TheDillestPickle's First Grow Journal

[Thedillestpickle]

Eyo!

made it over, things are looking fan-freaking-tastic and dense! im loving the look of the kali!

have u noticed a big diff using the root maker pots? ive been looking at picking some up but havent heard any real 1st hand experience as to how well the work, especially with watering.

keep it green bro!

Ccoastal

Yup it's looking pretty much how I fantasized it would look 3 months ago when I was day dreaming about growing lol

You know I actually bought 5 of those "air-pots" and I haven't used any of them yet. Cost me 50$ for the 5
Instead of using my 3ish gallon airpots I decided to go with 6 gallon regular plastic pots. I took a 1/4 inch drill bit to the lower half of the pots and blasted about 150 holes in each pot, but I doubt it made much difference.

My thoughts on the airpots even though I have never used them is that they must be better than normal pots. The main thing people think of is that they "air-prune" the roots and prevent spiralling. But I think there is something else that most people don't mention when they talk about the advantage of airpots and that is that the medium is exposed to air all the way down the pot, and it enhances the oxygen transport to the roots especially lower down in the pot where normally with a regular pot oxygen would have to travel all the way from the top of the pot. So I can see how it would be a huge benefit.

Take a look at hydroponics for example. When growing a plant there is always going to be 1 weakest link that slows down growth. If everything is being provided for perfectly such as light air and nutrients it is quite often the amount of oxygen to the roots that becomes the weakest link in an indoor garden. This is why hydroponics does so well. The more oxygen the better, and I believe that this is why airpots are a good step forward. I also imagine smartpots/mesh bags would be a good way to provide added oxygen to the roots.

Unfortunately they didnt have 6gallon airpots and I imagine that regular 6 gallon pots will outperform a 3 gallon airpot so I went with the biggest I could get. Next grow I will likely order some 20gallon smartpots. I also use 50/50 coco/perlite because although I have to water more frequently I believe the added oxygen the perlite allows for makes all the difference.

What do you mean how does it work for watering?

could someone please explain to me how i put multiple quotes into one post? I am going to have to make a second post because I don't know how to do multiple quotes

 

[Thedillestpickle]

I'm so stoned, also so use to people starting bad ass grow threads like this one but for some reason they never finish, in fact they abruptly, drastically, mysteriously drop off the face of the earth never to be heard of again and its like getting blue balled.

Anyhow i was presently surprised when i finally gander at the date and realized this thread is current! ordered two big bomb pic n mix today and I was blinded by the fact i was paying to close of attention to the posts and not the date... whew, thanks for not being that guy, even though you still have potential to end up one of those guys seeing how you're not done yet, lol

I'm quite stoned myself... kinda hard to keep my eyes open lol
I sure hope I make it to the finish with these plants
I'm aware of many shortcuts that I am taking(behind the scenes) that may jeopardize the plants.

For example I have no sprays ready to handle pests. I have nothing stopping pests from getting in. I have yet to actually scrub down/clean the room. I have barely enough ventilation(won't be enough once the weather warms up). I told 4 people about my grow so who knows what that could lead to(regret that but I have talked to them about it, and they know to keep it quiet). I have no filter to stop smell. My power cords are barely rated to handle the load I'm giving them. My timers are cheap and untrusty. My 1 fan doesnt turn back on if the power is interupted for even a second...
the list goes on

I am just barely winging it to be honest

that I have made it this far can be attributed to a series of most fortunate events. Luck has been on my side since the beginning and I hope it stays that way

 

[OldLuck]

Couldn't have said it better myself. I know exactly how you feel.

I'm quite stoned myself... kinda hard to keep my eyes open lol
I sure hope I make it to the finish with these plants
I'm aware of many shortcuts that I am taking(behind the scenes) that may jeopardize the plants.

