Corm's Grow Show: The Underground (or, How I Killed my Valley Ghash x Cake Fighter)

Was planning to update yesterday, but then I had to go to the dentist and spent the rest of the day in a fugue state. Pictures are from yesterday, and since I switched everything over to flower on a Monday night they’ve all started a new week as of yesterday. The primary group is a month in, just started week 5. Smells pretty good down there. :slight_smile: I’m not entirey thrilled with the humidity; running a dehumidifier I can keep it down below 70% most of the time, but I’d prefer 62 at max. Gonna grab some hypochlorous acid so I can at least use it as a preventive spray, and at some point add an intake line from the upstairs since it’s higher temps/lower humidity up there. Right now I guess the flower room is drawing from the basement, which is usually 10 degrees colder and thus 40-50% higher humidity than the rest of the house. The intake line would hopefully save me using the dehumidifier, which is an extra $50 a month or so if I’m actually paying for electric. Still not sure about that yet until the end of the year. Anyway, enough rambling, you came for pics and here they are! Group shot first:

Ancestral Skunks might be almost done flowering. They’ve all gone red and mostly stopped pushing white pistils; gonna start checking the trichs soon. They did well enough for autos, but I was expecting photos so I’m disappointed. Feels like a waste to have these in 10 gallon pots. Oh well, c’est la vie. Now I know to keep any others I grow in 3g pots, at least.

Blueberry. Too tall, some of the top buds are getting hit by the light every time it makes a circuit and aren’t gonna come out right. Should still be a nice yield, whatever does come out. There’s another one upstairs, and this isn’t my favorite anyway; dad/school weed for my partner.

Silver Mountain F2 dropped a few leaves from nitrogen deficiency before I managed to top-dress them. Apparently a 1/4 cup of worm castings every two weeks is just barely enough for them. I was expecting it to be slightly too much, but might have to go to 1/3 instead in the future. Buds are starting to look good, nice sweet incense smell. Hopefully it gets its potency from SSH too. :crossed_fingers:

Original Skunks are both unhappy with the light, but they’re the only ones so it’s not getting turned down. They’re just gonna have to suffer. Looks like a nice yield anyway; they’re both sweet skunk though, apparently. Looking pretty much identical, so the line is uniform, but not sure it’s uniformly what we’re looking for or just uniform. Probably make seeds next time we run them, but I’m not particularly excited by the prospect right now.

Neville’s Skunk twins. Kind of. In that the first one is Arnold, and the second is Danny DeVito. :stuck_out_tongue: Small, but stinky buds coming in on both from what I can tell. No uniformity, and I’m not sure the stink is actual skunk, but stinky.

Four little Frankensteins all in a row. I feel like this should be the start of a nursery rhyme, but it’s not; that’s it… and they all lived happily ever after until they got chopped down five weeks from now? :man_shrugging:

Port Wine Cheesus. Small, dense buds with no smell yet. It’s kind of a subdued smell even when it’s done though, so I guess I’m not surprised by that. Not a bad one, but I wasn’t excited enough by it to take more clones. If I’m more excited by this run, hopefully I can get it back.

Two GG4 RIL, first is starting week 5 like the rest and the second is starting week 3. Grew nicely into that pot; a month or so ago, maybe six weeks, it was a foot tall.

The tent. Not doing real updates for it since I’m too lazy, but this is going into flower too since we miscalculated timing on our clones badly. I’ve got more clones of these elsewhere. Clockwise starting from the front: 2x PWC, 4x Frankie, 1x MAC1, 1x GG4 and 1x Blueberry in here. Yesterday was day 1 of flower.

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Lol I know how that goes. Every time they ask if you can feel the nitrous, you gotta say no. Even if it means mustering strength you didn’t know you had :joy: Or until it’s filling the room getting the hygienist high…

Great looking operation in here :+1: You must have your hands full at harvest time…

The lattices look great, and I’m curious how difficult/easy it is to cut plants out of those when the time comes?

