PFFs Indoor RDWC grow journal

[pufferfishfiend]

Ok, 3 weeks later, there have been changes in my garden.

On the 25th, I chopped the stunted Dark Devil, it’s currently drying. It will barely yield 1/4.

I converted my individual reservoirs into an RDWC with 2 reservoirs, 1 for the 4 autos, 1 for mother plants I’m going to try cloning from.

The tote of water is left over from the old set up and I need to drain it and pull it out. The placement of the 2 RDWC systems isn’t ideal, but now that everything is full of water, nothing’s moving. I might have to do some light juggling to make sure each system gets enough light.

Onto the ladies, the 3 Dark Devils and 1 Ewok OG (turns out I can’t read either) are continuing to grow. I decided to experiment with topping/FIMing 2 of the Dark Devils, and I totally fucked it up and they’re looking sad.

The two I topped:

The other DD and EO that I haven’t molested:

I’ve decided to stop fucking with the plants until I can at least grow a healthy plant 100% of the way through her life.

The Girl Scout Cookies that I topped a while back is doing great, even though she’s really short.

The Gorilla Glue isn’t doing as well. At some point during the system migration she lost all her roots. I was sure she was going to die, but so far she’s pulling through.

As you can see, all of the plants suffered during the system transition. Both from inattention from me as I built the new system and from a poorly planned migration. However they’re starting to bounce back, and I’m finding the new RDWC system is way more stable and enjoyable to work with.

I also started 6 photos in cups early last week/late the week before to test a soil mix for the 16oz cup contest. They were old seeds, I planted 2 x White Widow, 2 x LSD, 2 x Green Crack and only the 2 White Widows germinated above the soil:

And then for the 16oz contest itself, I planted 6 x Lebanese landrace “pink pheno” x Blueberry Hashplant f2 I won from the latest server auction. So far 4/6 have popped their heads above ground. They’re regular seeds so I’m hoping for at least one female, and if I get males I might experiment with collecting pollen to do a seed run of the same line just to learn.

These are all running in a soil mix that’s 50% Fox Farms Ocean Forest, 50% a perlite/organic potting soil mix. The white widows are dressed with some old compost from the bottom of my bin, and the 6 pinkies are dressed with some top cover plant seed that you can see in some of the cups if you look hard enough.

I’m about due to plant the next 4 autos but I’m waiting on parts to build the second auto system, and I have no idea where I’m going to put it. I figure I have a few weeks to figure it out as they germinate in my bubble germinator, so today I’m putting 2 x Hubbabubbasmelloscope and 2 x Forum Stomper, both from Mephisto into a cup of water.

[JoeCrowe]

what EC level are you running on those plants in DWC? My eye says they still have a bit of claw-like leaves indicating high levels.

[pufferfishfiend]

Yeah they were overshot on nutes as I’m learning to dose the new reservoirs.

I’m letting it ride this week and I’m getting close to a top up, so that should dilute it down some more.

[pufferfishfiend]

I found some old photos of my first grow, 2 years ago in soil:

It was grown in a space bucket and I think it died before it finished, and most of the trichs ended up evaporating off because heat management was an issue at the time.

The pot was a home made fabric pot that I think was about 1/2 gallon.

[pufferfishfiend]

I’m trying something new for me for the next round of autos.

I’m trying to germinate from seed in my bubble cloner. Usually I’d put the seeds in rockwool and put rockwool into hydroton, but I was wondering if I can get away with just using netpots and neoprene collars.

Seems like it’s working so far, but I’ll keep an eye on things pretty closely.

[pufferfishfiend]

It’s the weekend again, which means it’s time for a garden update.

We’re kind of in LITFA mode right now, the 4 autos are starting to flower and the 2 photos are continuing their veg.

The 2 mangled ones are continuing to be sad looking. The Ewok OG and the unmolested Dark Devil are growing relatively well.

I haven’t measured the reservoir EC and pH, but I can tell just by looking at the plants the EC is a little high. I’m trying to start transitioning them to bloom so I need them to finish eating what’s in the reservoir. I’m going to top-up the res soon and if the EC is low enough, start moving them to bloom nutes.

The vegging photos:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my space, and how much I don’t like germinating seeds in DWC. So I moved the 4 auto seeds I was going to run in the new DWC network into soil. I snapped the tap root off of one of the Forum Stompers, which is the one that hasn’t popped it’s head above soil. Everything else has popped:

The plan is to move to auto and mothers in soil, clones in DWC and run my main garden on veg/flower cycles.

