Nugnewbie
Well-Known Member
I've turned the light down to around 500 ppfd in the center of the tent. Nor sure what the make of my light is. It has a full spectrum, including some uva diodes, not sure on diode count or anything. It works well.I feel ya on running low on buds and wanting to save them. Just understand that may take longer than just cutting your losses.
1) My reason for turning down the light and raising it is to try and limit stress on the plant and see how they respond. As if a plant isn’t healthy again there is no way it can use it all and there will be excess. Make a sick person run a marathon..
2) I left like 2” in mine picker to leave room to top dress WEEKLY (in reality the city pickers don’t hold that much soil) so to counter this you must top dress regularly. Also let the mix “cook” for a couple weeks prior to planting next time. I’m building my confidence as my goal will be to have large 25-30 gal sips someday.
3) Be reasonable with removing that bad growth and do this once they start to respond positively (if they do). U could also do some LST prior to trimming to help encourage lower growth.
5) Ik a lot of growers have had luck with tracking VPD but I have not. So the values I gave you were what mine were throughout veg. I’m flowering rn with about 78 deg and 58rh
GLR worked great for me and I don’t see myself looking back. I didn’t follow its scheduling perfect but again all through veg was just 14-on-4 off-1.5 on -4.5 off.
I appreciate the compliment on my grows but I am a total amateur as well. I’ve had my fair share of grows where I lose a lot of foliage (mostly indoor) but I never turned away from soil bc I love the fundamentals and biology. Good genetics help too. Everything from Twenty20 I’ve ran has killed it indoor even when I fucked up. I just love seed plants bc they grow up in the medium they will remain in.
There are some heavy hitters on this forum tho and take everything you read and apply it YOUR situation and equipment. Trying to measure your variables is great but unfortunately unless you have real calibrated equipment how can you trust it?
I think every soil grower has some gnats just pray they don’t get outta hand lol. I use them little sticky traps.
What light do you have? Also ive never used
coots so there are some pros with that and I’d lean on them for advice there as I’m not a compost expert but again someday hope to be. That’s why I use known soil and mix in extra stuff lightly.
As far as gnats go, I've applied beneficial nematodes twice, and have the yellow sticky traps as well. Still have more gnats than I'd like, but don't believe they are causing problems. I see you use the covers that come with the City Pickers. In the past, I've made covers out of panda film, but I hated how it was a pita to hold them up while top dressing. So, this round I made the covers out of panda, but instead of just cutting holes for the plants, I've made the covers two pieces, cut straight down the middle. This is where the gnats are getting through to my soil to lay eggs. Next round, maybe I'll go back to just leaving holes for the plants, as I had far fewer gnats then.
My medium did cook for a week or two in a tote. So, I top dressed with more soil on the 26th here, so I will top dress again April 2nd. I use Gaia Green 4-4-4 and also have Gaia power bloom 2-8-4. So, will top-dress thee 4-4-4. I have some fish hydrolysate, and fish emulsion as well. The compost I use is a fish compost from Black Swallow Living Soils. It seems to work well. I'm in Canada, so it's expensive to get Dr Earth through Amazon. Would rather use it then Gaia, as Dr Earth has microbes added, whereas Gaia doesn't. Oh well, used Dynomyco at transplant. Bigger SIPs with more soil would be great, but I'm not there yet either. Not sure I ever will, but maybe someday.
I haven't removed any growth yet. I've been hanging weights off the main growth tip for lst, and using lst clips as well. The plant is fairly spread out already. Yes, I'm leary of chopping anything off.