Corm's Grow Show: The Underground (or, How I Killed my Valley Ghash x Cake Fighter)

[Cormoran]

Got 3 packs of these from GLG freebies, so I decided to pop a whole pack. Terrible results at first, but I’m assuming that’s mostly because I got impatient and transferred them from paper towels to soil after 5 days rather than waiting what I gather is the standard 7-10. Two of them still survived and are going strong… no pictures because this is all hypothetical, of course.

Has anyone else grown these? I’m noticing what I think is a rather weird trait, the mature sun leaves have all started bowing in the middle and dipping downwards at the ends. It’s only happening with leaves that have been alive for at least a week or so, while the new leaves are still fine. The sun leaves that are showing this trait are clearly still alive and growing, the stems are still quite solid and springy. They just grow in a frowny-face shape, leading to the actual sun leaves dipping down at a 45 degree angle as if they’re distressed and need water even though they feel fully healthy to the touch. I haven’t seen this in any other strains, though I’ve only tried Blueberry and Northern Lights in the past.

[PetalPowerseed]

can we get a pic?

[Cormoran]

Not sure what’s going on with the orientation, I took this as a portrait not a landscape. Oh well.
Was a bit leery of uploading at first, but it seems someone else has been paranoid for me so all metadata is stripped beforehand. Good stuff.

[CornbreadJunior]

here you go mate… i cant fix the color though

[Cormoran]

Yeah, that’s a blurple I bought when I was taking my first baby steps… it’s labeled as 2kW which I guess means it actually puts out slightly less than a real 600W, not great but there’s no point using a real 1kW MH for two seedlings. If one of these turns out to be female, I’ll probably take a few clones before moving on to the feminized seed packs; interesting smells already coming off this one, kind of a peppery basil with a hint of sweetness.

[Papalag]

Welcome aboard mate
I’ll tag along for the show

Paps

[Donnie]

Welcome to og , happy growing

[PetalPowerseed]

what is the ph of your run off? and the purple lights can effect plants in weird ways.

[bytheKasiz]

i have one mid way through flower and she is a happy vigor plant, no problems at all.
Could be heat, light to close, ph, over watering/feeding.

[Cormoran]

My 4-way RapiTest meter gave me some issues this morning, but it seems to be working just fine now; some trouble getting it to register changes in moisture, which it’s doing fine on now, no issues with the pH test though. It’s coming up with a 7.0 pH for the larger plant, and ~7.3 for the smaller one (which is also exhibiting these claw-like sun leaves). It’s a bit off from ideal, but I wouldn’t think it would be enough to cause deformities…

That being said, it’s probably time to get some new equipment anyway. Anyone have any advice on the proper testing equipment to have for an indoor soil grow? Ideally I’d like to be able to fully control their environment, but for right now I’d be happier with just being able to get any information on what’s going on with the soil. I do know that the room’s at 71F with fairly low (20-30%) humidity, so the heat shouldn’t be the problem; the lights have been at the same level since they were seedlings, approximately 18 inches away and generating very little heat. That doesn’t leave much other than issues with the soil, I guess. I haven’t fed them since we started, maybe that’s an issue - I honestly don’t even know whether this is fresh soil mix or if I’m re-using it from a prior grow. It’s certainly not over-feeding, and the leaves exhibiting this claw-like shape are the only symptom, so it could be that they’re running low on micronutrients.

Cal/Mag spring to mind first, obviously. However, this is where I start running into trouble. For my previous growing experiments, I bought a large package of RapiTest 1601 soil test kits, which worked well enough to at least keep me from overfeeding the plants and burning the hell out of them like my first Blueberry grow. Those are colorimetric for all of the tests though, which doesn’t at all appeal to the engineer in me - especially since my growing partner is color-blind. Other options that I’ve come across while browsing online include sending soil samples in each time to have them analyzed by a lab; buying a full field test kit for $700, only to discover that it too uses colorimetric chemical tests on dissolved soil; or going all the way and buying hydroponic test equipment which will also only test dissolved soil, and doesn’t dial down precisely on any particular nutrients. Anyone have any better ideas?

[ReikoX]

The thing with all those test kits you describe use distilled water. Basically it only tells what is available with water.

Sending in a soil sample to a lab will tell you what is available to the plant with organic acids like the roots exhude.

[Cormoran]

Yeah, soil samples are definitely something that could get a bit expensive with my setup. I took a look at your workshop, very nice. I’ll be working with about half my basement as well once the construction is done, hadn’t considered the possibility of growing entire rows in the same soil though; we were going to have them in fabric pots resting in a runoff trough for each row. I guess growing multiple plants in the same soil has the obvious upsides & downsides of putting many eggs in a single basket. If something goes wrong, it goes wrong big… but also less maintenance and expense on soil testing when you do decide to perform it.

