Hello GC! This will be my first post under this alias but years ago I used to post under Buddha88 and since loosing touch with the community, I wanted to get a fresh start back into the world that is GrassCity. For the purpose of this journal well be using several indoor tents to demonstrate a larger scale indoor grow with the hopes that individuals out there can take away sections and ideas to apply at home. Disclaimer: This is a legal California medical 215 garden. We take extreme measures to ensure that we operate well within the scope of the law and strongly encourage all of you out there to check your local laws before embarking on the adventure that is your own medical garden. That said lets jump right into it and start breaking down the setup. The first part of any setup is ensuring that you have a proper space. For apartment growing you will almost always want to use a bedroom. If stealth is important key things you will want to ensure are minimal windows, no breaker box, plenty of available electrical load(dedicated fuse preferred), and no on-suite bath. If this sounds like an odd list of requirements, its more geared at keeping landlords and maintenance away from your grow. Any appliance, A/C, or electrical maintenance may require them to access the breaker panel. Broken windows have to be replaced, the more you have statistically the more at risk you are(in order to prevent light leaks I would recommend covering your windows anyways.) Also the on-suite bath could present plumbing issues. Finally, I mentioned a dedicated fuse. Apartments are usually not wired for large electrical loads(newer apts may be). For example both of my bedrooms share one 15amp fuse. This is definitely something you will want to check into before you begin planning on how many lights to set up. Be sure to factor in your non grow related electricity and allow a buffer so that you do not run the risk of electrical overload. With the room selected and those few key things in mind we can begin to prepare our equipment and tents. I strongly recommend tents if you'll be growing in an apartment. They are cheap, easy to assemble, and will not permantently damage the dwelling. Your landlord might also be a little more tolerant should they stumble upon a tent and not a room full of tents. Other advantages include ease of environmental control, enhanced light performance(discussed further later), and easier pest management. Moving forward all the information will be geared specifically at tent growing but should you have a question for your specific setup please do not hesitate to ask. Tent growing is probably one of the simlest ways to break down grow room construction and in my opinion we can break it down into 4 extremely easy parts: Selecting a tent, Selecting a Light, Ventilation, and External Controls. Selecting a tent is exactly what it sounds like. They come in all shapes in sizes, cheap to expesive, and yes there are huge differences in the $100 tents and $400 tents. To outline some of them here you go: Cheap tents will have inferior stitching and more lightleaks(pinprick wholes in the fabric), be sure to check the mesh ventilation on cheaper tents they are not always solid and can sometimes let in large amounts of light, always get a mylar lining. Thats a couple things to look for, bottom line is its tricky sometimes and while you can get great tents cheap there are definitely lemons out there. If you're looking at specific tents shoot me your questions. Lighting. First decide if this is a vegetative or bloom tent or perhaps youll be using it for both. In any case get the dimensions of your tent for examply my 4x4 would give me 16 square feet. The ideal lumen per square foot for vegetative growth is 3-5000 lumens per square foot and 5-7000 for bloom. Personally I encourage the 5000 and 7000 numbers respectively in order to generate maximum photosynthesis but if you're on a budget or wattage crunch, be sure to hit those minimums or alter your plan. If your using one tent for both phases you may consider a dimmable ballast in order to conserve some electrical cost. There's no point going over the max there is a maximum rate to photosynthesis and unless you're supplementing CO2 you pretty much push it at 5 and 7. Another note on lighting is that should you choose to use anything larger than a 4 foot tent i would consider using 2 lights. This will give you a better footprint and more even plant development. Ventilation is really your fan and filter. I suggest taking the cubic footage of your tent multiplying it by 5 and buying a fan close to that number(round up not down). If you can ventilate into a neighboring room as I have(see pictures) then you can use a multiple of 3. Buy an appropriately rated filter and you're all set. Interior circulation is I think best achieved through our mini fan setup most easily described through the attached photos. Zip ties and pressure hold them in place and with a little practice you'll get the hang of it. External controls are what really make all of this so easy. The reality is that by controlling the temperature/humidity of your dwelling you control