PFF 2021 - The Cabinet is Dead, Long Live the Cabinet

[pufferfishfiend]

2021 marks the second calendar year I’ve been growing, and what a co-incidence because with the new year comes my full commitment to my new cabinet, which looks suspiciously like the old one.

In case you’re unfamiliar with my previous grow…s?

PFFs Indoor RDWC grow journal

The disastrous conclusion to my big room was a long time coming, and I’ve been preparing and scheming and reading other’s posts and stealing ideas in the meantime, and have slowly transformed my cabinet into a one stop perpetual* shop.

* cloning excluded for now, pending the results of an experiment

“Yo, you’re pretty bad at growing, why you keep changing shit if you can’t get the basics right?”

I think the reason I’m bad at the basics is because I’m lazy. I can’t actively monitor 3+ reservoirs for pH and EC and make sure 2 environments are optimal. Correction, I can do it, I choose not to because that’s more effort than I want to expend on growing. Luckily, I’m handy enough to be able to solve all these problems. So this idea of a simple system that’s easy for me to monitor and adjust has been cooking in my mind, and slowly I’ve transformed the previously mostly abandoned cabinet into a new configuration, with some of the following benefits:

• a single reservoir to monitor and adjust
• live monitoring of said reservoir available at a glance whenever I walk past the cabinet
• stupid easy way to fill and adjust the reservoir. Draining is another matter entirely but I haven’t had to do that yet, and if everything works right, that should be a twice yearly thing and no more frequent than that
• all the plants are within reach, and eye level for inspection at all times
• flexibility to test/rotate genetics at any time
• flexibility to do seed runs/pollen runs side by side with flower runs at any time

“Ok, lets see it”

• The whole cabinet currently runs on a single “100W” blurple light. I say “100W” because it’s rated at more, but I think that’s what I’ve measured it pulling from the wall.
• There are 2 tiers, the top tier are mothers and other plants in veg. The bottom tier are flowering plants.
• Each tier is an ebb and flow tray, the reservoir at the bottom holds dosed water that’s pumped up into the trays. The overflow is piped back down into the water.
• Each plant (except one right now) is in coco, and uses the wicking action of coco to water the plants.
• The monitor on top of the cab shows a live dashboard displaying EC/pH/air temp/air humidity. Still to come are a water temp probe and a dosing pump for pH. These probes are permanently submerged into the reservoir
• I run Lucas formula, running at whatever EC the majority of the plants don’t seem to mind. Right now I’m targeting +1.2 EC and 6.5 pH, but I might push the EC for the flowering plants. This allows me to use the same reservoir for vegging and flowering.

“Dude, one light? You’re an idiot”

Ok, so this is a mix of things I read here buried deep in my stoner brain, and personal experience. Long story short, I was running I cloner above the vegging mothers in this cabinet (with a single light, the mothers were on tier 2 at the time) and noticed that some of them started to flower. Oops. So the overall light levels on the second tier are low enough that even though they’re getting 18hrs of light, they still flower. I swear I’ve read some stuff here that supports my experience but I’m too lazy to go squirrel it out. I leave it to the reader to tell me why I’m and idiot and why this cabinet won’t work.

“What about cloning?” (or, what’s this mysterious experiment?)

I reason that a big reservoir that’s aerated is basically the same as a big bubble cloner. All you need to do is figure out a way to suspend the clones in the water the correct way, give them enough light to keep them alive and let them figure out the rest. So I’m trying these little pontoons that float in the reservoir. They dangle the cut tip just into the water and float round on top of the reservoir. The floating is to ensure the clones are always in the reservoir no matter what the water level from all the ebbing and flowing.

If that doesn’t work, I have another light and a fabric light barrier and another shelf. A few bong hits, a few hours of swearing and sewing and reconfiguration and I’ll have it set up for 2 light schedules, and I’ll run clones and mothers in one chamber and flowering plants in another.

“Let’s see what it can grow”

Yes, lets! I literally set this up today so I don’t have any plants that have flowered from start to finish in this cabinet. The mother’s have all spent their entire lives in there, so there’s that? I do have some plants that came from this cabinet and flowered in a separate ebb and flow system in the big room

I’m not moving these to the cabinet mostly because they’re mostly finished and if I’m totally wrong about the second tier light thing, I don’t want to ruin all my plants. But this gives an idea of the kinds of yields I’m expecting, though the big LSD was a mother that I flowered out, so it’s larger than I usually veg to before putting them in flower.

