Working late in the grow house tonight… Updates tonight or tomorrow…
Until then my Friends… enjoy my outside grow secret I have held back this summer (white Widow) … Lots to talk about… Genetics, Flowering plants, prepping for 24x24 metal building…
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My Friends! How are you? I hope everyone’s grows are healthy and moving along…
So, we have made it thru our 3rd grow in a year and the first grow at our new place. Absolutely no bug problems but the unexpected seed run added a twist to things at the end.
Things we have learned this grow:
- Lung rooming the grow house does provide an excellent way to control the environment BUT it is expensive. Still cheaper to grow your own. Ebill May:480$, June 670$, July $525. The reason I bring this up as new growers I do not think take in consideration how much their electrical bills will be once they get going. If you are buying qtr. pounds every 2-3 months, then you should be able to pay the electrical bill. I have three tents 10 sets of LED Lights (3 per tent, one tent has 4). While LED is cheaper it does still cost to keep them going…
- I am going to have three grows a year going forward. 2 indoors and 1 outdoors in the summer. I feel that chasing the weather dragon in the winter and middle of summer is expensive and unnecessary as I will have plenty of inventory for months. I will shut down from Jan1st – 2 weeks in Feb and will start popping beans then inside the house. I will shutdown June-Aug in the summer and my 4 plants will be grown outside.
- I got to get more organized in the grow house and finish a task before I start another one. I am like a kid at a theme park running to the next attraction with blinky lights… The grow house is a embarrassing wreck right now.
- Genetics is not going to work in the current grow house. Nature happily showed me this early on and I appreciate it. A metal building will need to be erected in the future for this purpose.
- First time making hash. All the cannabis I have grown in my life, and I never made hash. I think it turned out well. Def enjoy the high more and will probably consume (vape) it this way and thru edibles going forward. 30 years of smoking carbon everyday will take its toil if I do not change. The bubble machine is def worth the cost if you are going to make hash.
Up on Deck….
Purple Kush… I named her Solitaire. As the two other plants I had vegging turned out to be runtz males that a friend gave me (US seeds anyone?). They were choppppted and I was left with only her. Currently I have a eggplant growing in the same tent )lower left corner). I hate to put plants in tents by themselves, so I like to put company in there with them. Solitary confinement is wrong for humans and plants.
She has vegged for 90 days. She was a slow grower. I have never cut off so many leaves in my entire life on a cannabis plant. There still more trimming to do! She has been in flowering now for almost 3 weeks.
I will be moving a Blackberry Kush in there probably on Monday. The black berry kush has only been on the octo for 1 month and oh my it is ready to flip. Needs trimming…
I have a tropical cookie going and that plant needs more vegging time but the freaking stalks for the sugar leaves are looooong and huge. I measured one and from the stalk to the leaf it was 8.5 inches long. Look at the bottom of the plan see how long those suckers are?
Phreaky Dreams is on the way up. It is doing great! It will be interesting to see what this plant looks like as it gets older.
April - Aug went pretty fast for me. A lot of time and research was done into genetics and the best way to go about doing it moving forward. As I stated in previous post I am not interested right now in crossing strains. I want to re-breed .nl strains like Purple Kush, Blue Dreams, Maui Waui, etc so other breeders can use them to make their crosses. Sure I will play around at a later date but right now we got to get this going next year.
I have grown different strains this year to test end product, growing conditions, etc. Next year we will be doubling strains when popping seeds in hopes of finding males. Two other close grow buddies will be doing the same as well. If a male pops and the other one is a female I intend on breeding them.
Not much else to talk about or update folks on. I might pop a separate post on the Phreaky Dreams grow and add to it as it grows. It is going to be interesting plant for sure.
Gonna go clean the wreck of a grow house I have now… Ya’ll have a great day!
GR
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Four hours in the grow house yesterday and I got it clean up where i can walk without having to jump, flip, cartwheel over stuff. Vaping hash during the exercise helped the time go by quick. Little more work today.
