Blueberry Bubblegum Dtw

[Irie Farmer]

The mix I'm using is coco/perlite/ewc with leonardite and yucca so not what one would consider soil, more of a soilless mix. I let em drink some then water the pots back to field capacity as even at full saturation the mixture retains 30-40% air.

If we were talking a clay-based soil then for sure, root rot would be an issue.

@Irie Farmer thats a good idea with the holes, I can picture how it would work. I've been using fabric pots for years, but I tried out plastic for this round to keep the root ball elevated from the runoff in order to avoid wet feet. Im thinking in the future I'll go back to fabric and use, say, clone trays, to keep them out of the runoff and get some air circulating beneath them. I'd like to start using fabric instead plastic pots for the early stages of veg as well.

That's actually a great idea bro! Or even a saucer turned upside down. I like to flood and drain so they are perfect for me. Best, Irie.

 

[Savage Henry]

Thank you, sir. Though I have to admit I got the idea from an old thread on here: https://www.thcfarmer.com/community/threads/rockwol-and-amazing-roots.37128/

 

[Savage Henry]

Noticed this the other night, couple weeks back I topdressed with ewc from a compost tea. The roots grew up into and out of the clump:

 

[3N1GM4]

Noticed this the other night, couple weeks back I topdressed with ewc from a compost tea. The roots grew up into and out of the clump:View attachment 589766

You sure that isnt just where the dirt washed away when you watered? I have to recover a spot of roots like that alot when I water.

 

[Savage Henry]

Yesterday was day 16. They're filling out the footprint nicely. I made a mistake setting my pump timer the other night and put an entire 35gal Rez @ 1.4 ec thru the pots. Not seeing any issues thus far, the runoff two days later was 1.1ec so all is well, in fact I interpreted this as them wanting a bit stronger solution, so I mixed it to 1.6ec, keeping the fulvic and silica the same and increasing the other three ingredients proportionally.

Two days ago did a drench and a foliar with biowar tea brewed with some alfalfa meal and a dash of kelp meal.

Last night was cleanup day, here's a before pic:

I lollipopped them, leaving the top 10-12" untouched. I left 18" last time I ran this strain and had sone impressive colas but too much larf for my liking.

I decided against using a trellis for a couple reasons:

I plan on running my foliar regiment thru week 4

I built the room super tight and would prefer to be able to move around in the room when necessary

I'm looking at experimenting with topdressing, so access to the back row/corner is necessary.

So after trimming them up I bent the tops to even out the canopy:

 

[Savage Henry]

Also worth noting the last couple rounds I've been experiencing a touch of root rot around this time. The last time it happened I came to the conclusion that it is actually root die-off. I attributed this to the removal of a large (20-30%) amount of the foliage around this time, making a proportional percentage of the root mass redundant. In anticipation of this I added some hydrogaurd to the Rez. Hopefully this combined with my weekly tea applications will mitigate the issue.

 

[Savage Henry]

Been a bit over a week since I updated. Right now we're about halfway through week 4, things are chugging along relatively smoothly. I monitor my runoff daily and it has been coming out at 1.4 ec and going in at 1.7. So with each Rez change I've been bumping up the base fertilizer by 5% or so. I got up to 130% which came out to 1.8 ec and the runoff abrubptly (in a day) went up to 1.7. We had a bit of a heat wave here the past week and my canopy temps have gone up to around 85 degrees. In response to this I set the humidity to 75%, according to the vpd chart I use this rh works for temps from 56-92f, so I should be good.

The leaves are nice and dark with just a bit of curl starting on the top ones, so if the runoff gets even a bit higher than the Rez ec I'll run a lower ec (1-1.4) for a couple days until things normalize.

Did a foliar with a biowar tea and just a touch of alfalfa earlier this week. I may nix the foliar from this point out but I may continue it for another week or so. I just picked up some soluble powdered kelp extract and am itching to try it. Tested it out (mixed with yucca and ca25) on a couple veg plants today, if it doesn't cook em then I'll prolly do a foliar day after tomorrow.

Something I've noticed with running a higher rh is they drink a bit less, which makes sense.

Anyway, here's some pics:

 

[Savage Henry]

Thanks for browsing thru, @THCdurk I saw that you've been considering making the switch to coco. Might I suggest reading through the grow logs of @nMEEKS if you haven't already. he's long gone but is a professional horticulturalist who uses coco. I was gonna just dm you this but I figure others might benefit from being pointed in his direction as well.