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They don’t even ask anymore, she gave me like a triple dose right up front because she knew it wouldn’t work on me otherwise. :stuck_out_tongue: My endocannabinoid system is just too highly trained, it seems…

They definitely look great. I’m curious how it works too… we’ve been using tomato cages up until now, just got the lattices up in time for this run. It’s making defoliating a bit of a challenge, I can say that much… and I’m a bit nervous about getting mold back there with the humidity. Not sure how well the hypochlorous will reach back there either. We shall see, it’s an experiment in progress. :crossed_fingers: My partner usually does the harvesting anyway, but I’ll see if he feels it’s easier or harder. Should be pretty easy to tell just from the amount of cursing he does. :rofl:

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It does give the room a certain professionalism and it’s super clean looking. Seems like a good way to control the level of the canopy. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for a harvest time update. Hopefully it works out :crossed_fingers:

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Good morning brother
Dental work omg 🫣:scream_cat::dizzy_face:‍:dizzy: feel better

Pwc should start to stink any day now

Your garden looks amazing bro

Definitely need to try Neville skunk and silver mountain when there done

Great job :clap:

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Slick operation you are running there @Cormoran :+1:

I was curious about the lattice panels you added recently, are you training the plants up against it? (I think that’s called espalier training).
That makes a lot of sense as it uses space very efficiently.

Cheers
G

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Espalier, neat… learn something new every day. :slight_smile: So far it’s still a work in progress, the plan is to grow them out to about a foot tall or so before transplanting into these pots downstairs. From there, yep, training the two outside rows against the lattices to keep room to walk between the rows and care for the middle row, which still needs to be supported by tomato cages. It takes a little more coordination than the perpetual flower I was running before, but looks like the yield should be a lot better and it’s a cleaner setup too. Still learning as I go, but this is the best way we’ve had it setup so far and I think I’ll stick with it for a while. At least till next week, never know when I might have a dumb idea. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well, there was nothing dumb about that idea… :+1:

I’ve been thinking about it, perhaps the setup could be slightly optimized by canting in the bottom of the lattice inwards so it is off vertical (80 85 degrees). That might improve light coverage on the plants, maybe… :laughing:

I’m following with interest. :mag:

Cheers
G

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That can work good :+1: idea

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Looks like it’s update time again. Well, yesterday was, but again I zoned out and didn’t actually take any pictures while lights were on… so we’ll pretend it’s still yesterday. Most of yesterday I thought it was two days ago anyway, so it’s an easy jump to make. :wink: We’re currently starting week 7 of flower for the main flower room. Might start harvesting some of them as soon as two weeks, or might be closer to four, depends on the trichomes. Typically we go for a slightly longer run and more amber, about 25% at least. Hopefully there are no problems between now and then; I’m a bit nervous about flowering in this climate, but can’t get it under better control without the costs going unacceptably high. Currently it’s 80F/74% humidity. Not too bad considering that it’s 85% humidity outside, but I’m not thrilled with it. The saving grace is that there’s about 3x the CFM in airflow in there as the size of the room. It’s usually the most comfortable room in the place, and far more comfortable than outside, at least for me.

Ancestral Skunk F2s, or possibly F3s, seem to be finishing up; I was kinda expecting them to be harvested already actually, but we looked at the trichs yesterday and they’re not quite there, mostly milky though. Not really sure how long they’ve been flowering for, since I wasn’t keeping track of when they got moved down here and that’s when I first switched the lights over - I think it ended up being 5 nights. More than long enough to get preflowers, and long enough that some of them got stressed and had to reveg. Now I know. Something about G.I. Joe. :stuck_out_tongue: If they started flowering from that and didn’t go back into veg, that could be as long as 14 weeks, if I’m remembering right… maybe closer to 10 from how they look though. Oh well, this is the upside of letting the plants tell us when they’re ready. If we screw up and lose count, they still know what’s going on.

Miss Blueberry is a hot mess, as usual. Branches all over the place, behind the lattice and in the reservoir. She DGAF about all these ties and restraints, she just wants to grow. Everywhere. The second GG4 RIL was actually supposed to be next to her, she took up all that space too though. :stuck_out_tongue: Tops keep getting clipped by the cords on the light, which isn’t great, but they’re still growing decently other than some damage to the leaves.

Silver Mountain F2 is one of the two plants still drinking a lot of water; all the others have cut down. I think she’s gonna be next, bottom of the pot was slightly wetter than the other one when I checked last. I gave them both a bit more, all the others were still pretty soaked. Buds are starting to look pretty nice, and there’s a unique smell to them… I guess kinda like sandalwood or incense, probably from the SSH from what I’ve heard.

