Pot Plant In My Shower Stall

Hey, GC! Alatar the Blue here with indoor grow journal #2. Here's what we got goin' on:


Flowering room (shower stall)
1 x HTG Supply Gen3 90 watt LED UFO
2 x 55 watt 2700K CFLs
2 x 40 watt 2700K CFLs
1 x small stationary fan
Current occupant: The Morrigan, a bag seed clone that vegged for 30 days and has been in 12/12 for 3 days. Medium: Two parts Fox Farm Ocean Forest to one part perlite. 2 gallon pot.



Vegetation Shaft (closet)
1 x HTG Supply 4 ft. 4 bulb HO T5 lamp, 216 watts of mixed spectrum lighting
1 x small stationary fan
Current occupants:
Lucille, a Barney's Farm LSD plant from seed that broke the surface 24 days ago.
Medium: four parts Fox Farm Ocean Forest to one part perlite. 3 gallon pot.
Freyja, a bag seed clone that has vegged for 33 days.
Medium: four parts Fox Farm Ocean Forest to one part perlite. 2 gallon pot.


The Goal

Our goal is to harvest a plant about once a month.


The Plan


Our plan is to veg out Lucille, our Barney's Farm LSD girl, for the next month, get a couple of clones off her, and then stick her in the flower room with The Morrigan. We don't have a plan for Freyja. I guess we'll call her the backup plan. Then we run LSD clones for a while. That's enough of a plan for the time being, I think. I have some other seeds. We'll get to those eventually.


Pot plant in my shower stall

 

The Morrigan, our bag seed queen in 12/12




Lucille, the Barney's Farm LSD princess



Freyja, runner-up in the bag seed queen in the shower stall competition. We're not sure why she is still here.

 

Lucille, when I first laid eyes on her. She's the one on the right.



2009-11-07 The seed goes into the water



2009-11-11 Helmet head. Our special needs child.



Direct intervention was required



The membrane eventually required direct intervention as well.



2009-11-12 Seedling



2009-11-17 Seedling day 7



2009-11-24 Seedling day 14. Our special needs child started slow.

 

2009-12-01 Vegetation, day 1





2009-12-05 Vegetation, day 5

 

2009-08-31 Once upon a time, we had a plant named Big Girl.



2009-10-03 She was a big girl in a big 7 gallon pot.



2009-10-10 But then she got sick.



2009-10-11 Big Girl got sicker and sicker, and we couldn't do anything about it. People on GC tried to help us, but we could not be helped.



2009-10-19 Eventually Big Girl died, but before she did, we took some cuttings.



2009-10-18 This is the last photo of Big Girl



This was my first time taking cuttings. Diseased cuttings from a diseased plant. What could go wrong?

2009-10-28 The Morrigan was one of the cuttings. Here's a shot of her on day 11 of rooting. Maybe I should write a cloning tutorial.


You know, that probably wasn't the best picture to choose. That was one of her off days. The Morrigan can be moody. Here's a canopy shot from about the same time.


2009-11-13 But The Morrigan had her good days as a clone as well, and eventually she made it into a pot.




That's it for part one of our retrospective on The Morrigan. I need a break.

 

2009-11-20 Here's a shot of The Morrigan with her sister, Freyja. Freyja is not getting her own retrospective pictorial, so I thought I'd throw her a bone. This is day 19 of vegetation. You can see in the photo that The Morrigan is hungry. That quickly blooms into full fledged malnutrition in both plants, which sets them back a bit. Hey, it's a process.



2009-11-23 Vegetation day 22. The Morrigan gets her first taste of LST. There is a riot of dense growth around her core. Stretching all the longer branches out toward the perimeter of the pot opens up the middle, lets some light in there. Vigorous growth results.



2009-11-29 Group shot. That's The Morrigan on the left, Freyja on the right and Lucille in the middle.



2009-11-30 Vegetation day 29. The Morrigan gets her second round of LST.



2009-12-01 Vegetation day 30. The Morrigan's last day of 18/6, and we have a few tops.



2009-12-05 12/12 day 4. The Morrigan is waving her tops about like a true tart. Gotta love that in a pot plant.



So that means it's time to tie her down again. This hobby has fetishistic possibilities.



So that makes us kinda current. Freyja gets short shrift, as always. That girl needs better representation.

Off topic entirely, it has been two weeks since my first crop went into the jar (singular). Two weeks. They call that a minimal cure. So I'm smoking home grown tonight for the very first time ever. And I am high. This is definitely, without a doubt, the most expensive weed I have ever smoked. Money well spent.

Coming Up Next

The Morrigan has preflowers all over the place. Actual flowering is imminent.

Lucille's fifth set of leaves is just starting to come in. Can a topping be far behind? I think we're going to see a topping. A full throated topping, mind you. None of this FIM fastidiousness. An outright decapitation. Get ready to stretch your neck, Lucille.

Freyja sulks and wonders when it will be her turn in the flowering room.

It's good to have a journal again, and a pot plant in my shower stall.

 

Check it out. I have visitors! Hey Myles, thanks for stopping by.

Yeah, it was sad. The clones were my consolation. I kept part of that plant alive. And the whole episode motivated me to shell out for a Hanna pH meter, so it wasn't a total waste. A larnin' experience.

Nah, you were right the first time. It was pH lockout. Well, maybe we can throw in nutrient burn on top of that. The aquarium pH test kit I was using was giving me way bad readings. So Big Girl starved to death in the midst of plenty. I kept the cuttings alive till they rooted by foliar feeding them Grow Big in distilled water.

