Hello fellow blades. I believe it is high time for me to start my own grow journal now that I am back up and running after quite some time. So let's get down to business! Background: I have started out with my two favorite bag seeds that I had. One of them was from some 'Trainwreck' and I grew out one of those seeds on my first grow and that was a great learning experience. Also some pretty decent bud for having to chop early and get the hell outta there in time. This grow OP will be a perpetual one that I will harvest every 2-3 weeks. I have two plants from seed that I hope are girls and will be used as my mothers(hopefully), from which I have taken two clones so far with one starting to take off so I am off to a good start. Specs: Soil: Just using some boring old Organic Miracle Grow without anything added. I have each of the mothers in a 6 in. pot and will probably flower the clones in plastic cups until I find a good micro solution to grow the clones out in. Nutrients: Using some 5-1-1 fish emulsion currently and plan to add in some Blackstrap molasses more towards flower. For preventative maintenance I am using neem oil about every two weeks. Using RO water and a tap water dose every once in a while for the hardness in it. Ventilation: Two Yate Loon 120mm case fans with a carbon scrubber Grow Box: Filing cabinet that is 13.5"W x 18"L x 24.5"H. I am using the two drawers for separate chambers instead of opening up the whole space for one taller chamber. Each drawer has about 12" of usable total height. Lighting: Veg/mothers: Three white LEDs. Two of them are plain 3W emitters while the other has three diodes on one emitter. Currently I run a 24/0 schedule but once I get some timers it will be more like 20/4. Flowering: Currently I have 16 3W emitters in the flowering chamber, which calculates out to 30W actual usage. 6-660nm Red, 4-630nm Red, 2-Warm White, 2-445nm Blue, and 2-465nm Blue. Light schedule is obviously 12/12 for flowering. I plan to double the amount of LEDs which should fill out my driver capabilities quite nicely, some of these will include UV chips. Here is me building the flowering LED. Goals: I would like to do a more comprehensive study on LEDs and devise a good spectrum that will produce a good amount of dense bud that is full of trichs. In the plastic cups for the clones that are flowering I am aiming for a quarter out of each cup after 2-3 months. I think producing a Half O a month would be plenty for me. On that note has anyone grown out of the Solo plastic cups all the way through flower? How big did you get them/what issues did you encounter? Is my weight estimate doable? And now for the pictures! This would be Day 1 of growth on my first clone. Day 2 And here are the two hopeful women. One on the right is the 'Trainwreck' seed and I will just call it Hobbit Weed and the one on the left is going to be called Sage Weed because that's my buddy's name who is the one that found and gave me the bean. Well hope you guys enjoy! I am going to attempt a day by day picture journal with some thoughts as well so stay tuned! I can't think of anything else at the moment so I will just go have a toke. Comments/criticisms/questions are always welcome.
Day 3: Starting to really see the newest two leaf tips a lot more now. Just gave them all 1/4 nutes after the transplant into their new pots(not the clone though). They still look happy today so I am guessing the transplant went alright. Cheers to the wake and bake!
Yes it will be. I have just the whites for vegging the mothers and clones because I don't need anything fancy for that.
How much does it cost to operate all the LEDs? Im sure this is a tough question, just curious about how much money can be saved with leds
Well it is the initial cost that is usually the deterring factor in taking up LEDs that and the learning curve that is required with them. It is more for someone who has a lot of time or space to tinker with these. Anyhow, the actual cost of operation is very low because LEDs do not consume much power for the light output, although HIDs have LEDs beat in the actual LPW. So we will say that for both the flowering and veg chambers I have about 40W total power for this grow(Although that is a higher estimate than the actual wattage). So in one day there are 24 hours and electricity is charged in kilowatt hours, which means we need to take our wattage(40W) and divide it by 1000 to get the kilowatt which would be 0.04kW. And each hour you run that it would be 0.04kWh(hours), and with this all we need to do is substitute in whatever price you are charged for electricity($0.13/kwh) and multiply this by 24 to see how much you spend in one day. We then arrive at a total cost of $0.13 so only 13 cents a day! That's if you are constantly running all the lights on a 24/0 schedule, so the actual cost would be about half when accounting for the 12/12 schedule.
Day 4: Starting to see some good growth, leaves are still a little light for my liking but we will see as it gets older if that will stay an issue. Took another clone from the Sage plant as well to keep things on track and moving along.
Day 5: Is anyone out there? Haha. I will keep posting either way! Been having this crap that keeps growing on the top of the soil annoy me. I am not sure what it is and it is on all of the soil in each of the plants, but it doesn't appear to be hurting anything. I have a picture in normal light and under LED, you can see the odd discolorations in the soil in the plain light.
