PFFs Indoor RDWC grow journal

[pufferfishfiend]

Garden update.

The autos are continuing to flower. Not even sure how long each one has left. The Ewok OG looks like it’s the furthest along, but it’s also the youngest auto. I’ll probably just wait until the biggest Dark Devil is ready, and then pull all 4 of them.

The photos look like they’ve never seen a set of pruning shears in their lives. You’d never know I defoliated them last week.

The clones I took from the Girl Scout Cookies are doing well. The ones I cloned 2 weeks ago have started to put on some nice roots. The ones cloned a week ago have mostly rooted - I think there’s one or two clones that haven’t got roots yet.

I’ll veg these in place as they are for a month, then grab 4 to run in a second photo DWC system and the rest go into the flowering cabinet. In a week or two I’ll cut a second set of clones and repeat.

The second round of photos are still growing. I think one of the Hubbabubbasmelloscopes has started flowering, the biggest one.

The White Widow soil plants got an up-potting last week, and I changed the soil mix out and clearly didn’t do a good job the transition. They’re recovering though, and both have responded nicely to their topping.

Last week I said I thought the cup plants had stalled in veg. That was not the case. I’m starting to see 2 distinct phenos, and it looks like I have a male/female pair of each pheno I’m seeing.

Two of them are fairly tall, two of them are shorter:

I’m seeing male bits on one of the tall ones and one of the small ones:

I’ll know for sure once they’re in flowering next week. Hopefully I’ll have two nice little families.

[pufferfishfiend]

Data logging is up. As I expected, my Atlas pH probe and my cheap pH probe disagree on what the pH is. I’m going to trust the newly calibrated precision instrument over the 2 year old un-calibrated cheap Chinese instrument.

Adjustments are slowly in progress.

And if anyone wants to run a SenseHat on the Mycodo platform, here’s the input file I cobbled together:

mycodo-sense-hat.py

[Ginger_Rick]

Oh man… I’m a pretty wordy guy and I’ve gotta be honest it’s difficult for me to properly express how hot I am for your Atlas probes.

You’d better pray I dont remember where I left my portal gun or that thing is gonna be gone in the morning!

[pufferfishfiend]

Short update today.

Now that I have my realtime monitoring up and running, I got more and more tired of looking at my “failures”, the plants that I was unhappy with.

So in a Marie Kondo moment, I chopped them.

To go along with that, I cooked my clones. My bad pH probe strikes again!

So this is kind of a soft reset?

Luckily, my mothers are kind of out of control:

So a new batch of clones, monitored by my real time monitoring system is in order. While those are rooting and vegging, I’ll clean out the DWC system and reset it to receive the 4 best clones.

I’ll also be re-topping and taking clones from these ladies (only one pictured, too awkward to get the other, and I’m too lazy to move it for a photo):

I’m not happy with how high they were topped. These will be flipped to flower once the whole room is full of just photos, which is a while off yet so I’m not super concerned with slowing them down.

My soil autos are progressing. Curious to see how these will look, this is my first time growing autos in soil, and so far I feel I haven’t had a grow I was happy with in DWC (or soil, for that matter).

My cup boys have started to drop pollen, and the girls aren’t even showing sex yet. So I have to collect the pollen for later:

[pufferfishfiend]

Ok, so after spending 6+ hrs stabilizing my pH before taking my next round of clones, I get about 33 hrs of buffering before the pH starts to rise:

I’m currently waiting for a shipment of AN pH-Down as from what I read, it’s supposed to be stronger than GH pH Down. If that fails to keep it stable for longer, I’ll start looking into battery acid (no joke, just need to research concentrations available and how to dilute it safely).

This is my 5G cloning tote. It’s running 0.04 EC of nutes (1ml of GH Micro, 2ml of Bloom), 5ml of UC Roots to run sterile and took 19ml of pH down to get it to 5.7 before the 33hr rise to 6.6, at which point I adjusted it back down to 6 with 4ml more of pH down.

[ShiskaberrySavior]

What’s your starting ph before adding chemicals might want to look at a alternative water source .

[pufferfishfiend]

8.3

An alternative water source isn’t really feasible right now. I’ll have to make do with what I can.

[ShiskaberrySavior]

Wow good luck that’s really high

[pufferfishfiend]

Yeah and it’s full of dissolved CaCO3. If it goes too basic it falls out of solution and I get powdered chalk in the bottom of my reservoirs.

I might re-jiggle some budget stuff pending research on RO systems.

[JoeCrowe]

woah and I was just pondering what is buffering your solution at such a high level. That’s extreme ph! Even… ghetto-ing it for now with brita filters might improve your situation.