the conditions in your tent. If it's too hot/cold you adjust the thermostat accodingly and your A/C unit adjusts the entire setup. Humidity control can be applied in the same manner but treat the grow room not the whole house. Pest management can be segregated in this same manner. In my experience should pest/bacteria infect one tent it usually will not become an issue in the others and this makes it much easier to deal with or minimizes the loss. Well there I think that was long winded enough hopefully some information was useful. Plenty of Pictures attached so please see them for details and feel free to come at me with any questions. Next well move into my plants and grow methods and round out whats in the boxes and whats on deck. To move on to our plants well start with our cloning area, move onto our vegetative area and then finally the bloom space. I'll break down everything best I can but theres alot going on so if you have questions ask. Cloning we use a pretty typical setup. Wire chrome shelf with T8 LED. Recently switched to the LED so I'll let you know how I like it compared to fluoro. Out of the box I was pretty impressed with twice the lumens for half the wattage so well see how they do. I clone in 2" RW cubes using clonex rooting soluting and their nutrient solution. I recently tried Life and do not recommend that product. Clonex is where it's at and nothing roots faster in my opinion. The ones pictures are all DJ Short Blueberry Day 8 from cutting. Most of them have rooted in the block just waiting for them to break through. I did this batch with Life and I would say its about a day or two behind in development compared to Clonex. The Veg and bloom rooms are pretty much identical. They are all approximately 4x4 (1veg, 2 bloom), with a 600 watt light. I use 4", 1 gal square, and 2 gal round pots respectively(see pictures). We use happy frog mixed with 50 cups of Super coarse perlite. I do not recommend using any kinds of fine perlite. For nutrients we use Canna Terra with Liquid Karma and the occassional powder Myco supplement. I will discuss all that stuff in depth later in the journal as they come up. Finally I think i will give you a list of the strains we have and be done with it. Vegetative Girl Scout Cookies Gorilla Glue #4 Alien OG Blue Dream Kryptonite Blueberry Indica Blueberry Platinum Bubba Kush Bloom Bubba Fresh(Banana OG x Bubba Kush from NorStar Genetics) Cookie Lady I hope I wasn't too long winded in my first post here today. My intention is to be helpful so please if theres anything I can do to improve this post or otherwise change or add to it, Please let me know. Thanks GC! Mr. Sensi
Appreciate the feedback and the like! I'll be adding tutorials(nutrients, cloning, etc.) as they come up in my journal so please check back for updates.
Hey Blades! So we had a little work today just wanted to post an updated. In the bloom tent we moved the 2x Bubba Fresh into new containers. I just wanted to talk about the logic and our methodology a little. We move our plants from 4" to 1 gal to 2 gal to 3 gal always taking the smallest jump possible. This allows the plant to fill the container ASAP and maximize growth/watering rates. Don't be afraid to transplant midbloom. You're plants will barely feel it if you know what you're doing. I want to talk a little bit about root pruning real quick. I believe this is an extremely important part of the transplant process. Root pruning is best achieved by making shallow, vertical cuts at the noon, 3, 6, and 9 positions of your plant(imagine the pot is a clock face). You also will want to cut a shallow "X" into the bottom of the plant. This opens up the root ball and helps to relieve any root bound stress. It will also stimulate increased rooting and help the roots to move out into the new space with increased vigor. Also there is one more extrememly important reason to root prune. If you are using rooting enhancers like Rhizotonic for example they are completely ineffective unless they are absorbed into the roots and into the plant. In order for this to happen at an optimum level, there has to be an open lesion that allows the supplement to be absorbed. With the opening, the rate of absorbtion is often too low to be effective. For that reason we personally only apply such supplements at transplant. Today post transplant we watered heavily with a mixture of Rhizotonic and Liquid Karma. This mix is aimed at helping to establish and promote a boom of new roots and also to maintain and boost our Myco's. The final benefit I see in our method is the new addition of fresh organic matter. By adding new soil to the container we should stabilize our pH and be able to maximize soil conditions. We should also now have enough fertilizer in the soil to carry us through the end of this grow and eliminate the need for most supplemental fertilizer. I hope maybe some of you were able to find that informative. No pics today as it's kind of hard to snap and depict transplanting but i think you get the idea of it. Any questions please let me know. We should be starting a new batch of flowers and our DWC in the next week. Stay tuned!