Original Skunks are bulking up and starting to dip a bit. Had a cola growing up against the wall earlier and now it’s at a 45 degree angle. These are the ones I’m probably most worried about mold, if the buds get too dense it might not matter how much airflow there is. Not that I’ve ever had budrot, just looking for trouble before it happens… I’m gonna keep spraying with hypochlorous, but at significantly lower concentration than before. I started out with 50ppm on my normal IPM schedule, and two days after the second spray they started showing signs of stress. It might be because I gave them too much calcium late in flower, just top-dressed some more gypsum, but I think it’s because of the hypochlorous. Gonna ease off to once a week, and maybe reduce the concentration further. I added about 10ppm to the water I’m using for the condenser when I make RSO, and it cleared right up after having let it sit for nearly 3 weeks.

Neville’s Skunk. If I hadn’t seen it myself I dunno if I’d believe these two came from the same pack of seeds… one is already coming close to being done at only 6 weeks, and will probably come down next week or maybe two weeks from now; the other’s barely even had visible flowers for 2 weeks yet, and still has nothing but clear trichomes. Also the only one still drinking huge amounts of water, roughly 4 gallons last week. This is gonna be a long one. They both smell kinda bad, but I dunno if I’d call it skunky. It’s certainly not what my partner remembers and reminisces over.

Frankensteins are already bulked up and flopping all over the place. One of them has spider mites, unfortunately - or at least had them. The hypochlorous might have killed them, haven’t seen any webs or anything moving since then. Funny, I didn’t even buy it as a pesticide but for mold, and it might be a better pesticide than the neem oil. :roll_eyes: Nice dense buds, great smell and great high. I’m growing the original clone-only. I took a few more clones of it yesterday, though we’re considering letting this one go. The smoke is harsh, and so far 4/4 of the growers and smokers I know prefer the GG4 RIL, if only slightly. I have not yet polled dentists, but I suspect they feel the same. Except that fifth dentist who doesn’t believe in brushing - dunno about that wackjob.

Port Wine Cheesus is… um, unremarkable, mostly. Very easy grow, likes everything I’m doing, seems like the only leaves she’s ever dropped were from lack of light on the lowers or against the wall. Even when they went a month in inert medium with barely any food, she was fine. The Frankie nearly died from it, and was stressed for a month afterwards. That’s the one that we couldn’t cage, so it’s now flopping all over the place, where again the PWC is fine; nice and compact. Gonna have to see how the smoke is, I know the few buds I had were good but didn’t seem particularly better than GG4. That just checks all the boxes for almost everyone.

GG4 RILs are both looking nice. My partner didn’t even recognize the second one, thought it was a Blueberry because it had taken off so much during stretch. Apparently they like having enough calcium. No damage on that one except from the first week of flower when I pushed the cal-mag too much. In other words, boron excess. Where’s the tower, where’s the gun… :stuck_out_tongue: Anyway, that either means I should be cutting the micros at 6 weeks or that the hypochlorous was what damaged them, or possibly both.

The tent’s just finished stretch, currently starting week 3. Everyone seems happy, and apparently they’ve grown about a foot during stretch. I didn’t even realize because I’ve been here the whole time watching, but my partner sure noticed. I gave them a little gypsum last week as well, roughly half as much as the 10g pots downstairs got. Hopefully they should be good with nothing but occasional worm castings through flower. I picked up another 20" industrial fan last week and will be replacing the 16" pedestal fan in there for probably 3x the airflow; the one in there is also broken and stopped oscillating, though the oscillation was never terribly useful in there. Always had it pointed up at the ceiling anyway so it wasn’t blowing directly on the plants from two foot away.

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Love the tent set up wow

All of your plants look amazing brother

I switched my lights to on at 3pm and off at 10 am just for the heat .they are in veg and it still gets hot but the light schedule helps

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They’re already in flower, so changing the light schedule would be a bit messy now… but I don’t really think I need to. It gets up to 90ish up there, but it’s fairly easy to open the tent a bit like I have it now to help with airing it out, and there’s an exhaust fan blowing outside in the upper corner that’s cut out from the picture. More worried about the humidity and airflow - when I first started I was growing in the attic, with less ventilation and getting even hotter. The plants survived as well as any I grew back then - not very - but they also got mold after a few weeks in the jar. Could be they weren’t cured properly too, though.

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It’s been two weeks, so it seems like about time for an update. That’s about the limit of my short-term memory anyway. :stuck_out_tongue: Main flower room has just started week 9 of flower; hopefully some of these should start coming down soon. Hopefully they make it through cure without molding. Still at 70% humidity or so down there, but no sign of any mold/mildew issues.

