Feels like the first time: Bubba's Gift/250 watt CFL Nano-Grow

Hey everyone,

So I'm writing this about 7 weeks into bloom on my single Bubba's Gift, which I acquired as a clone here in Oregon over the past winter. My initial intention back then was to start a grow journal to document my first-ever grow in real time for you all. Alas! That obviously didn't happen. But better late than never- right?- so I thought I'd throw together some pics of where she is right now today, then some shots of the early days vegging this girl under a single 85 watt CFL. Not to get ahead of myself though...

I'd like to add more details later, as well as dive deeper into some of the techniques I used (almost comically extensive training/pruning/defoliating), but for right now, if I don't post these pics and get the ball rolling, I never will.

The basic experiment was to explore the frontier of ultra low-cost, ultra-small space growing. A nano-grow, in terms of both cost and space.

I read a bunch of stuff online about pruning/shaping/defoliating and also relied on my experience with bonsai (and many houseplants over the years) to establish a branch structure that would lead to multiple colas arrayed as perfectly around the light source as possible. Well damn it, I'm proud to say that at this point those colas are even more magnificent than I hoped they would be. I couldn't be happier with how this girl is doing.

Here's some basic info, then we'll get to the pics...

LIGHT:

• veg phase: single 85 watt 5000k CFL (made for photography), 18/6 schedule
• bloom phase: two 125 watt 2700k CFLs, 12/12 schedule

NUTRIENTS:

• veg phase: dyna-gro orchid pro (7-8-6), occasionally my own urine diluted 10:1, molasses
• bloom phase: fox farm big bloom and tiger bloom, molasses

ETC:

• The medium is soil- forgot which brand but it was higher-end
• all water is directly from a spring in the oregon coast range, never PH checked (it has magical properties and needs no checking... only kind of kidding)

The smell is absurdly, overwhelmingly divine and almost sexual... an otherwordly combination of bubblegum, pina colada, berry/grape and kushy funk. She's also uniquely pretty, with sexy purple and dusty mauve colors intensifying every day. Let's check out some pics! (Yes, it will look like I'm not flowering under 2700k lights but that's because I adjusted the balance to more accurately reflect natural daylight.)








Here's a look at the branch structure: low and spread out. Each branch is effectively a cola. (Not that you'd know it from the lil nugs there at the base.)



For reference, here's a completely unedited pic from the same batch as those last ones. Obviously, the light from the 2700k bulbs dramatically distorts what you'd see under natural daylight:




EARLY DAYS:

I planted my clone at an angle, a common practice in various forms of bonsai and also I think applicable for our purposes as well. I staked back each branch super low so they'd grow sort of sideways and up to create almost a satellite dish of colas around the light. Sort of a screen-of-green kinda thing minus the screen.

Dig it:




The ladies get to know each other:



Kinda hard to tell here but this is after staking, the whole thing is just inches off the soil at this point. You can see rebar tie wire, bent into little hoops over the branches and into the soil, if you look carefully:



Okay guys I'm gonna call it here for now, I'll definitely add photos though and check back often. For now, happy growing everyone!

Here's the larger context of the grow. My little nano-operation is in one of the houses in this photo, taken the other day by my cousin from his UAV:

And also! Please post away here, questions, comments, whatever... AMA : )

Okay, had a snack and am posting a few more pics here. These first 2 show more of the early stage branch training, the goal was to have no one single central apical bud (cola), but rather a series of colas growing up, niiiiiice and evenly lit. Pic quality not spectacular in any of the following images.



Now in this shot, I've added wood and deer rib supports to continue spreading the branches/future colas apart:




Now here are 2 more I took the other day with my phone. The first is an interesting shot from directly above:



And here's probably the best shot so far portraying the internal structure...



Let's check out an early pic once again to see how that branch structure began...

Cool bro.!!! When I seen nano grow I thought one dube plant, but fuck there's a small bags worth. I love seeing micro grows. Especially them computer cab grows, their neat. Look real pretty man, good job (clapping)

Thanks man!! Yeah, apparently the bubba's gift isn't known for large yields, so considering that plus this being my first grow, I gotta say I'm pretty happy with it. I'll be really curious what it all weighs out at when dry. Plus she keeps plumping up day by day. She's supposed to be a super early finisher, but based on all the white pistils that keep popping up (plus the info in Zeus's awesome harvest thread) it seems like she still has another couple weeks. July 8th will be 2 months of flowering, so maybe around then...

lol thanks fischer It seemed sincere but it's always nice to know for sure!

Looks awesome man! This is a great inspiration,will definitely be following I've wanted to test out a micro grow sometime in a kitchen cabinet or like Fischer said those computer can grows are neat. even taking on a space bucket project would be sick

On a side note you mentioned bonsai trees, I just got one a few weeks ago and it's in good shape but having trouble with the moss on the top soil is dying out on me lol. You got any tips?