Hello GC! Time for a small update on whats going on around this APT! My second box had been open so i just switched over a new crop of 12 plants into there yesterday. 3x Platinum Bubba Kush, 3x Alien OG, 1x Gorilla Glue #4, 1x Girl Scout Cookies, and 2x Blue Dream. I'll be adding 1 Blueberry in a couple weeks as well. Pics are included. Most of them are between 1 and 2 feet going into bloom. hoping to keep them between 3 and 4 feet at finish but first time with the Gorilla Glue and this particular Blue Dream supplier. Thats leaving my veg tent pretty bare but I'm hoping to get a fresh new batch of blueberry going in there to help keep things full and moving. Clones are rooted but they've been a little slow bursting through the cubes. The other bloom tent is in the latter half of flowering. The Bubba Fresh is starting to ripen and i expect withing the next 20 days it should be ready to go. I've been waiting a long time for this strain, the combination Banana OG and Bubba Kush seems just finger licking good. Expect plenty of pics as we approach the finish. The Cookie Lady is really putting on weight and this is looking like a fantastic strain. If the nugs keep the Cookie density then this will be a super heavy yielding strain. Probably another 30-40 days left on that one but I will keep the updates going as this strain was only produced on a limited basis and I haven't seen a lot of info out there on it. Purple Caper Seeds was the original breeder and Dark Heart Nursery was dispensing cuts in the San Jose Area. I'll be putting some tutorials up here related to pH issues and a cloning how to as well. If there is any other information I can share with the community or if any of your are interested in these strains, Holla!
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. We have had a ton going on around here. Up here in NorCal the outdoor season is really kicking off and I've been busy cloning/vegging plants to help others in need. Some quick notable updates. Veg Box All the mothers were chopped and we got a huge very successful batch of Gorilla Glue, Girl Scout, Plat Bubba, Alien OG, and Blue Dream clones which will be the next set of plants to hit the tents. Only another few days til they're ready for soil. I also recycled a batch of trashed yellowed off clones and they're now vegging. I'll post pics later of these today so that the community can see how easy it is to take literally half dead plants and bring them back to shining life. I also abandoned LED's for vegging, if you're interested in why or have questions about my experience let me know, IMO though they are shit for vegging(hint hint they caused the trashed batch). Final note, I will begin using tissue culture around there to start replicating my plants in the next week. So if youre interested look for that journal to come. Rounding up the supplies now and waiting for some plants to reveg so we can get it all going. Bloom Box 1 The bubba fresh is near harvest. Should be ready by end of next week. looks delicious and anxiously awaited. The cookie lady has a bit more but this one is a real beauty in my opinion. makes me wish i had kept some clones. pics of both to come and both are looking beautiful. Bloom Box 2 Plants have just started to bud. I will probably lollipop this evening time permitting and post before/after shots for those plants. All and all they have really gotten big and I'm hoping they keep on strong. Like I said I will upload plenty of pics tonight of clones, vegging, blooms so check back for progress.
Yes indeed! the MS and hormones are a little steep cost wise and my computer just took a crap(hard disk failed) so I'm hoping to get everything within the month. I will start a separate journal just for that when the time comes!
So I'm about to upload some pics just wanted to break down some of whats in there. On the little plants you can see the progression in recovery from left to right. There's only about 10 days difference in planting between the yellowest to greenest. I just see a lot of people out there saying you cant save sick plants and that's just not true. The next are the heading cuts on my mother's. IMO if your growing in confined spaces, cutting your mother's back in this fashion will get you a better set of regrowth and will help to manage their size while providing strong healthy cuttings. Happy to answer more questions on the specifics of that if someone has them. Next is just the new buds from our younger blooms. Looking healthy and strong and they're pretty much on auto pilot. In the other box of almost finished buds we had a little bit of PM break out on the Bubba Fresh. It wont affect the finish of the buds but I do spray Need oil on the other plants to help prevent the spread. In my experience Neem is your best defense/attack against PM, which seems to be a plague amongst people I know in California. Anyways here are the pics and as always questions/comments appreciated.