The overall plan is to run the following schedule every weekend:

1. Pull any plants that are done flowering, hang for drying (targeting 3/week)
2. Move any vegged clones ready for flowering into flower (targeting 3/week)
3. Move all rooted clones to coco pots into veg for 2-3 weeks (targeting 3/week)
4. Clone a bunch of plants into the pontoons
5. Trim and jar previous weeks harvest
6. Smoke the dried and cured weed from previous harvests

I don’t know how much per week this will yield, or if it will even work like this. I suspect there are still a lot of kinks to work out with the timeframe, and rates of loss at various steps and yada yada yada. This will all be documented here.

The goal is to grow enough to keep up with my smoking habit. Given that I’m at about 1/2 oz per week, that’s pretty tough but possible, I think. I may have to adjust how many plants I’m running at each stage, find the right strains and phenos and alter how long I veg for before I put things into flower, but I hope this will at least take care of the basics I’ve been neglecting.

“What genetics you runnin?”

• Dark Spark x Blueberry Hashplant
• Headbanger x (Dark Spark X Blueberry Hashplant)
• Lebanese landrace x Blueberry Hashplant (pink pistil pheno, F3) (rotating in, seedlings right now)
• Cheese
• LSD (flowered the mother out, so this is rotating out right now)
• Candy Kush
• White Widow
• THC Bomb
• Girl Scout Cookies

I’ll try to update weekly and document how the system is going - hopefully once it’s in full swing we’ll get to see a little of everything every update.

[pufferfishfiend]

Weekly update.

Things in the cabinet seem to be going well. The pH and EC kept climbing steadily through the week as the water level dropped. The feed is too hot, and I was a little over zealous with my last pH adjustment. I topped the reservoir back up with tap water, which dropped the EC and rose the pH. I was waiting for the top up to buffer the remaining acidity in the water, which seems to be finished. I’ll dose it back down to 6.5 soon.

Vegging is on going, though it looks like the THC Bomb that started flowering didn’t get the re-veg message.

I have two new entries to the veg chamber, 3 of the LR x BBHP mentioned above. I lost one to damping off.

While these seedlings get established and I’m waiting to sex them, I’ve dropped 4 x Spotted Limes I received from @JBow918 (regular autos) and 3 x Mephisto Double Grape (fem autos).

Obviously this cabinet is ideal to run autos in, given that I can put the flowering autos in either chamber as I need. I’m curious if the autos will perform the same, better or worse than the photos. So, lets give it a shot.

I’ve moved all the rest of my flowering plants into the cabinet and completely shut down the closet.

I had to flop the tall LSD to get it in, which is looking nice and frosty but has very clear trichs still.

This one is growing pistils from one of it’s fan leaves at the top, which is cool to see.

The pontoon cloning was a failure, as I had a feeling it would. I’m not about to reconfigure the whole cabinet yet just for some clones, so I’ll be running the cloner outside the cabinet for now. Later today I’ll cut about 15 clones of various strains to go into the cabinet next week.

I have also just gotten some bubble bags to process the disastrous harvest from my closet. I was going to do a bubble hash run today and include that in this update, but the weather is not co-operating, so I’ll include that in my next update.

[Muleskinner]

holy shit, is that a Star Trek-style life signs monitor on top of your cabinet??? congratulations, that is the one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen!!!

[pufferfishfiend]

Yes it is!

There’s a little monitoring PC on the floor in front of the cabinet that I’m calling ‘the squid’ that monitors the res in real time, and the PC at the top is a dumb terminal that just displays a dashboard for the squid.

[pufferfishfiend]

Update time.

I finally processed my closet harvest into some bubble hash - I ended up with about 4g of 25 micron hash, and about > 1g of lower quality stuff that I just stashed into a mason jar.

Not sure what the procedure is re drying bubble hash/curing it. I’ll probably do some lazy reading this afternoon to figure it out.

I harvested 2 plants from my flower cab, and together they yielded a half bong hit of bland weed (which got me really stoned). These gals went straight from the cloner to flower, and they never really developed a root system. I’ve stopped doing that since about a month ago, but I’ll still be pulling a few small plants out over the next few weeks.

