Prelude This is my first post here. I have wanted to grow for a few years now but had a steady supply of herbs for cheap. Recently my guy has been going dry. So I decided to grow my own. I have been doing research for the few years I was waiting. This first grow I decided on a blue dream due to having the terpene profile I need and a rumor of an easy grow with big buds. Setup 20" x 36" x 60" grow tent, 4"x14" inch carbon filter, 140 cfm fan, Rapid led grow light 2x2 kit with chilled logic pucks v3 with upgraded driver able to push about 180 watts at full power. Nutrients GH flora series, CaliMagic, Diamond nectar, Rapid start, yucca powder The seed I'm using are a garden of green blue dream feminized. I started her in a jiffy pellet and she sprouted in 3 days and was showing leaves on day 4. I was initially going to transplant into a solo cup however I accidentally bought some 1 gallon smart pots so I used them. I was having problems with my RH being too low and the plant drying out way to quickly. I was spraying the walls like 4 times a day and had the ventilation off. Yay California weather in summer. Before i managed to transplant i had to buffer coco with calmag. While i was waiting for the coco to buffer the pellet dried out completely . Thankfully i caught it before it started to droop. The roots poking out of the bottom were now brown though. I was worried being on a time crunch and running dry decided to empty my already empty wallet and add the humic acid and rapid start to help with root development. I also realized i needed a tray to get the smart pot out of the water and needed something to help with water spread. So got a plant lifter and the yucca powder for a surfactant. I am doing a drain to waste with a high fertigation method. The picture is right after this incident on day 6. I thought i saw a white fly i have had problems in the past with them on my house plants so i added the perlite on top to help with them breeding. I have been without any plants for around 6 months to be sure i am rid of those bugs i hope they are gone. I have sticky traps coming to see if i have an issue. I started adding the other amendments as soon as i got them one day after picture above. Feeding at 450 EC 20 percent runoff. The incident i believe stunted the growth a bit but by day 9 it seems to have doubled the leaf size. Day 9 fertigating at 750 EC increasing 100 EC every day until I hit 1100 EC. I fertigate twice daily. My runoff was measuring 440 EC as of today day 9. I am starting to have the opposite RH problems of being too high I have progressively turned up the exhaust fan to help with this it set to 15 minutes on every 45 minutes. I will probably update weekly but I can respond to questions.
I run my seedlings at 70% rh they thrive & are healthier, have a gander at the VPD charts and give it a go you won't be sorry...
Honestly I may be paranoid about the humidity because my vegetable garden is plagued with powder mildew right now. Im also trying to get a feel for my ventilation as I do not have a speed controller right now so I want to see if I really need one for later when there is more transpiration. I had seen that ages ago but I forgot it existed thanks for the reminder.
So i wasn't going to post again so soon but I have some issues right now. Here is the progress from yesterday to today. I'm much less worried about humidity now after seeing it thrive. So Now the reason I am posting is i think i already have some pests. I believe i killed this one but i may have missed it was very small. I only saw it because it flew under my lights. This looks like what I had before which I believe is white flies. Nothing on the sticky traps. Do any of you guys have any idea if I'm right on the identification? Also any ideas how to get rid of them? More perlite its already about an inch thick? I initially wanted to go with coco to limit the chance of these guys showing up. I battled last spring for a few months before trying to get rid of white flies. I don't have money for about a year to go hydroponic. I have more experience in organics but didn't want the bugs in the house so chose not to have a living soil.
So I did a few things to help with pest problem. I think I caught it early enough. The bug may have come from outside the tent while I was watering i think. I added more perlite to the top its making a mess but meh . I also started a insecticidal soap treatment 10 minutes before lights out I will continue with it for another week or two. I just used regular old dish soap as I have done with the veggie garden. I thought about using neem but I didn't have any on hand. I also didn't want the burn the seedling. Here is a picture the cycle after the first treatment. These last two images are showing the progress for the last day. There is also 2 roots sticking out of the bottom now
Diatomaceous earth if u coat the top layer of soil with it, it will kill any bugs trying to get in or out of the soil, I would make sure to repot, clean up and vacuum the rest and I would not use it in flower. Just cuz I doubt it’s good to smoke that ish. And it blows around, better yet.. top the soil with sand and grab yourself some neem oil my friend
Also a fan on the stalk (almost pushing it to the side) will keep flying bugs on there toes trying to get in the dirt as well as beef up ur stalk from the jump
I can try some diatomaceous I don't think it will hurt. However the last time I used it in my veggie garden it did not work to well. The veggie garden was outdoors though. In my house plants I tried the sand on top about 2 inches deep it did not stop them or help at all. I left the one gallon pot a little under filled, the perlite is about 2 inches thick. I wanted to try another inorganic topper so i settled on perlite due to having it on hand. I'm thinking the white will also help confuse the bugs like foil or reflective mulch can. I have a vornado fan its a small very powerful fan blowing on it now. Its blowing excess air toward a sticky trap. Who knows if it will work. The soap works well by itself in my experience. When I use neem I add some soap to it anyways. I will be getting more neem just need to wait until next paycheck. I'm getting better quality neem this time.Thanks for the suggestions I will probably pick up some diatomaceous earth too. My brain right now really wants to spell perlite like pearlite. A quick google search yielded a lamellar structure composed of alternating layers of some minerals. I guess I learn something everyday. I was hoping for a lite pear soda that sounded delicious when i googled it .