The Ancestral Skunks should probably be ready to come down soon, but then again I’ve been saying that for a month now and they’re still up. Dunno what’s going on with the trichs, I guess they still look fine though; they’d look better if I had the energy to pull off dead leaves, but I just don’t.

Blueberry, still a hot mess. Nobody else thinks they’re supposed to grow twice as wide as their pot and down into the reservoir, why do you have to? :rofl:

Silver Mountain F2 is looking nice; those tops are getting pretty big and solid. Again, hopefully they survive the humidity. This is one I’d quite like to sample, very different smells from most of the others. It’s light but not floral, kinda an incense smell to it. I’m guessing she’ll want another 2-4 weeks, still lots of white pistils and drinking fairly fast.

Skunk #1 seems to be finishing up. Just a few tufts of white pistils on those buds now, and they’ve slowed down their drinking schedule a bit. Hopefully they can come down this week, if not maybe in 2 weeks.

Neville’s Skunk again throwing me for a loop… the small one that seemed to be done is now drinking faster, and the big one that seemed to be taking forever to finish is drinking slower. Maybe I just messed up my count of the watering schedule, come to think of it. This is why we check the trichs. :wink:

Frankie making a mess of things, as always. Nice solid buds with a fruity smell developing into something… not skunky, but kinda rank anyway. One of them has spider mites. :frowning: Gonna have to extract her, the others can sit in the jars until we actually want to smoke it or need extra bud to extract. It’s not bad at all, just not what any of us reach for first.

PWC hasn’t been drinking much for a while, should probably be ready soon since it’s an indica. Fairly subdued smells, I have to get right up in there to smell much of anything. I’m a bit surprised by how small the buds are coming out, dunno if it’s because of how I “trained” her or failed to do anything of the sort, as the case may be… or if it’s just how they grow. I’ve got two more in the tent, we’ll see.

Things are proceeding as normal with the GG4 RILs as well. Unfortunately the one against the wall seems to be getting a few spider mites as well, should be coming down soon enough anyway though. A quick bud wash should sort it out. The second one is only at 7 weeks, so it’ll be longer before it’s ready, but it also doesn’t seem to have any spider mites.

Things are working out ok in the tent; it doesn’t seem to want to stay above 70% humidity anyway, and there’s pretty good airflow. Probably still gonna move that industrial fan in soon, they just started week 5. GG4 and MAC1 started needing support last week, Frankie is just getting to that point now. They’ve sped up their drinking a lot, was giving them 1.5 quarts every four days then had to go down to three and now it’s about every day and a half. I’m not enjoying it. Might be good to get some bigger reservoirs, but then they’d also need more space which I don’t really have, so it’s a catch-22. I may just randomly stop watering them and see what survives when I give them a quart once a week, depends how lazy I get. :wink:

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My RH is hi as well mid 60 ‘s I just increased air intake and circulation

I rh is much Better , I pump air from the main portion of my house

I know your organic but I believe you can add potash to your feed or top dress the potash I have is a 0/0/50 it will force the finish and harden up some of the buds

Pwc is surprisingly small buds I do think it’s training related
I skipped a run with her but when I run her again I’m not going to train her at all and I’ll Reduce n more and increase p and k in weeks 3/5 and also really boost k from weeks8 through finish

You can make organic teas that will do the same as my fertilizer

Banana peal fermentation for increased p

Increased k is just potash to top dress

And liquid kelp is the bomb
I’m thinking of going to the beach and trying to find some kelp to dry out and add as a soil amendment

It will help

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Starting to lose track, I didn’t realize yesterday had been two weeks, which makes this the start of week 11. Not really much of an udpate at this point. We chopped most of the room last week. Most of it will probably be overdried by the time my partner gets back to do trim jail, since it’s gone from an average of 70% humidity all day to an average of 50%. Most of it was probably always gonna be RSO, so this shouldn’t make much difference, but it’s not ideal. Oh well, c’est la vie. :man_shrugging: Anyway, here’s the group pic of what’s left:

Silver Mountain F2 after… I guess this is called supercropping? I’m not really sure. I chopped the tops two days ago and I’m giving the rest of the plant another week, so whatever that’s called this is what it looks like now.

GG4 RIL is 2 weeks behind, starting week 9. Should be good to go in another week or two.

