NeerGreen: New Era grow #1

shnkrmn said:

......snip.......
About your analogy about soil vs hydro. I think the exact opposite, that soil is the more daring medium requiring close observation of multiple variables whilst hydro is more like ballooning or gliding. Actually, for me, in water, it's more like baking. Follow the formula, use the correct temp and time, don't use old baking powder or flour with bugs in it and all will be well. If you open the door of the oven too much your souffle will fail, beat your mayonnaise too much and it will separate.

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I agree hydro is so much simpler than soil. It seems the easiest way to start. That's why I have so much respect for CN's ability to save a hydro fail by moving to soil! That takes skill and guts.

shnkrmn said:

Be sure to degauss before mooring to the mast in Lakehurst.

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I think that would be step 1 in the three step (2) not doping your cellulose with rocket fuel ingredients and (3) using He for an LTA LOL

Then again the really informed usually go with the conspiracy bent. I wonder if they had Hindenburg hours with Art Bell's predecessor back then? LOL

I think that must be at the root of my problem. I beat my mayonnaise too much as a youngster, and now I've separated. cn

cannabineer said:

I think that must be at the root of my problem. I beat my mayonnaise too much as a youngster, and now I've separated. cn

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ROFLMAO actually I think the roots maybe the root of your problem.

cannabineer said:

Thank you, eye!
For humidification I can really recommend hanging wet laundry. Towels will provide 24 hours of cheap good moisture.

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I can attest to this. I designed a ghetto humidifier by running a tiny cloner pump which took water up and dribbled it onto a towel. I stole the idea from a swamp cooler. I used a fuel pressure regulator from an Auto parts store. But some pumps barely lift it 24" so you might not need one. Use a pump timer if RH climes to high. Hope this helped.

Thanks, Afrawfraw! I haven't had trouble with humidity lately. My plants have become large enough that they transpire a coupla towels' worth.

But I pulled a handful of yellow leaves off Halle today, including a pretty cool "mutant" leaf with two tiers of leaflets, the upper one incomplete.

So I mixed an N boost ... 1140 mg of ammonium nitrate in 1.9 liters of water, for a calculated 200 ppm of N. That's as much risk as I'll take with a plant that is successfully flowering ... and showing impressively dense meaty bud structure for a plant in the middle of week 3. And her smell!! Ohh ... it tickles my memory; it's something thick and sweet and familiar ... like cherry cheesecake with a hint of almonds.
cn

Okay, it's Tuedsay and time for an update.
It's day 22 of flower, the start of week 4.
Alice is stretching just a little, which is making her build recognizable colas.
I have noticed that her new growth is a healthy dark green at the bases of young leaves ... but it yellows toward the tips. That, and she's been dropping leaves at the low-to-mid level. I took over 20 leaves off her in the last two days.
I've interpreted this as appetite, specifically for Mg and N. GH Flora is somewhat low in Mg, and I did not take the elementary precaution of adding dolomite lime to my Happy Frog soil. So now I have to provide total nutrition, effectively "soilponics", into the awesome felted puck of roots that the soil has become.
Here's Alice's canopy ... the very dark green of her youth isn't there any more, except close in on new growth. Nitrogen!!

Here is a bud close-up. Some trichome formation is evident, and the side buds are growing reasonably well.

A backlit sea of adolescent colas. PedoBud.

Bud and leaf structure from below. Kind of airy, but I suspect she's not even halfway there yet.

So I decided to give her a shock of N and Mg. Since she's flowering, i didn't want to stint her on P either, so I weighed out
ammonium nitrate 2 g (350 ppm N)
magnesium sulfate 2 g (100 ppm Mg) (130 ppm S)
monopotassium phosphate 960 mg (110 ppm P) (134 ppm K)
and dissolved them in 2 liters RO water for a final TDS of 1330 ppm. I had to swirl hard after adding the phosphate ... I got some mild clouding (most likely from the formation of struvite. This is ammonium magnesium phosphate, a poorly soluble salt responsible for a common sort of bladderstone) that cleared up quickly.