Welcome aboard, Dlowski! Nice to have you here. I'll post up some more pics later of my set-up, it's sorta like a kitchen cabinet. Hopefully this thread/journal can turn into a good place to share ideas related to tiny operations.

So what kind of bonsai did you get? As far as the moss, that can be a challenge for sure. Do you know where the bonsai was grown or lived before you got it? Was it local? If it was, you could try to emulate the conditions it was in already... like sun exposure, amount of water, etc. That could be a lot of work for you though, depends on how committed you are to the moss. Very generally, morning light (as opposed to afternoon sun which can be too harsh) and obviously plenty of moisture is better for mosses. If it was grown somewhere other than where you are, it could be that much more difficult to reproduce those conditions. The other possibility though, is that the moss was never really growing properly on the substrate in the first place, and was instead just set on it for sale appeal. In this case you'll probably never get it to do well... can you tell if that was the case? Another wrinkle in all this is that some mosses do naturally go into a sort of hibernation and look dead, but in fact aren't, and will spring back to green in the wet season. That's probably not the case here though.

And does moss grow naturally in your area at all? If it doesn't, you could have an uphill road ahead of you in terms of babying the delicate moss. If it does though, you can try collecting some (that naturally grows in an environment similar to wherever your bonsai) and transplanting it yourself. This can take a while, but one strategy is to collect some, put it in a blender with yogurt (apparently it likes the acidity), and then pour the resulting mix out onto your bonsai soil. Under the right conditions and with enough time, new moss can start to grow and actually be connected to the substrate, as opposed to just set on top of it. There's stuff online about transplanting moss so you might want to look into that.

Anyway it can be really hard to keep moss alive if you're not in a place where it naturally grows, but in any case, that's awesome you got yourself a bonsai. Can you post any pics?

Hey guys,

Took a few shots today of the delicious gorgeousness ripening before my very eyes:



A bud in the hand is worth how many in the bush? While the colas look a bit airy as the buds aren't growing all the way together in places, the actual buds themselves are really dense. I'm pleasantly surprised! I wasn't sure what the CFLs would result in, but the buds are quite hard and really resinous.



Here's a close-up of the flowers on the above cola... just look at those calyxes tinged with soft purple! So exotic and yummy:



Here's an interesting angle taken from the floor showing the multiple colas bathing under those twin 125 watt CFLs. Not shown here is a CPU exhaust fan above the light, but a passive intake port can be seen in the upper portion of the pic. The passive intake was formerly an active one powered by its own CPU, which shortly into bloom failed. It doesn't seem to be a problem though as the exhaust fan is beefy enough to draw air in through the passive intake and the atmosphere seems to remain fresh and buoyant inside the little cabinet. This pic is digitally altered a bit more than usual to open up the shadows, otherwise it'd be all silhouette and you wouldn't see any flowers. While there are obviously some leaves, the vast majority of what you're seeing here is actual flower- the result of my intensive defoliating routine starting in early veg:



As you can imagine, I'm pretty excited to harvest...

Yea I'm living in a Southern Europe Mediterranean climate so hot and dry.. Perfect for Mary Jane though but yea I starting keeping my bonsai indoors on a windowsill now

Have you ever done a space bucket grow? Or you did say that this was your first grow right

I'm supposed to get a new wifi box and some more GB at the start of next month. But for now I'm limited on the Internet, hard to load or view photos at the moment

Ah ok... yeah that moss probably isn't long for this world, brother. But no, never even heard of a space bucket, but I looked it up and that's definitely the spirit of what I'm doing. I constructed a cabinet under my standing work table and while it is bigger than a 5 gallon bucket, it's not that much bigger. I'll take pics of the setup sometime soon.

You're certainly in the right climate for these guys though:



Any san pedro fans here?

Awesome! I've never tried cactus whether San Pedro or peyote. But definitely want to, in fact I would love to grow some San Pedro on my balcony and some other plants like a little dream herb garden but idk where to find any where I'm at for the moment also doesn't it take like a year minimum to get enough to ingest?

Have you looked online D? Not sure about shipping to wherever you are but san pedro cuttings are usually pretty widely available, though kinda expensive online. If you're in america, you can sometimes find them at home depot or other big box stores- not often in my experience, but it's always a special moment to find one of these power plants mixed in with the other cacti. They're not illegal and people never seem to know what they are. In fact the one in the pic above was from a home depot, it had 4 fat columns a couple feet high. A real score.... especially since the whole thing was only like $40 or something. Anyway they're typically sold as cuttings online and yes, they can take a while to get big enough to bother with, so get the biggest cuttings you can afford in the first place. Small ones grow slowly but by the time they're 2-3 feet tall their growth rate seems to pick up, in my experience at least. You want at least like a foot per person depending on the potency- which you can never know ahead of time. That being said, they do grow really fast by cactus standards, especially in your climate. In fact during the growing season (like right now) you can water and feed them almost like a tropical houseplant, i.e. all the time (assuming they're kept outside in full sun).

