from this to the individual pots. I will have to wait to see how long my pulses will need to be until I get it all hooked up. I am thinking 1-2 minutes with the small pump I have will give em a good soaking. The pots saturate quickly so my gut tells me I will run a 1 minute pulse every other hour. This will give them a good soaking 12 times per day, and should keep the system balanced, provide a constant stream of nutrients to the plant, and provide a consistent and thorough exchanges of gases through the medium.

 

[DocCrow]

I took some better pics of the girls while I was moving things around. I am going to try to take good pics (well as good as my pics get anyways) every week of all of them to track this thing.

This is the Kandy Kush and the White Widow x Blueberry. The Kandy Kush has been a runt since i cracked it. It suffered some nute burn as a seedling when transplanted. The WWxBB looks pretty good so far.


This one is the Black Domina X OG Kush one of the better looking ones so far.

 

[DocCrow]

AK-47 from Female Seeds No 1 and 2
No 1 is a bit runty, but starting to pick up. #2 is the stretchiest one so far and I think I like it best from the AKs.


Nos 3 and 4 These 2 are a bit shorter than #2 but looking good. Most got a bit of damage you can see here when I first put em in coco. They are all back on track now.

 

[DocCrow]

And the Mandala Strains. They are all their safari mix which are seeds from some of their experimental crosses. I have 8 beans popped so hopefully 4 of these are girls, and at least one is a keeper. I have more that will get slowly worked through. My initial impressions of these are all very good. These plants are all very vigorous. I hope they yield well.

1 and 2


3 and 4
4 is the most interesting one. it grew a fan leaf out of the top of it, and I thought it would die. Instead the nodes beneath both grew up as tops so this one is a 2 headed monster. I have since cut the fan leaf growing out of the top.

5 and 6

7 and 8

 

[MrAwder]

I really like where this is headed. I love micro growing even though I have much more space now. This has awesome potential and I would love to use it for a pheno hunting/head stash SOG.

I would leave the fans for now. Let them stretch, you have the space for now. If they are huge in a week then re-examine the idea in order to slow them down. I would say the plants are still small enough that they will benefit greatly from the energy produced by those leaves. Once stretch is over hack away and expose those bud sites.

 

[fukndenny]

Very cool.

I had a similar setup in the past, around 450w CFL, last run I got just over 300 G dry.

It was in about 4.7 Sqft I believe.

Since then I switched to HPS, but every now and then I miss my CFL cab, I even have some plans for a new one if I decide to make it!

Good luck and enjoy the smoke!

 

[BrownThumb]

Your set-up looks good and so do your babies. Keep us posted!

 

[Chloemobile]

Is PPK basically a Wick watering method?

 

[DocCrow]

Is PPK basically a Wick watering method?

Yes. The pots have a 6" by 1.5" plumbing sink tailpiece coming out of the bottom of the pot. This is filled with coco and sits in the reservoir below. The level of the Res is controlled by a float valve that is connected to a bulk nute reservoir. By raising or lowering the water level in the res I control the moisture profile of the pots. It also has the benefit of keeping the roots out of the res, so the coco acts as a buffer. I will be top feeding with 12 saturation pulses a day also. I should have NO problem with these plants filling the cabinet.

So yes PPK is essentially a wick watering method, but when used with the saturation pulses you get a lot of the benefits of different Hydro systems, but with the buffer of the coco (or whatever growing medium you chose). Through the due dilligence of D9nxs, OldOne, ImaginaryFriend, and many others this has shown to be an extremely effective way to grow very healthy plants with a minimum of headache. Especially when using Jacks Hydro + CalNit at 600 PPM.

 

[DocCrow]

I really like where this is headed. I love micro growing even though I have much more space now. This has awesome potential and I would love to use it for a pheno hunting/head stash SOG.

I would leave the fans for now. Let them stretch, you have the space for now. If they are huge in a week then re-examine the idea in order to slow them down. I would say the plants are still small enough that they will benefit greatly from the energy produced by those leaves. Once stretch is over hack away and expose those bud sites.

Thanks, that is what I figured I would do. I think this would be great for Pheno hunting. I have 36 sites in 2.5 sq feet. This would be ideal to run 12/12 from seed to find phenos for breeding. You could have a room of shelves set up, and a ppk sog trays set up on all of them. You could run tons of plants in a small area.

 

[DocCrow]

Another question I would like to pose to anyone reading this thread is what strains should I add to my list to grow in this thing. I would ultimately like 8 or so mothers for variety, preferred strains that will finish in 9 weeks or less. I'm looking for a variety sativa indica and hybrids. Any Ideas? Stuff I can get of the Bay. Even once I get my moms selected i would like to run a pack of seeds now and then to switch it up a bit. I expect the rest of the grow to be fairly boring if this PPK works as I suspect it will.

DC

 

[Mister_D]

Doc - To answer your defoilation question, I would go ahead and remove 1 or 2 leaves per plant. This will stunt them slightly for a day or two, but once normal growth resumes the plants will put more energy into growing their side branches. I'd normally suggest you do this while they are still vegging, but due to you already flowering that isn't possible. Bears mentioning, the ONLY reason I suggest you defoilate during stretch is because you want to take clones from seedlings with minimal veg time. Removing leaves now will give you bigger healthier clones later.

I have around 300 seeds of various varieties i'm starting to look through for my vert sog. I'll get back to you on strain selection . Love the micro ppk too, very cool .

 

[DocCrow]

Doc - To answer your defoilation question, I would go ahead and remove 1 or 2 leaves per plant.

I have around 300 seeds of various varieties i'm starting to look through for my vert sog. I'll get back to you on strain selection . Love the micro ppk too, very cool .

Thanks man, I think the micro PPK will be great. The moisture profile in the soil looks extremely good right now. If I can pull 14 grams per cut out of 1 liter of coco in this system I will be stoked! The key is going to be finding the right strains/phenos and dialing them in so they finish at the proper height. This nutrient regime in this type of system has been proven time and time again, that takes a big part of the equation out of the picture. I should know in about 50-60 days either way.

After checking on them I think they are spaced far enough apart now that the lower growth is getting enough light with the fans on there. I think i will wait until they are a bit bigger before I start cutting them up. I need these plants to stretch another 15". I think that in 2-3 weeks I will be able to lollypop them and keep all the cuttings for clones. From the look of them now I should get 6 or so clones from each one. The best from each will be a potential mom, and the rest will start getting cycled through the cabinet at various start heights to start getting my strains dialed in (one week 4 3" clones go in, next week 4" clones go in, etc.). I will vary the start heights of each strain until I find which start height finishes them right at the glass so I can max out the space in my cabinet.

Thanks again I value all of the input I get. I am always looking for ways to improve my methods.

DC