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.