Took a few pics just now under uncharacteristically blue oregon skies, so let's take a tour of some of the sights peripherally related to our Bubba's Gift grow (which I should have said earlier is god's gift x bubba kush).

First up, here's a couple of clones... well, past the clone stage I guess and are fully in veg-mode now. They're growing (I need to split them up soon) in coco coir, a departure from my first grow which is soil. I'm adopting the "windowsill houseplant" methodolgy here, no additional lighting at all:



Check out the leaves in these as-yet un-defoliated plants...



As compared to the one in flower, which has been defoliated extensively (I didn't white balance this time so it has that amber glow):



Interesting to note how much smaller the leaves are on our flowering girl, despite being an older plant. This miniaturization is without doubt due to repeated defoliation, and interestingly, it's this very same phenomenon that is used to the bonsai gardener's advantage. Ever wonder why a bonsai, say, maple has such small leaves? Well, it's partly because of root trimming (which is necessary so they don't become rootbound), but a big part of it is also... drumroll please... defoliation! That's right, the leaves of bonsai are often systematically plucked with the express purpose of miniaturization. Anyway here we see it in action, the defoliated bubba's gift has markedly smaller leaves.. I might take a clone and see how far I can push this- just how small can those leaves go? At what point, if any, would it negatively impact flower yield?

Moving on, if you noticed the plant in the left window in the pic above, it's this guy, angraecum didieri, a beyond charming epiphytic orchid native to Madagascar. He bloomed for me 2 years ago but I wasn't as good about taking pics of things then. The single flower it grew was pure crystalline white and drop-dead gorgeous. He's growing mounted on cork bark amidst sphagnum moss I wild-harvested (not hard to do around here) and sterilized in an oven for an hour at 200 degrees.



Here's another san pedro, or trichocereus pachanoi for us latin lovers out there. He's a solid 5' of pure Andean power. (Native to the northern Andes, they are.)



This is cool shot, if your bandwidth can handle it Dlowski, because it shows about a year's worth of growth on the specimen I posted upthread. If you look you'll notice it's the same plant/collection of plants, but there's now all that growth sprouting from those 3 big cut columns:



Here's a different angle- the new growth is obvious if you compare it to the first pic. Incidentally, when you slice yourself some cactus someday off a nice fat column, you're going to want to liberally dust the fresh wound (which will obviously be the entire cross section of the cactus) with rooting hormone. This apparently helps encourage new growth from the wound- a tip given to me directly from a professional cactus grower, and one that seems to be working:



Well that's all for now- the blooming girl is looking and smelling fantastic, but I didn't take any new pics. I'm thinking one more week before harvest most likely- after reading Zeus's harvest post, I'm paranoid of cutting too early, but my mouth is just watering...

Big news people. I took some trichome pics this afternoon and have determined that it's time to harvest tomorrow! It's a full week shy of 2 months of bloom, but then the gift is supposed to be an early finisher, so I'm going for it. My fears of early harvesting from zeus's thread be damned.

I'm obviously way excited to pull her out of the cabinet one final time tomorrow morning, admirer her for a bit, get out the special japanese bonsai trimmer, and get to clipping. I was debating trying to reveg the remaining plant, but I don't think I'll take on that project right now as I'm not hurting for clones. Shit, this is oregon, I'm not exactly hurting for herb either. So I'll just nurse along my clones a bit longer and probably do another bloom at some point soon... not immediately, though. I'm gonna enjoy the quiet in my room from not having the exhaust fan on 24/7 for a spell.

So, guernica out... the next time you see me I will have harvested my first cannabis crop

Amber alert:

Alrighty, done deal... here's a phone pic of the mostly trimmed result hanging in the former grow cabinet. I turned the exhaust fan around so now it's blowing into as opposed to out of the chamber, and angled it so it's not blowing directly on the material. I'm also de-carbing the trim as we speak to infuse in coconut oil later today. All in all, I feel good about my first grow, especially given the low light CFL setup, lack of pH checking, and overall "winging it" approach. Any guesses as to what the finished product will weigh out at?

One more pic showing the branch structure/colas during the trimming process (obviously I opted for the "wet trim"). Once it was all mostly trimmed I'd cut a branch, trim a bit more, then hang it up. I'll still probably trim more once it's dried depending on how it looks... the little sugar leaves are pretty darn sugary, so I don't want to trim too much away...

Here's a couple of San Pedro's I started from seed almost two years ago. I also have a Peruvian torch that I got from home depot. they hot glued flowers on it. Not sure why? lol!