explosive growth in coco coir

[Dustytrails]

Absolute pleasure reading and absorbing all the great information and great pictures you've shared with us. That has been a productive grow
Thanks!

 

[phxazcraig]

Here's where keeping all those leaves may pay off. Lots of green fan leaves.

Buds are nice and tight.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to use Grove bags....

 

[phxazcraig]

Absolute pleasure reading and absorbing all the great information and great pictures you've shared with us. That has been a productive grow
Thanks!

I'm a bit short on pics, but it sure has been interesting for me. I'm now using Grove bags, which will be perfect for me if they work as advertised. I put 9 ounces of buds in one, and I'm working on a second as the buds dry. The buds are incredibly sticky. In a month they should smell awesome. I think I'll have a pound and a half or more, counting some larf buds.

I'm also very pleased with my Trim Bin, which has a dry sift screen in it. The trim leaves are very sugary, and sifting them is like getting free kief where I never did before. Quite a bit so far, and I'm waiting on the best batch of leaves to dry to sift more. Then I'll try making hash. And oil. And I'm putting stems and fan leaves in my girlfriend's Lomi to make mulch.

 

[phxazcraig]

Today my coco grow is done, except for a few branches hanging to dry. Last night I took down the tent to pack everything up for the summer.

I have about a pound of good bud in two Grove bags curing. They are near 70% RH, so I'm burping them a bit to keep below 70.

Those are from the first harvest, which was mostly top buds. I am drying the lower branch harvest in 21 small paper bags, each holding about an ounce of wet buds. I'm guessing a half pound dried there.

I also have a fair amount of trim leaves that I dry for sifting, and I have a significant amount of kief from it. I want to sift that further.

Now it's time to dry, cure, sift, nugsmash, and make oil. All in all, if I were to be buying weed at the dispensaries, I would be paying at least $200/ounce, so I've saved somewhere around $4000 with this grow, which should last me 6 months or more until the next crop.


Where my grow tent used to be.

 

[Aqua Man]

Great job man and to boot you jnow whats in your smoke

 

[phxazcraig]

Great job man and to boot you jnow whats in your smoke

Pots are outside drying up in the Phoenix sun. I'm running around doing all sorts of cleanup before a weekend party, but at some point I'm going to pop open those Air Pots and see what the roots look like.

Post-mortem: I never got the nutes dialed in during flowering. EC just continued to build and rise in the runoff, and I've still not figured out why.

 

[phxazcraig]

I haven't git a final weight yet, but I should have a pound of good buds in these two Grove bags. And I have about 25 paper bags each holding about a wet ounce of lower bud drying. I'm hoping 1.5 pounds in the end. Plus I have a lot of kief from the trim.

 

[phxazcraig]

Last night I determined that most of the paper bags were dry, so I moved them into mason jars for curing. Also sort of hand-rubbed the dry buds to knock off excess leaf as the buds had a lot of it. Got a good amount of sift from that, and about 8 more ounces of (larfish) bud.

Compared to my last grow, in soil, I got a few more ounces, though I still haven't got a final weight on the Grove bags. The buds themselves are bigger, tighter and stronger than the Ghost OG strain I grew under the same light. However, that grow had 5 plants instead of 4, and it took 163 days, with 107 days of veg and 57 days of flower. This crop took 120 days, with 35 days of veg and 85 days in flower. The long flowering time seems due to the Sour Diesel strain, as predicted. My soil grow took a very long time deliberately, particularly at first when I wasn't feeding adding nutes in soil. That slow-grow experience had me underestimating this crop's growth in veg, though it was similar in flower.

I plan on starting my next grow in October, after the 'travel season'. I have only one trip planned to date, to go diving for two weeks in June, but I usually make a trip to Roatan in late September, and some other trip in July/August. I'm going to look to buy some commercial drain pans as my homemade stuff gave me too many leak issues. I'm also going to have to solve the variable flow rate issue I have with my reservoir pump as the water level goes down in order to have a consistent watering amount.

And eventually I hope to come up with a decent drying chamber. None of this crop took more than 4 days to dry down to crispy bud status.

Now I have something to play with in terms of trying to make hash out of kief, and that larfy bud looks like it might be good to throw into the Nugsmasher Mini.

 

[phxazcraig]

Final Yield: approximately 28 ounces of bud, including the lower buds. (8.5 ounces of lower buds.) Buds at 60-65% RH. I got another Grove Bag today, so I transferred the lower buds from jars (had been drying in paper bags) to the Grove Bag. Took the opportunity to get a tare for the Grove bag and weigh all three to get a 'final' weight.

By comparison, my first grow of 4 autos got me 3 ounces. My second grow, of 5 photos in soil, got me 18 ounces. This, my third grow, got me 28 ounces.

