Second grow - same ILGM seeds, hopefully better results - all comments welcome

I'm in the final week of another grow but am getting the other one started while they finish up. Current grow here.

Seeds are from ILGM.

• 2 Blue Dream
• 1 Blue Haze
• 1 Blue Cheese
• 1 Gold Leaf

I'll be using what is left of my Perfect Nutrients stuff and then switching over to salt I mix up with a few extra things.

I started the seeds by soaking them in plain warm water for 4ish hours while my jiffy pods soaked up water. I set up a small grow spot in my closet for now. It is using an old 350watt equivalent CFL bulb I had for starting tomato and pepper seeds. They are on a grow mat set to 84 with the probe shoved underneath/between them. My very first time with seeds failed due to the humidity dome so I am using something that is not actually sealed. I opted for an old storage container for the top and a cut off cat litter lid for the bottom.

I planted them in the pods on Friday evening (2022-07-0. I just let them sit in darkness with a heating pad while I waiting on them to pop.


They sprouted last night while I was busy with company and so I forgot to check before bed. They stretched a bunch so I pulled them out of my DIY humidity dome and moved them close to the bulb. The CFL shouldn't put out enough PPFD that being close would matter. Hopefully it is enough for them while I work on rigging something else up. The single pod in the dome is the Gold Leaf which didn't pop yet. If it doesn't pop in another day or two, I will plant a replacement.



I have some old cob leds I have had in storage for many years (2017 maybe) from my first foray into trying to overwinter peppers and tomatoes indoors many years ago. They all ended dying on me because of environmental factors. I had to budget for a 6 months to afford the lights back then so getting a grow tent/dehumidifier wasn't really something I could do. They ended up in storage shortly after that.

The cobs are all old luminous CMX-22s on a DIY dimmer. I am going to rack them up and put them in the closet to get these going better while I wait on my other stuff to dry. I will be moving everything in to my big tent once it is ready. I will be taking clones and working to collect pollen via colloidal silver on 1 of each plant's clone. This time I will be starting those clones in the closet and letting them go early.

I'll post details on how I end up setting up the cobs once I figure it out.

The gold leaf is starting to break the surface. I'm going to keep it under the dome for now and pull it out later today. I want to give it a bit more time with higher humidity before I put it out in the room. The CFL grow light is currently set to be on 24/7. I think I have another outlet timer around somewhere so will look for that and then run it 18/6. Worst case I have to buy a cheap indoor one.


I'll probably build a small "tent" frame out of some pvc/wood scraps to act as a divider for the closet. It will use left over plastic sheeting from my big tent build. I'll cover the walls with it as well and plan to put some kind of tote or container on the floor for catching drips. The basement I don't care about, but the closet has wood under the old linoleum/vinyl flooring.

I pulled out the cobs from storage and am working on trying to get something DIY using what I have laying around. I will most likely just end up buying angle aluminum to build the frame with. I am also trying to decide how I want the lights broken up.



The closet will support 2 cobs deep and as many wide as I want. I have a single controller and 6 cobs I can hook up. The more cobs, the more efficient the lights but the lower output each light runs out. I am going to hook them all up pointing at the wall and try my phones PPFD meter app on it to see how much output there is. Then I can decide how many to run on the controller.

There are 3 options.

1. Individually hanging cobs. Would allow me to modify hang heights for each light. Downside is that I then have to deal with each light.
2. Pair 2 cobs on a frame so they go up and down together. Gives me better height control and less to deal with?
3. Have a single frame with 4 or 6 cobs on it. It is just one thing to raise and lower and each plant will then need to be adjusted.

If you have the energy go individual. It is especially nice to be able to use as many or few as you want and to vary heights vs have to prop up smaller plants.

That said, any option will be fine. Go with what your gut says.

I very much do like the idea of being able to adjust the lights individually. I just have to figure out a plan on how to do it.

Currently thinking I will buy a box of screws that fit the pre drilled holes and make some metal hangers out of some metal wire I have. I can put 4 on each of them that then hook together with a ratchet rope or something that is attached to the shelf above it.

Unfortunately I won't have time to do it where it will matter. Some other stuff came up and I am heading out for a week. Plan is to run them off the CFL while I am away. They will slow down their growth but should be okay otherwise.

I'll be putting them all in small nursery bags on Sunday before I go and mixing up some low EC nutes for them.

I transplanted the seedlings today. The root was just starting to push through the jiffy pots they started in so I thought it was a good time to do it.

I put them in a mix of 70/30 coco/perlite. I planted them all low enough that the stem was almost entirely buried due to how much they all had stretched.

I also moved how my light is set up to give it a bit more even lighting. I wrapped the CFL bulb lightly with a piece of coated garden wire to gently hold the light while it is sitting there. The height is adjustable via some wire slide things that I had from my LED.

