A Walk Down Memory Lane - 8000W Bubba Perpetual

Hello everyone, 
 
There's so much I want to say. First and foremost, thank you to all the members of this community that share the beauty of this plant and help people create a deeper connection to it. I've learned a lot from this forum, and though this is my first post, I know this community well. 
 
My goal through this retroactive journal, if you will, is simply to give back. I am now at a stage in my life where I believe it would be a disservice to not share the mistakes I made, the things I learned, and the 1000's of gorgeous photos I took of this plant that I love. 
 
This journal will include:

• 300 Plants in 4 rooms
• Gorgeous Old School Bubba, Green Crack, Purple Kush
• Ebb n Flow w/ Rockwool
• Scrog 
• 8000 total watts by the end
• Hash Production
• Extensive Cloning Tutorial
• Bud Dryer Construction

and much more... 
 
So sit back and enjoy the show.  B)
 
 
 

 

In the beginning...
 
June 2009
 
After a rather disappointing tent grow in my bedroom...
 

 
To a slightly more successful run...
 

 
I was called by a friend who worked at a dispensary near my house. Apparently they were having trouble with some plants they were attempting to grow and needed me to come play doctor. 
 
I walk into the place and see 12 beaten up plants that had nearly every problem in the book. Some were nutrient burnt, some were heat stressed, some over-watered, and many of them covered in spider mites!   Not to mention they were all sitting in pots entirely too big for them. 
 

 
Despite the fact that I had only grown 6 plants by this time, it was clear that these plants were suffering. The clones in that box were in even worse shape if you can call it that. Their idea of cloning was sticking leaves into a cube completely saturated in water and throwing it under that 1000 watt.
 
So after careful observation, I told the owner that he must throw most of them away and start over. He was, shocked 
 
The owner spoke very little English and after much translation through my friend I convinced him to allow me to spend the next couple days reviving the plants. I immediately chucked the ones that were covered in spider mites - I mean they were so bad, there were networks of webs across the leaves and more brown spots than chlorophyll at that point.
 
Within one week, I made some decent progress and managed to quarantine the ones with less spider mites and take cuttings from them. I set up my t5's that I brought from home and built a little clone box underneath an office desk.
 


 
The owner saw this progress and was pleased.  He right there offered me a position and explained to me that he had $10,000 worth of hydroponic growing equipment being shipped by the end of the week and wanted me to set it up. 
 

 
 
Next: The Prep Work Begins...

 

 
Thanks man! I definitely have used almost every type of rockwool grodan makes. So don't you worry; you'll get to see plenty in this journal hahaha
 

 

 
Thanks for the kind words and I appreciate the warm welcome!
 
The boss scenario gets so much better. You're all in for a crazy story.
 
Tomorrow, we visit the setup and transition - and ultimately the beginning of my hydroponic journey.

 

June 2009 Cont.
 

 
Wow. So it was time to get my game face on! My mind began to flood with all of the possibilities! I had no idea what was due to arrive. All I knew is there were 3 decent plants in dirt, a couple clones barely hanging on, and 3 spider mite plants that I was spraying with neem oil religiously. I had brought most of my stuff from home at this point and set up a little workstation and I was grabbing random things from the hydro store as I needed it. 
 
Current state of affairs:
 



 
The last photo is cuttings I took from the spider mite plants. I cut the least infected areas and kept them completely separate in order to quarantine them. The only reason I kept them is because I had no idea what I was dealing with. The plants had tags but from what my friend told me, they were all mixed up and no one had any idea which plants were which. Due to the early stage of vegetation and the fact that I was a noobstick, I could not identify any of them. My strategy was to take as many cuttings as possible, label them, flower the soil plants, mother the cuttings and keep only the best. Natural selection at it's finest!
 
I finally got my hand on the invoice and I swear it was like reading Greek.   I didn't know dick about hydroponics and I suddenly began to feel over my head. But as someone I was too high to remember said, "fake it til' you make it!"
 
I immediately began to Google the shit out of hydro setups and found a couple journals on here as well as some other competing forums with growers who were using the same equipment. I began to immerse myself for hours in these forums often burning the midnight oil well into the morning. I figured out that I had all of the necessary equipment arriving for an Ebb n Flow setup with Hydroton. 
 
From what I can Remember:

• 2 4'x8' Trays
• 2 4'x4' Trays
• 4 1000 W Lights
• 4 Large Airhood Reflectors
• A couple 8" Can Fans 
• The shittiest ballasts anyone could ever ask for. I swear they made noises like they were going to explode... all the time.  
• Pumps
• 100 6" square pots.

Let me fill you in on this dispensary. It was on the second floor of a jewelry manufacturing building on the edge of the shady part of the city. The place was set back down a long hallway with a bunch of doors with no tenants behind them. The faint smell of ganja was about the only way you could navigate your way to the place. There was no welcome sign, no green cross, just a doorbell and a camera.
 