Frankie. Shoulda caged her, but because I didn’t it’s taking two weeks longer. Apparently light intensity is lower when all the leaves are two inches from the floor, who knew? :roll_eyes:

Same deal with the PWC, should probably be done already but I didn’t support it properly and so it’s not.

Neville’s Skunk continues to give me a hard time. Both branches on one side have now collapsed and are trying to fall off the plant; I tied them to the cage for now. Really should be chopped now, if not last week, but there’s no room anyway. Lots of leaves getting crispy and necrotic now. Oh well, either way it’s one more week.

The tent is starting week 7. Most are looking fairly decent, a little bit of yellowing because I stopped giving them worm castings after last week’s feeding. Or maybe two weeks ago, dunno. I also cut off the cal-mag, getting just plain water now. The Blueberry is a disaster. Dunno what the hell happened, because I’ve been giving her less water than the others and they’ve been frequently underwatered, while she now seems to be overwatered and may have stopped drinking entirely. Not really sure. I know when I watered yesterday, the bin ended up full of stagnant water while all the others are empty, and meanwhile all her leaves are dying. I’m gonna skip next watering for her and see what happens. Worst case she dies, which was gonna happen in two weeks anyway when it’s chop time; if the buds end up too early, I’ll just toss them in the RSO jar.

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Bro worm castings and cal mag is mostly nitrogen and I would not use it during flower

It will delay the finish in the weeks 7 through finish introduce Epson salts for mag
And pot ash and molasses for phosphorus and potassium, always lower end, and illuminate calcium nitrate in flower
Just my 2 cents
Imho
Peace
Paps

There’s no nitrogen in my cal-mag. I give them worm castings through the first few weeks of flower as normal so they have at least some; before, I was blindly following advice like that and wasn’t giving them castings or any other nitrogen and they were just dropping all their leaves by week 5. Pretty sure this is better than what I was doing, at any rate, and I’m not trying to make any more changes until I’ve had time to evaluate how this works. The plants sometimes take a week or two to react to changes, and the soil takes weeks or months; randomly changing a bunch of things just leaves me wondering which had which effect later on.

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I gotta find time and space for a Frankie or two, it seems to have a following here.

Room and tent look good Corm, I have some extra mater cages if ya need em. :wink:

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Poor excuse for an update incoming.

The plants that I was expecting to be overdried by last week weren’t even ready to trim yet, and this week has been up around 80F/80% humidity outside again. It’s closer to 80/65% inside, but still not sure if everything will be dry by this weekend. Hopefully it doesn’t all smell like hay from terpenes evaporating. Then again, I was expecting to have to shut down entirely over the summer, so a harvest of slightly sub-par buds is better than nothing at all. Still makes perfectly good RSO, if nothing else. In the meantime we chopped the other five plants that were downstairs, since there’s plenty of room. I was too dumb to realize that we could shut down the flower room entirely for a few weeks once they were chopped, but my partner figured it out. :stuck_out_tongue:

Group picture next, since I started talking about the tent and then digressed into a page of musing about silica. Started week 9 in there yesterday. Branches are falling down all over the place.

I might need to add silica to the soil. Not entirely sure what the organic methods are, a 5-minute search turned up potassium silicate and DTE as well as something called “volcanic tuff” that only seems to be sold on the West Coast. Possibly only by one company - I haven’t found anything produced by anyone other than MontanaGrow, anyway. They do carry it at BAS, so that might be the way to go if I can’t find anything cheaper that includes shipping cross-country. Potassium silicate might be cheaper, and even if it’s not organic it’s at least natural, so that might be an option too. Not sure I entirely like the ratios though - potassium silicate is 52% silica and 32% potassium, while this volcanic tuff is 76% silica and 5% potassium. Might be easier to work with the tuff, since it’s almost entirely silica. Might also be it’s time to get a damn soil test. :roll_eyes: I’m paranoid - and they’re out to get illegal growers in general - so as a rule I don’t like having my name on any lists even remotely associated with the state, but it’s possible that this is a bit too paranoid. I wasn’t expecting it to take years to figure out decent soil chemistry by trial and error, and I doubt the university is actively collaborating with LEOs to find growers. There have to be simpler ways, and they probaby don’t have the budget for large-scale sweeps anyway.

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I don’t know if it’s true and I’m too lazy to research it, but I’ve heard/read that rice hulls are a good source of silica.

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