TL DR; I’m planning on growing some legal weed, as I used to be pretty good at it, but I’m realising that there is lots of new stuff for me to learn.
Good day all. Great to see OG is back (but I don’t find this facebook/youtube app inspired autoscrolling stuff as good as
the original vbulletin forum designs… Get off my lawn!!!)
OG going down to the ArCees scared me out of growing for a long time. I’m falling back down the rabbit hole in the new legal environment.
Now that I’m living in the land of 4 legal plants, this last month or so I’ve of course been lurking the forums thinking about Krusty, Noone, Reaper, and the tree style of growing again… Also a new (to me) addition to those names, is Heath Robinson to the list for inspiration. Hm. DWC trees can actually really push out the yield, eh? Who knew? Back in my day large scale DWC was just a recipe for unhealthy plants that have unstable PH, low DO issues accompanied with mold problems in the room. 1.5GPW of lamp possible with simple adherence to the simple principles of indoor gardening, no 30 bottles of snake oil or fancy mechanicals that aren’t needed. Hm. I mostly just stuck to diced rockwool or coco/hydroton, but I really think I’d like to give this RDWC a shot.
I can’t figure out why nobody seems to grow tree style anymore. Doesn’t make sense to me.
Anyway, looking at my 25.5’x13.5’x7.5’ uninterrupted and unfinished area in my basement (total basement area is about 850 sqft or so), I’ve got a pretty nice blank canvas to start with. Tested it out the other day, 2 1500 watt heaters pushing 2600 actual watts of electric heat (killawatt confirmed) brought the basement up to the following temps on the hour:
Hm… well, that looks pretty promising for sure. My local climate goes like so:
Cool. I used to muck about with aircooled lights and year round indoor growing and mother maintenance, but in the legal grow climate, I really won’t need to. So… avoid full lights until middle October or so, and try to be finished by early May or so. Help friends to grow outdoors during the regular grow season, but I can do two really good indoor tree grows a year. Sounds fun.
Now, I’m looking at grow tents (Yes I think a 20x10 would fit quite nicely) strains… and lighting, nice and simple- vertical bulb hanging from a cord- I wonder if horti’s are still the way to go- OMG, what a bunch of differences… LEDs are actually good now? What’s all this about double enders? CMH? Woah, there are digital ballasts that don’t suck? Universal plugs for the socket cords? For a vertical hung single ended HPS, Hortilux is indeed still the best, but man, are there ever differences in lighting.
Great, so this is a nice and simple plan. I want to divide a 10x20 Gorilla tent into a 10x7’ center lung and res room with two 10x6.5’ grow chambers for 2 RDWC plants each on a flipflop for equal heat throughout the day, one res using Jack’s one part and some supplementary nutes as required. Yep. Seems simple enough.
And deeper and deeper into the research rabbit hole I go, Wait a minute- which strain is highly regarded that will grow successfully in this method? Which mini split compressor wattage- do I go for the inverter ones? Which mini split evaporator- a floor mount? Which size of container for the plants- PP or what other material? Which size of res? Which lighting category? Which wattage? Which make? Which ballast? Which carbon filters? Which RO system for the least waste water? Which chiller? Which pumps to keep up to the container size and chiller size? Which air pump to keep up? And blah blah blah.
Man! This growroom design stuff! 15 years later, it’s still the same. It never ends with the thinking and internal debating. And I’m loving the shit out of it.
They say weed is potentially addictive. They say gardening is potentially addictive. The research part of this hobby of indoor gardening always turned my crank back in the day, and it sill does. Good to be back at it. Now, time to go research which modern strains can actually yield well in this sort of system, failing that, I’m going back on the hunt for a cherry pheno AK.
