Hey Al....thanks again.
I'm pretty meticulous about everything I do.
Seems so! You're the only person I can think of who has (wisely!) bothered with air pump redundancy.
Keep an eye on that Hanna meter, tho. Hanna & I parted ways many years ago due to poor quality meters that lasted roughly a blink of a gnat's eyelash. Use nute concentration & pH test solutions frequently to calibrate and verify operation. When (not if) the Hanna wears out/quits, look at a Truncheon nute meter and Eutech waterproof pH meters.
My biggest question here has to do with specific nutes. I'm using the old standby of General Hydro 3 part with a few added things (epsom salts and hygrozyme) here and there.
Sounds reasonable. I've never used GH but lots of ppl do, with good success.
So many products on the market and I have no idea if one is any better than the other.
hah, you and everyone else. There's a magic snake-oil sauce vendor for every cannabis grower.
Do you have any aero buddys that have found one particular brand works better than others? If I had to make an educated guess I'd say that the GH 3 part system was good but could probably use a 4th part made with some bloom boosting product.(I've recently added some BigBloom).
Can't really offer you any advice on that path.
The reason I change nutes every week is that my co-op partner has the identical set-up and changes every other week. I can't begin to tell you the difference between the two ops.
Does GH recommend weekly tank dumps?
Are you sure that your ops are totally identical? This is HIGHLY unlikely.
You can tell if biweekly dumps will work for you by running a tank for 2 weeks and keeping daily note of the ppm when you check it. You should see ppm drop steadily over the life of a tank. Dump them when your measured ppm is about 60% of your start figure.
I'm not sure how you're defining "sexual maturity". These babies grew to 12" after being topped once and then I induced flowering. It was exactly 14 days from the time they sprouted. I wasn't being impatient...they were just growing like wildfire (I posted a pic at 8 days) and I was afraid if I didn't induce they would get way too big for the space.
aha... you didn't raise your plants to sexual maturity before you flowered. Problem #1.
Sexual maturity (which I've defined twice in recent posts;
kindly read what I've written so I don't have to say it several times!) is defined as when preflowers begin to appear at the nodes. This requires about 6-8 wks of vegging after sprouting from beans.
I appreciate that your new, immature plants were vigorously growing vegetatively, but plants have to be grown out to sexual maturity before you can flower them or make good mums out of them. You may have to prune back a plant which you are vegging up to sexual maturity from seed a few times before you can even sex it, much less flower it.
With respect to the cloning process I guess I'll need to start over again. That's a lot of time reverting back to veg and then back to flower and it almost seems faster to start from scratch.
Yep, you need mums which are sexually mature, known female and are kept in constant veg. It will take 3-5 wks for a plant which has been under a flowering light cycle for more than a week or so to swap back to full veg mode growth.
It would be faster by a few weeks for you to reveg a flowered plant than to start over from beans, but you can do it either way. Either way- you need to bite the bullet and do it.
One last question.... I saw a papaya strain recently and the beans were quite expensive (relatively speaking). Got any experience or opinions?
None, really. I've grown White Widow, AK47, Sweet Tooth #4, LUI, Power Plant, Skunk #1, White Skunk (WW x Sk#1) and a few others I can't recall because I was stoned at the time.
The main thing you want to know about a strain you're going to SoG is whether it is a primarily indica dominant strain or not. Indica dominant strains produce best in SoG though any strain will grow in a SoG.