Hey all, I'm about 7 weeks into flowering this quasar plant I got from attitude seedbank as a freebee seed in an order I placed a while back, and have a noob question for you. I've been running advanced nutrients ph perfect sensi bloom and hobbiest bundle, (with great results I might add!) And now I'm ready to flush. I'm growing in 5gal. Buckets, DWC style, with RO water. Out of the RO system, my waters ph is usually between 6.8-7.7, so should I add ph down to get it in the 5.5-6.2 range? I haven't used it since I started using the ph perfect for flowering..lol And some pics as promised...go easy on me, this is my first grow! I also grew a syrup autoflower from buddah seed along with this one, it finished @ day 73 from seed, and produced just about 3oz dry of some pretty kick ass weed! On that plant, I ran RO water that I ph corrected when I initially put just water in, but did not ph correct the addback water, and ran it like that for 10 days I think it was. Here are a couple bud pics from that plant. First one is while it was still wet, 2nd is after 10 days curing.
Plant is lookin' good! 10 days is a decent amount of time for pure ph adjusted h2o. I'm a noob to dwc...on the grow I'm doing, I was thinking ~3 days pure ph adjusted h2o, but that may/probably will change. I do believe you should definitely ph adjust the h2o to the range you mentioned. I'm sure the smoke tastes awesome with 10 days and really pure of nutes...I think the trick is using nutes as long as possible to get as much mass as possible before flush, but still getting that pure no-nute taste.
Thanks man! I'm a noob grower myself, so its all new to me, but 10 days seemed to work, I harvested about 1/2 or 2/3 of the plant after 3 days on RO water only, then the rest a week later, and after drying and 10 days of curing for each, I really didn't find mupch eof a diffrence in taste, maybe the tinyest bit smoother if anything. One thing I did notice, was that the plant had barely even started to yellow after just about 2 weeks of RO water only, without ph correcting the addback water (i corrected ph initially after filling the bucket with RO water) I've noticed most guys plants a lot of the fan leaves are yellowing and dying off by the time they harvest, curious why mine arnt doing the same. I changed the other plant over to just ph corrected water yesterday, I moved the plant into a spare bucket I had, let the nutrient solution that was still on the roots to drain off over the course of 15min or so, then poured a gallon of ph corrected (5.6) RO water thru the netpot over the roots, allowed that to drain off, then put the plant back in the original bucket with RO water, we'll see what she does over the next week or so, I took a couple leaf samples yesterday, and noticed a couple amber trichomes along with ~60% cloudy, and 39% clear. Lol But the lower buds are still mostly clear, so ill probably do a 2 part harvest like I did with the syrup. The quasar right now has a sweet pine, kinda spicy smell to it, really nice. Really makes me wish I had scrogged it, it has tons of budsites, but most of them are smaller bic lighter sized buds, vs the main cola which is really starting to fatten up, here is a pic I just took of it: And a pic of one of the bic sized buds: It'd be great to get some more opinions on flushing in dwc, how long and are you ph correcting your water? Thanks in advance all!
Yeah it actually takes awhile for the plants to utilize the nutrients in the leaves, after a good flush it probably takes 2 weeks to turn yellow. If you've been feeding aggressively until the flush, in soil they definitely won't have time to use up all the resources in the fan leaves within 1 week.
For some reason i wasn't thinking and assumed you were in soil But yeah in dwc it's debatable, you don't necessarily need to flush that long at all (to the point of yellowing leaves) Lucas doesn't even flush at all and recommends not to. A critical look at preharvest flushing - 420 Magazineâ„¢ Lucas Formula: No Flushing - 420 Magazineâ„¢
Interesting reads, bro,thanks for the links. Gotta admit, the buds seems to be growing great over the past 2 days, definetly gotten noticibly thicker! Over the past few weeks, I've decreased the amount of nutes in the bucket each time I changed the res. Last I checked, it was 442ppm, and now its down to like 4ppm lol I'll keep a close eye on it over the next day or 2, if I notice anything funky ill just add some sensi bloom back in.
So, for my latest grow, I decided to do a test for myself, to see which way tasted / smelled better to me, so here's what I did and what I found. I grew 2 plants, super lemon haze from green house seeds, veged them for a little over 4 weeks, and flowered them for 9. Used advanced nutrients sensi bloom (ph perfect) and hobbiest bundle and followed they're feeding chart, only going 3/4 strength at max, and actually started burning them and had to cut back to 1/2. Anyway, at the end of 9 weeks, on one plant I ran just straight water (ro filtered, no ph adjustment) for a day, then chopped. The other, I gave plain RO water for a full 48hrs, and kept the light off. What I've found, was the one that got the longer "flush" definetly tastes a little better, and feels stickier while handling it. I don't really see a visable diffrence in trichome production like some have suggested the dark period at the end does, but I can definetly feel a diffrence. I've read about both sides of the argument about weather or not running straight water in DWC at the end of flowering makes a diffrence, but in this case, I think the combination of the extra time in plain water and the dark period definetly made a positive diffrence! Here's a side by side pick of them both cured and ready to smoke! 24hr straight water, normal light on left, 48hr straight water, in darkness on right.
Dude... you are breaking the most important rule of the scientific method! You are changing more than one variable at a time with your experiment! The only way to figure out what technique improves quality is to do everything the exact same in a side by side grow and change ONLY ONE THING. You changed flush time and lights off / on. So what ended up happening was that you don't know weather it was the longer flush or the dark period that made the difference. Next time, I'd suggest flushing one plant for 24 hours in the dark using PH adjusted RO water, and the other plant flush for 24 horus in the dark using UNADJUSTED PH RO water. That way you can determine weather or not in the future you will adjust your PH of your flush water.