Ya know, entomology is the one class I never took that I really regret not taking. I need to spend some time learning more about the language and techniques of bug ID before I will feel too confident that I know what I am looking at. At this point, the plant is so close to the finish line that I'm not too worried about it. It may have affected yield to some degree but I think I'll still pull plenty from this. I definitely need to stay more on top of things in the earlier stages of growth next time around, though. I think I could have kept their numbers down if I had sprayed some neem at the first signs of their presence.
Plant is chugging right along at about 45 days of 12-12. It looks like it's starting to approach the finish line--way earlier than I expected. Could be a mix of malted barley topdressing, the LEDs, and the scale issue. Could be genetic, too--no idea really. The top cola is about 8-10" from the light, so it's getting hammered with a pretty high density of photons. The rest of the canopy isn't quite so far along. The calyxes are starting to take on a pink hue in some places. I wish I had a second temp/RH sensor to put under the canopy. Even with two oscillating fans I am getting pretty poor air mixing in the tent. The air under the canopy seems to stay much cooler than the air in the top half of the tent. The larfy lower buds are turning very pink and I suspect that this is due to the lower temps. I have been maintaining temperatures that cycle between 68-79F at the canopy level for most of the grow. One last update. After reading through @Organic sinse 's Auto's thread I have been inspired to try growing some Autoflowering plants in here. I really like the fact that I do not need to worry about light pollution with autoflowers. The tent is in the same room as my work-from-home office, so it will be nice to not have to worry about disrupting the plant's 12 hour skotoperiod and give me more flexibility as far as "work hours". I picked up Sour Stomper (Grapestomper OG (Gage Green Genetics) x Sour Crack F5) and Canna-Cheese 1:1 (Cannatonic x Northern Cheese Haze). I'm excited to give these a grow! That's all for now. Hope you folks are having a great week!
Beautiful plant my friend. Love the color! I’ve been thinking about trying autos next time to cut down on the hassle. I’ll be along for the ride if you post it.
Nice man! Glad to get to see your plants again. I'd like to get some autos going also. I'm kinda in the same boat. My tent is in the same room with my snakes so I'm in there working quite a bit and I know for a fact that my tent is riddled with pin holes. Even the main zipper leaks light from the inside so Im sure that any outside light is getting in there during lights off...always something to tweak eh?
Thanks Mainah! Yeah I'll definitely keep y'all posted. I'm excited for the Canna-cheese as my first foray in CBD medicine. I love cheese crosses and the description for this seed variety sounds like it brings the funk Do you have any experience with Cannatonic? Great to see you, Deez! Yeah, I think autos will fit nice with my lifestyle. I have grown a few in the past and had pretty lackluster results, but I'm looking forward to giving some good auto genetics an honest run. IIRC you used to rock a 2x2 tent, right? Did the wife ever sign off on your expansion? My current setup is a 2'x2.5' tent. Hoping that I can keep it filled up with one big autoflowering plant. Looking into adding some side lighting like these LED Buddies: https://growlightsaustralia.com/product/buddies-plug-and-play-kits/
Lol so there is a new version of the fan controller that I whined about a few pages back that fixes some of the issues I brought up. Guess I bought one just in time lol. CONTROLLER 67, Temperature and Humidity Fan Controller
I have grown Cannatonic a few times and can’t say I’m a fan tbh. It just doesn’t seem to agree with me. Nothing exciting to grow either IME. My favorite CBD strain for some time now is CBD Critical Mass. Fun to grow, big yields, good high, and very medicinal, or at least for me. I’m always trying new ones though. I have some CBD Blue Shark that’s okay but I won’t do it again.
Thank you for your honest review. I knew I should have consulted with you before buying any seeds claiming CBD chemotypes. Luckily I love cheese so maybe that part of the lineage will contribute some favorable characteristics. I like the amount of transparency that Mephisto has with the grower community about their breeding practices and process, so I'm looking forward to trying out these seeds for sure!
I also was not a fan of cannatonic. Tried it three different times from different growers. Just in case... But it was like smoking a dud to me. I might as well have smoke a cigarette cause i got no effect. That was with a joint, bong, vape and tincture. Just my 2 cents Sent with more cow bell!?
upon further inspection, I think those were made by whiteflies, found a whole bunch of white stuff on the plant next to it (some random weed) and a whole bunch of whiteflies all around. Got rid of that plant and sprayed neem... The comfrey is in a 15 gallon smartpot on my balcony. It's not thriving there but it isnt dying either so I keep it and add whatever I can to my compost bucket.
Heya friends Quick garden update for y'all. I decided to end the poor plant's suffering last Wednesday. The scale infestation was worse than I thought. The plant was senescing pretty rapidly and I think that is definitely due in large part to scale damage. Some scale shots I started seeing Bananas, so I took that as a sign that the plant was ready to come down.
The plant has been hang drying for about a week now in the tent. I have the exhaust system set to kick on if the RH goes above 60% (I have been fiddling with this trying to decide on a good range for drying). Here is right after the chop The hanging apparatus Sensor placement is very important! In order to test the water activity in the flowers, I put a small subsample into a sealed jar with a SHT31-D air temperature and relative humidity sensor. The sensor is connected to an ESP32 microcontroller and sending data to my home assistant server. I filled the jar about half full with untrimmed flowers and sealed it up. Here is what the data looked like over the course of about 12 hours in the jar. Even after 12 hours the RH in the jar was still climbing, indicating that it did not quite reach equilibrium. At 9 am I opened the jar, which you can see in the drastic drop in RH at the end of the graph. The goal is to stabilize the equilibrium RH in the jar at about 62% which is equivalent to a water activity of 0.62. At that water activity, I can store the buds long term without concern about microbial growth.
