Toquer's Grow

[toquer]

Okay so I'm going to give a virtual tour of my place as best I can. This is my third location and I hope to be able to keep this place up and running for several years. We moved into the empty warehouse in October of 2013. It had an old 100A panel but sufficient 3-phase power in the building in the front so it did require electrical work. I look for buildings with 3-phase power because it is cheaper and the load that can be run looks much less suspicious. I am in an industrial section of town.

So for my operation we run a perpetual sea of green. We harvest 36 plants every other week and put 36 new plants in their place.



Veg is 16' x 16' and runs about 7000W between T5's, and 400W&600W MH.
Clones are put into RootMakers where they are in early veg for about 2 weeks. They are topped in this stage and then transplanted to 4" pots.

In the 4" pots I am looking to get 3 to 5 arms per plant which I will use a variety of pruning techniques to establish an even canopy across the 36 plants which make up a run.

From there they are put either into a 3 or 5 gallon fabric pot and vegged until the right height and the proper amount of root structure. Once they are ready they are sent into flower.

Our flower room is 14' x 40' and runs 16 - 1000W bulbs. We use a combination of dual spectrum and standard HPS bulbs in Magnum XXXL hoods.

Our room sits at a rather tight temperature range of 72F to 77F. They have fresh air intake periodically and I run ozone continuously. Dehumidifiers sit in the corners to reduce relative humidity and keep it between 40% and 50%. A 5 ton portable as well as a 2.5 ton minisplit keep the environment dialed in exactly. We will be burning CO2 very shortly, I just haven't had a chance to implement that system.

Plants are watered/fed by hand and looked after daily. Leaves are taken off as necessary throughout flower, but the majority of the work has been done ahead of time so that flower is a matter of just maintaining a well built plant. Foliar sprays are used a few times a week all the way up to the week before flower. It rains in veg almost daily.

Now what might I be using to produce this beautiful crop? Currently we are using Progress Earth's Vortex Brewer and Compost Tea. We also use Sunleaves guano's to brew 2 other teas. Our soil is VermiFire. Our foliar product is compost tea. Our bloom booster is compost tea, our finisher is compost tea. Other than compost tea they are fed de-chlorinated water. Our entire system is based on the soil and the compost tea brewer. For clones however, I am using tap water. They don't ever get watered, they just get sprayed with fresh tap water on a daily basis. I found that using the city water maintains a sterile environment for my clones and I have nearly 100% rooting success at this point.

So how is my yield and the quality? Well I provide one shop with a regular supply of 2lbs every week. This is a perpetual thing. The crop gets tested and is always low to mid 20%. I've had a high of 25.31%. That was my highest THC content ever. We run 3 or 4 strains but I try to keep that number very low as to provide the crop constantly. I am in the process of building another flower room onsite with an additional 8 lights for flower. I feel that we can handle the increase. It will at least allow me to run 4 strains religiously and not fluctuate which one I grow more of.

 

[toquer]

So my grow costs...

Soil costs me $2 bucks a gallon so each plant is about $6 to $10 bucks
Compost tea costs me $0.43 bucks a gallon so each plant takes a gallon a week roughly, less when they are younger, more once they are older, but roughly a gallon a week. so that's about $6 to $7 bucks a plant for it's life.
Electric bill is about $2500 a month.
Rent is $1350 a month.
Seeing that I harvest 72 plants a month and yield 8 to 10 lbs my cost per lb is...
72X10= 720
72x7= 504
1350+2500+720+504=$5074
about $635 bucks a pound.

Now I've been looking at using nutes, but I want to stay as organic as possible and Aptus has been brought up as the line to try it with. If I replace 1 feed of compost tea each week with Aptus it will cost roughly $500 bucks for the grow...what should I expect as an increase in yield? or perhaps in increase in quality? not sure how to measure quality other than test results in the lab for a higher potency.

My new clones pictured above will be getting Aputs starting tomorrow. I'll divide the 36 into 2 groups of 18 and we shall see what happens. The bad thing is that it'll be months before I have an answer to this question.