Hell yeah the DE won’t work after it gets wet tho that’s the only down side other than the not using it in flower
Update day. I have continued spraying the leaves every day with the insecticidal soap. There is some minor damage from handling and spraying the bottom of the leaves. I have not raised or increased the dimmer on the lights yet. I am thinking soon though the plant is starting to reach out of the lights optimal range. This picture I am starting to see it reach more and feel the need to change the lights a bit. My LED pucks are about 5.3 inches round and the outer fan were moving out of the optimal light position. I raised the light from around 6 inches to 16 and increased the light to a little over half of my dimmer potentiometer. This is so i can use both of the pucks that i have to encourage her to bush out. I did increase light levels using my not so scientific phone application. I went from around 15,000 lux to 35,000 lux they max out at over 100,000 lux. I feel that with the 3rd node being developed that i needed to switch to a higher EC nutrient base at 1200 EC. The PH is lower as well closer to 5.8. I accidentally poured a bit 1600EC nutrients i forgot to dilute. I did catch it quickly and diluted it down to the 1200EC and flushed 2 times my normal watering amount. Hopefully it will push it through the coco. There seems to be some stress from the light change as well. The leaves are starting to point down It could also be related to the nutrient issue above. I'm going to give her another few days before I react further. Any idea why she is leaning to one side? I started to notice this when the second node was developing. I thought it may have out grown it by now. I have tried some LST massaging to get her to level out.
So I will start off with saying I messes up again. The guide I am following had one sentence that I missed reading. The line was dilute nutrient mixture with cal-mag water so there is no deficiency. As soon as I noticed I started searching and realized I was getting the claw and maybe some wind burn. I forgot to take picture's but she was very unhappy. The day after I fixed my nutrients it grew another inch. I also noticed that there were now roots that were peeking out the sides of the 1 gallon smart pot. Its transplant time. I moved her to a bigger 5 gal smart pot as well as changing out the tray for a tub to help with the increase of water now needed to fertigate properly. There were around 15 to 20 roots peeking bad photo but meh i only have 2 hands. I also accidentally while changing a timer set it to on for a few days it was thankfully the exhaust. She seemed to not really be effected by this but i did start hanging towels to help with humidity and aimed fan due to probable wind burn toward the towel. Starting to look better here and pick back up. There is now 5 nodes and she is very dense. I have been slowly raising my lights trying to get her to stretch. Her overall height is around 6 inches tall including the stem in the pearlite. I decided to FIM right after this photo. I will eventually use a scrog so I don't think I will worry about an irregular shape. The wire is to pull down fan leaves down to give more light to nodes. I'm trying to get her to bush/branch out more im only using 1/16 of my grow space currently.
Holy shit.. alright.. that plant is doing terrible for how young it is.. that being said, it’s 110% fixable and you’ll get way better with time. First off. You gotta figure out exactly what your ph is.. going into the plant first. Then check the ph of the run off. That will tell you if your ph is off, if your ph is not off. It’s the load of nutrients your giving it while it’s still so young. This plant needs more “LITFA” (Leave It The Fuck Alone). If it’s not the pests killing it, it’s over nutrient and over watering. Or an incorrect ph causing one of the above. I wouldn’t give it any nutrients other than a way diluted amount of nitrogen once a week until it’s leaves are healthy ( not curled, not discolored) the leaves are so dark it’s either nitrogen toxicity or lock out from all of the cal mag. I would flush the shit out of it with ph’d correct water. And give only water with barley any nutrients in it if I gave any at all for a week or two.
theres so many possibility’s my friend, it has to be ph related or pest related, there are no burns on your leaf tips, I think it’s not able to uptake what you are giving it.
Its PH I think. Thanks for the tip. I did not realize my nutrients are PH creeping. Stuff I just put in is at 7 I had been getting it down to a 5.5 to 6 when I'm mixing them. I was giving them around an hour to sit before I did final PH. I guess I need to check it more regularly. Runoff is a 5. The mix is a 30% perlite in coco it should be very hard to over water. Currently watering twice a day. There has been no pest sighted since i added the perlite on top. I did check the soil when I transplanted and saw normal looking soil no movement or oddity's
New more accurate PH meter is on the way. Those drops are not very good for me I don't feel accurate enough. Neem is on the way. Ill probably spray with neem just in case. It has never had an negative effect on my other plants if I spray before sundown/lights off.
Yup I have Calibration solution coming as well. I forgot to order storage solution do you feel its necessary?
Likely you've thought of this... But being a new browser through your thread I couldn't help but notice how healthy the seeding looked and gradually dropped off every post as I scrolled down. One thing I noticed was your humidity steadily decreasing just as much as your plants health. Do you have a humidifier you can add to bring that RH back up?