Once you finally made it inside, it was actually well decorated. Your typical marley and budporn posters were scattered on the walls. Nice looking cheap pleather couches bordered the room along the fake wood floors. There was a desk with the clipboards, computer and printer where you'd register. Beyond that door was the 'showroom'  with everything cased in glass, some standard magnifying lamps and a custom paintjob on the wall that led to the back door. Beyond that door was a large office space with more pleather couches, a coffee table, one big boss desk, one cheap desk and a book shelf. Adjacent to this was two more smaller rooms. Those were the rooms I had available to do whatever I wanted with.
 
So as a few pieces began to arrive, I started prepping the spaces. 
 
Room 1

Room 2

 
I made a trip to the hardware store and bought a bleach sprayer pump and multiple bug bombs. You can see the spray cans on the chairs in the middle of the room. Before I left we set the bombs to go off and I spent the entire next day bleaching and scrubbing the walls and floors.
 
I wanted to treat it like a laboratory. My laboratory. Not to mention spider mites are not to be fucked with. To this day I have a nasty phobia of them. 
 
There is nothing quite like a clean slate. I had really less than I started with but felt so accomplished. I just sat and stared at these blank walls and floors which would soon be the canvas to my creation.
 
Next putting it together: piece by piece.

 

Mid June 2009
 
To give you better perspective, this is the layout of the office.
 

So with all the reading I'd done, I decided it would be best to model my grow after a guy named Al B. Fuqt who was doing Single Cola SOG on a 2 week rotation. He would basically just grow mothers in one room, take massive clones 8" tall and put them straight to flower in the other. Rinse and repeat 2 weeks later. 
 
I thought this would be a great idea so we could keep harvests coming in on a regular basis to fuel the dispensary out front. Boss sees continual progress so everyone is happy. The only issue is I still had these 3 plants in soil (I threw the other three away as they were a threat to my sterilized rooms). While I put everything together I would continue to take cuttings from them.
 

 
 
It was like Christmas...
 

 
I set up my tent I brought from home in room 2 and the 2 4x4 black trays next to it. The hole in the wall above the tent in picture 1 is where the ducting from room 1 would travel through. Since this was an old manufacturing building the outer walls were concrete with nowhere for the air to escape. My plan was to move it to above the main office area and let it disperse throughout the facility.
 
I am not sure what I had in mind with that duct setup in picture 2. Obviously I was dealing with 8" ducts with a 6" fan I had left over. I believe the splitter was in effort to take heat out of the tent while also pulling cool air through the reflector. 
 
With this tent setup, I could finally get those soil plants out of R1. 
 

 

 
I set up the pumps with a T split to make it effortless to drain the tanks since all I had was a tiny bathroom sink in the corner of the room. This sink was the only water/drainage source in the entire facility. 
 
 
Here is the subsequent layout after all of the changes.

Next: 
 
More failure.
 

 

July 2009
 
So this entire time I was waiting on the rest of the goods, I was trying my luck with cloning. I had failed many attempts as it had already been 3 weeks with no success.
 
Doubt is a killer, my friends. There's nothing worse than staring at a cutting with its stem inside a rockwool cube wondering if it's rooting or not. A few of them had leaves that were turning nasty colors so I sacrificed them to open up the cube and see. Nothing but a rotting stem.
 
I was researching the subject furiously. If I was unable to clone, then there was no future for this setup. The boss was getting worried.  We still only had 3 soil plants in a tent. I finally bought a heat mat because good ol' Al swore by them. The AC in this entire office was ran by one thermostat. In order to keep the tent cool I had to keep the AC at around 65 F. It was not ideal for the clones. So with this heat mat I hoped to solve the problem. 
 
Sure enough, a week later... Eureka! 
 

 
Amidst this success my impatient boss had already reached out to other friends in the industry who were also growing. They gave us one of their flowering plants so we'd have something to throw into flower right away. The issue was it was in hydroton. I had already sent back all of our hydroton for rockwool flock: 
 
Why?
 
Security. I'll explain. The office we were in was inside of a secure building which had operating hours of 8:00 AM - 6:00 PM. No one allowed in and out past that time because of the security risk (jewelry manufacturing). If a pump failed or something happened after we left, we would walk in 14 hours later to discover dead plants. The water retention of rockwool gives you a buffer of time in case you miss a watering where hydroton would not. Not to mention the cleaning and reuse of hydroton with our tiny sink would be a nightmare.
 
So back to this plant. I'm pretty sure this plant they gave us was what they called purple bubba. It was about 1 week into flowering already and was a little over 1 ft. tall. I wanted to transplant it from hydroton to rockwool so the other plants in rockwool were able to maintain a normal feeding schedule.
 
I now can say I do not recommend transplanting a flowering plant from hydroton to rockwool for many reasons other than the obvious. Needless to say the plant freaked out and went into shock and worse than that I had over saturated the rockwool causing it to be overwatered... Insult to injury. 
 

 
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The reason this happened was due to my own stupidity. Al used rockwool flock instead of the cubes because it was cheaper. I knew that rockwool in itself was naturally alkaline requiring it to be soaked in 5.0 ph'd water. In efforts to combat this I decided it would be a brilliant idea to take the whole massive bag and just let it soak in the tank and I'd just let it drain on its own. 
 