 

[Savage Henry]

Finishing up week 5 now, and I noted some mistakes I made in the past week or two as they are manifesting themselves at the moment, or have over the past week. The problem being too much nitrogen.

As can be seen in the pics posted below there are leaves growing out of the buds, nothing that can't be corrected or moved past but something to learn from for sure. My first mistake was using alfalfa meal in my tea a couple weeks ago, I've seen anecdotal evidence on here of leaves "growing thru the buds" when alfalfa is applied too late. I thought I could get away with it since I only used 1tbsp/4 gal of tea. Maybe it has an accumulative effect, I had been using it weekly all thru veg as well.

Anyway, this was compounded by keeping the calnit at 2g/gal thru week 4. And on top of that I tried out jacks classic blossom booster (10-50-30 I believe) which threw even more N at the girls. Real bonehead move.

 

[Savage Henry]

So I started playing with my elemental ppms in cannastats and realized I could get the same ppms of P and K that I got with .5g/gal blossom booster if I used .3g/gal of mkp instead. So bingo, just what I needed, a slight boost of pk without anything extra. The booster has micros in it as well so it looks like it would be better suited potentially as a base with some calnit and Epsom, much like the jacks 3/2/1. But that's something I may play around with later.

Thing is, with the calnit dropped to 1.6g/gal it throws my ca:mg ratio off. Not sure of how big a deal this is but it seems like maintaining a 2:1 ratio is ideal. I have some edta calcium around to do this, but my research on its necessity is incomplete. I believe @MGRox is knowledgable in this area, if he and/or @Capulator can chime in on this I'd appreciate it.

Also, I've been playing around with my irrigation schedule. Read an inspirational presentation some coco company made to Mexican tomato growers about this (http://www.myriadint.com.au/Mexico Presentation.pdf). So I bumped up from 3 irrigations daily to 4 evenly spaced, then to 5 yesterday. Basing the total irrigation volume off of the plants daily use with 20% added for runoff. This is all within an 8 hour window starting 2 hrs after lights on and ending 2 hrs. Before lights out. I also started logging the volume going in and the volume running off as well as the ph and ec of both. Was discussing this with @Funkadelic of he'd like to follow along.

Anyway, here's what happens when the flowers get too much N at the wrong time:

I'm not really sweating it as the ladies have just over a month left and I believe I've got their ratios back on track.

 

[Funkadelic]

Do you have a short cycle timer?

 

[Savage Henry]

Yea, but I'm using it for my co2 at the moment. I'm using 8 Lph (2gph) pressure compensating drip emitters and a digital harbor freight timer for the pump. The emitters put out 133.33mL/min so I've been basing the cycles off of that.

Just ordered a digital short cycle timer with a photocell that goes in increments of 5 seconds. Ill plug that into the harbor freight timer set for the 8 hour irrigation window. It should allow for more precision as I'll be able to dictate the volume down to about 11ml (5 seconds of 8 Lph).

 

[Funkadelic]

Yea, but I'm using it for my co2 at the moment. I'm using 8 Lph (2gph) pressure compensating drip emitters and a digital harbor freight timer for the pump. The emitters put out 133.33mL/min so I've been basing the cycles off of that.

Just ordered a digital short cycle timer with a photocell that goes in increments of 5 seconds. Ill plug that into the harbor freight timer set for the 8 hour irrigation window. It should allow for more precision as I'll be able to dictate the volume down to about 11ml (5 seconds of 8 Lph).

Post updates homie

 

[MGRox]

Thing is, with the calnit dropped to 1.6g/gal it throws my ca:mg ratio off. Not sure of how big a deal this is but it seems like maintaining a 2:1 ratio is ideal. I have some edta calcium around to do this, but my research on its necessity is incomplete.

Ye I did a thread on Ca:Mg ratios I suppose. Recommendations can be all over the board and vary depending on if we are looking at base saturation or a nutrient solution.

In general, and from a ppm perspective; Ca:Mg ratios in hotriculture typically vary between 3:1 - 10:1 (which is to say a 2:1 - 6:1 Meq ratio). But note that:

http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/icm/2003/4-21-2003/camg.html
"Various greenhouse and field trials indicate that crop productivity is not influenced by ranges from less than 1:1 to more than 25:1"
(the above ratio is in Meq not ppm's)

I wouldn't worry about holding a specific ratio (provided your in the "range") unless you see an issue in your environment.