I also wrote up instructions for someone to take care of them while I am away. Hopefully they are okay.

I got back from my trip on Saturday and spent the weekend dealing with trimming and curing the previous grow.

The new plants look pretty good. There is a little bit of yellowing of the leaves but the roots are showing through the fabric pot. I'll plan to move them up to a new pot and then into the grow tent after a day of recovery.

Unfortunately, this grow got away from me. The plants are still going on, but my closet plan did not work out well. I ended up getting extremely busy with life and just let them limp along with the CFL and plain closet.

They almost completely died from neglect.

In mid to late August I cleaned out my tent in the basement and moved them in there. The plants were still in their original fabric pots (which thankfully air pruned the roots so no root issues to deal with.

I fed them around 200 EC of nutrients and left them on life support. I watered them every other day. Lights were running on low (40% I think) and set to about 18inches above the plants.

4 of them bounced back after a week or two in the more stable environment but the last one never recovered. Turns out the one that died was the extra Blue Dream.

I found some time at the end of September to finally transplant them. I skipped the gallon pot this time and just put them right in the same 7 gallon fabric pots which I cleaned out after my first harvest.

I kept watering around 350 EC with plain water every few waterings. I ended up skipping 2 or 3 days at at time with the huge fabric pots.

2 of the plants have grown completely into the lights. Only one of them developed any damage to the leaves from the lights basically touching it.

I wanted to switch them over to flower a few weeks ago but knew I would be traveling for Thanksgiving and really didn't want to risk leaving them alone. Instead, I let the plants go and decided I would figure out a game plan right before the holidays. Thus, the update today.

The plants were all untouched at this point. I hadn't even bothered to remove the few leaves as they died and just let them fall. I debated between two choices on what to do with the plants.

1. I see how they perform without any changes beyond adjusting for the plant height but I'm still very concerned about the potential height issues I may run into.
2. I do some potentially risky supercropping and LST.

I opted for 2. The method I chose is not a good idea for anyone else to follow. Just tracking my journey.

The stem was hard from the slow growth so I wasn't able to break it with my fingers. Instead, I found a pair of small pliers and used them to break a section between two nodes completely. I worked the stem from different angles, then wrapped it in some grafting tape and gently bend it. Basically ,the top half of the plant is now leading way to the side.

Amusing enough, I think these went smoother than my first time trying to supercrop anything.

For the rest of the branches, I used flexible wire and tied them down in a spread out way.

This time, I topped off the pots completely with more coco and perlite.

I took some before and after photos with my phone, but haven't had a chance to look through them yet. I'll upload something showing progress tomorrow.

Holiday plan for the plants is to water them heavily Thursday morning then hope for the best until I get back on Saturday night.

Assuming the plants all take to the cropping, I am going to start increasing the amount of feed I give them and increase the light power setting until I am ready for flower. I expect to only give them a few days of adjustment before entering flower.

The plants were still looking okay after being away. Unfortunately, one of the super cropped tops was poorly done and it dried out. I snipped off the top of it and am just letting it go as is.

One of the other tops may end with the same fate.

When I super cropped the plants, I took 2 cuttings from each and tried my hand at some clones. I put them in rooting gel then put them in jiffy pots then put that in some dirt inside a peat pot. I soaked the soil pretty good because the peat pots were dry. Finally, I put a quart bag over top to maintain humidity.

As of today, all but one were doing well. I transplanted them out of the peat pots and into gallon fabric pots. The bag is sitting on top loosely. I'm planning to try my hand at getting pollen from the clones using colloidal silver from the get go.

I have also eased up the lights to 80% power as of today and raised them up a bit more.

I spent some time mixing up a new batch of concentrated A + B to replace the liquid nutrients mix I was using. A is masterblend 4-18-38 and epsom salt while B is calcium nitrate. I accidentally mixed A with hot water which super saturated it. It formed crystals at the bottom of the mason jar. I heated it back up and added more water to it.

I'll jot down more detailed mixing and fertilization details next time I update.

I finished cleaning out the junk from my humidifier and have that running again. I hadn't been running it at all during vegetation. I'm going to get everything up to par and get ready to flip to flower hopefully in a few days.

Today will be the day I flip over the new plants. I put off starting because the super cropped tops were not healing up as nicely as I had hoped. I decided to snip them all off and do some defoliating. I should I just topped them instead. Oh well.

Nutrients are as follows:
Note: I measured out mls for everything following the recommended charts and then converted to grams. The original mix I did I would use the full power recommended mix and then dilute down to where I wanted it. This time, I just calculated down to get around 400 EC of nutrients in the water and then weighted it out. I now just use a small scale to measure out the liquid

For anyone curious, 1ml == 1gram of distilled water, so I just weighted it all.