Plus I have a small, but significant amount of kief too, in a small container. This is just what I sifted through my Trim Bin, so it needs to go through more screens and a cleaning before I know how much hash I might have. I think I will try freezing the trim and re-sifting it. Or make oil, possibly butter, from it.

 

[phxazcraig]

Final Yield: approximately 28 ounces of bud, including the lower buds. (8.5 ounces of lower buds.) Buds at 60-65% RH. I got another Grove Bag today, so I transferred the lower buds from jars (had been drying in paper bags) to the Grove Bag. Took the opportunity to get a tare for the Grove bag and weigh all three to get a 'final' weight.

By comparison, my first grow of 4 autos got me 3 ounces. My second grow, of 5 photos in soil, got me 18 ounces. This, my third grow, got me 28 ounces.

Plus I have a small, but significant amount of kief too, in a small container. This is just what I sifted through my Trim Bin, so it needs to go through more screens and a cleaning before I know how much hash I might have. I think I will try freezing the trim and re-sifting it. Or make oil, possibly butter, from it.

Follow-up report on my crop.

It has been about 6 weeks since harvest, and the buds have been curing in those Grove bags since May 13. Due to peculiarities of the Phoenix climate, drying and curing is a challenge, but these bags have helped. The initial problem is drying too fast, which tends to lock in a hay taste. So I do a short dry, followed by a careful (or paranoid) daily jar-burping (or whatever) to try to slow down the drying while preventing mold. At this stage the buds are in some sort of airtight container and reading RH in the 72% range - clearly a mold risk. I basically let air into the containers multiple times a day until the RH dropped below 70%, at which point I put them into the Grove bags this time.

The Grove bags still needed to be burped when I saw the RH climb above 70% a couple of times in one bag. I just didn't want to take the risk of losing 1/3rd of my crop to mold to risk leaving them in the bags. However, it may be that the bags would be OK there - I just don't know how wet is too wet to put into those bags. At the very least I kept burping them until buds weren't sticking to the bottom of the bag!

The Grove bags advertise maintaining moisture levels, but at the same time allowing some gas exchange. I really don't know the (alleged) tech there, but I would like to. In my case the RH seems to have maintained quite well. One bag at 66%, another at 62% and the last at 52%. The 52% was my fault. It was the bag of lower (larfy) buds, and I feel asleep during a burping process. Woke up and buds were down to 52-53%, so I just sealed them in the bag and left them in the closet.

The bags had not been opened for the past 3.5 weeks and were sitting on a shelf in a dark closet. Upon opening just now and giving them a sniff and a feel, it seems all is well. The smell is nice, though not intense like it was when things were wetter. The hay smell is almost completely gone, the buds feel reasonably tight (but not like store-bought), the feel is 'just right' in the hand, and the smoke is smooth and mellow. (Sour Diesel grow. I have no idea what Sour Diesel is supposed to smell like, but this doesn't seem 'diesely' to me.)

I think the Grove bags are actually better than jars, though I have too little experience to really tell. Certainly they are more convenient in ways. They are more for bulk storage, given the size.

I think the taste and smell will improve over the next 3-6 weeks of curing. I'm going to try to keep from opening the bags as much as possible in the meantime, having set out some buds from each bag to sample over the next week.

I haven't reweighed the crop, partly because I've also set aside an unknown amount in the past 6 weeks and smoked it (half ounce?) Still, around 28 ounces, which seems astonishing to me. Sure was fun growing it too.

 

[phxazcraig]

I'm starting another crop in the same tent (Gorilla, tall) in coco, and I'm trying to address issues I had with the previous grow. Specifically, the drainage saucers. The homemade ones using Cocoforcannabis design had a lot of leaks the way I built it. (At the junction of the hose to the bottom of the drip pan.) I found these 12-inch drain saucers at Home Depot online:

I already see that overflow is an issue here, so I'm going to add some overflow saucers somehow. Problem is, the hose coming off the saucers will conflict with a drain under them.

 

[Fromunda506]

I bought some of the floraflex self-draining saucers before I started my latest run. Not cheap, but def worth it. I run DTW coco in 5 gallon fabric pots and have had no issues with overflowing even when I hammer them.

 

[phxazcraig]

Here's a bit of an update, 3 years down the road. I've cured some issues I had, specifically around the feeding system.

The problem I had was the height of the nutrient level in the big 30 gallon reservoir. If full, I had lots of pressure and lots of flow. If near-empty, I probably had less then half the amount of water pumped than when full.

I solved that with a cheap-but-easy solution, using parts I had on hand. The concept is simple - make sure the water level is the same when your feed pump goes off. I did that by providing a second bucket for the feed pump to sit in, and a second pump to fill the feed bucket from the reservoir. I drilled 4 holes (2 wasn't enough!) near the top of the bucket to drain excess water from the feed bucket back into the reservoir. I mounted four lengths of tubing through those holes and sealed things up with extra grommets I had left over from the DYI sump pump project. (Looks goofy, works fine.)

