MrEDuck's journal

So the folks in HS grow.
Here's mine.
I currently flower in a 2x2x4 box with a 400W HPS in a cool tube. The grow exhausts into the tube and everything gets sucked out by a 6" booster fan that claims to be rated for 400cfm. Temps stay nice and stable with plants raised up 15" so that the top of the canopy is about 6" away from the light.
I flower 4 plants at a time with this setup.
Currently I have a Blue Dream on day 26, here are some shots of her starting with when she was transplanted and put into flower.


The other plants in those pics turned out to be males
Here she is after ten days. I think I should have topped the mains to get the branches to develop faster. Next time.


This is day 14 I think

Day 20



Today

This is another Blue Dream that's on day 13 today
Here she is still in veg. The seedlings with her are two Midas from Rare Dankness and a Royal Dog which is a cross of a Royal Kush and a Gooddog that a friend made.

Transplanted into a #3 nursery pot and put into flower and trained


After 2 days

After 7



And Today



Joining the Blue Dreams are the Midas that were pictured as seedlings with the Blue Dream in veg. I use an 18 gal storage tote with a PC fan and 2 26W CFLs for keeping moms and starting seeds and rooting clones and early veg.
Here they are around 10 days old. I'm not sure what the date was and it's just saying I uploaded them two weeks ago which could be between 14 and 20 days.

Here they are 6 days ago with the Royal Dog. They got put into big pots and into flower



After 2 days


And today


The Royal Dog looked like this yesterday but I defoliated her and she looks like this now


I think that's everything, I had a post all written up but it got eaten.

subbed for sure

I took this when I was checking the girls this morning. Not bad for 27 days.
I thought I'd posted a pic. Damn, here it is.

And a few more from pics from today:




The other Midas was a male so I took some clones of him and removed him. I'll be replacing him with the Royal Dog soon.

beautiful... subbed as well

Nice to have someone else along!
The other Midas was a male so he got killed. Got a nice shot of roots growing out of where I'd buried the stem.

The Royal Dog is now in flower with the two Blue Dreams.
I found out I'll be getting some nice seeds that I'm excited to start closer to the fall. I'll probably start them under some CFLs in August, there's F2 Jack Herers and a cross of the male Jack Herer used in the F2s witha purple AK. Combined with the Midas and another strain that a friend bred called Dark Rainbow I'm going to have a lot of males to sort through. After going on a 4 male streak I think I'll start extra beans of each to be assured a female of each.

I took this yesterday morning, I think it's day 19 for this girl. I'll have more pics of everyone one Tuesday.

I took this on Friday

Day 36 for the pancake who is still having issues. At least her buds are fattening up and pumping out resin. The bushy one is on day 21 today and doing very well. The Royal Dog got buried a bit as an experiment because of a discussion about whether or not stems buried during flower would root. Only one way to know!




I have the stuff I need for making colloidal silver coming this week. I'm going to make some pollen from my blue dream and self her and backcross the most similar S1 to her and keep doing it until I have a seed stable version of this exceptional girl.

Got some presents in the mail today. There's some F2 Jack Herers made with original Sensi stock and a cross of Jack Herer and a purple AK-47.

I'm excited to get these going.

I've been trying to learn to use photoshop. Here's a pic I took this morning of the girls in the box.

This is how auto white balancing it turned out

Not bad still kinda yellow to me. Here's what I did

There's still some issues because of the space the box is in makes it hard to take pics, but I'm pretty pleased with myself!

Alright mreduck, nice plants man. what's the genetics of your friends 'good dog'? If u don't mind me asking

Thanks man!
The Good Dog came from Dr Greenthumb and was crossed with a Royal Kush to make the Royal Dog. Royal Kush is a cross of an Afghan Kush with a Skunk #1, I'm not sure exactly what is in the Good Dog, I know it comes from a Queso Negro but I don't know what the rest of it is.

man, thats amazing, wanna share technique you use for fixing that pic? What program are working with?
thanks