I fed this to Alice, who was still pretty "heavy" from the GH Flora feed of two days ago ... but she took the whole gulp without any overflow. After her short spa session in the sunlit window, it was back under the Ushio with her.
She is a vigorous enough plant, but she smells lousy ... a sharp green/metallic scent, and sometimes I get the distinct and specific smell from her buds of freshly-cut schedule-40 white ABS pipe. NOT a top-shelf smell. But I have noticed both plants evolving their odors in different directions as a grow progresses. So I still hold hope for this one ... yet I don't feel bad about challenging her with aggressive nute combos. After all ... this is for science! cn

Halle is still the same size (as per tape measure) as a week ago. She too has been losing some leaves, but not like Alice. With the odd interveinal color and her generally paler green, I wondered about Mg and N for her, so I mixed the same rich thick libation for her ... N blast with Mg, P and K.
Here are the weighed salts, ready to be added to 2 liters of RO water. The ammonium nitrate has been recrystallized.

The mix (shaken, not stirred), ready for application in a beaker that has been with me for a very long time.

Here's Halle's canopy. It is jungle-dense and looks pretty good from above, but her older leaves, including some reasonably well-lit upper leaves, are losing their depth of green color. I hope she likes her snack.
I took a close shot of one of her fattest colas, oooh sparkly.
And - ! I finally figured out that yummy smell that was tugging at my memory ... a very deep memory as it turns out, because it is exactly the lovely redolence of the "Klear" brand floor wax my momma used when I was a preschooler, back in the days of the Gemini program and Petula Clark on the FM.
Note the varied shades of yellow peeking out from under her skirts.

A shot over the top, showing how fat and massive the young main colas are. This plant, despite being ultra-compact, might very well be a yield queen! The top ten inches of each main branch are stitching themselves together into loaves of greenbud. I have real hopes for her. cn

...beautiful, neer! I've always wondered how folks get their grow heights so uniform. (?) Lately I've been teaching them a bit of yoga to expose the deeper parts - Ha!

eye, I am always in favor of lovely ladies using yoga to expose their deeper parts.
As for the even canopy ... I'll be honest: a lucky mistake. I didn't plan it that way. In fact I would really have liked Halle to stretch.

I posted this pic in the Problems forum.

The leaves remained soft/supple. None of the crunchiness I've seen with overfert. Since I've supplemented with N and Mg, the usual suspects are unlikely.
Such lesions I have seen (online, not in person so far) as suggestive of Ca andor K deficiencies. I've been feeding them plenty of K, and Ca def in soil? I'd hope not. In any case, GH Flora seems to have adequate soluble Ca, so I give that failure mode low confidence.
I did get a very intriguing suggestion from the thread: it might be P def. While the pics I've seen of P def aren't an exact match, they are quite various, unlike N def pictures which are pretty diagnostic. So I'm changing the feed to be P-rich.

Since my N/Mg blast, I've noticed that the new growth (all in the buds) got very dark green. So I might have gone a bit overboard with the N ... after all 4 liters of 350 ppm N is a bit of a thump.
I've decided to change the nute profile to Aggressive Flower ... 3 ml Micro and 10 ml Bloom (for 125 ppm P) into 3.8 liters of RO water. This blend has a measured TDS of only 500 ppm.

Here's Alice the Widow. Her colas form a lovely hollow square of 12 tops rising above the plant's midstory.

Here is a bud closeup. The cola structure is beginning to fill in. Note the very dark green of a slight N glut.
This plant is showing some trichomes, but nothing special. And her smell! Green/metallic/plasticky. i do hope this improves as flower progresses. She might be for nowt but hash.

Here is a shot of a yellow leaf framed by healthy green growth. If the yellowing stops, then the "add P" will have been a great call.

A healthy young bud from the underside.
Today is day 35 since 12/12 and day 25 of official flower.
cn

Halle has been receiving the same nutrition. She seems to also have done well taking the N/Mg thump.
Here she is, basking in the winter sun. I watered both plants with 4 liters each of GH flower mix. The soil had gotten pretty dry, and it took time for the solution to soak into all of it. In fact, I had run-through that I had to slurp up with a pipette and squirt into the top.
So today I made another four liters and gave Alice 2.5 of that (shes the thirsty one!) and Halle the rest. The soil is now good&moist without being drippy-drenched. I want the whole root ball wet so that the roots can slurp stray nutes out of the edges and corners. Otherwise I could easily see setting myself up for underfert ... with overcompensation once the soil into which all the nutes fled by wicking happens to get well-watered.

Both plants also received a visual check-up for any signs of herming ... so far 100% girls.

Here is a leaf that just dropped, showing pale green and yellow ... and those brown necrotic patches.

