My janky trichome rig always bugged me. I took a moment today to find a spare tool holder that came with some monitor mounts, and my SAE tap and die set. 2 minutes later and I think I came up with a pretty serviceable mounting solution:
The vibration from the pumps makes photos hard to get at this level of zoom, but visual inspection is easy.
I always cut a piece off and put it somewhere stable for a good look.
Yeah, I think I’ll do that.
Oh my god. The time it takes to tend to 2 plants vs. 8 plants. There go the rest of my plans for the day.
Double Grape: day 56
She’s getting along. Seeing some light bleaching since switching to the new light, and some nute issues. The run off pH was in the 7s, so I’d wager that has a lot to do with it. Otherwise she’s slowly fattening up, probably have a few more weeks left. Happy with the frost at this point though. Gonna be some nice trim.
Dark Devil 0: Day 44
She’s also seeing some nute issues that are probably stemming from the high pH of the runoff - it was also in the 7s. She lost 2 bottom fan leaves to the same issue you can see on her next 2 bottom fan leaves.
I’ve made a note to check the pH of these 2 ladies mid week some time since the run-off pH was so high. It’s probably the root issues they’re having that are contributing to the pH rises. There was a funky pale white cloudy sediment in both buckets when I did the water change.
Dark Devils 1,3,4 - day 11
Nothing too interesting going on here, they’re still seedlings. They’re growing at different rates but nothing too crazy. Their runoff pH was about what it was going on, so I’m not worried about the pH in their buckets rising. All their roots are looking healthy. I’m going to keep a closer eye on that going forward. All of them are probably hungry and I put them on an aggressive veg nute schedule.
Girl Scout Cookies: day 23
I was looking at the past photos of the DG and the GSC and GG both are definitely behind where the DG was at a similar age. The fog experiment probably slowed them both down. Otherwise it’s a healthy little photo seedling that will be a mother to my first forays into bulk cloning and trying to run a mini SOG.
Gorrilla Glue: day 23
She’s really squat and small. She’s only about 1/2 - 1 full node behind the GSC and she always lagged it a little. I’m not sure if it’s a problem. I wish I grew at least another seedling of both GG and GSC so I could get an idea of that the phenos look like in my grow space. Oh well, next time.
Jewok OG: day 2
Waiting on roots, then she goes into DD2’s old bucket. Will check PPM and pH to make sure not much has changed in there since I pulled the seedling before I do though.
I moved all the fog equipment out and pushed the grow further back into the room, making space for a couple of future DWC cloners. I also raised the light to get the seedlings to stretch a little (will make topping/FIMing the photos easier) and to deal with some bleaching on the flowering ladies.
when I used rockwool I had to block the light from hitting the rockwool or strange fungus would grow on the surface. Probably from nutrient and light interacting.
Yeah I’m looking to get rid of the rockwool long term. I have these neoprene collars that I’m going to use for clones, I’m wondering if I can get a seed to germinate in one using my top feed bubble germinator.
Well, I’m glad I checked the pH levels as I was moving the Jewok OG over to a DWC bucket. Everything was up around the 6.3 - 6.5 range, so I dropped them all back down to 5.8. The Double Grape was down to 5.5 though, oddly. I nudged it up to 5.8 as well.
I noticed that the Girl Scout Cookies had a fair amount of leaf droop and was starting to show signs of over feeding. I decided to check the PPM and discovered 2 things:
I did some quick research to find I was a little too aggressive with the feeding I fed her last time, which is probably something I started doing because my pH was creeping up on me and I didn’t check frequently enough.
So, dilution is the solution:
While I was sitting there waiting for the pump, I noticed this stupid bitch:
This is her leaning away from my light. She’s runty, her roots are runty, she has a weird leaf thing that I’ll snap next time I’m in there with the camera. Her days are numbered if she doesn’t cut the shit.
Also I continued dicking around with trichome pics. Even though these have horrible distortion and blurring, I liked them:
The blurples do interesting things to the bokeh in my garden.
Shortly after my last post I cut half of the DG down, then last weekend cut the rest. She wasn’t filling out, and she didn’t have the best life. Her roots were rotten and I had forgotten to remove some wire I used early in LST so her main stem was all restricted. I didn’t bother taking a final picture of her since it looked pretty much the same as the last photo I took.
The garden is in maintenance mode right now as I’m trying to come up with a plan to get on top of my pH so I don’t have to baby it for 3 days after a res change.
Science is happening.
enter the raspberry pie! That one running debian? I use nutrients with EDTA and lots of reservoir water to try and help stabilize the ph drifts. The UBC horticuture phd says the plants can take a ph variation of a single point. you know like 5.5 - 6.5 it doesn’t have to be like a straight jacket, a little drift is normal.
It’s running Raspbian, which seems to be Deb based.
My plans include converting each group of 4 buckets to RDWC and turning 4 5G reservoirs into 1 ~30G reservoir with an external tote. That should give me more stability, and then the above is for real time monitoring and alerting.
I checked my city’s 2019 water report and it’s real heavy on Ca and Mg and is pretty basic.
My pH swings have been from 5.5 all the way up to 7.x. Enough to pull sediment out of the reservoir. Anything I can do for stability at this point is a step in the right direction.
yah for sure! that kind of ph shift is too radical. Have you considered reverse osmosis? I even use dehumidifier water it tests 0 on the EC meter.
I have considered RO, but due to the cost and the fact it’s another thing to worry about it’s in my back pocket as a nuclear option.
I’ve seen stability in the reservoirs, but it’s almost like it gets into a positive feedback loop. Once it falls out of range and goes basic, it’s very hard to stabilize again. I should be completely replacing the reservoir once it gets that bad, but I don’t want to lug water around all week.
Automation should eventually be able to help with that too.
Edit: Also these are all theories straight out of my asshole. The sensors should be able to actually tell me what’s going on.
observation is the first key to an excellent discovery 
Keep learning! You are definitely on the right path to move forward, the last thing you want to do is give up.
my gut instinct on that was the nutrient levels were too high. The down turned tips on the leaves is my sign. I’d try diluting by 1/2 or 1/3, see what happens.
Look closer, she’s got an extra something she shouldn’t have.
The overfeeding has already been taken care of 
lol yah the third leaf! You never know what is going to happen! I had one with 4 it grew an extra 2 shoots at each node. I assumed you were talking about something else Laugh
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.