 

[toquer]

I just realized i messed up a bit on that...
The soil is cheaper by $200 bucks a bag so the gallon cost is $1.40, makes more sense, I was thinking, wait there are 9 gallons in a bag, no way i'm paying that much for it. I get it delivered on a pallet in a big 2yd bail.

So that's $7 bucks each plant for the soil.
72x7=504 for soil
72x7= 504 for compost tea
1350 rent
2500 electric
$4858 a run.
about $600 bucks a lb

 

[green bastard]

youve got my attention bro im along for the ride!

 

[Seamaiden]

Have you considered getting top soil delivered in bulk to your location? In my world paying (usually around) $33/yd is a lot better than paying for bagged, palleted soil at the prices you're outlining here. Then, you'd lighten up the top soil (most do have sand added to them as they're meant for use outdoors) and amend as you see fit and you're off to the races. Anyway, if you could go that route you'd reduce your cost per plant for media by a fantastically huge margin. Eliminating perlite in favor of rice hulls will also realize an incredible cost savings, assuming you'd be able to source the rice hulls (think: ag 'waste' product--nut shells & that sort of thing) as rice hulls used for animal bedding are literally a fraction of the price of perlite. A little more work (unless you get a concrete mixer like I did, cannot say enough how it saves my back and the backbreaking work of mixing up soil batches), but a lot of cost savings and better ROI.

I personally can't say anything about Aptus, but I've just received a bunch of samples from an outfit called Sensational Solutions, all micronized organic amendments/ferts with incredibly low use rates. Good stuff it's lookin' like, can't wait to try 'em out.

 

[PButter]

Dig the space, really dig the simplicity(organic). I Love that you appear to be hand watering- in the gardens I know, the folks who hand water 'see' the plants quite a bit more... Yeah, doggie! Front row.

PB

 

[toquer]

Seamaiden, i have a concrete mixer and have tried the method of cheap soil and then working it myself. 7 bucks a plant is cheap in my opinion at this point. for a while we did subcools supersoil and that's got it's place and has great results, but its a tremendous amount of work to mix up 350 gallons of soil even with a concrete mixer or enough floor space to spread it all out and then shovel it around. i've been there. with boots on and everything. we used to put the used soil out, amend it, add new soil, mix it all up, let it stew in the sunlight and then mix it up again and back to the cans to the sunlight. these days, open the 2 yard bag, put soil in pot, add plant, add soil, firm up...done...next! so much easier and for almost the same cost as me getting 9 kinds of meals and guanos.

2 yards is 36 bags. I get that every other month. It's one big bag dropped off on a pallet.
that's 12.50 for a bag of soil that retails in the sunlight supply catalog for 16.95 - 28.95.

at some point the time=money thing reaches a point where you have to determine how much you get paid.

 

[toquer]

OK so I've been toying with the idea of going back to using a product line. And of all the ones that I've looked at I decided to give Aptus a try. And after 1 week of growth, well here's the difference...

Aptus w/ Oneness as the base on the left, Humboldt Oneness line on the right

Yes its time to feed again.
From my position the Aptus is doing better. The roots are more robust and have been populated with fungi already. I'll get a picture of that too.

 

[neverbreak]

very nice bro, love all the detailed explanation. consider me subbed.

neverbreak

 

[toquer]

tomorrow starts week 3 for these guys. today they are getting fed again. They were transplanted to their 4" pots where they will remain for likely 2 to 3 weeks really depends on if I get things timed better in here. I seem to have too many in veg all the time. comes with trying to have too many strains. Anyways...pictures... So there are 4 of them this time. One of each group. The one's with the letter A on the label are getting Aptus, the others just Humboldt's Oneness line.
No Aptus

with Aptus

The indica is growing faster with Aptus and has better nodal structure. The sativa's look about even to be honest. Hard to tell the difference there once they got into a nice comfortable root zone.

Part of it all comes down to the soil in my opinion. We spent a lot of time determining which soil we wanted to use and for the sake of having everything in one bag it had to be VermiFire. i just had another bag delivered in the past week.