I had an old 15 gallon reservoir, so I turned it upside-down and put the feed bucket on top of it. A pump in the reservoir runs 24x7 pumping water into the feed bucket. The 4 tubes I installed drain the feed bucket back into the reservoir. Now when the feed pump goes off, it always sees the same water level. I set a timer to feed every two hours. During the light-on hours, I pump for 9 seconds. During the dark, 2-4 depending on the hour. 9 seconds gives me a consistent small amount of runoff. Plants are growing like weeds again!

As noted in an earlier update, I ditched the homemade self-draining saucers for commercially-made drip saucers. I redid my sump bucket system with a newer one after the old one cracked and leaked. I took the time to carefully redo the drain tubes into the sump bucket, and that solved a ton of nagging issues with leaks.

It's a simple concept - separate feed bucket - but it sure helps get consistent input flows.

 

[Grownsince95]

Welcome back!! I just returned from a long hiatus myself

 

[phxazcraig]

Another update from the 2025 crop. The current crop is using mostly the same system shown earlier, but I redid a few parts. I took a heatgun and some scissors and custom-fitted the feed lines around the plants so they are nice and even. My old sump bucket fell apart, so I bought a newer, bigger one that fit my sump pump better.

And I screwed myself when I redid the feed pump line during flowering. No idea why I thought it was a good idea, but I removed the old bit of tubing in the feed bucket that had the air holes (siphon breaks), and I replaced it with a newer, shinier one. Seated it in place with the heatgun, and it looked good. Then - twice in a week - I had a flood. Near as I can reconstruct, my replacement bit of tubing with a siphon break hole must have had a little clog. Because the night I filled the reservoir, it must have never quit siphoning. I woke up to a room with a very soggy carpet, an overflowed drain bucket, and an inch of water inside the tent. And an empty reservoir. I added a second air hole - but the same thing happened a few days later. I added a third air hole, and the problem hasn't come back since.

While this reservoir+bucket system looks Rube Goldberg, it actually has worked perfectly for its purpose. I get a totally consistent and predictable flow, no matter how much or how little water is in the main reservoir.

I also have reduced the EC level of the nutrients, using the GH average Flora series feed chart, and thinning that with extra water. I figure that the every-2-hours feeding schedule gives them all they can eat.

I also have totally different plants this grow. I bought some Indica seeds from a seed bank in Tempe, and they are much shorter than the Sour Diesel of the original grow. It means I have about 3 feet of space between light and plants for a much more even lighting pattern to the edges. I also flipped to flower in week 3 so the plants wouldn't get ahead of me.

Finally, I have three plants in pots growing outside as an experiment, and they are doing tremendous. Gives me a comparison to the indoor grow, except the outdoor ones are about 2 weeks ahead. I had 3 spare plants in red solo cups I couldn't use in the tent, so I dropped them in pots and left them in the back yard, in Phoenix. I forgot that January was less than 12 hours of light each day, so the plants immediately started flowering. It looks like they will make it to maturity, even though the days are 14 hours long now. I hope to harvest in 2 weeks.

 

[phxazcraig]

Well ill for sure be interested in your weights. If you were using a 1000w led and C02 in that 4x4, if you were using good genetics, you could possibly max out at 2lbs. But since its 600w, and your not using c02, im very curious as to what your weights will be. Id say your growth rates are comparable to active hydro systems and not passive. Like I know your running drip which is passive, but your grow performs like my active system. I just dont understand how increasing the run off increases the growth rates. I also noticed your EC is way higher than mine. I veg at .5 ec and flower at 1.0 max. I also never drain my system, only top offs. Everything I put in, my plants consume. I monitor individual nutrient levels basically warming myself up for a Aquaponics trial one day.

Im not trying to talk down or up about your grow either. More less laying out all my available data for ya so we both can understand it all better. I have alot to learn apparently. . it just doesnt make sense how wasting nutrients can increase growth rates lol.. but it does.

I'm replying to this 2 years later to confirm the above on the basis of more experience. I have two more grows in since this one. Each grow has followed the same lines, with crop weight more tied to flowering time than much else. In general, with my 4x4 tent, 600w LED and no CO2, I will get around 1.5 pounds of yield with an 8-week flowering strain. The Sour Diesel crop from this thread flowered for about 12 weeks and also vegged for an overly-long 5 weeks. I still only got about 1 3/4 pounds. I also leave more leaves on my crop than many, so that adds to the weight. (I do this to slow the drying process down in Arizona's brutal low humidity). And I weigh with a RH of 60% in the bag of buds, so perhaps more water weight than some). But certainly I'm not approaching 2 pound yields no matter what I do without either more light or more CO2 or both.