For example I have no sprays ready to handle pests. I have nothing stopping pests from getting in. I have yet to actually scrub down/clean the room. I have barely enough ventilation(won't be enough once the weather warms up). I told 4 people about my grow so who knows what that could lead to(regret that but I have talked to them about it, and they know to keep it quiet). I have no filter to stop smell. My power cords are barely rated to handle the load I'm giving them. My timers are cheap and untrusty. My 1 fan doesnt turn back on if the power is interupted for even a second...
the list goes on

I am just barely winging it to be honest

that I have made it this far can be attributed to a series of most fortunate events. Luck has been on my side since the beginning and I hope it stays that way

 

[Thedillestpickle]

Couldn't have said it better myself. I know exactly how you feel.

Ha yea I'm just going through this whole thing fingers crossed. I just had to fix up the room and retrain all my plants and it took me 9 HOURS! I'm pretty tired now lol
The plant's only got a couple hours of HID light today, the rest of it was spent under 80watts flourecent tubes at 3 feet lol so fuck all... hopefully they will just feel like it was a cloudy day today haha
Also a windy day cause I had to do some training
and a rainy day cause I watered them

I had to retrain all my plants. Originally I had tried to keep the 4 shoots apart using tape and bbq skewers propping the tops away from each other... That didn't work. The plants had too much muscle and they were constantly breaking free of the masking tape
In fact when the tape was strong enough to hold the skewers started bending... like they must have been putting a good 10-15 pounds of flex into the skewer!
So I untaped them all and tied them down using metal wire run through holes I drilled in the pots. It was definately stressfull on the plants, and I'm not too happy about that because I'm in 12/12 now, but hopefully it won't be too bad because it's only just the start of 12/12.
I had to really flex the branches down the way I wanted them and I crunched alot of the stems. I had a few pretty bad splits happen on me, a few were about 1/4 inch wide split right in half on the main stem, I just covered it with masking tape and I'm hoping for the best. I have alot of faith in these plants, they have been so much more resilient than I would ever have expected. About 2 weeks ago I had split one plant right in half at the base where the main branche connect. Like totally fucking split the plant in half... taped it up with masking tape and today I checked under the tape and it was totally healed up, it looks awesome... totally healthy. So I'm thinking any splits or cracks I cause today will heal up and be ok. And even that plant that split straight in half, it never wilted for even a second in fact it is now my healthiest looking plant, leaves are perky all the time even during lights out.

I just also wanted to leave a note to myself that my 2 Kish seeds have sprouted and I will be planting them into beer cups tommorrow. They will be going straight into 12/12. I will let them grow out in the beer cups as long as it takes for me to sex them and then if I get a female it will go into a 2 gallon pot. This is more just an experiment to see how the 12/12 from seed kish does compared with the 2 week vegged Kish.
All my plants were watered at 1100ppm today. pH out was 5.5 from the kali mist. The lowest I have seen it go. The ppm's out was 1350 so not too high, i'm not sure why the pH would go so low, but it's so low to be worried

I'm glad I got all that work out of the way, all I need to do for the next three days is empty the dehumidifier tray each day

 

[Syn311]

I'm sure they will be fine and heal up nicely. It does sound like they went through a war zone. How much more training do you think you will have to do?

 

[Thedillestpickle]

I'm sure they will be fine and heal up nicely. It does sound like they went through a war zone. How much more training do you think you will have to do?

They did go through a warzone, it was pretty rough but it had to be done
I had to pull the branches further apart from eachother or my canopy would have been too dense

There should be no more training, from here on out all I am going to do is water them and remove any dead leaves.
It should be smooth sailing from here

I'll be keeping an eye on the very tip of the fan leaves for any signs of nutrient burn, I did raise it 200ppm in one feed which is pretty drastic. I will see if I can't bring it up to the 1400ppm as recommended by H&G

They will stay under 100% MH for the next 2 weeks. For the 3rd week I will swap out the 1000watt MH for a HPS and leave the 600MH and 400MH.

I'm looking forward to seeing how they look tomorrow when the lights come on, and see if they are looking perky or droopy. Hoping for the best

 

[ManGrow]

I hope everything keeps going well for you. Seems like so far you've made it out okay. You're plants are proving how weed got its name.

 

[crackbaby]

Good luck, subbed!!!