Okay time to mix up some stuff, feed, and trim out some of these leaves and look for where my first cut will be.

 

[Seamaiden]

:) Really enjoying seeing this *direct* side-by-side comparisons and your observations. Keep up the good work!

 

[green bastard]

yup awesome job ill be keepin an eye on this thread bro!

 

[Thoth]

Ya ya, me too!

 

[toquer]

So an update. Here are some new pictures. Plants have been topped and cleaned out on the bottom. We'll see what the difference between the 2 are. For the indica, no noticeable difference as of yet. These are pictures from yesterday, I should be able to see some changes come tomorrow for this plant. We'll see if Aptus changes the way apical dominance exists if the apical has been removed.

as for the sativa...
again no noticeable difference. The plants didn't like the foliar application just recently, but nothing too alarming. They'll be just fine. They were only topped, not much if anything done to the bottom. I like to have a very even canopy with this plant and only send it in with about a foot of growth on each arm. I need about 12 arms per plant to get the yield comparatively to the other plants. But damn she tastes so good and you can smoke her all day long. Well almost! If you smoke her at night, it's an odd kind of sleep, not much sleep really, just kind of laying there day dreaming while you wait for the morning alarm clock.

 

[toquer]

Sativa update...
The ones with Aptus have a thicker stem and are overall taller. I'm not sure there are more nodes on the ones with Aptus vs. the ones without. The rest of the growth seems about the same. They are currently still under t-5 a 16 bulb fixture. Just as above the lights are slammed down on them and are a mere few inches above the tops. I topped them again this week so now it's just a matter of keeping a nice even canopy and letting them develop into good sized bushes. They'll get transplanted into the flowering pot next week once we harvest and things move from one room to another giving myself space under the metal halides for the remainder of veg. None the less, here are the pictures, the ones with Aptus are on the left and have a blue tape on the pot.

 

[toquer]

Indica update...
Well the indica grows much slower than the sativa and to add to that, we still believe that there are more than one strain with the orange tag. Anyways, there are several differences between the ones receiving Aptus and the ones getting just Humboldt Nutrients. The biggest one for me is that the Aptus plants are almost an entire day ahead of the other ones when it comes to feeding. So given that i'm only about a month into veg that equates to a lot more nutrient going into the Aptus plant over the course of the next 3 months. Which i'm cool with as the plant is better structured. The side nodes are growing faster with Aptus and that is exactly what i'm looking for with this strain. They don't extend laterally for me, they come out a tiny bit and go straight up again leaving me with a stick. Granted i can stack a ton of these into one space together, but that's not our style. Rather have a nice big bush. So there aren't as many pictures here, as there isn't that much to see. it'll take another week before they bush out more.

 

[Seamaiden]

Great updates.

 

[toquer]

so i was transplanting the other day and decided to take a few pictures of my root zone. this isn't the plant i'm doing a side by side comparison with. it's a bubba kush that we recently got. haven't flowered it yet, but i've got a set ready to go in and another set that's now in 4 inch pots. because i started this set after the set i'm doing a comparison on i decided to give this group aptus as well. i like the results in veg for how little i've got to do to mix it up. none the less, here are some pictures...

 

[toquer]

Sativa update...
I can't tell the difference from this point of view. They all look very robust and healthy. And if i look closely, i really can't see much of a difference. The ones with Aptus do get lighter sooner than the ones with Humbolt. They'll get transplanted this week as soon as my bag of soil arrives. I'm looking forward to another shipment of VermiFire. It's the soil of choice for me. I've looked at a few others, but why mess with something that's working perfectly. None the less the sativa's will be going into their flowering pots for the next month before they go into flower. 5 gallon smart pots. give them plenty of space and just let them grow to fill in the cage.

 

[toquer]

Indica update...
I can't see much of a difference here either. I will say the consumption rate of these ones with Aptus is far greater though. So there has to be a big difference internally in the plants structure. I'm excited to see what happens when these babies go into flower. It's still a month away, but that's fine. I like letting them get to be big robust girls.