The golden nugget from my research here is that Ca levels and ratios were first determined to eliminate toxicity of trace minerals (including Mg) and NOT related to actual uptake. Ca is most valuable to prevent toxicities of other things and is only secondarily important for plant growth.
Yep, I said it haha.


For N+ with your plants, you will get the upper leaf curl or claw. However, overly stretched node spacing and foxtailing here may be related to watering frequency rather than N. With N to K ratios you can alter node stretching "relative to N", even in an N+ situation (particularly after floral initiation). However, ratios will not alter stretching with too high of water frequency. This is related to water being held in the medium relative to watering interval.

 

[3N1GM4]

So I started playing with my elemental ppms in cannastats and realized I could get the same ppms of P and K that I got with .5g/gal blossom booster if I used .3g/gal of mkp instead. So bingo, just what I needed, a slight boost of pk without anything extra. The booster has micros in it as well so it looks like it would be better suited potentially as a base with some calnit and Epsom, much like the jacks 3/2/1. But that's something I may play around with later.

Thing is, with the calnit dropped to 1.6g/gal it throws my ca:mg ratio off. Not sure of how big a deal this is but it seems like maintaining a 2:1 ratio is ideal. I have some edta calcium around to do this, but my research on its necessity is incomplete. I believe @MGRox is knowledgable in this area, if he and/or @Capulator can chime in on this I'd appreciate it.

Also, I've been playing around with my irrigation schedule. Read an inspirational presentation some coco company made to Mexican tomato growers about this (http://www.myriadint.com.au/Mexico Presentation.pdf). So I bumped up from 3 irrigations daily to 4 evenly spaced, then to 5 yesterday. Basing the total irrigation volume off of the plants daily use with 20% added for runoff. This is all within an 8 hour window starting 2 hrs after lights on and ending 2 hrs. Before lights out. I also started logging the volume going in and the volume running off as well as the ph and ec of both. Was discussing this with @Funkadelic of he'd like to follow along.

Anyway, here's what happens when the flowers get too much N at the wrong time:
View attachment 595852 View attachment 595853 View attachment 595854 View attachment 595855 I'm not really sweating it as the ladies have just over a month left and I believe I've got their ratios back on track.

Oooh foxy lady...

 

[Savage Henry]

Thanks, @MGRox for laying it out for me. Fertilizer-wise things are going smoothly, sometimes when I'm playing with cannastats ill start grinding my gears more than is necessary.

However, overly stretched node spacing and foxtailing here may be related to watering frequency rather than N. With N to K ratios you can alter node stretching "relative to N", even in an N+ situation (particularly after floral initiation). However, ratios will not alter stretching with too high of water frequency. This is related to water being held in the medium relative to watering interval.

This is interesting, it aligns with my research about using irrigation timing and frequency to steer either vegetative or generative growth. The papers I've been reading are in reference to tomato growers but I believe their principals can me applied to our line of work:

So according to this, at least for tomatoes, for generative growth (I'm working under the assumption this can be applied to our flowering cycle) that allowing the medium to dry out 8-12% between irrigations steers the plant in the right direction. This apparently is combined with a higher ec and less runoff to achieve the same purpose.

I've been bumping up my number of daily irrigations while lessening to overall daily volume of them yet my runoff has been increasing while runoff ec has remained stable. According to this same paper the right move here is to irrigate less:

Whether this is referring to less overall or less frequently is a question I'll solve thru some experimentation. I've kept the total volume the same while reducing the amount of cycles from 6 to 5. We'll see what my runoff volume and numbers tells me tomorrow.

As for the fox tailing I'm thinking it may have to do with the fact that I'm not exchanging any air overnight and the residual co2 is just sitting in there. Same thing happened to this strain in a different run in a different room where I also did not exhaust/exchange any air during the night period, resulting in a bit of this:

So I'll install an exhaust blower set on a timer to run at night and we'll see if things calm down.

 

[Savage Henry]

In other news I've been getting a fungal tea together. Last round I applied one in weeks 6,7,8 on this 9 week strain. Pretty interesting stuff. After the first application a bunch of springtails showed up and ate all the dead-looking slimy roots on the top of the pots (hand-watering early on had removed any top layer of coco, my diy drip rings have solved that issue). The little guys acted like natures own crawling enzyme.