The plan is to grow out autos in the garden in soil while I wait for vegging and cloning, then to fill the 2 x 4 site DWC networks with clones and flip them all at once.

Planning for the new network in my space:

At the same time, I’m growing the 2 White Widows that survived my cup test into mothers in soil. They were up potted this weekend.

I’ll eventually move these into my cabinet that’s currently running the 16 oz Cup seedlings, and use that as a mother cabinet.

Speaking of the 16oz seedlings, they’re doing great:

The data logger in continuing development. I have all the hardware sorted and now I need to start thinking about how I want to gather the data. @Ginger_Rick has a thread (Ginger Rick's Unidentified Flowering Object) where he’s doing some things that I also want to do, and he talked about using Mycodo. The problem is my Raspberry Pi is an old one and is not powerful enough to run Mycodo. I’ll probably upgrade to the latest Pi and try to run it on there.

[Ginger_Rick]

Yeah my UFO is running a pi2b that I had on hand when I started this madness. Grabbed a pi3 for my latest build, which I plan to get some shots and notes up on. The 3 is soooooo much snappier, glad I went for it, but now my UFO is going to have the slower interface. That being said I know there’s a function for tying multiple units together, so in the long run I’ll have everything in one place.

Sorry for inspiring you to empty out your wallet, but I gotta say I’m pretty jelly of your Atlas Scientific sensors. They do not come cheap!

Edits: fucking autocorrect when I’m typing with gloves on…

[pufferfishfiend]

This is project I started years ago

I had the sensors/RaspPi for years and was just dragging my heels on setting it all up. I actually started to set it all up and then you posted your journal!

Kismet.

[Ginger_Rick]

So funny how that happens! I had been messing around with trying to run a few arduinos linked together over serial so I could get all the sensors I wanted going. I’m a bit of a hack coder, lots of borrowed pieces from all around, and it was turning into a major uphill journey. Then I saw Mycodo covered on hackaday and I threw all that out the window and grabbed the pi outta my parts bin. So happy I found it, and I think there’s been something like 5 major revisions since I started in about 2 years back. He’s a very active developer, it keeps getting better all the time.

[pufferfishfiend]

Weekend update time.

The garden continues to thrive with many plants at different stages of their lives. Even though the garden is fairly low maintenance right now, I should still post these weekly updates since I love sharing with you all, but really this journal is for me to match up to my private, more detailed offline notes and track visual changes in the plants.

I gave the Girl Scout Cookies mother a haircut this weekend. Doesn’t look like much changed, but I cleared a lot of growth out from the inside of her dodgy manifold. While I was giving her a hair cut I took 2 clones and popped them in my bubble cloner. There are more clone-able shoots left on her but I want to run a small scale test first.

The Gorilla Glue continues to keep growing. She’s recovering from a topping so I didn’t give her a hair cut, but she badly needs one. Once my bubble cloner is freed up I’ll give her a trim and take a few clones from her.

The Dark Devils are just bulking up. They’ve all entered into flowering and midway last week I topped the reservoir up with more water, and started transitioning to bloom nutes. They’re still putting out new growth and they’re drinking pretty heavily. I’m due for another res top up, and as you can see the EC is still too high so I probably won’t change their nutes this top up.

The last DD is by far the largest and has the most bud sites. It has fan leaves the size of my hand.

The White Widow photos and the Cup plants are doing ok. The cups are tricky to water and I feel they’re suffering but I’m sacrificing them to the altar of learning. The White Widows were topped last week, so I’m giving them some time, and then will up pot them within the week probably, to their final 5G fabric pot homes.

The next round of autos, the 2 x Hubbabubbasmelloscope (HBSC) and the Forum Stomper are slowly growing. I think they sent their tap roots down to the bottom of the pot before they started their leaves. There was an incident with the cat (that got her banned from the garden) and I got to see more of their roots than I wanted. The smallest plant was peed on by said cat. It seems to be recovering slowly.

The data logger is running Mycodo with my Atlas sensors reading data. I need to write some code for the SenseHAT I got for the Pi, but that shouldn’t be too hard, I just need time to sit down and do it. Once that’s done, I’ll calibrate the sensors and throw it in the grow room to monitor the auto network.

[Ginger_Rick]

Yes! A Mycodo convert! Glad you decided to give it a go.