Previous grow was using all PerfectSunLEDs Perfect Nutrients for the whole grow.

I used up all of the A+B that I had a few weeks ago, so I mixed up a new concentrate to use in place of that.

I was still using their Fulvic Calmag up until yesterday. Today I will switch to a flowering feeding schedule.

My homemade recipes are below:
A is 500g of water, 300g of Masterblend 4-18-38, and 150g of epsom salt.
B is 500g of water, 550g of CalNit.

Crystals ended up forming in A so I heated it back up and adding around 100g more water to it (I didn't measure). There are still some crystals, but the jar I have it in is already full so I will add some more to dilute it once I use up more of the nutrients. Next time I will mix up slightly less nutrients in the water and figure out how much I need to add to hit my EC.

Feeding for veg was originally with my old A+B which I used at 20g of both for a 5 gallon bucket full of water. I would do 2 normal strength feedings followed by water or a half strength feeding, depending on how the plants looked.

My homemade mix I increased A (because of added water) up to 24g and lowered my B to 14g. I have been using around 10g of fulvic calmag as well.

The recipe I mixed based from I had found in a forum. I don't remember which one anymore.

From my notes for mixing:
The first batch I mixed up at that strength for a 5 gallon bucket and found that the EC was far to high so I diluted down and watered. I ended up having to almost half the strength to get back to where I had been watering previously.


I ended up with using around 24g of A (increased to 28g because I added extra water) and 14g of B which means 0.758g of Epsom, 1.516g of Masterblend, and 1.621g of Cal Nit per gallon.

Ratio I was targeting was 1-0.5-1.1 for Masterblend, Epsom, and Cal Nit.

Future batches, I will plan to mix at a ratio where I can use the same amount of A+B concentrate to arrive at my target ratio.

For flower, I will be keeping the A+B ratio the same and replacing the cal mag with Colossal P and Flower Girl. Recommended from PerfectSun is to use 7ml of Colossal P and 3ml of Flower girl per gallon. I don't know remember what amount I was using of each so will skim through my notes again.

I will most likely use them around half strength and slowly increase my total EC up to around 700 and see how the plants do.

Since this grow will be flowering over winter, I decided to do lights on during the night and lights off during the day. I am planning to do 7 to 7 and will be setting up my outlet timer tonight for it.

Also, I water for the idea that I don't want to deal with runoff and am willing to sacrifice some potential yields for skipping that step. My first grow ended up with 679.9g of buds (including small/larfy buds that I eventually sorted out and used for edibles) so I'm not overly worried about the grow. Worst case, it doesn't work. Best case, I end up with the same amount for the tent which is fine for me. My usage is so low that I could probably just do one grow per year and still give some away to friends.

I spent around $2400 (might be lesss) total for everything for the first grow plus energy to run it which put me at $3.53 per gram or $100.07 per ounce. I could do the whole depreciation and calculating it over the life of the light and equipment, but I don't care enough to do that.

My future grows and openness to experimentation will be based on the idea that my first grow covered my equipment costs at around what I used to pay for an ounce back in the day and I'm okay with that. Future costs per grow will be 300-400 in energy costs (not sure how much the heater will cost to run when it drops to -15F overnights once we get into actual winter and a negligible amount of nutrients since I have bought raw ingredients to mix my own as I slowly work through my whatever is left from my PerfectSun Nutrients. I will calculate nutrient costs at some point for future grows, but I also garden normally so I expect it will end up all wrapped up in the same purchases.

Looks like I might have a rodent chewing on my plants. I am going to have to set up straps up and wrap up the cannabis and hope for the best.

I had to trim back a few branches that were completely gnawed through and will plan to wrap everything else with tape.

Trap wise, I will put one in each pot with some peanut butter and see how that goes. I don't have enough on hand to do more than that right now. I'll grab some photos of the damage and plan to get some photos up.

I think the plant damage is exacerbated by my letting the plant dry out a bit inbetween watering this time. I found evidence of the stems splitting from what I assume is having an excess of water and trying to grow and hitting forcing an expansion on the hard outer shell. Lazy grow method has had some draw backs this time.

I wrapped each plant's stem with grafting tap and set up a mouse trap on each one. I also have a rat trap and another mouse trap on the floor. I will reevaluate what I am doing tonight when I have more time to look at it.

My initial game plan is to simply snip off the branches that look mostly gnawed off and switch to daily watering as I ramp up to flower and just see what happens. I know cannabis can be super resilient so am hoping it works out okay.

I finished uploading all of my photos to my computer and will put together a post of some that showcase the grow in another post.

Photos from my phone are going to be badly focused as I didn't take any time on them.

This is the worst stem from the Gold Leaf.

This one is one of the others. Not sure which as I just did this super fast before getting back to work.


