phew plants are growing! buds are budding! lol! Actually My daughter is graduating from high school as well! I’m excited! I made this for her “the turtle” Japanese symbol for long life.
ok got some photos of the plants! Hey Hey Hey! They are growing nicely.
I have been studying their habits and it turns out they love to eat bugs! They thrive on bugs! They’ll rip right over and ‘snip’ chop that bug up and carry off the carcass meat.
Hell Yeah.
I watched a wasp drag a spider about 5 times it body mass by yanking it a bit at a time while it took it off to its nest to lay eggs on. They are savages how they lay eggs on the spiders abdomen. The spider is paralysed by the wasps sting. The wasp knows to to micro dose the spider just right so he stays paralysed but alive. The baby wasps when they hatch, they eat the spider and instinctively know to only eat the fleshy bits and leave the organs etc so the spider doesn’t die and it is literally eaten alive.
lol they’re actually paper wasps I’m herding. A much more dangerous symbiont than the parasitic wasps. My rule is don’t fuck with them, they don’t fuck with you.
Solid strategy
ok today is a new season in the grow! I am plunking in king tut. They are seriously overgrown in the root zone - but I just cut them outta there. Usually I would plant them earlier than this, but I have lots of computer games to play and music to listen to Just kidding it’s almost the end of planting season in the garden. I just have to repair the drip systems, the shanks got broken off from careless human stomping. My new plan is to bury them. A bear stomped and broke it last year! It’s always a new battle.
Things are blooming as well! Big bud is making huge strides in the bloom phase. For some reason it trips into bloom a week or so before it’s put in there. Not sure why! By the time it’s in bloom the thing has already started blooming. crazed.
D-OK! We got some uhh plants adjusting to their new home. I treated them rough, pulling them through a small hole and cutting their roots away. They’ll pull through after a couple days of looking nasty. Once their roots grow back heh heh.
I re-upped the nutrient on the meat breath to normal dose. They actually seemed to grow really fast! tomorrow I will push them apart a bit more and raise the light. Probably the final time. The Big bud plants are really starting to pump out the smells! I have to get to the store and get more juicy micro nutrients in the next couple of days. There are three plants left to dose. The leaves on the king tut I planted are turning towards the light and resurrecting! I think the next grow is scheduled to be big bud and king tut.
Are you fully draining your reservoirs periodically? Now that I put in a recirculating pump, I’m tempted to just top up the reservoirs unless I’m switching nutrient programs.
hey hey! Well… If anyone is reading this…get ready for disbelief. I just let the plant absorb the veg dose until it’s depleted then I put in the bloom dose. When I hit bloom it’s the same thing. I just top up the nutrient levels as needed until the end. Short answer: I never change the reservoir.
If you keep asking questions, I have lots more startling information to share. I also try to time my doses so it uses up most of the EC by harvest time. If they are good and depleted by the time I chop em down, I did a good job managing the levels. If I just dosed them and then a week later I cut them down and the EC is 2.0 I know I screwed that timing up lol!
In the past I would dump out the buckets every 2 weeks and replace with a new dose. While that does ensure you are not killing your plants with some kind of crazy dose… I use the EC meter and the plant to sanity check. If there is danger of crazyness happening, I will indeed dump the bucket out and start over. I really try to not reach that danger zone!
oh, by crazyness I mean nutrient imbalance.
That makes sense, I had an idea that would work but everywhere I read about it talks about how changing your res is important.
Once I get my continuous monitoring set up, I might switch over to that technique.
well… “You’ll never get fired for recommending someone do a reservoir change”
Honestly it’s the #1 way to avoid problems, right? So there’s nothing wrong with it…per se. Except at the end of the grow I bet 25% of the nutrients I paid $$ for were in the flower garden outside. So I started experimenting with only changing between veg and bloom. Soon… I was experimenting with never changing it. You definitely have to see what works though. I can’t guarantee the same buffering etc with someone else’s system/nutrients.
truth to that 
we were having a problem with a Peters product in the greenhouse
they sent a lab technician and he told us that they would run the fertilizer to burn
then dial it back till it did not and the was the recommended rate to apply
told us to use all the products at half rate and never had a problem again
but that was poinsettias
plants are plants
Dequilo
I’ve never had to run stronger than 50% strength, often less.
Yeah, at this point I’m trying to let the plants tell me what’s going on, and then use measurements to confirm what I think I’m seeing. I skipped a res change last week because the pH seemed good and the plants seemed happy, the only started complaining toward the end of the last week.
You mentioned you run certain feed levels, how did you come up with those? Measuring how the nutes affected your water, or did you calculate it from some dosage chart and knowing the size of your res?
poinsettias are photosensitive too…requiring 3 months of 12/12! An entirely different approach with the grafting onto the root stock though! Once I cloned one that was left over from the holidays, but it never grew like a grafted one.
I wholeheartedly agree that plants are plants. Cannabis is just another agricultural product.
oh yah the dose levels! I would claim that was experimentally produced. I mean, they have a mixing chart, but I let the plant do the talking. The mixing chart is tablespoons per liter or something strange.
By carefully observing the plant after a dose and seeing how long it takes to absorb that dose, you can see if it was optimal. Then you can tinker, if you want by cutting the dose by 1/3 or adding 1/3 more to see what happens. Then I use the EC meter to show people what the levels are. I used to not even use the meter lol!
Cool cool, I started with math but now I’m going to listen to the plants and adjust from there.
I did the same thing when I grew the melons in DWC. They spoke to me and said they did best at 18/6 cycle and using a good bloom dose at EC 2. lol I’m starting to sound like some kind of nutty plant whisperer.