Well that's good to hear! Day 6: Loooong Black Friday at work, but we have some darkening of most of the leave and another node popping up. Things are looking nice and I will flip it to 12/12 soon.
I'm tuned in, you caught my eye with the insomnia sig. Anyway, I have never actually done a grow but am becoming more and more interested. I am nowhere nearly a seasoned smoker as you are so if you don't mind I'd like to ask a few basic questions. First, where can I potentially buy and/or obtain seeds other then mids. To follow up on that, if I were to use seeds from a bag of mids would the whole plant be mids? Also, how do you tell the difference between a female and male plant? I am not trying to sound stupid, I just don't have any experience. Besides my questions, your grow is looking better and better each day and I am looking forward to see how they turn out.
Thanks for the positive support! Anyhow, all of your answers can be found on the forums but I can answer these for you. 1.) You can order them from an online retailer such as Attitude Seeds(highly recommended on the forums), you really don't want them being mailed to your grow address and you also want to use one of those prepaid Visa gift cards and buy that in cash and then use the card online to buy the seeds. 2.) Yes the whole plant would have the genetics of your mids plant along with the genetics of whatever male pollinated your bud. Although it's a mids seed, with proper care and attention you will have a more potent bud than your original. 3.) You will be able to tell when you begin to flower(caused by a 12 hour dark period each day) and the male will grow little sacs that eventually are the size of seeds. The female can be identified by the pistils that will be like two little antennas instead of a sac, but be wary because sometimes the sacs open up and reveal pistils. It is only difficult to differentiate earlier on, but after a week or two of flowering you should be able to clearly identify the sex(either pistils or sacs) Day 7: First day of flowering and wowza, leaves are starting to explode. Probably going to take a clone of my other prospective mother quite soon.
Thank you for answering my questions, I was going to search the forums but figured it would take a lot longer and after following your thread I knew you'd be more helpful. I'll still be checking in daily so keep posting pictures man!
Day 8: Continuing along nicely. Leaves are a little on the light green side, so I'm going to mix a full strength batch of ferts. Also going to take a clone of the other prospective mother today.
This is the process I follow, though I certainly haven't dialed this part down yet, the best place to take a clone is from one of the lower branches of a vegging plant(your mother). Due to height constrictions I am going to be take one off the very top of the plant to keep it a little shorter. Take a cut someone between internodes of a shoot off the plant(not just a fan leaf) and then put your mother back you are done with her. Take your clone and put in under water and make a 45 degree cut at the internode(the part where the other leaves sprout off of your cutting), and then scrape a bit of the outside off to allow for easier root growth. Also take off all but the top two leaves, your plant won't really use them initially. Dip this into rooting gel or powder and then put it into a hole wider than the stem and try to keep the dirt from touching where you want to root, while also keeping it somewhat grounded in the dirt. A moisture dome is always a good idea because the plant will not have roots for a while but it still needs water and the dome also traps the water from respirating from the plant. Personally, I use a solo cup and a 2L soda bottle that I took off the label and cut right where the bottom harder plastic meets with the thinner middle plastic(hope this makes sense). Then in the bottom "tray" made of the harder plastic cut a small V into the side from the top so that it will fit inside the rest of your 2L Top that you cut this from. Now you can pretty easily slide the top over the bottom but it will still form a seal and isn't too difficult to take off. Then you can unscrew the top, keep it on, or even drill some holes into it to get the moisture at your desired level. If this doesn't make sense check out some of the other tutorials on the site, I think in the Advanced Growing Techniques section there are some stickies that are quite good. Here is my 'Hobbit Weed' potential mother before I chopped her top.
Day 9: Just sprayed all the plants with some neem oil. Installed new light timers to both chambers but woke up to find that the flowering chamber was On when it was supposed to be Off so hopefully that doesn't cause any problems. Still would like to figure out why that happened. Also discovered an issue with one of my fans that solves something that was bugging me before. I had a crappy set-up mount the filter over the fans and one time I believe I got it in the fan and turns out it broke a fin. I should have checked sooner after it happened, because the whole box had a weird vibrating to it until I replaced the fan today. I also installed a better filter mount so I won't have to worry about ruining another fan.
Day 10: Steadily chugging along, figured out the hiccup with my light timer, I accidentally set another program when I was fiddling with it after I opened it. So now the light schedules should be in check. Going to water with nutes today as well. Going to use a more balanced NPK this time from whatever I can find around the house. I only let this veg out for 6 days, I mainly wanted to make sure that it had enough growth to handle the flower chamber light intensity. I also wanted to try and just basically run this 12/12 from clone so I didn't want to veg it very large at all. This will allow me to get a good idea of how I should handle this strain on some of the future clones.