Sucks about the scale dude, fuck those buggers...hope the final product comes out good regardless. Good deal on the DIY meter seems to be working good. I would make a small suggestion to get a smaller jar so it can reach equilibrium faster. The meter I got comes with containers that are maybe 0.5 oz at the most and it reaches stasis in about 10minutes or less. You can get a 4oz jar from Ball that would fit the same regular size lid. Or get a 1oz jar and mod it. For reference, this is the container that came with my meter, airpod for scale:
'Sup Scoob! I ended up buying some cheap hygrometers for this time around. I would like to try something like the Ruuvitag. The things are so cheap that I'm rethinking my DIY approach. This fella on the LED Gardener Forum figured out how to get them connected to his home assistant server for his grow room automation. I'm thinking I could replicate that and set up some notifications so that the sensor will at me if the humidity in the jar gets too high.
Heya friends, sorry it's been a bit since the last update. The buds from the last harvest came out great. Dense, super sticky, and smells I think the plant definitely should have gone for a few more weeks to ripen up, but overall still very enjoyable smoke. I'm also really happy with the yield considering the pest issue and the early harvest. All in all, it came in at about ~140 grams. Pretty sweet for a 135w LED grow! I don't think I have ever hit 1 g/w in my past grows, and there was a lot of room for improvement last cycle. The efficacy of the new LED fixtures is pretty amazing. I have a new plant started--my first "real" go at growing a proper auto-flowering variety. This is Sour Stomper from Mephisto Genetics: I've been playing around with Home Assistant a bit more. I have automated the light, a space heater, and a humidifier. Growing autos is a bit of a race, so I'm really excited to have the environment dialed in with all the sensors and such. I'm thinking about starting a thread here on GC about this topic in the DIY subforum. All for now. Hope you folks are doing well and staying safe and healthy!
Sup, Growmies! Hope everyone is doing well and staying safe and healthy! Got another update for y'all. This one is a two-parter. The Sour Stomper seedling is on day 17 since its emergence above the soil and looking great! The tent looks pretty funny/chaotic with all these sensors and cables running everywhere The real rat's nest is outside the tent lol Everything except the space heater is plugged into this power strip, which has a built-in circuit breaker in case anything starts drawing too much current. I'm using these TPLink Smart Outlets to control power for almost all of my AC devices including the light, oscillating fans, humidifier, and an oil-filled space heater. These are all controlled in Home Assistant using automations. The outlets I'm using can handle up to 12.5 Amps a piece--way more than enough for my needs. If anyone is interested in making their grow a little "smarter" I highly recommend starting with these. You don't need to go through the trouble of setting up a home automation server to get these working as they come with a companion app that makes for an easy plug-and-play experience. These would be a great replacement for a regular digital timer as you can set up schedules in the app with your smartphone. There are other models with higher amperage ratings and you can even get some that have power monitoring built-in if you want to keep track of power consumption. Pretty slick!! I got this little humidifier made for reptile enclosures and it's perfect for this little tent!
Here is Home Assistant Dashboard in its current state. I've added a user input to set the grow start date and keep track of days/weeks of the grow and another to set the lights on/off times (top left card on the dashboard). On another tab, I have toggles for all of the automations as well as a user input slider to set the climate targets for the tent. Right now I have the Lights-On temp set to 80F, Lights-Off temp set to 70F, and the RH set to 70%. This keeps the VPD right around 1 kPa which is supposedly ideal for vegetative growth. Here is what some of the sensor data looks like so far. First up some of the temperatures. Here are air and soil temps for the last 24 hrs and last 7 days, respectively: It's amazing how much the light heats up the soil. I have a soil heat mat placed under the 10-gallon pot and it's always set to 75F. You can see that soil temps (blue line) get up to about 78F with the lights on. RH is really stable in the tent with that little humidifier. Here is the last 24 hrs and 7 days again: The ambient RH is super low, averaging around 25%. That big dip in the middle of the 7-day graph is from a day that I was a little late to refill the humidifier. The other dips represent times when I opened the tent. Here is the vapor pressure deficit (VPD) in kPa: Next up is some soil moisture data. I have three different soil moisture sensors: a digital soil moisture/temp/EC probe, an analog soil moisture probe, and a DIY tensiometer for soil water potential. Here is the soil water potential from the tensiometer. The gauge pressure is probably what most folks are used to seeing (this is what the blumat sensors report). The matric potential is the actual soil water potential with respect to the tensiometer's probe geometry. The spikes represent irrigations--I have been watering about once every 2-3 days based on feel while I figure out an ideal range for these sensors in this specific soil. To finish up, I wanted to show you the History Tab for the AC components. This is a pretty cool feature in Home Assistant that allows me to see the history of the state of each of the devices. You can see the space heater and humidifier switch on and off really frequently to maintain those climate targets. Pretty cool, huh? Let me know if this type of content interests you folks or if you have any questions. I really enjoy looking at this data and have learned a lot from working with the sensors! Cheers!