Hi Meeks - you know I love your work. It is amazing. Your thoughtful posts and responses to questions are much appreciated and your pictures are ridiculous. So I bring my questions to you.
Hey, I'm gonna try to break your post up, hopefully this works!
Daylight savings. You said something about changing time for this but I was not sure what you meant. Can you change your flower time gradually (or quickly for that matter) if you would like to change your on/off time during the day?
I usually don't change my flowering time once I have the flip set, however I think the plants would continue to flower as long as you maintained a 12 hour dark period during a transition. I might have been thinking about my timers being set to turn the lights on and run irrigation at 8am, but with daylight savings it would now be 9am when all that actually happened.
Regarding something unrelated to my question below you once said: “The easy concept to understand how to keep your plants happy is that they like consistency (hopefully in the ideal range), and you already know that.” To me it seems natural that plants need conditions to stay within parameters but is it not possible that fluctuation within those parameters is better than consistency? With the RDWC folk, it seems the good growers allow their ph to fluctuate. What do you think about ph fluctuations in coco?
(I can see why you have a questions here, that quote of me is a very poorly worded sentence, haha)
If you take a look at the picture below, which I'm sure you have seen before, you will see that some nutrients may become much more available at the upper end of the ideal range, while others are more readily available at the lower end. This is why the people growing with just water as their substrate are finding it helpful to vary their ph a little within the desired range. In a normal soilless potting mix there will be a slight variation in how each tiny piece of substrate releases nutrients. That is why most commercial systems will find an ideal pH for the nutrient solution and apply that with consistency, knowing that there will always be minor pH swings in the mixing tank and media.
Is there some easy method of mixing salts that you are aware of other than manually?
You can always do what all these fancy pants liquid nutrient companies do and mix up a few bottles of concentrate with a liter or two of water, just making sure to keep certain thing separate so they dont change form and lockout. What I do personally is weigh out my salts in advance for tank refills into ziplock bags and just have those on hand ready to fill up with a cup of water, shake, and dump into the res when it needs recharging.
Jack said he popped 1000 OGR seeds before he found a true keeper. What are your thoughts on that?
Jack had the space to do true seed runs, all the rest of us are just jokers hoping to win the lottery.
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Well that's not quite true, I'm sure some breeders do actually work their parent lines down pretty far, really selecting for specific traits in the females with each generation and better yet some of those actually get lucky enough to find an excellent male that is distant enough genetically to work with, and that creates the very few and far between true F1 hybrids within our industry. And true F1 hybrids have excellent vigor and uniformity to the point where you could not tell one plant from the next based on performance.
A while back you said you do not use rooting compound for clones. Why not and do you recommend this?
I don't use it because it is not needed so I have not spent the money on it. Preventing water loss from the cutting is the only thing required, and eventually roots will form in an area that is suitable for root growth (minimal light, moisture and oxygen available)
Depending on how well you can control your propagation environment you may want to use a rooting hormone to help encourage rooting in less ideal conditions.
Would you mind providing some details regarding your flushing method/timing during the grow?
I like to start my flush two week before I start harvest, and I usually harvest over the course of a long weekend, so some plants go more like 17 days without nutrient input. When I say 'flush', I am no longer recharging my reservoir with nutrients after filling it up to the top when it is getting low. That means for the first 5-6 days there is still some amount of nutrients in the solution I am watering with, but it is being diluted rapidly each time I refill the 20 gallon tank with just RO water. I will also hand water (just RO) the volume of the container to each plant twice during this 2 week time, once at the beginning and then again a week in.
I believe I saw that most recently you are watering during heavy flower three times a day. That is during the lights on right? Do they drink much during lights out?
Yes, only water during lights on. The plant uses much less water at night because the stomata are closed so the transpiration stream is stopped. Watering frequency depends on the size of the root mass and the stage of growth the plant is in and even the humidity. I did not irrigate more frequently than 3 times a day during this flowering cycle and began by only irrigating once a day when the plants were smaller in the first couple weeks.
You are getting these awesome results with nothing but nutrients right? No banana extracts or molasses or anything other than nutes?
Just dry salt nutrients.
I have not seen anyone else ask this many questions in one post. So I have that going for me.
Thanks again for everything. Peace.
I think you take the cake PDX, thanks for posting this in the log, I am happy to answer questions! Let me know if you have any other questions because these were all good ones that I had not talked about directly. And of course, thanks you very much for the kind words!
Meeks great fuckin work bro!!! Every single shot is amazing!
Shit, Thanks Jeezer! :cool:
I have a quick set of photos that I took yesterday before the first bit of harvest! I will try to take some photos again during trimming before they are dry nugs!
Day 60 White Skunk
-Meeks