On another note…
Sometimes I get on music kicks where I ill just listen to a certain group for a couple of weeks. Find a song I like the best then just play covers back to back looking for the one I like the best from the original. (Kinda like selecting females to breed 
) For the last 3 weeks I have been listening to a lot of Starship and yesterday I put the cover mix on Jane. Jane has been my theme song since I found my my females went out partying with my stud Male Freakshow. After listening to them all in the four hour cleaning exercise I found the one I like the best of Jane. Nothing is better than original hands down but this came close. Had the best Cowbell…
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My Friends! How are you!
Me?
High as sheet… on some Blue Dreams bud and hash… very very tasty!
Solitaire, our Purple Kush plant is coming along… No problems here other than she has more leaves on here than I like but they seem to grow back faster than I can cut them.
She now has a new friend in the tent… Ms. Blackberry Kush! This plant has only vegged for 1 month and it just sprung up to quickly that I went to flower her and she is a her 
Ms. BB Kush will get a little hair cut tomorrow and some of those lower branches are coming off.
I didnt get a snap of the Phreaky Dreams I will post one tomorrow but it is having the same issues as growing freakshow seedlings. They don’t like a lot of water apparently as the edge of the leaves are turning up on a couple of them but i saw this and corrected my behavior and I think it is will be ok. We will see.
I’ll post a pic tomorrow of it and also discuss why my Solitaire looks bushy on one side, not the other side and how I got it to grow that way.
Stay healthy my friends!
GR
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Nice
I think People will appreciate the dive into the electric wash new growers don’t know what to expect
Great job my friend
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My friends, just a follow up post to yesterday and one other topic… Water quality when growing…
Phreaky Dreams is off too a ruff start. The rest of the beans I popped with it of other strains are doing fine. I think the Phreaky Dreams seed though doesn’t like a lot of water or neuts… Like I said the rest of the beans are doing fine. I gave a few of the seeds to the grandpa of the male freakshow plant and he is reporting the same issue. Struggling seedling. I have plenty more if it should jump off the cliff. Looks like too much water to me.
While talking to my grow buddy we were comparing notes on weights on our Blue Dreams yields (my biggest yielder was one of his clones). He and I have the same everything as in lights, # of lights, pots, soil, neuts, so I’m sitting there thinking what is the one variable here??? He uses well water. I use county water BUT I run it through a 5 stage filter to get the ESM to 0. I got him to bring a water sample and his PH was spot on but his TSD was a whopping 191. His buds tended to be “airy” and not dense.
I have gone back and forth on post about bringing the water down to 0 with some push back that I am filtering all the good stuff out. YUP that is exactly what I am doing. We use the liq fert TPS1 which from my research has everything a cannabis plant needs in order to grow. (Grows the sheet out of tomatoes too!) This is the only variable I can think of that would affect the grows +/- . I just wanted to share this observation especially to new growers that water quality along with PH is super important in your yields.
On another note, I am water freak. I don’t drink tap water. If you ever test your water and see what crap is in there you don’t want to drink it. If you get a Zero pitcher from wall mart or amazon and use it for a week, you will def not want to drink from the tap again. If you let your filter in your pitcher keep filtering pass the point where it is producing 100+ppm water quality you will get a wiff of “FishPondWater™” Yeah little by little you are drinking that crap. You can get Zero pitchers for about 35.00 and bulk order filters from amazon for about 11$ a piece.
So this brings me to my next section, this is my life every day. 5 stage filters take about 20 mins to filter one round and it takes two rounds to fill 1 gallon
So my new little project that I will keep updates on is my “Giant MortissieSkinflurbnessksksks 5 stage water filter”
My plans are this.
Get two coolers 10 gallons or more.
Get another zero pitcher and remove the top where the filter screws in. It comes out on its own.
Drill a hole in the top of one cooler and the bottom of the other cooler the size of the filter that hangs down in the pitcher.
Take the top of the pitcher with the filter and put it in the first cooler which is sitting on the second cooler and goes right on thru. Seal the top of the pitcher that is now sitting on the top cooler so the water doesn’t leak.
The bottom cooler needs to have a on off type of spout not a pull off put on one because water is heavy and will come out fast.
