PPs Journal

Thanks for the advice! I appreciate it.

 

Thanks Poke! First I'll try increasing the hours of light, and then if that still doesn't stop them from flowering, I'll try asking loki. I don't think I've ever met him before.

 

Just wanted to write a quick update, in case anyone was curious about growing cannabis using aquaponics (where water from a fish tank is feeding the plants (http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/)).
 
I threw one of my clones into the system to do another test run. My change for this trial was to keep an eye on the pH, because sometimes in the last trial the pH was getting too high. For this run I kept the pH between 6.0 and 6.5 the entire time (it wasn't difficult to do, and I only had to adjust it once or twice). The plant still showed the same problems as the last run: it was growing fine until flowering started, and then the leaves and pistils started looking sick and dried out. This seems to be what others have posted on the internet when they tried to grow cannabis using aquaponics (AP).
 
I don't think I'm going to experiment with using AP for cannabis anymore. For my next run I'll be using soil, under the same 1,200 watt lights. I still use my AP system for growing other vegetables, like kale, lettuce, carrots, beets, green beans, etc... and for all those plants it's working wonderfully. But for whatever reason it doesn't seem to be growing my cannabis very well.
 
If anyone figures out a way to grow cannabis using AP, it would be nice if you could share that info here, so that we all could learn. The nice thing about AP is that it's extremely easy to maintain: the most "work" is simply feeding the fish once a day.
 
 

 

Yeah, it's very possible that the pH was still too high for the weed. But in AP we try to keep the pH above 6.0 for the fish's health.
 
It's possible that there's some kind of "trick" to get mj to grow well with AP, but I'm tired of experimenting with it. At least when I switch to soil I won't be in the "experimental" realm anymore, and I can feel confident that I'll probably end up with a good final product.
 
I subscribed to your new journal a couple days ago, but I haven't gotten through all the posts yet. I'm planning on catching up sometime soon!

 

I'm having much better success with soil than with aquaponics. I'm using BAS's organic soil with fabric pots.
 
This is a plant 2 weeks into flowering. It has the same air temps, air circulation, and lighting as my aquaponic plants. It's about 20 inches tall.


 
Compare that to my final aquaponics experiment which was growing right beside the above plant. The plant obviously looks very sickly.

 

 

I'm really happy with my current setup. I'm using 5-gallon fabric pots with organic soil. This plant is 3 weeks into flowering. (Sorry I had to black out some of the background).

My only remaining question is if I should use plastic or fabric pots next time. Maybe I'll do a side-by-side comparison sometime.

 

Do you guys think it's normal for the plants to be producing lots of new pistils 3 months into flowering?