What are you running your ec at these days? When I first started DWC I had so many issues and in the end the best thing I ever did for it was dropping my levels way down. I run pretty lean these days and my plants love it, with their roots in the nutes they can take up all they want. I rarely go above 500 or 600ppm (on a .5 scale? I think? My meter is at home and I am not) and I dont feel like I’m missing out on anything except burnt plants and frustrating res swings.

If you have never come across the work of the legendary Heath Robinson it’s worth a bit of googling. I’ll try and find a link to one of his tree grows on IC later, but he talks about running lean feeds in RDWC and he always crushed it. Like 3 grams per watt multi pound tree crushed it. Truly legendary, but he made me a believer in lean feed rates and I’ve never looked back.

[pufferfishfiend]

My ECs are way hotter than yours. I’m targeting 1.8 in the flowering DWC, 1.6 in the veg.

So you’re saying ~1.2 EC is your max?

[BudSy]

As far as I understand with any DWC or airoponics you need about half the strength of other mediums. Usually late veg and flower you do not want to go above 1.6EC and most should be even lower.

[pufferfishfiend]

That’s what I’m starting to understand. I’m slowly trying to run my ECs down.

[Ginger_Rick]

Yep, I never go past that anymore.

That was my res swap last night, and that’s me going hard cuz they are in the throes of flowering and stacking up. But take a peek in my grow, my foliage is lush and my pistils are popping.

I just ranted off on this topic pretty hard in my thread last night, but if you want the TLDR, once I went to a low EC, sterile rez my buds got bigger and my hassles got smaller and i have never looked back!

[Ginger_Rick]

Another thing I’ve noticed about a sterile, low EC res is they seem to be able to handle the swings better, even when I’m the absent minded professor like I was this week and let em drop to like 4.3ph. It seems to me that when I make dumb mistakes like that it isn’t as rapidly catastrophic as it was when I ran higher feeds.

I dunno what the right analogy is here… maybe something akin to crashing the car at lower speeds?

But I only let my res ph fall that hard this week because I was super busy and everytime I looked in on them they looked great. It’s late, I’m tired, I’ve been working overtime, the girls look great so instead of reaching for my PH pen I say “fuck it, I’m having two bong hits and going to bed, this is fine”

But for the last two days they’ve definitely been at far too low of a ph level. In the past, when running higher feeds, I have completely screwed plants by doing this dumb crap. Stunted them and slowed em to a crawl and made them miserable. At lower EC they just seem to be more even keeled overall.

I should say, I have no hard data to back this up, and I’m not sure if others have had this experience. Just seems to be what I’ve observed in my garden.

[pufferfishfiend]

Heya, thanks for tagging me in your post, I really appreciate it, and your help with trying to make me see the light with lower ECs.

Also thanks to @JoeCrowe for the same

I’m not ignoring y’all, I’m just slowly transitioning

[Ginger_Rick]

There are soooooooo many things in the strange twilight world of cannabis cultivation that, as a result of being confined to the shadows for so long, are now treated as mystical knowledge, dark arts not to be questioned.

I have met so many guys over the years who do it the way they do cuz “that’s how its done”. And I get how this has built up in the underground grow community especially when you think about someone stepping into their first big underground grow, guys backing him up saying this is how we do it. With so much riding on it you say ok that’s THE WAY it’s done.

I’ve seen so many debates on the forums devolve into utterly religious turf wars over spectrum, or feed levels, or defoliation. Seen people get all kinds of nasty because someone comes out and succeeds in a different way. It makes it hard to question the established wisdom sometimes, and it’s one of the biggest reasons I think communities like Overgrow have such an important role to play in the evolution and maturation of a truly next level legit cannabis culture. We just can’t leave it all up to the big corps to set the tone for our culture, the one we’ve all built and cared so much for over the years.

In the end though, spoiler alert, it’s a weed, and it wants to grow. There are a million ways to do it and a million ways to succeed. In my experience the growers that get stuck saying “this is THE way” ultimately limit themselves because they get stuck in their positions and can’t try new things.

[JoeCrowe]

lol true knowledge changes over time. Got to be careful to run a real experiment though, and not allow yourself to fall victim to confirmation bias.

[pufferfishfiend]

Yeah that’s actually why I’m taking it so slow. I’ll probably start my next round of DWC (which will be from clones) using a lower EC target.

I’ve also been thinking of trying the Lucas formula since I’m ignoring the back of the nute bottles anyway