Halle's colas are remarkably fat and beefy for her young age. I wonder how soon she'll be ready. She has way more trichomes than the supposed White Widow, and that floor wax/ cherry cheesecake smell (with subtle undernotes of lime and eucalyptus, especially after I've handled a stem) is oh so very nice.

cn

neer they look beautiful. Interesting your yellowed leaves look like my yellow leaves. When I boosted the nutrients and added Mg the yellowing stopped its progression. I envy you being in the home stretch. Its looking very good.

Thank you, Annie!
I ended up watering both plants today again. Alice felt quite light for having had a watering yesterday. So I mixed GH nutes (2.5 ml Micro and 10 ml Bloom, for a TDS of 500) and added 2 g magnesium sulfate (for an added 50ppm Mg and some S; new TDS 680 ppm). Alice is amazingly thirsty and took the whole 3.8 liters, even though there is less soil in her cloth pot.
Halle got the same treatment, but leaked about half a liter of excess. The runoff read 860 ppm, which is very good imo ... I take it as a sign that the plant is drinking water and nutes in essentially the ratio provided.

There's still some yellowing, but I suspect it's old damage revealing itself. I think I have it "licked" well enough to finish in style ... unless my saying so would offend the gods, lol! So many failure modes still available. I am tickled pink to not have seen a single gnat, mite, bug of any sort.

Have you followed the "LED without LEDs" thread? Some very cool info is coming to, uhm, light over there. I would be very tempted to add an actinic/red-biased panel to supp the HPS on my next grow.

Come to think of it, I have that 4x24-watt T5 panel from the early hydro/veg melodrama in October. It has 2x Fiji Purple bulbs and two different blue/actinics. I'm wondering if I should add it to the mix, to see what it'll do for late trichome boost. What I'd like is to have two grow spaces so i could do a controlled experiment. The future is a big place, insh'Allah. cn

I wanted to post pics yesterday (traditional Tuesday) but I did it today. Sue me.
Today is day 30 of flower, which puts the gals in week 5. They're both pretty heavy with flower at this time.
Alice is my transpiration champ. I had her soil soaked three days ago ... and today the root ball was dry enough that the nutrient (I've settled in on 3 ml Micro, 10 ml Bloom and 2 grams Epsom salt in 3.8 liters of water per unit dose) beaded on the soil at first.
Here's a shot of some cola structure.

Here is a close-up of a growth tip. Some of my pistils have begun to brown. (I always wanted a Browning Pistil, lol!)
There's also a decent but not overwhelming show of trichomes.

Here are overhead shots of the whole plant, showing off the growing bud mass.
When I moved her, I caught a quick whiff of mostly green stank, but with lemony notes. So maybe there's hope for her odor profile yet. At least the offputting smell of freshly-cut ABS pipe seems to be fading.

She's still dropping leaves, but at a slow rate ... I pulled three off her today, all lower fans. I'm accepting that as normal for a plant halfway finished.

Finally a bud close-up.

cn

Halle is so much slower to go through a potful of nute water. I wonder why she transpires more slowly. She's more compact, but packs an awful lot of foliar area into that chunky little package.

Here's a view from the top ... so dense and basically healthy.

A close-up of a growth tip shows pleasing trichome set.
I'm also noticing pistils browning, and the calyces (proper plural of calyx) getting fat ... on day 30. I wonder if she's a legit 49-days-or-less pheno! Shame my "clone in a glass of water" attempt failed.

Here's a bud from halfway up the plant. It's been growing in shade from the stacked fans. I pulled them aside for this shot. Surprising brownness.

Here are two of her four main colas. They are quite dense and fat. All the tips in the second pic (including the shaded one in the foreground, lower left) are coming from one branch that I LSTed into growing sideways.

A shot into her drawers! The stuff in the pot looks like more roots than soil at this point. I watered her with flowering nutrient as in the previous post, but I only gave her two liters. She does transpire more slowly than Alice.

One thing I've noticed with all the going in&out of the tent and moving the plants into the living room for their daily fussing-over in the sunlight ... is that not all the odor ends up in the charcoal canister. So as I'm polishing this tiny treatise, my ozone generator (Crystal Air brand) is running and dealing severely with the terpenaceous escapees. Ve vill haff ORDA in ziss camp! ~evil grin~
cn

Beautiful, simply beautiful, I think you are going to be very pleased with the outcome.