Sure thing, though I'm not sure how much help it will be as this was really the first time I ever played around with Photoshop to try to do this. This was also done to a .CR2 image which is an uncompressed image format and has more settings you can directly change in Photoshop. The first step is adjusting the color temperature of the light to adjust the white balance (you can also adjust this setting on your camera manually), my HPS bulb has a color temp of 2100K so that's what I set to. That made the single biggest difference, next I still needed to filter the yellow because HPS puts out more yellow than even that can take care of. Next I upped the contrast a bit and then I moved a few more of the sliders a tiny bit. After the contrast change it looks pretty damned good though. At that point it really came down to just trying each different slider and seeing what moving it did. This is not the only way to do it. I'll post a pic later that my wife edited a from a jpeg that is really good, but it took her as long as it took me to get it right and I'd never done this before and she has a degree in photography.
I'm actually curious to do these changes to shots taken under natural light.

I'll have some pics and an update later today. I am reasonably sure I've figured out what the issue with Pancake is, the pH problem causing the Ca lockout is because she's been getting too much ammoniacal N with no nitrate to balance it. Plants can absorb nitrogen in three forms, ammonium salts, urea, and nitrates. Urea has no electric charge, while ammonium bears a positive charge and nitrates a negative one, so when the plant absorbs an ion it has to release another ion with the same charge to balance things out. The ions it uses are hydroxide and hydronium (this is often noted as just being a H+ ion for simplicity but that actually can't exist in nature as it would just be a proton with no electrons around it and it wouldn't be able to exist without reacting with the nearest source of electrons, so what happens is the extra proton gets shared between some water molecules), base and acid. So absorbing ammoniacal N causes the release of acidic ions dropping the pH in the media. I couldn't get a decent measurement of my runoff pH because I was using one of the dropper kits and the discoloration rendered it useless. I'm going to give her a feeding of Jack's Classic 20-20-20 which uses urea and nitrate only with a pH of 7. Hopefully this will neutralize enough of the acidity to allow her to absorb Ca again. From then on she'll be fed a even mix of ammoniacal and nitrate to hopefully avoid this.
I must say growing on a budget sucks. I really wouldn't recommend this to anyone with a choice. But I set this up for about $100 when I was using CFLs and pulled about an ounce and a half and then I added the HPS which came to about $200 with the fan and ducting.

thanks for the info. Since I am using Linux with gimp, will be a bit difficult to achieve this cause I'll need win or osx for photoshop, but I'm pretty positive, I'll manage to get similar results with Gimp as you did with adobe (if it will be worth the time since I use it only for enhancing my mj pics at the moment)..

I'd say Ca is being locked out more from P than from pH... and if that's ammonia form of N and high P, no wonder... But you know better what you feed man.. Do you add any Mg? cause that too locks out the uptake...

I know you can also do it with gimp, but I haven't ever played with it. I can download it and take a look. My wife gets the whole creative suite through her job so I haven't needed to use it.
I've been feeding a 3-1-2, but my pH has been registering as <6 but I have no way to read anything lower. I tried cutting the Mg in case that was the issue and it continued. Even after giving her a watering at pH 7 it came up around 6 but it seemed a little lighter. She'll get neutral feedings until runoff rises above 6. It's been two weeks of trying to solve the issue and she is hurting for it. Thankfully the other plants are doing ok so I should still get a good yield overall.

well hopefully ull get that sorted out.. i wonder what's my runoff, since i use only liquid pH drops and color scale i would not be able anything else but clear water. but i stopped adjusting ph and just feed my plants with 8.5-8.8pH water and so far did not see the difference...

Pancake looks no worse today. No preflowers yet on the Royal Dog but she's growing well. Bushy got some frost overnight.

most of them such beauties.. but damn that other one is not that happy.. u sure its calcium def? can't it be overfert? or zinc? or N toxicity?

I'm seeing a pH drop of a little over a point between feed and runoff so I'm going to just keep raising the pH of the feed and monitoring it. I'm guessing there should have been more lime in the potting mix. I can't wait to get out of the dirt and back into hydro. I'm planning on building a flood and drain system. The next grow will be a SOG because I have a lot of beans I would like to go through to find keepers.
I marked one of Bushy's colas and have been taking pictures of it most days so that when she's finished I can show the development over time. Here's two from this morning.