Medical Grow - 2x 600W Organic Dirt

About a month ago I decided to build a garden room to provide for my wife's medical needs.

I began by constructing a 5.75'x8.25'x8.5' room using standard construction practices. Walls are 2x4 studs with 5/8" drywall outside and 1/2" inside(all mildew resistant 'green' board). 2 dedicated 20 amp 120V circuits(12ga to 2, 20A rated outlets) supply power to the room. There's also an existing outlet I can pull about 8A from if I need to.

Walls are painted using flat white paint. Flooring is a $40 section of linoleum from Home Depot cut down to size.

My plan is to start with 2 600W HPS lights, growing 8 plants using a customized version of SubCool's soil recipe.

After the drywall was painted, I started several clones from our dispensary under a 250W MH light. This complicated the remaining work on the room since everytime I worked on the room I'd have to move the plants to a dust-free area. It did shave off a couple weeks of flowering though so I'm glad I did it.

Here are some pics:
- The original wall vent. There were 2 'suicide vents' in the garage already - I was part way through dry-walling over the unused one in this pic

- The air intake/light trap. All that remained here was to caulk/paint it. Notice the 8" starter collar holding the Deau Passe HEPA filter.

- The completed air intake. The HEPA filter was removed due to too much pressure loss. When the exhaust fan was running, the room was under a large negative pressure - I'd guess about 2psi based on how hard it was to open the door. With that kind of pressure drop, I can't stop unfiltered air from coming under the door, so HEPA becomes useless. It might work with another fan pushing air into the room, but that adds noise, power, and complexity(matching/tuning the fans).

- An awesome fan I'm searching for a larger version of this style of fan to circulate air in the room. The wall-mount fans normally used cause some vibration and I'm at my self-imposed noise-limit already.

For this grow I'm going with SubCool's "supersoil" technique, with some modifications.

Back on 11/7, I mixed up the following recipe:

1.9 Bags E.B. Stone organic potting soil
1 Bag Fox Farms Ocean Forest
1 Bag FF Happy Frog

30# Worm castings(dry)
2.5# Bone Meal
1.25# Bat Guano(9-2-1) WRONG KIND.
2.5# Fox Farms Happy Frog Bat Guano(0-5-0)
1.75# Blood Meal (Cut down to compensate for wrong guano in batch 1)
1.5# Rock Phosphate(0-2-0)
0.75c Epsom Salts
0.75c Dolomite Lime
0.75c Diatomaceous Earth
0.75c Kelp Meal

I was trying to make a 1/2 batch of SubCool's "supersoil" in 1/4 batch increments. After realizing (too late) that I used the wrong bat guano I drove to the other local garden store. Lo and behold, they now carry Fox Farms! Claim that as another victory of prop 215 - my local conservative gardening center now sells FF

The diatomaceous earth is a substitute for the Azomite - I didn't feel like waiting for a mail-order shipment of it. I had DE already in my backyard and it supplies the Silicon that makes up something like 2/3rds of the Azomite.

I rinsed off a tarp and mixed up the soil on it - first mixing each 1/4 batch then mixing them together. The 1/2 batch of soil fit perfectly in a 45 gallon trash bin from Home Depot. I kept the bin in the garage to keep out bugs.

About another week later I finally came across the humic acid. Since it's liquid humic acid, I converted the required 2TBS(I wanted to double it - that shit is awesome) into 250mL:

Received Greentrees order including liquid humic acid. Converted required 2TBS Humic Acid powder into 250ml liquid:

12% Humic Acid content in liquid
2 TBSP = 29.57ml

29.57ml / 0.12 = 246 ml

Then I mixed up a solution containing:

2 Gallons reverse-osmosis(RO) water
250ml Humax Humic Acid solution
1 TBSP Blackstrap molasses
0.5 TBSP White sugar

and applied it to the "supersoil".

Just recently I stopped in at our local Family Hydroponics store and found some glacial rock dust, which I'll start to use as an additional Azomite replacement.

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After some searching, I found a local source of Roots Organics soil. I used the RO soil for all of the gallon pots. I'm not convinced that this stuff is as good as people say it is. Almost all of my clones showed nute burn shortly after transplanting. After a couple weeks I measured the pH of the runoff using test-strips - it was 7, with low-6 water. That seems odd for an organic soil - maybe they added too much lime?

In the meantime, I also picked up some RO Buddha nutes in-case I flowered before the "supersoil" baked. I've used the grow formula once so far and it seems to be helping. The Buddha Grow doesn't dissolve well though, leaving me wondering if I should be mixing a batch for each plant. If I don't, they don't all get the same amount of nute-sludge. I water as needed, alternating these nutes with plain molasses water at 1TBSP/gallon.

Speaking of water, I use RO filtered water. The pH is about 7 though so I add some Mad Farmer Get Down pH reducer to drop it to 6. I would go with 6.5 normally but I think the RO soil needs help with it's high pH.

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A few more pics:

- the unfinished panel showing the NextGen Ballasts, the Speedster for the light-fan, and the Temp2V for the room-fan. I need two more power strips and it will be up and running.

- 6in HO Can-fan driving the lights. Fan pushes air into the lights so that odors won't leak into the system.