 

[budsmokah]

Thedillestpickle, Yo I came to watch your grow for the next few months to see how you handle the extra tops you gave your plants. How often do you water and feed them? Bud leaves are healthiest when you can get them as dark green as possible without burning the leaf tips.

 

[Thedillestpickle]

Thedillestpickle, Yo I came to watch your grow for the next few months to see how you handle the extra tops you gave your plants. How often do you water and feed them? Bud leaves are healthiest when you can get them as dark green as possible without burning the leaf tips.

I'll keep you posted on the topped shoots and make comparrisons to the untopped ones.
I'll upload some pictures in a minute to show what I have done.
I have been feeding my plants fairly light the last couple weeks. I usually water every 3 days or so depending on how fast the pots dry out. I pick up the pots and when they start getting light I know I need to feed them. I feed every watering

I know my plants have been getting hungry because the leaves are starting to have less of a deep green look and some of the bottom leaves were turning yellow and falling off. That was when I was feeding at 900ppm. I had been bringing my ppm down each feed because I was checking the runoff and getting high EC of 1500ppm so I figured I needed to lower my feed.
Now that I'm seeing the yellow leaves I'm bringing it back up to 1100ppm and I will consider raising it again if I see the need
I'll keep an eye on the runoff ppm but I won't try to control it nearly as much as I was trying to before.

 

[Thedillestpickle]

I'm just going to upoad some pictures to show how I've trained the plants.
I'm including pictures for Budsmokah of my topped shoots. We will keep an eye on them and see how they do comparatively. And no, I am not trying to prove you wrong. I think this is a better grow to try an experiement with than the other one, because I will have lots to compare with, and if it hurts the yield it won't make a big difference to the overall weight. My intention has always been to produce large main colas, and I imagine this technique will make them smaller, but we will see

The supercropping I was doing earlier caused some stems to split. Here's an example of one that didn't really heal up, but it doesn't appear to be effecting the growth up top




One of my plants split right in half as i was training it a few weeks back. Looks like it healed up really well. It's an interesting new type of flesh it seals the wound with



This happened last night. Actually this happened to 3 of the plants. None of them are wilting though. I just patched up with masking tape


This is the damage I caused earlier when I had my ppm up to 1500ppm



I let my EC go too low over the last couple weeks. Lower leaves were turning yellow and falling off fast, so I brought the EC up to 1100ppm



I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, I have alot of leaves and budsites touching the walls. I am worried this could lead to mold later on in flowering. Any thoughts?



I've labelled the topped branches so I can keep track, I topped 3 branches removing the uppermost tips. I also fimmed 2 other branches to see how that effects the cola. Just for fun



That's the topped branch. I removed only the small tip of new growth



Should be interesting to see a fimmed cola



Here's how I trained my plants ast night. I pulled the 4 branches down and apart and then I pulled them back together with more wires. Really makes the plant look huge when it's all stretched out like that.

 

[budsmokah]

Sounds like these babies are having a good time. Can't wait for more plant growth pics and updates man.

EDIT: I just checked back some pages and you are doing some insane stuff to your babies. This journal should be interesting dude.

 

[Syn311]

Nice work. I don't know if I will do the same with my current plant but I am definitely interested in some of these techniques in the future.

 

[Thedillestpickle]

Sounds like these babies are having a good time. Can't wait for more plant growth pics and updates man.

EDIT: I just checked back some pages and you are doing some insane stuff to your babies. This journal should be interesting dude.

LOL what's so "insane" ???

I havent killed them yet.

 

[budsmokah]

LOL what's so "insane" ???

I havent killed them yet.

Exactly

 

[Thedillestpickle]

Exactly

hahaha that gave me a pretty good chuckle

I just thought I would share another "insane" thing I've been doing when mixing my nutrients

I mix up my base nutes at a little over full strength(2.5EC) in a large container. And I add in all the additives at recommended dosage. I keep those concentrated nutrients/additives for up to a couple weeks. I just stir it up and mix it with water to the right ppm and pH it. Because I dilute the mix to achieve the right ppm I am also diluting the additives. Seems to be working for me and I save some money.
The real benefit to this is I can mix up enough nutes for 2 weeks in one night and when it's time to feed all I have to do is mix the concentrated nutrients with water and pH, it's really easy. It really helps if you need to feed different plants at different TDS levels.
The way I see it I'm not actually skimping on the additives neccessarily, because as the plants pull water and nutrient salts from the coco, the additives concentrate in the coco. I'm sure I'm not washing away 100% of the additives when I feed either so I bet I could go even lighter on the additives to compensate for that.