Otherwise, vegging, cloning and cycling plants continues.

The continued acidification of my water… continues. The feed is still too hot, despite topping it up and only adjusting pH a smidge. Maybe I need to use a less aggressive acid? I still have some GH pH Down, I’ll try that out next top up.

The autos I dropped last week have all started sprouting. Just waiting on one of the Spotted Limes to pop it’s head up. I ended up losing a germinated seed to a cat-astrophy. I left the glass of seeds where I shouldn’t have, and came back to a spilled glass and a missing seed. Oh well.

The LLR x BBHP seedlings are thriving. I have 2 of one pheno and one of a another. Or I have 2 males and a female of the same pheno. Of some combination thereof.

Still waiting on these slow-ass LSDs to finish up. The plant is telling me it’s close but it’s trichomes tell me otherwise. I also ended up moving one of my DS x BBHP girls to flower, cause I don’t need 2 and I liked the shape of one of them way more than the other.

And to wrap up, I’ve been slowly cloning throughout the week and will soon have a full cloner, until I can start vegging some of these girls for a few weeks before they flower.

[pufferfishfiend]

The pH has been really stable this week. Last week I topped the reservoir off with tap water and didn’t adjust pH. This week, another top off, probably a small pH adjustment and then some liberal doses of LITFA.

Vegging is going ok. Some plants look happier than others, due to an experiment I’m working on.

The seedlings I planted last week are lanky, but growing. I put two autos to grow in the flower chamber, and 4 in the veg chamber, just to see how much impact growing an auto in the flower chamber will have vs. growing an auto in the veg chamber. I need to get a few fans in the cabinet to get these girls stems stronk.

Flowering is on going as well:

I gave up on getting the THC Bomb to re-veg, it’s just not happening. I moved it to the flower chamber (on the left) and will wait for it to finish.

LSD that still has at least 3-4 weeks to go:

No roots on the clones yet:

And yet, the show must go on. If I’m going to be harvesting plants every week, I need to be planting every week! So what’s a dolphin to do?

Plant more autos. Today, a single Creme de la Chem by Mephisto. It will be going into this much larger than normal pot, and I want to compare the yields in that pot compared to the blue solo cups I’ve been using

Now, about this experiment I mentioned before. I noticed due to the way my flood/drain trays are constructed, there was a lot of standing water. Thats probably not good. I took a peek at one of the mother plant’s roots

Really soggy at the bottom, and they’re only using 2/3 of the pot. Thinking the standing water might have something to do with this, I built a small little platform to put some of the mothers on.

(the white thing in this photo)

I’ve had 2 mothers on there for about a week, and taking a peek at one of their roots

Much nicer looking! The roots are using the full pot space and they’re nice and white.

So a project for this week is to make a platform for at least the top tray. I have a few more experiments I want to run that might change how I grow that would obviate the need for a platform for the bottom tray, but we’ll see about that once the roots on the clones come in.

In other news, I’m drying another 3 plants that were due to come out. I might actually get a full bong hit out of these 3, so that’s a doubling of my yields!

[pufferfishfiend]

Short update.

EC and pH are relatively stable.

Vegging plants look happy enough, flowering ones slightly less so?

I definitely need a stronger light in the cabinet for vegging, and probably a second light for the flowering chamber. The stretch on the auto seedlings is real, and aggressive.

You can see on the bottom right one of my new clones that made it into the veg chamber. I have about 4 more rooted clones that need to go in. This one just has the roots sitting in the cup in a net pot that’s nested inside the cup. This is an attempt at a media-less veg and flower. We’ll see how it goes.

Flowering is slow, probably due to the weak light that reaches down there:

I harvested 3 LSD plants a few weeks back, nearly smoked through it all. Ended up with about 1/8th which is pretty good for me and my micro grow so far.

I have my THC Bomb that I couldn’t re-veg flowering away, no idea how long that one has to go. It foxtailed a bit while I tried to reveg it. Not looking forward to trimming this lady.

Otherwise, I’m really giving a lot of thought to changing up how I run this cab. Instead of running a handful of mothers, I might clone mothers when they’re ready for flowering, and veg the clones while I flower out the original mother. That should help keep the amount of vegetation in the veg chamber at a minimum, and help with accidentally growing plants that are too big for my cabinet.