Anyway, I used Jeff Lowenfels tactic he outlines in teaming with microbes called "giving fungus a head start". My last fungal brews I did this by adding 3-4 tbsp of organic steel cut oats (ground to a powder) per cup of ewc. Added 30g each of the biowar root and foliar packs, and added enough water to make the mixture cohesive but not waterlogged. Put this in a clone tray with another on top and put it on a dark shelf on a heat mat. 3 days later it looked like this:

This time I changed the recipe up a bit:
1 solo cup ewc
8tsp insect frass
5 tbsp oatmeal
30g root and foliar

Stirred all this together dry then added dechlorinated water in roughly the same fashion then layed parchment paper of the clone tray and spread it out until it was roughly 1/4 inch thick, taking up much of the tray. No heat mat this time, just covered it the same way and put it on a shelf butting up against the flower room which has been in the mid-80s with 70-75%rh.
Checked on it 36hrs later and voila:

Looking damn perfect. I'm currently brewing this up in my 5gal bucket airlift Brewer with 1tbsp powdered kelp extract and 2tsp cytoplus and 4gal dechlorinated water. It's looking like I'll let it go for about 18hrs or so. I'm not sure yet if I'll dilute it into the resevoir or just pour it in the pots by hand.

I used to add the frass with the kelp and humic just to the brew, not the head start mix but I read a study this week about how chitin (chitosan, specifically) encourages the growth of endomopathenogenic fungus like metaharzium anisopliae and bacillus thuringensis (http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/3/4/757/pdf) which (along with several others) make up the biowar packs. This reminded me of a study I read forever ago about people multiplying the met through a similar process as the Lowenfels head start while adding chitin. Well, I have the frass around as a source of chitin so I figured I'd give it a shot.

I'll post up some canopy pics later when the lights come on.

 

[Savage Henry]

Day 45:

 

[Funkadelic]

In other news I've been getting a fungal tea together. Last round I applied one in weeks 6,7,8 on this 9 week strain. Pretty interesting stuff. After the first application a bunch of springtails showed up and ate all the dead-looking slimy roots on the top of the pots (hand-watering early on had removed any top layer of coco, my diy drip rings have solved that issue). The little guys acted like natures own crawling enzyme.

Anyway, I used Jeff Lowenfels tactic he outlines in teaming with microbes called "giving fungus a head start". My last fungal brews I did this by adding 3-4 tbsp of organic steel cut oats (ground to a powder) per cup of ewc. Added 30g each of the biowar root and foliar packs, and added enough water to make the mixture cohesive but not waterlogged. Put this in a clone tray with another on top and put it on a dark shelf on a heat mat. 3 days later it looked like this:View attachment 596752

This time I changed the recipe up a bit:
1 solo cup ewc
8tsp insect frass
5 tbsp oatmeal
30g root and foliar

Stirred all this together dry then added dechlorinated water in roughly the same fashion then layed parchment paper of the clone tray and spread it out until it was roughly 1/4 inch thick, taking up much of the tray. No heat mat this time, just covered it the same way and put it on a shelf butting up against the flower room which has been in the mid-80s with 70-75%rh.
Checked on it 36hrs later and voila:
View attachment 596753 View attachment 596754
Looking damn perfect. I'm currently brewing this up in my 5gal bucket airlift Brewer with 1tbsp powdered kelp extract and 2tsp cytoplus and 4gal dechlorinated water. It's looking like I'll let it go for about 18hrs or so. I'm not sure yet if I'll dilute it into the resevoir or just pour it in the pots by hand.

I used to add the frass with the kelp and humic just to the brew, not the head start mix but I read a study this week about how chitin (chitosan, specifically) encourages the growth of endomopathenogenic fungus like metaharzium anisopliae and bacillus thuringensis (http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/3/4/757/pdf) which (along with several others) make up the biowar packs. This reminded me of a study I read forever ago about people multiplying the met through a similar process as the Lowenfels head start while adding chitin. Well, I have the frass around as a source of chitin so I figured I'd give it a shot.

I'll post up some canopy pics later when the lights come on.

Deeply appreciate your science. Keep up the great work, please

 

[Savage Henry]

Obligatory canopy shot, day 51:

Details and such will follow in a bit.