Now all I would need to do is take the garden hose and fill up the top cooler and will have 0 water produced in the bottom cooler in batches of 10gallon+
My friends what do you think?
GR
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Golden age or wild west? lol
My first couple attempts were guerilla grows as a teen in the mid to late 90’s, switched to indoors when I moved out in the early 2000’s and was growing for the compassion clubs by my 2nd or 3rd crop, which was about the time I discovered CannabisWorld, Cbay and OG. Which were brilliant and brutal as people figured out better ways to grow by arguing passionately about opinions based off assumptions/anecdotes with little facts.
It was glorious and the access to experienced growers/breeders like Vic High, Breeder Steve, Chimera, Rez, BOG, Dr Greenthumb, etc was incredible for a beginner but it was also fully illegal and prohibition definitely changed the vibe. When I look at beginners getting into growing now in Canada with the easy access to quality genetics, hydro shops were you can see plants growing and talk about it openly without paranoia, factual info based on peer reviewed studies about best horticultural practices; this seems like the golden age or pre-golden age compared unless your an outlaw at heart like most of the old heads who grew.
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It’s been a pleasure reading your adventures back into growing and definitely relatable with all the changes over the years away. Also glad I’m not the only one returning to the hobby after a hiatus, although I only stopped growing for a decade or so before I ruined my back and my doc wanted to give me a prescription for the good dope instead of opiates.
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It might cost a little more, a few hundred bucks for the system and $50 annually for filter replacement, but you might find an RO system would probably be more convenient.
I use municipal tap water for the garden, but I drink RO water. My RO comes out with TDS<10ppm.
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You know Tracker, I looked into one at the old house but the cost analysis showed I could buy zero picture water filters for 20 years before I paid the thing off. The unit was a little bigger than these so I will have to check into it. I am sure also I would go through filters much quicker than once a year. I am filling up about 25-30 gallons a week. Do you know if the filter is easily changeable in these units? Like in under 5mins?
The other issue is my patient wife wants me out of the kitchen along with all the empty jugs. My grow house doesn’t have water but I do have a florid room out front I am going to turn into more work space. I was going to set the coolers there and just stretch a garden house out there to fill the top cooler up. When I erect “Big Grow Domus” in the next couple of years we are gonna run some water and more power.
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Have you looked at using an Inline water carbon filter instead as that’d be easier then filling your jug constantly and I imagine will cost less in the long run. That link is literally just the first one that popped up from a search, there’s all kinds out there. I’ve used one with a living soil table to get the chloramine out of the tap water and it lasted for over a year, probably between 1.5-2 years before I had to replace it.
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Thanks for the info I am going to go do some research on it.
guess you have to decide what your time is worth…? 40 minutes/gallon x 30 gallons/wk is 20 hours a week. almost three hours a day? that’s not counting all the nickel-and-diming with all the pitchers and filters, etc…
dude.
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I bought my water filter from these folks for $240 about three years ago and it’s still serving me just fine; if you’d rather DIY of course you can, but I’m dubious about whether these Zero water filters are a better long-term value in the end. There’s also the value of your time. I’ve tested my water with a BlueLab and it comes up at 0.1 EC, though I haven’t gone so far as to have it lab tested.
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Exactly! That is why I am thinking of doing the “Giant MortissieSkinflurbnessksksks 5 stage water filter” w/ the coolers. The in home systems are very expensive but would save a lot of time. I am trying to save a lot of time w/ out increasing cost and still not to have to fill the pitcher gallon by gallon.
I am a WFH SyE and so filling them up one at a time is not a time issue for me as they get filled through the day. Do I want to save more time? Of course.
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Filters are very easy to change. You can install them anywhere you have water supply and drain.
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I took this picture 4 days ago and posted with the blackberry kush on the left.
Today… look at this thing go!
One of the quickest plants I have ever seen get to flowering. 1 month of veg.
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I’ve got a couple friends I go into details with, but otherwise I just don’t say any details to anybody. They might know that I grow, but they’d never understand the plan!
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I’ve got a lot of customers , 1st time growers i consult I have been told that I am overly passionate about our craft. “Dude you can sit here and talk this shit all day can’t yah”
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