All I can say is WOW! No wonder I could never get a good grow in the past. There is so much more than planting a seed and watching it grow.
I am getting ready for my first grow and going a better route. I made a small investment in the tools. Purchased some seeds. On my next day off I am heading to ACE to get some soil, pots and nutrients (provided they carry what I have been reading are good).
Unlike other things I buy tools for and jump in... mistakes here are time consuming. An entire grow period can be wasted on lack of knowledge. Where I am not expecting a professional grade grow, I am realistic, I would like to have a successful 1st grow. For example.... I purchased seeds with higher THC levels fully expecting to get less until I get more experienced. I have a very high tolerance as I am a daily smoker so I hope that I can at least grow a crop that will have some affect on me.
Where I am getting confused is there are so many different responses to a situation. It can be hard to find an answer at times. The whole chemical thing still has me baffled. LOL.
If anyone here would be willing to help me I can trade services. I am a semi retired graphic designer including photo and video editing. I also program in PHP and more recently, 3D animation and modeling.
I am starting with 3 seeds (if they all sprout lol I have 2 extra in case) Different strains all with very similar climates and grow periods. I hope that nutrients will also be similar, this area is my most problematic. I have also seen nutrients that will boost the flavor. ( I wanna say also add flavor? if I read correctly).
My goals are:
A fair yield
Decent THC level
Not have to rely on someone else to get my supply.
Most important - Does not taste homegrown!!!
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help
theres no one way to grow a plant and get flowers "right"
One key here, is to not treat differing options as conflicting information, just exactly what they are, different options :)
A lot of newer growers take two conflicting statements from veteran growers as conflicting information, when often, the truth is, these veteran growers just grow differently then one another lol.
Good point. I think theyāll test hardness, too.
FWIW, hardness is an indicator of buffering potential. Better is when they list CaCO3. Generally if water is hard and pH high, it has high buffering potential. CaCO3 is a better indicator. It has 4 ranges from soft to very hard. The higher the number, the greater the buffering potential. 0-60 soft, 60-120 moderate hard, 120-180 Hard, 180+ very hard.
If you care about pH then you need to care about buffering potential/hardness. Buffering for this purpose is the capacity to maintain pH. PH high but CaCO3 is 30, who cares. It lacks buffering potential so any acidic environments quickly acidify your water. Water that comes from a limestone aquifer, howdy Texas hill country, might have a pH of 9 and a CaCO3 hardness of 240. Youāll have to buy pH down by the gallon to overcome that. Worse youāll think youāve got the pH down only to check it the next day and the pH has bounced right back up.
Is this important? Beats me. It can be critical for newborn pigs and tropical fish. It would indicate you could potentially have pH issues in soil if pH is high and hardness is vey high, and like Paul Harvey would say, it is the rest of the story.
PH is chemically one of the single most important parameters you can monitor with plants being cultivated in non organic grow methods.
If you have hard well water, i generally just recommend investing in an RO filter and
cal-mag supplements. My well water is full of heavy metals, and smells like boiled eggs lol. Its drilled through an old capped off land fill form the 60s. I dont even give it to my dogs. I keep an RO filter around, potassium bicarbonate, and cal mag.
If your water is hard enough with the right gasses and minerals in it, and you grow in containers, it will kill your plants even if you stabilize the PH before using it. Even if growing organically in a container. This water tends to be fine for plants planted in ground with a locally heathy soil ecosystem though, as there are microorganisms usually present capable of processing most of these minerals into plant usable forms.
Often if you PH adjust very hard well water, and dont let it sit to precipitate the hydrochloric salts you end up creating out of solution, it will end up depositing those as salts into the soil. IIRC Calcium in hard water as an acetate loves to precipitate in soil as useless to plants calcium hydrochloride salt build up when the PH of the water is dropped below neutral. Only certain soil bacterias and fungi can even process calcium HCL at all.
When root zones go acididc in hydro growing methods, the reason calcium deficiency pops up in leaves so fast, is because its an immobile nutrient, and you can actually chance the calcium acetate within the structure of the leaf itself to calcium HCL, which is useless to the plant. The nutrient is immobile, so once damage is done you cant undue it either. Cannabis prefers an acidic leaning PH, even more so in hydro, and this is why calcium/magnesium lockout through acidic PH can be so common with newer synthetic fert growers, and is often misdiagnosed as
cal-mag deficiency, further compounding problems.
The reason a lot of growers prefer using all this information to their advantage,. and grow entirely using synthetic feeds is entirely because the result can vastly eclipse anything organic grow methods can even begin to approach.
That doesnt say its better though, just that some people are indeed more concerned with quantity over quality.
Ph isnt that important in most contexts of soil growing, but in the rest of them, it is absolutely 1000000% mission critical. Crucial. You will not achieve results like this without monitoring it, and keeping it exactly where it needs to be, at all times.
All that being said, most growers dont need to pull colas like this, and it would quickly become old weed that never got smoked before it was just kinda old and lame if you were chasing yields over quality. But the quality of runs like this are nothing to shake a stick at themselves.
Some living soil grown organic buds full of that sweet sweet nectar that is organically grown cannabis resin though, you're not going to get that being all scientist about your cannabis. Not at all. It's not even possible growing like this. But you'll prob never see colas the size of a baseball bat testing at 36% doing that either.
There does not exist a growing method of merit without a list of pros and cons lol