- 8in HO Can-fan exhausting the room. It goes through the ceiling into a 6" charcoal filter.

I went with a variety of different clones for this grow:


Green Crack
Cherry AK-47
Jack Herer
Lamb's Breath(Bread?)
Trainwreck
L.A. Confidential (runt of the litter - nute burned and stunted)

I'm planning on going with 8 plants, but I haven't gotten around to getting more clones.

Here they are in week 2(post-transplant). The group shot is under the 250W MH that I started them under.

Here they are in week 5. The LAC is coming around and might not stay the runt much longer. CAK, TW and LB aren't looking all that hot, with all of them still showing signs of burnage. JH is just insane - if I stop posting it's probably because it decided to eat me.

Got the final 3 babies today - White Widow, Purple Kush(!) and Mendo Purple(!!!). They're looking good despite coming in rockwool - why the hell do people keep using rockwool? That stuff is crap. It holds waaaay too much water...

I planted them all into 1 gallon pots, 2/3rds filled with FF Happy Frog and 1/3 FF HF cut with 1-4 ratio of perlite. I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs compared to the Roots Organics Soil. After planting, I mixed up 1/3 gallon of RO water, pH adjusted to 6.5, added 5mL each of Grandma's Molasses and Humic Acid, and watered slowly. They'll sit out for the night in quarantine before putting them in the room tomorrow.

I think I'll have to fire up the second light tomorrow and start looking at transplanting into the #7 pots. I've got about a week to go before the "supersoil" is baked though. It's coming along, although there's a bit of cobweb mold hanging out on the surface of the soil so I might turn it once more this week.

The final shot shows my light arrangement. I went with jack chain over nylon cord since I figure my house is literally hanging by this chain - if it fails, I could have a fire, and my house could go bye-bye. It really is a pain in the ass to adjust though. Also note the bungee cords to absorb the small vibration produced by the light. It's always a good idea to back up your bungee cords with a slack line of chain or wire in-case they decide to give out. I haven't done that with my fans yet but will shortly.

I love your selection and commend you on it

I will be watching this one from the front row

Impressive - that JH is a thing of beauty

Tell me about it Trench that is my strain of choice

Added some glacial rock dust to the SubCool mix and gave it all one last mixing on the blue tarp. The glacial rock dust probably won't do much since it won't have time to break down, but I wanted to add a few trace minerals after skipping the Azomite for diatomaceous earth.

Transplanted the LB, JH, TW, and GC into the #10 nursery pots using 30% subcool and the rest Roots organics. I've found you can get about two pots out of one bag of roots soil. The subcool mix looks like its going to last a while at this rate.

I put the LAC into one of my 7 gallon smart pots - I'm interested to see how it performs. I'm planning on putting the WW into one as well, since with all of these great genetics LAC and WW are on the bottom of the pecking order.

After transplanting I gave each plant a good soak using some pH adjusted RO H2O - no nutes and no molasses this time. A friend kicked me down an air pump he wasn't using so I've been bubbling the stagnant RO water for about 15 minutes to raise the dissolved O2 before pH adjusting.

The new clones are looking pretty good - the WW isn't in the picture though since I moved it away from the light for a few days after a tiny bit of yellowing on the oldest leaf. It perked back up today though so it's now back under the 600W.

I'll probably get around to transplanting the cherry AK tonight, adding cable ties to the control board, and finally putting the light fan on a timer.

Looking great !

Removing the hepa filter made the negative pressure in the room stronger man just to let you know

tom__420 said:

Removing the hepa filter made the negative pressure in the room stronger man just to let you know

Click to expand...

Nah - I can open the door a LOT easier now. The HEPA was restricting the incoming air. Now if I removed the carbon filter on the exhause, THAT would increase the negative pressure.

Are you using an intake fan or just passive intake?
If you are using a passive intake than removing the hepa filter would increase the negative pressure due to the exhaust fan being able to pull the air at full capacity
If you are using an intake fan than what I said does not apply

Sorry folks - lots of personal stuff this year so I haven't had the time to maintain this log.

tom: I think we may having terminology issues. The pressure in the room is lower with a restriction on the intake. How's that?

Today marks the start of week 6 of flowering. Yields look ok, but not great. Some plants have really taken-off, with Green Cush, Lamb's Brea(th/d), and Jack Herer being the biggest. Cherry-Ak and MenoPurp never really took off.

I got the dreaded PM that's making it's way around SoCal this year. A big "Fuck you!" to the newbies who shipped infected clones. This stuff seems to be evolving, since sulfur burning, Seranade, milk sprays, green cure(potassium bicarbonate) and neem oil all failed to eradicate it. True, I probably need to bleach the room, and some of those treatments probably cancel each other out - sulfur residue might form sulfuric acid which is going to cancel out the pH raising effects of the potassium bicarbonate. I've grown for years from seed and never had a problem with PM, so after this grow I'm forsaking clones and going back to seeds.

I went ahead and added a UVB CFL ("10") from the pet store, which was probably a waste of $30. I also added a 250W MH to fill the room up with a bit more light.

More pics to follow. That's all for now.

Here are some pics I took a week ago, at the beginning of week 5.