The distilled water isn’t a problem, I keep a few bottles on hand for precisely this purpose. Running with multiple fabric pots and sending in that many soil tests seems unworkable for me, though it’s something I’ll obviously want to do before growing in my backyard… maybe I’ll get a EC/TDS meter to make basic soil testing easier than the RapiTest chemical kits, and just see how it goes from there. I’ve never had significant imbalances in any one nutrient before, always gone pretty predictably - lots of N in veg, up through about a week into flower when they start leveling off and then later in flower low N, lots of P/K. Not sure I feel like putting out another $700 on a full kit just yet, I still don’t entirely know how much the basement rebuild is going to cost.

[ReikoX]

You don’t have to test every pot, you can take a small sample from each pot and mix it. That’s what I do with my three beds. Mix and test, then just amend it all. The error is within the accuracy of the test anyway.

[Cormoran]

I suppose it’s unrealistic to be testing each plant each time, and most of the time I’m going to be working with averages anyway; it’s certainly not like I’m going to be individually feeding each plant, so why individually test? Then again, at that point I’m not sure why I’m testing micronutrients either, since I’m painting with such a broad brush. It might be worth it to professionally test the baseline soil I start each grow with, just to be sure what I’m working with and figure out if I need any soil amendments from the get-go, but otherwise you’re right: I’ll just mix them and dissolve to test with a TDS meter before watering every week or two, rather than the RapiTest chemical kits. It’s at least digital rather than being analog, and my partner can read it while the kits inevitably come up as smudged shades of brown to him.

Might be nice to dream about clean, simple, easy, high-tech and low-cost ways to test micronutrients from lots of samples at once; in reality though, I guess that’s just called hydroponics and is why Big Ag uses that over soil in the first place. Since we’re not working on the same economics of scale, gonna have to stick with our caveman methods and do a lot of grunting to ward off evil spirits…

[Heliosphear]

Welcome to OG, your off to a really great start. I would put everything you got into getting the basement completed, soil pH will be easier to control when you have a stable environment to grow in.

Thank you for sharing your grow, be good to yourself.

[Cormoran]

Yeah, that’s why I’m not starting any more, just figured I’d at least throw some testers on and hopefully get at least one female to clone, so I can get something new to smoke; I’ve been going through the same stuff I bought on the black market in February of last year, since for some reason I had a hunch that prices were about to skyrocket. They did, and the medical dispensaries ran out of stock, and I sat at home fully stocked up and giggling at the news.

Might as well post some pics while I’m thinking about them, though:

Without a reliable way to measure nutrients on hand, I’m kinda stuck throwing darts at the broad side of a barn; I’m gonna hit something, just no idea what it’ll actually do. From the look of the lower leaves, and the fact that I just threw some re-used soil from previous grows (post-flowering/flushing) into a pot and figured these were testers anyway, I’m gonna guess that they’re starting to want more than just the nutrients from the compost mixed into the soil and start mixing a gallon of Earth Juice: Grow tea to split between the two of them, probably tomorrow since the soil is just starting to get dry now. That should help to replenish P/K that was used from last flower, and top up the nitrogen so those leaves stop coming in with yellow tips.

Oh, and speaking of getting females to clone, anyone have any clue on the sex from this photo? I don’t have a USB microscope, so this is as close-up as I can get without it starting to get terribly blurry; not sure if it’s enough to see pre-flowers, but here goes nothing.

[Cormoran]

The plants disagree with me that they needed to be fed, it seems… the leaves are saying I already screwed them over with nutrient burn, so I figured I’d compound that by top-down watering to flush them. Now they’re overwatered so the roots can rot or the soil can go anaerobic. Oops!

I have a EC/TDS meter coming in over the weekend that I’ll use to test the runoff and see just how badly I face-planted on this one. They seem to be surviving, anyway; and the day after I fed them, they both started smelling much more strongly of fruit - a kind of apple/peach cobblery scent, obviously the Cake genetics coming through. So it’s possible they needed to be fed, just not as much as I fed them. Usually I’m using fresh soil, and don’t have to feed them at all before transplanting them to a 7-gallon fabric pot. Got lazy this time and the babies are paying for it. The new plan is officially to LITFA for a few weeks, other than watering, and let them grow for a while until they’re ready for transplant.

[CornbreadJunior]

good luck!!! you got lots of great help here!!

[Nagel420]

I’m gonna say they need a healthy dose of LITFA. Before you added nutrients I was thinking overwatered. clawing down is sometimes a sign of that. clawing up is usually cal mag. But I just saw this now so…

Let the soil dry a bit, since you seem to like gadgets, a soil moisture meter will give you a good idea, and its gonna be more dry than most think!!

[Cormoran]

Before I added nutrients, it was registering at 30% or so on my moisture meter… I waited a day and a half from then to feed them. If it’s actually even dried than they read usually, that would mean they were almost completely dried out rather than overwatered…

As far as the clawing, I’m not even sure they were really clawing abnormally before. It’s possible the leaves just hang down a bit more than average on Ghash crosses, I’ve seen similar pictures on a few others by now. Apparently MAC does something similar as well. The leaves on the tops point to the sky, but a few nodes below that and they start to dip. Now, obviously, they’re really clawing and it was due to nitrogen overload. Hopefully with the flush that’ll no longer be a problem, and I’ll just leave them to dry out once or twice before transplant.