Hey, Myles, my spies tell me you have a bunch of seeds on order. Rumor has it that a spring grow is in the offing. Good deal. I look forward to reading about it, though I expect that's going to be a fairly messy grow journal, judging by the ones you frequent. They are gonna trash your journal, Myles. We're not going to be able to find the grow in the journal.

Don, don't forget the built-in soap dish. We have all the amenities in the shower stall.

Since I'm growing with LED and CFLs, ventilation is not much of an issue yet. I don't have much heat. I suspect I'll get there eventually though. Those CFLs multiply. I think it happens at night.

Thanks for dropping in, Don. And thanks for not noticing the dangling extension cords and such. I'll be seeing you around campus, I'm sure. I've already got a seat in your grow journal and I could probably benefit from a little more time spent in the Grow Room Design/Setup forum.

 

They are closing in on it, I think. The unit I have, a 90 watt UFO, is not enough of a producer to do a good grow on its own. That's what I think. Mind you, there's a guy on GC right now who is doing a nice SCROG of four plants with a single 90 watt UFO, and it looks like he's getting legit results, so maybe its closer to adequate in more skilled hands.

There is a SCROG in my future. I can feel it. I've got to figure out a relatively facile way to mount a screen in my shower stall without defacing the shower stall.

But more recent LED light designs like the jumbo UFOs and the Hydro-Grow-LED Penetrators look like they are much closer to going toe to toe with HIDs. We have a couple of comparison tests going on right now that should tell us some things. You probably know about Rumple's Prosource 180 watt Jumbo UFO test. Irishboy is doing a side by side test grow pitting the Prosource 180 watt Jumbo UFO against the Hydro-Grow-LED 126 watt Penetrator.

There is lots of interesting LED activity going on on GC. We just formed an LED Growers social group. Five years from now we may be telling noobs tall tales about the days of horrendously hot HIDs.

Those shiny new toys are awfully pricey, though.

 

Thanks, Ed. Good to have you along for the ride.

We have some happy plants right now. We'll see how long I can keep them that way. I'm one of those guys who's all thumbs, none of them green, but I am making some slow progress in a horticultural direction. There is hope for me, I think. And it's comforting to know that you will be popping in to peer over my shoulder from time to time. You have a way with plants, Ed. I can tell.

This here's an old fashioned soil grow. None of those space age media. I am eying that coco coir, though. I think I'll be trying that soon, as in as soon as my current bag o' dirt runs out. I already have my supplier lined up. And when that happens, I'm going to start pestering you about watering regimes.

Baps! Good to see ya. Glad you like the journal so far. Yeah, I opened my first journal with a wall of text, but I got the impression that no one besides myself was reading it all. I thought I'd go the picture route this time. Everybody likes pictures and they are good for telling a story.

The Morrigan has her tops waiving in the breeze again, the strumpet. Since I tied down all the tops at the perimeter of the pot, some tops in the middle have caught up and now they are lording it over everyone else. We'll have to reign them in a bit. I'm shooting for a nice, even canopy, a screen-less SCROG. I've seen some growers pull that off nicely. We'll have to see if I can manage something close.

I'm a LST enthusiast, for sure. If you are growing with CFLs and/or LED then you really need to do something to get the plant growth to be more horizontal. And it is amazing how much LST promotes new growth and generates new tops. Plus, it gives me an excuse to mess with my plants.

I'll be over there as soon as your update posts, Baps. Enjoy your day.

 

Don,

It makes perfect sense and sounds like good advice. Thanks. My first go-round, we used the Miracle-Gro soil with time release ferts. A nasty business, that.

With these two clones, I did go from the peat pellets directly to 2 gallon pots, and I planted as soon as a I had some root tips protruding from the peat pellets. But I did baby them along for a while with frequent light waterings, on the advice of my wife (she's the gardener), and by this point I was in Fox Farm Ocean Forest cut with 30 percent perlite. Sodden soil has not been an issue. I love this stuff!

For the seedling, I started her in one of those peat cups with a 50/50 mix of FFOF and perlite. After a few waterings, it seemed like I was growing in rocks, which may seem perfectly reasonable for hydro guys, but they generally have automated irrigation. Talk about needing frequent waterings! But I did avoid the infamous FFOF seedling nute burn. Again, as soon as I saw any roots at all, I planted the peat cup into a 3 gallon pot. But I continued to do frequent light waterings in the suspected area of the now buried peat cup until the seedling really seemed to take off, indicating to me that she had successfully breeched her peat enclosure.

Graduating to successively larger pots does make sense to me. I can see how that would give you more control over the watering. This has not been an issue for me since I moved to Fox Farm soil, but I do anticipate moving again, this time to coco coir. FFOF is too hard to get a hold of around here and very expensive to ship. The coir comes in dehydrated bricks. But coco coir seems to really retain water, making watering a trickier affair, or so it seems to me. I guess I'll find out.

I will take your advice to heart, Don Piano. Thanks for taking the time to impart it.

 

OK, Don, let's be honest. You have a soil fetish. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. We're all God's children or some such nonsense. But you are obviously a very dirty boy.

Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about.

I haven't either, but I'm a noob, so what do I know? People talk about it a lot, but they could all be repeating the same bit of apocrypha to one another. I think a lot of that sort of thing goes on in this hobby. That's part of the fun, I guess.

Great tip. At the rate I'm going through seeds, I have a lifetime supply of those peat cups. In the future, I shall add vermiculite.