This is the stem that looks really bad. These stems were from the really bad supercrop job.

And here are some representative photos of the grow from when I started prepping up til now. It is more random plants but it is what it is.

Before vacation:


Day I get back from vacation:


2 days ago:

My meeting ended early so I was able to head back down and wrap them all up. I looked through and trimmed off a few dead spots and supported one floppy branch.

I also had to wrap a few branches that the skin was peeling on.

I decided not to start flower today after all. Instead I mixed up a normal veg amount and watered until runoff with the 4 plants to ensure that they are filled completely. Hopefully they are still doing okay over the next few days.

Just checked on the plants today and I think I am dealing with rats rather than mice. 2 of the traps were tripped and another branch was snipped completely off.

I am going to mix up some DIY rat poison using Vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol) and using it downstairs in the basement. I'll also pull out the mouse traps and buy some old school rat traps and put them along the walls. The rat bait will go along the walls and in the tent.

Today all of my hard pest control has finally paid off. I found a dead rat outside my grow tent. Looks like the poison took care of it. Hurray.

I have been basically letting the plants limp along while I waited to see if I could deal with the rat or not. Today I will clean out the tent and rearrange for flower. I will most likely need to move the plants lower to the floor as they have gotten a bit taller. However, I will also do some LST on the branches to spread everything out again. I also need to trim off some leaves.

Plans will be to switch to flower this weekend, assuming no more major issues like rats eating all my stuff.

I haven't had a good chunk of time to fully switch over. The holidays have continued to be crazy busy. I have however raised the lights up as high as they can go because the tops were looking a bit wonky. The tent was also getting a bit drier from the furnace kicking on more often since everyone is home full time now.

Today marks the first day of switching to 12/12 lights. I'm running them on from 6PM to 6AM which is just before the house heat kicks on in the morning. I was tempted to just try running during the day like before because I don't have to deal with any light changes, but I'm concerned that it may end up way to cold in January.


This last watering I gave I fed the plants a bit more of the Fulvic Calmag to help make sure they have some extra along with my normal flower mix.

For flower, I am using my DIY A+B along with Colossal P and Flower Girl. I added them around half strength to the mix because I am running everything lighter. I did not measure EC this first time but will get something dialed in after lights on tonight.

I also have to check if my PH has drifted at all in my well water because the ground around here is basically gushing water now while during the summer it was really dry.

I know the basement gets some extra light in during the day because it has a window and the crawl space has some air gaps around the door. The basement window shines directly on the tent during parts of the day so I blocked it off with a cardboard box for now. I will plan to replace the box with a towel or blanket, but that will wait til tonight.


Here's what the really chewed stem looked like on the 14th.


And here are a few photos of the tent looks as of this morning.

Looks really nice.
If you like ILGM, I highly recommend their Granddaddy Purple and Gorilla Glue.
They may not be "landrace" seeds, but they're 2 of my favorite strain/buzzes I've grown.

Best of luck to you.

.Smoke said:

Looks really nice.
If you like ILGM, I highly recommend their Granddaddy Purple and Gorilla Glue.
They may not be "landrace" seeds, but they're 2 of my favorite strain/buzzes I've grown.

Best of luck to you.

Click to expand...

Thanks for stopping by. I've been happy with my ILGM plants so will definitely look into those two strains for future grows.

I opted to buy some regular seeds this time as I want to experiment with my own crosses and/or just pollen chucking for fun.

Plants are still looking okay. I think they are bouncing back and seem to be handling the stress of flipping to 12/12 fine. I'm going to re lower my lights back down once they come back on and do a bit more clean up. My goal is to try to spread the plants out a bit more to fill in the spaces I have in my canopy. There are a few spots where there is currently nothing. After that, I will hopefully just let them go. A lot of that depends how far they bolt (stretch) during the next 2 weeks.

My ph of my new batch of nutrients had drifted down to about 5.7 after mixing so I added ph up for the first time. Not a lot, just a few drops. I don't worry about hitting a specific target, just a range that changes since the ph affects the nutrients availability to the plants.

EC wise, My current batch measured at 1.1 after phing so I diluted it down to 0.8 before hand watering. This watering I watered way past normal to make sure the coco is completely saturated with nutrients. Maybe around 10% runoff. Game plan is to see how the plant does with my current feeding and adjust as needed.

Next grow I may look at adding an auto watering system to try comparing my lazy grow with high frequency feeding.

I've been saving up for another tent so I can have some more flexibility with my future grows, however I'm not certain if my basement can handle another setup without running another outlet. I'm pretty sure there is only a single circuit in the basement right now. I will have to trace out the lines and check for sure. I also need to look at calculating if I can safely run everything on a single line.

I will also be looking at setting up an an indoor microgreens grow so may look at setting it up so that I can use that for seed starting and vegging small plants.