Hazy daze of summer

They didn't wait to start stretching. I have already felt the need to tie down first Mekong High and then Royal Haze (thumbnail)..not sure how far I will try to take LST on them, but I would at least like the runt SLH and the other smaller plants to catch up a bit. I'm actually hoping now that one of the Chocolopes will be male, not so much for the pollen, which I've concluded I will likely never have the time or space or patience to use appropriately for breeding (no way I can do big numbers), but because I'd love to rip out one of these two-smartie plants and see how the root penetration is working into the second ring.

 

Thanks DG! hell, I dunno. ..whatever feels right combined with a little stoner science...this is a first for me, you know, trying to control sativas and mostly-sats. I'll probably be real aggressive with LST on 1 or 2 of them, more conservative LST on others if they are climbing a lot faster than the canopy...and try whatever the hell you all suggest or I make up if that fails. I think my real problem is width, not height, if I only get <=1 male. I flipped these at 4 - 6" So yeah that number you see in the lower third, "Day 6", means the sixth day after FLIP. Peewee sativas

I do plan to take cuts from the lower branches as soon as they are ready, which for a few of the will be mid next week. Since some of these strains are noted for lowers that normally grow as long as the central cola, I don't know how removing those lower branches will affect the apical.

I do now know that roots from an interior smart pot easily penetrate to the second ring- here's the inner smartie from an outdoor plant I pulled several weeks ago because it proved to be male. It's been sitting out in the field for weeks. I just deconstructed it today:

 

Earthquake shakes the east coast. Hurricane heading in. My entire flower chamber (Ra) breaks down mechanically. NONE of my recent fortune cookies predicted this. How could it be?

I got back yesterday from a three-day outdoor grow road trip at 4 pm or so, and found Ra light off when it should have been on. Signal light on so there was power. I guessed the bulb was bad, and that seemed to be it. Shit. Checked datalogger, the bulb blew around 10 am, two days prior. Got the old standby bulb in at 5 pm. So the hazes were going 12/12 for almost two weeks and then went 12/12/4/54/12/12….phuck! and you could see it, they were stretched and the new growth was kinda cool, almost albino no chlorophyll. Can't be good. Can it? Def a radical way to slow down your sativas, light stress em.



At least the HVAC and cabinet itself was fine during the shaking! "Overkill the hell out of the ventilation...and then double it." ~Rump.

more updates coming right up...

 

The first consequence of the accidental wierd photoperiod looks like just what you'd expect from a funky photoperiod: a plant has shown nuts.



It was Chocolope 3--one of the "banana" treatment regular seeds.

It's just a single case, n n=1, but that's enough for my purposes to disprove and make me discontinue the banana treatment of seeds (in an attempt to improve female ratios). Lots of researchers get trained in universities these days that only large-n studies produce knowledge. Naw, 'taint so.

 

Yesterday I stuck in the old Sun bulb that I had pulled in April and it struck right up--though I noticed some occasional strobing and remembered that was why I'd pulled it. Got up this morning and the light came on w/o problem. I had installed the Ushio HiLux bulb on 5/15 and ran it about 2 months, then I turned it off a month, then it was on for two weeks and it failed. So this morning I thought "what a POS is that Ushio bulb with this LUmatek purple 600w." I ordered a replacement bulb (new Lumatek branded bulb, another fence pee--we need a smiley for that) that would get here, hopefully, next weekend...hmm about when the hurricane should hit.

Then around 10 am, after running 3 hours, I found the light off again. This time I had a hard time removing the bulb; when I finally got it out of the cooltube, I could see that the base of the bulb (and the mogul socket) were partly melted.

So now it seems a more complicated failure. More likely a problem with the ballast or the cooltube fixture. I decided to put off the failure analysis and just go for a a replacement system asap. More details later...

Just wanted to note for the record also that the fan failed in Ra right before my road trip last friday. Cheap oscillating tower fan so I wasn't too surprised, but now, seeing the lighting failure, Im really starting to appreciate how lucky I got with those first couple of cruise control grows







Well, here's an unintentional piss on the fence. I guess that happens more as we age, eh?

 

OK, to wrap up this unprecedented (for me) quad post, here's the group shot for the second week -- the week the lights went out for three days and the fan went away.