[pufferfishfiend]

Yeah, I knew it was bad, but not that bad.

I’m already mentally planning a jury rigged RO system with a collection barrel hooked up to sink near my grow space. Need to figure out where I’ll get the money from!

[pufferfishfiend]

Oh that was 8.3 after I put in the nutes + UC Roots, after a 24hr oxygenation and off-gassing. 8.5 before that.

Hmm.

[Ginger_Rick]

Riiiight soooooooo… not to sound like that creepy dude in the bushes outside your house or anything, buuuuuut daaaaaaaaamn I’m hot for your graph!

Are you setting up some microdosing pumps on a PID loop or what?

[Ginger_Rick]

Ugh… sorry, that’s crude of me.

You’ve got lovely foliage as well!

[pufferfishfiend]

Hahaha!

@Ginger_Rick

Are you setting up some microdosing pumps on a PID loop or what?

That’s definitely the next step. I can’t decide if I just want to bite the bullet and buy an Atlas peristaltic pump or use a cheap Chinese pump and try to program it directly into Mycodo.

[BudSy]

Just a note to watch out for @pufferfishfiend if you are going to store RO water. I started to do something similar myself and had all sorts of troubles. Being that RO is so pure without any impurities and minerals it is like a sponge for gases. The gases all want to dissolve into the RO which changes it. In particular the main issue I had was CO2 dissolving into it and forming carbonic acid or something similar to that which turned it so acidic I was dumping in so much PH up in it. I went back to tap water which was an EC of 0.9. I am not far off trying a 50/50 mix of RO and tap water to drop the EC a bit and hopefully with 50% of the mineral content still in it may not have the issue with the pH.

[Ginger_Rick]

Its not really much on the programming side, I’ve done it before to keep ph somewhat stable while outta town for a week and a half before. Just gotta time out how long it takes your cheap pump to toss a known volume of liquid, say 100ml. Then figure out a reasonable dilution rate with your pH adjuster in water. Then all your PID loop has to do is monitor your pH and keep it within a specified window by turning on an output for your cycle time. Give your loop time for the solution to mix and you should be good.

I think you’ll need to do almost all the same work setting up an Atlas pump, only it will come with a known calibration. Figuring out your own calibration is just a few minutes with some water and a stopwatch, and I imagine the savings would be worth the minimal difference in effort.

[Ginger_Rick]

@BudSy

Being that RO is so pure without any impurities and minerals it is like a sponge for gases. The gases all want to dissolve into the RO which changes it. In particular the main issue I had was CO2 dissolving into it and forming carbonic acid or something similar to that which turned it so acidic I was dumping in so much PH up in it.

This is VERY fascinating, and something I haven’t thought about before. I don’t run RO anymore, one of the upsides of coastal rainforest life is water that’s 12ppm straight from the tap, so not worth it. But this might explain some issues I had when I was first starting out with RDWC. Thanks, food for thought.

[pufferfishfiend]

EC of 0.9? Wow, even my EC is only 0.4 from the tap.

Good to know about the RO water. I’m going to give a stronger acid a shot, then might look into getting a dosing pump set up. Only if those fail will I move onto RO.

[pufferfishfiend]

I guess it’s time for a full update?

The garden is … improving? I dunno anymore.

I trimmed both of these gals last week when I took clones. I was more aggressive with one than with the other, simply because I was running out of spots for clones and didn’t want to “waste” them. I was also a little apprehensive because it was my first big trim and reshape and I didn’t want to kill both plants. But those worries were unfounded.

Clones are doing ok. I’m expecting to see some roots within the next few days.

pH seems more stable since the last dosing. I found a piece of root from the last clones floating around on the bottom of one of the net cups, and I removed that.
When the pH spiked the water went cloudy, today it’s clear again, but only after I removed the piece of root. I wonder if that was actively contaminating the tote?

I’ve come to the conclusion that I my soil plants have been suffering because the pH of my water was significantly higher than I assumed.

I pHed a bunch of tap water by eye (just dumped 10ml of GH pH Down in 4G) and started feeding them that. They seem happier, I think. But the damage is done with the Hubbabubbasmelloscopes. I’m hoping because the Forum Stomper seems to be slower that I can get ahead of the pH issues before it starts to seriously flower.

The cup plants are starving. I was alternating feedings of Lucas formula mixed to 0.3 EC because I didn’t want to overfeed them but I think I’ve having the opposite problem now. I’ve started feeding them with every watering, lets see how that goes.

The pollen is really flying:

I’m also in the process of harvesting pollen from the tall boy.

Now, I actually don’t know if I’ll end up using any of this pollen - this is the first time growing out this strain, I don’t really know it very well. But it will at least give me more seeds to get to know it more.