Lol, "terpenaceous escapees"... the ladies look great man, you have some lovely colas forming there

Thanks folks!
Today I pulled Halle out for a trichome check and removal of yellowed leaves. While I was manipulating her fattest cola off to the side, I heard a ~crack~, and that entire branch sagged. Aiee!
The branch had split from the stem at the main attachment point. I'm pretty sure this is the branch that had cracked this way maybe a month ago. But it had grown a nice "dollop of hot glue"-shaped reinforcement.

So I went to the shop (pronounced "pile of junk in the garage"), found a scrap of oakwood lath, sharpened one end, holed the other and used a bit of cotton twine to sling that branch. There's still a pretty good tab of living bark on the underside, so let's see if the branch does well.
I had to reach into the plant with some vigor in order to plant the stake and tie the twine. Ohhh did my hands ever smell strong coming out of there! Such an intense bright lemon/pine/eucalyptus fragrance, but interestingly without the fruit and floor-wax notes that make her such an engaging plant.

Here's a backlit shot of the outside (skinniest) aspect of this cola. You can see why I might want to save it. I was seriously considering chopping this branch and getting a bit of trimming/grooming practice. The trichomes are about 1:1 clear:cloudy. However there are still active growth tips on the buds not at the very peak.

A top shot shows something obvious under the HPS: the youngest leaf marginsare picking up a purple-black coloration. I take this as an indicator of maturation in this pheno ... not a deficiency or stress indicator.


I would be tempted to leave her on the back porch for a few nights (or in the cold dark garage?) to see if this purpling can be pushed by temps.
But the bottom line is really ... I am just pleased to have come this far in teasing good pretty bud from this one seed popped four months and eight days ago. Halle's entering the home stretch!
Almost all her fan leaves show some yellowness. But I think it's simple senescence, and I won't play Chase the Deficiency. I will simply water with flowering nute and allow the fans to yellow.
How much of a good idea would it be to add my T5 panel? Would adding the actinic/UVA have a trichome-building effect worth the extra 100ish watts?
cn

<edit> I found the story of the first crack in post #89. It turns out that was one node up. This one is one of the two the side branches just below the fork made by topping the plant.

Today is day 36, the start of week 6 of flower. Even so, Halle looks close to done.
I'll start with Alice today. She still has many white pistils, and although I pulled off another ten yellow leaves today, she seems to be on track for another month or so of maturation.

A shot across the top, with a wreath of tall colas surrounding an inner webwork of popcorn.

Here are two main tops, with bud structure still filling in.

A close-up of a top.

The popcorn in the middle.

A different bud close up. There are some trichomes, but honestly ... I expect a White Widow to look dipped in sugar.

Alice still smells vaguely gross ... metallic green and plastic. However when I touched a popcorn bud, the smell on my fingers was the familiar citrus/conifer smell of bud. Not very strong, but still OK.
She drank a gallon of nutes today.
cn

Halle is doing fine after her injury on Sunday. She has few white pistils left on her tops. There still are some coming in on the lower buds and more hidden part of her main colas. The cracked branch is still very healthy ... good turgor on her leaves.
These two shots are of an undamaged main cola to show off Halle's chunky bud structure. Her smell has moderated. There is less of that delicious fruity floor wax thing going on, and more generic green scent.

Here is a shot across part of her canopy. Her fans are beginning to yellow globally. I refuse to overnourish her at this point.

Halle took a feed today as well. Her soil is doing an unpleasant thing ... when it dries out, it loses its thirstiness. Water poured on top forms pools and beads. it took me close to an hour to water her ... pour in some nute, wait for it to be absorbed and form a wet spot to act like a blotter, pour, wait, repeat. I wonder if i can use a persistent, non-toxic wetting agent to assist this rehydration process.. If I hurry, the nute just pours through channels it cuts into the soil ball.
Here is the damaged branch with its fat heavy bud set.

Finally, some shots of the plants under the HPS. Halle is sitting on the shoosh box I'd made for the air pump earlier in this adventure. Alice has stretched enough that the tops are almost even at this point.

A shot of a main cola from Halle under the HPS. The young leaves are developing purplish margins and interveins that show up particularly well under the yellow HPS illumination. It was pretty chilly in the house last night, and I anticipate another cold night.
Although no new florets seem to be emerging, i have yet to find an amber/browned trichome. That would give me an excuse to chop, groom the bud, and try revegging Halle. I do so want to try propagating this beast of a plant! My one effort to clone a branch (starting three weeks ago) in a glass of water, under 24/0 of CFL, failed.

cn

Beary nice cn and my hat is off to you..