 
When you have this much rockwool completely soaked it will take years for it to drain out. I then started filling up pots with all this soaking rockwool in order for smaller batches of it to drain under the light. It was working.
 

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So I went into a panic and took cuttings from they dying plant as fast as possible hoping I could just revert them after they rooted. The plant died within a couple days after this. The boss was upset and I was losing points. 
 

 
Fortunately they perked up and continued to stay healthy. The three rooted clones were transplanted and placed in the mother tent. Since the 3 soil plants were still in there, I continued to handwater everything. I would just dunk the rockwool plants in a bucket of ph'd water when they needed it which was roughly every couple days. 
 

 
More success with clones started filling up the mother tent. 
 

 
I was a cloning machine at this point and my confidence was rising.
 

 
At last, I had a full tray!
 

 
Next: Automation 
 

 

Late July, 2009
 
The waiting game has started. I currently have a full tray of plants that have barely just taken root. The boss keeps asking me when I'm harvesting. I already had put the tray into flower a week earlier. 
 
Based on the SOG grow I was modeling mine after, Al was able to pull an ounce out of each single cola. I looked at this tray of 35 plants and said even if I end up doing 1.5 lbs then that's a good start and I could continue to fill the rest of the clones into the cycle.
 

 
In the meantime I was continuing to cut clones like crazy off the three nameless soil plants.
 

 
Here's the tray a couple days into flower. The node spacing on that clone looked really nice. Unfortunately not all the clones were this tall, which is the main requirement for single cola SOG. In fact this clone is a bit on the shorter side.  
 
I had already planned a vacation at the end of the month with my girlfriend. The tickets were booked far in advance and despite the circumstances at the dispensary there was no way I could cancel. I had to leave the grow in the hands of my friend.  Luckily the plants were still very infantile and I would only be gone for 8 days. I asked him to send me progress photos while I was gone.
 
August, 2009
 

End of the 2nd week of flowering
 
I did not instruct my friend to move the lights closer so the node spacing got out of hand. I wasn't sure if I should lop off the bottom branches or what.
 

The mother situation.
 
You can see in the bottom corner, one of the clones that I was trying to revert from flowering looks confused. Some crazy single leaves started coming out of this plant and the growth looked really awkward. 
 
So I finally got back from vacation at the end of the first week in August. Due to my lack of labeling I had these nameless plants that were looking very nice from the mother tent. I am assuming this is the "purple bubba". 
 

 
I cut clones for these as well and this time I believe I labeled them. At this stage there were the 3 soil plants that looked similar as well as the purple bubba. However, if you notice the bigger soil plant looks far more sativa than the other two. The labels that were originally in the other pots were:
 
OG Kush
Trainwreck
Diesel 
and something else. 
 
Here are the mothers before and after cloning:
 

 

I finally got this tray hooked up to a res so now the entire setup was on timers with pumps. 
 

End of 3rd week of flowering.
 
 
Next: Fytowhat?

 
 

 

Late August, 2009
 
So yes, Fytocell.
 
What a fuck up. Let me explain:
 
At this time I have less than a year of experience growing this plant and neither of the two previous harvests rendered successful results. I was desperate to prove myself.
 
Al recently posted that he was now using Fytocell. 
 

 

• Perfect water to air ratio at 60% water and 37% air
• great capilary action
• ph neutralized
• inert and biodegradable 

What's not to love?
 
Since I was not impressed with the rockwool flock (despite it working) I opted to follow suit and try the fytocell. I read the directions and cut a small hole in the bag and filled it with water and allowed it to drain. I must have missed the part where it says to let stand for a period of time and immediately transplanted a few clones in the fytocell. 
 


 
Overwatered, freaking out. I immediately pulled them from the fytocell and allowed it to drain properly.
 
But in more positive news the mothers were starting to gain traction now that I had their watering regulated and controlled. That weird flower revert was showing signs of improvement. At this point I already had removed the other 2 in soil and threw them into the flowering room.
 

 
 
 
September, 2009
 
Harvest time!!!  
 
The clones from the plant that I killed (purple bubba) were ready to harvest and I couldn't contain my excitement. It was the first bud that I grew that was actually worthy to smoke!
 

 
While I was doing cartwheels in my head the boss had a look of disappointment on his face. He saw 5 little sticks on a table that represented nothing close to an ROI. It would probably barely cover the lunch we had that day. I had to curb my excitement and explain that this was the beginning and convinced him this was all part of the plan, which was partially true. 
 
We didn't even know what this plant would turn out like and after further inspection, he was quite impressed with the product despite the yield not being what he expected. Even in these shitty iphone 3g photos, it was evident we had a sugar coated fast flowering plant. 
 
The Sea of Green approach at this point was rendering unworthy results but I was determined with the proper sized clones that I could replicate Al's success. 
 

 
At least the clones I had on lock.
 

 
Next: Momentum

 

 
Awesome! Thank you for the compliment 
 
I was hoping I wasn't boring the audience with the narrative.   Don't worry about the photos, I get a new camera come Christmas time