The marks are to remind me how I LST'd three of them so far: a Chocolope on the right with just one traditional bend, and Royal Haze and Mekong High on the left with a second bend that is intended to head them towards a spiral. I also took cuts of the lowest branches (both sides) of RH and MH and threw them in the cloner.



I have no idea how and whether the spiral will work--I can already see some twisting in the stems, and I would think wierd kinks and twists would hinder phloem or xylem movement, or both. OTOH, from the group shot it's already clear how effective these LST approaches can be in controlling height (at least at this point).

 

Thanks for the support, Downgirl...It was a traumatic couple of days, but the new setup is working well. When all the repairs/replacements/store credits get sorted out, I expect to have a working backup light system, and I may even be able to deploy it in a different room when I get around to growing for size.

I also finally found a new gro-mentor and watcher... who is very well known as a great trainer. Here he is checking out the Mekong High, my most rad spiral LST attempt.



His comment? "This one, The Force blocked is. First two velcros, loosen." Which of course I then did.

I wish I didn't have to leave them for multiple days at a time, but as the little grow-Jedi famously said: "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose."

 

Another Chocolope went nuts...presumably forced that way by the funky photo-period. But it's ok, it gets me down closer to a reasonable number of plants to try to finish. And as my new grow-mentor reminded me: "There is another."

 

he he....thanks, Downgirl and Chunk...and Possuum, hokey smoke, you got my day started off right with that nature photography of yours. Yep, I've been in moose country, have run into em back there in the bush, but never in my grow. Big creatures! so those BF buds of yours are bigger than they first looked Hanging out with the Bubblefuck, of course...no wonder Bullwinkle was so, um, dopey...

Tell you what, scoop that shit up and compost it, I'm thinking it'll quickly replace all this talk of lavender, aloe and comfrey tea! just beware, with that moose around, no doubt Dudley DO-right of the Mounties is also in the neighborhood...

I'm leaving my new grow-buddy Yoda in charge here whilst I vamoose to chaperone my outdoor plants on their date with Irene...hasta la vista

 

Well Poss and Downgirl, thanks for the kind wishes. While I was out and ready to sacrifice my body to protect the outdoor grow--which wasn't necessary, thank god--the real storm problem happened indoors, where the power went out for what turned out to be about 5 hours. So now I've had a truly bizzare photoperiod sequence for these haze plants. Who knows what will emerge? Here's the datalogger for Irene's visit. You can see the power outage right in the middle of 8/27, where the green temp line drops and the red relative humidity line spikes up



take away lessons for me: an uninterruptible power supply would be nice, but it'd have to be very beefy to have handled backup power for 5 hours. Having battery power in my flowering light timer is cheap and helpful, though, since when the a/c came back on the timer cycle was undisturbed.

Finally, no knock on Yoda, but I guess The Force wasn't enough to keep the lights on ...

Now these plants, otoh, are going to be very disturbed. I can't wait to find out what a deeply disturbed stone from a haze hybrid is like

 

Thanks Poss. The backup CFL is a jewel of an idea--I am gonna implement, but use the PAR30 LED bulbs that I set up for use with males. I'm not collecting jizz anymore anytime soon, so that fixture should be perfect for what you suggest.

The CO2 spike you noticed is also interesting. I have been collecting these graphs but studying them mostly for temp and RH flux. It would be useful to know more about the CO2 changes, especially in situations like this where it wasn't my presence that made a diff.

As for "dialed in" I appreciate the thought, but I am moving away from that whole turn of phrase now in light of the mechanical and meteorological challenges here in the past couple of weeks. The ecologists talk a lot these days about resilience, and in an interesting and tightly defined way. I'll spare the rant this am, haven't had second shot of java or first vape, but as usual wikipedia has a pretty good treatment.

Long and short of it here is that "dialed in" for me comes out of the same school as "maximum sustained yield" and the idea that there is some sort of "equilibrium" one can reach in the environment. Instead, I'm coming to see that we take a system like an indoor grow through rising periods of productivity (plants grow, also gnats and the like) with periodic crashes (intentional ones like harvest, unintentional like lights go out). A lot of the management focus ought to be on where you are in the curve that represents continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal. I see soil recycling, for example, as the "back loop" where the best kind of restructuring and renewal go on. Blah blah blah. Bottom line: there will never be just "set and forget" for good grows. More in the weeks to come as coffee and bud sink in.