The AltarNational Garden

Got a couple good looking places I'm looking at, both with full basements. It's looking very likely that I'll get the opportunity to frame out a nice full size grow room. Pretty exciting, I feel like I been waiting for this point since I first decided to try out growing. Now I get to start thinking about how big a space I really need/want, et cetera. I'm thinking something like 14x14 but it might be serious overkill. I have a plant limit to stay legal so I am going to do some long veg periods and do some big ass individual plant ops, like one plant per 4x4 foot print under a few different lights maybe. Or I might try to do some vert stuff with the six circled around a scrog column in the middle of the room with a 1000w in the center... hmmm.. vert is pretty enticing when I look at the math on the increase in surface area.

Oh hey, what's up guys. I should take some new pics of the flowering room. Everything's looking decent except C99 is losing some leaves due to an unplanned N deficiency that I'm trying to correct for now. C99 eats up all the N so I'm not surprised. I had no issues with it last time because I was really aggressive about staying on top of grow feed.. but this time the soil mix was a recycled mix with eyeballed handfuls for reamendment so I probably just didn't put nearly enough worm castings in. Learned my lesson there and went and bought some #4 mix to put the rest of my worm castings (measured) into and amended with an extra TBSP of dolomitic per gallon.

In other news my outdoor experiment seems to be pretty successful. I'm a little worried about frost but otherwise they're still going strong and starting to bulk up decently. They're just these single lollipops with long stems so I am not going to get much but I did nothing whatsoever to care for them so I'll take it. (The bud that is there looks just as crystally as the indoor stuff to me, so I guess they do alright in whatever's out there in the woods for soil.)

Anyway I took some pics of those... I'll get the flowering chamber tonight and put both up.

Oh, btw, that's in regards to the C99 outdoor... the K2's I put out later are doomed for sure, not anywhere close to far enough along and we already got one night that dipped below freezing. But the C99's should make it. Could pull it now but I'm not gonna... just hoping we don't get another frost too soon. On that note I should see when I put them out there...

Hmm... wondering if I could slip out there and tie a paper bag loosely over the head of each one the evening before an expected frost... would that do anything? The stem would still be exposed but it's obviously more hearty than the buds. (Then again I'd be creating a fucking sail to catch the wind by putting the bag on there.)

Hmm... vague guess puts the outdoor C99 at about 6 weeks... if I can get another week and a half out of it I'll be satisfied...

Any pics?

They are coming good sir, getting them off the camera now.

It can be challenging to get a clear shot of them against these forest-camo backdrops, heh,

Anyway they're really nothin special, just a fun experiment. Each one is on top of a 3 foot stem because they had to stretch so much to compete with the overgrowth... and I'd say there is a good 6-9 inches of bud forming on each one, if that gives any sense of scale... I'd have brought something to compare for size but I'd have just been embarassed at the result most likely, lol. (I still feel like my indoor buds all look a lot bigger before I break out a bic lighter for pics, lol.)

Here we grow:















You can't even see the bottom of the stems here... heh... I staked them rudimentarily with sticks to help with any tipsiness though.. anyway group shot of the two:

This is my first time coming near completion with an outdoor plant and I have to say, this shit is awesome. Nature for the win. I didn't even add anything to the ground. I literally dug enough down to bury the solo-cup root ball, breaking the roots out of the way as I did so, and threw the dirt back on top. No nutes, not even a hole filled with soil mix or anything... just right into the ground.

The yield will not be much but C99 clones amazingly. Even if I wanted to go no-effort I could do this each year in high numbers and probably get by on that alone. But instead what I think I will do is start vegging a bunch of ladies about 2-3 months before winter ends and do some monsters next summer.

Also: Looking at those myself, week 6 might be a little generous, but either way I'm basically giving them until the next severe cold night at this point.

And it's actually coming back up a little so this whole week I've got 40-50 degree nights, yay. I hope it holds out, this shit is too early for me.

Do you need to clip pre-emptively with frost or can you just wait til you see she's limp after a frost?

They can make it through the freezes we are getting now altar. It's not until a hard freeze that you need to worry!

Thanks man, good to know. What constitutes a hard freeze? Does it have to do with whether the ground is actually freezing, versus a light frost wherein the ground itself doesn't freeze out?

AltarNation said:

Thanks man, good to know. What constitutes a hard freeze? Does it have to do with whether the ground is actually freezing, versus a light frost wherein the ground itself doesn't freeze out?

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You got it brotha!!

Remember keep the roots happy and the girl above ground will be happy

They are hardy birches

AltarNation said:

Second unit went off without a hitch.. here they are in place before the plants come in... gotta wait another hour and a half before light cycle starts, then I'll get them arranged.

LED in lower position, barely between tops of vscrogs:

LED brought up to max height, shows potential of space.

Honestly I probably didn't veg long enough to take advantage of such badassery, but hey, maybe I'll luck out and get a lot of stretch, lol.

vscrog closeups on the T5's:

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I love what you are doing here....cannot be here much,
but I see this and know I am missing out. :0)

Good luck!

JD

Thanks JD... it doesn't look like I vegged long enough to take advantage of it but the lower halves are all filled out... I will get some shots tonight.

Okay here are the shots from the other night... pics don't do it justics because you can't get the front shot from the bud-side. Eventually I'll get that shot (when I bother to move the middle plants, which are suspended between the two drain channels.)

@Javadog if you wanna see the screens in action here you go.

Role Call:
Left side, starting from the back is, NLxNL, CaseyJonesxGreenManalishi, Diesel, and NLxNL again.
Middle: Kolossus in the back, then two CJxGM's
Right Side: C99 all day.


C99 screen from the back:


C99 screen from the end/front:


NLxNL trained over to accommodate the space the Diesel is gonna waste at the top of the 4-bulb. (Gave up on getting to the top bulbs... MAYBE on the c99 side, almost definitely not gonna happen on this side due to less stretch and the ballast gap in the 8-bulb fixture)
Anyway NLxNL:


Left screen from the end:


Not a great shot but you can see the diesel and the CJxGM next to the NLxNL here:


C99 screen from the back again:


C99 end/front again:


Closer on one of the buds on the end of the C99 front:

The hairs on the C99 are so big they are like little worms! Awesome.
Which breeder are you C99 from?

Hot Diggity Sog said:

The hairs on the C99 are so big they are like little worms! Awesome.
Which breeder are you C99 from?

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Yeah C99 is a very nice strain visually during growth! Actually it's a really great strain all together. Amazing veg speed (eats N like nobody's business though), roots super easily, as soon as 4-5 days time to show out the bottom of a rapid rooter.

The breeder is Female Seeds.

It's a sativa with just barely over a 7 week flower time. The recommended harvest window is like 52-57 days.