In my last crop, to simplify things, I simply started watering every 2 hours - 12x a day! It's what I ended up doing with last year's crop, and I figured this would give the plants maximum nutrition possibilities. I mix my nutes weaker than the recommended average, figuring the frequency of feeding would replace any used nutrients quickly and keep my runoff EC down as well. After the crop this year, I think I may have overdone it some, because a couple of the plants had roots growing all the way down from the pots to the runoff bucket, through the drain tubes! It does take a lot of nutes, and I get about 5 gallons of runoff per day, but I water all the plants in the house and the yard with the runoff, so not a problem for me.

In reviewing this thread after two years, I'm pretty happy with the amount of useful information in it. I'll add a few more notes for this year's add-on. I spent time this year trying to fine-tune my setup. Like that angled brace in the tent - that was simply 2 inches too long, and this year I hacked it off to fit properly. I also took apart the tubing system and carefully cut the tube lengths for a perfect fit over the pots. I also, unfortunately, redid a small tube in the feed system in the reservoir. This was the critical location of the siphon break hole, and something went wrong. I filled the reservoir, and the next morning I came in to find 30 gallons of nutes pumped into the tent, and overflowed onto the rug. Somehow that siphon break failed, so I added a second small hole. And a week later, the same thing happened AGAIN! So I added a third hole, and the siphon has been reliable.

It's basically now a proven system that tends to work without maintenance. I added filter bags around all the water pumps in the system, so they don't fail from clogs, from grit and stuff washing in. Especially the drain sump. By watering every two hours through the grow, I solve all sorts of runoff EC buildup issues, and all I need to do through the grow is adjust the amount of time spent on each watering cycle (2 to 10 seconds). The Rube Goldberg watering system I have in this thread actually works fantastically well (once the siphon break was debugged), and it greatly simplifies the watering schedule by being consistent.

It's very nice to have a working system that I'm no longer troubleshooting and re-engineering. Now I just enjoy growing the plants each day. Plus I've added an outdoor crop at the same time.

 

[Galgrows]

I'm replying to this 2 years later to confirm the above on the basis of more experience. I have two more grows in since this one. Each grow has followed the same lines, with crop weight more tied to flowering time than much else. In general, with my 4x4 tent, 600w LED and no CO2, I will get around 1.5 pounds of yield with an 8-week flowering strain. The Sour Diesel crop from this thread flowered for about 12 weeks and also vegged for an overly-long 5 weeks. I still only got about 1 3/4 pounds. I also leave more leaves on my crop than many, so that adds to the weight. (I do this to slow the drying process down in Arizona's brutal low humidity). And I weigh with a RH of 60% in the bag of buds, so perhaps more water weight than some). But certainly I'm not approaching 2 pound yields no matter what I do without either more light or more CO2 or both.

In my last crop, to simplify things, I simply started watering every 2 hours - 12x a day! It's what I ended up doing with last year's crop, and I figured this would give the plants maximum nutrition possibilities. I mix my nutes weaker than the recommended average, figuring the frequency of feeding would replace any used nutrients quickly and keep my runoff EC down as well. After the crop this year, I think I may have overdone it some, because a couple of the plants had roots growing all the way down from the pots to the runoff bucket, through the drain tubes! It does take a lot of nutes, and I get about 5 gallons of runoff per day, but I water all the plants in the house and the yard with the runoff, so not a problem for me.

In reviewing this thread after two years, I'm pretty happy with the amount of useful information in it. I'll add a few more notes for this year's add-on. I spent time this year trying to fine-tune my setup. Like that angled brace in the tent - that was simply 2 inches too long, and this year I hacked it off to fit properly. I also took apart the tubing system and carefully cut the tube lengths for a perfect fit over the pots. I also, unfortunately, redid a small tube in the feed system in the reservoir. This was the critical location of the siphon break hole, and something went wrong. I filled the reservoir, and the next morning I came in to find 30 gallons of nutes pumped into the tent, and overflowed onto the rug. Somehow that siphon break failed, so I added a second small hole. And a week later, the same thing happened AGAIN! So I added a third hole, and the siphon has been reliable.

It's basically now a proven system that tends to work without maintenance. I added filter bags around all the water pumps in the system, so they don't fail from clogs, from grit and stuff washing in. Especially the drain sump. By watering every two hours through the grow, I solve all sorts of runoff EC buildup issues, and all I need to do through the grow is adjust the amount of time spent on each watering cycle (2 to 10 seconds). The Rube Goldberg watering system I have in this thread actually works fantastically well (once the siphon break was debugged), and it greatly simplifies the watering schedule by being consistent.

It's very nice to have a working system that I'm no longer troubleshooting and re-engineering. Now I just enjoy growing the plants each day. Plus I've added an outdoor crop at the same time.

That's what we wanna hear. Congrats on your build success. Good luck outdoor also.