I'm just going to assume it works because it makes perfecty good sense to me.
The theory only works for additives that don't include macro or micro nutrients as their primary ingredient/function. That might not work so well for silicates or cal/mag, or a PK booster as I consider those to be another form of base nutrient
You could probably even go a little stronger than 2.5EC but eventually the nutrients will begin to precipitate out of solution

I have actually been doing that with my silicate because I bought that product sortof on a whim, and I'm not having any problems with needing thicker stems. I may use more silicate in my next grow but it is too late to bother with this one now that I am entering 12/12 I will be reducing the silicate even further. Also my NPK is very high in K so I didn't feel the need to boost that too much higher

I know we are nowhere near done this grow yet(oh god!), but I have been thinking up some really interesting idea's for my next grow... All I will say is that it involves 5 1K bulbs, 8 4 foot flouros, 4 plants, and 200 gallons of medium. If you think this grow is interesting just wait until I get that one started!

 

[Syn311]

hahaha that gave me a pretty good chuckle

I just thought I would share another "insane" thing I've been doing when mixing my nutrients

I mix up my base nutes at a little over full strength(2.5EC) in a large container. And I add in all the additives at recommended dosage. I keep those concentrated nutrients/additives for up to a couple weeks. I just stir it up and mix it with water to the right ppm and pH it. Because I dilute the mix to achieve the right ppm I am also diluting the additives. Seems to be working for me and I save some money.
The real benefit to this is I can mix up enough nutes for 2 weeks in one night and when it's time to feed all I have to do is mix the concentrated nutrients with water and pH, it's really easy. It really helps if you need to feed different plants at different TDS levels.
The way I see it I'm not actually skimping on the additives neccessarily, because as the plants pull water and nutrient salts from the coco, the additives concentrate in the coco. I'm sure I'm not washing away 100% of the additives when I feed either so I bet I could go even lighter on the additives to compensate for that.

I'm just going to assume it works because it makes perfecty good sense to me.
The theory only works for additives that don't include macro or micro nutrients as their primary ingredient/function. That might not work so well for silicates or cal/mag, or a PK booster as I consider those to be another form of base nutrient
You could probably even go a little stronger than 2.5EC but eventually the nutrients will begin to precipitate out of solution

I have actually been doing that with my silicate because I bought that product sortof on a whim, and I'm not having any problems with needing thicker stems. I may use more silicate in my next grow but it is too late to bother with this one now that I am entering 12/12 I will be reducing the silicate even further. Also my NPK is very high in K so I didn't feel the need to boost that too much higher

I know we are nowhere near done this grow yet(oh god!), but I have been thinking up some really interesting idea's for my next grow... All I will say is that it involves 5 1K bulbs, 8 4 foot flouros, 4 plants, and 200 gallons of medium. If you think this grow is interesting just wait until I get that one started!

Your next grow idea sounds like pretty good science experiment! Are you planning on putting those 4 foot flouros in between those plants vertically with the 5 1K bulbs as close to top of the plants as you can get? What do you think your effective Lumens would be? Have you ever looked into LED? How about UV light supplementation?

 

[OldLuck]

You shouldn't have a problem with mold with the leaves/buds touching the walls, well atleast I didn't. Looking very good my friend, I wish I had the time and room to do all of the things you are doing. Can't wait to see the buds. What do you think about this? https://www.rollitup.org/general-marijuana-growing/409622-truth-about-flushing.html
Got 37g off of my small plant.

 

[Elliesdaddy]

That's reacted really well to the topping congratz bro

 

[st0wandgrow]

I agree with Old Luck. Mold shouldn't be an issue. Most of my KM phenos colas weren't overly dense, so mold was/is never a concern.