This grow is intended to become a regular breeding project. I chose to go with autoflowering plants for the ease of stagger planting and breeding with their lighting tolerance and lifespan. This will hopefully lead to quick harvests of pollen and give me ample time to select the best females for pollination. I chose the Ryder mix because it will give me a lot of genetic diversity and hopefully a pretty stable rude bloodline. I will be using 30 inch plastic window trays for pots. Soma has said a few times that weed really likes to make horizontal stretching roots far more than tapping roots, a behavior fairly common among "weeds". So hopefully these will be taking advantage of that. There will be 7 of these boxes which packed together will take up all the square footage in the space. I will be using a 450 w cmh and a supplementary cfl with the shocking light schedule of 56/4. This is rather experimental but as I have read of moderate success with full 24 hour light I'm not too worried. I chose this because the natural flux in turgor changes over 5 days(ie the 5 day watering period) and I thought that it wouldn't be too stressful to have such an odd lighting schedule if it was more closely attuned patterned to their water absorption. These four hours of darkness are the only times I will interact with the garden. Obviously I will still be checking on the garden and it's hardware everyday. For my soil mix I used a hand mixed, eye measured combination of: Granular Azomite Neem Seed Meal(even though the smell made me gag) Glacial Rock Dust Diatomaceous Earth Coconut Coir Coco Hulls Greensand Homeade compost(our ducks droppings, feathers, and occasional blood from slaughter, oak leaves, laurel leaves, and a bit of soil lifted from my parents house) I also have a myco innoculant that I plan to put in the soil with the seeds. I also have some Soilmoist which I don't have experience with but it looked neat, might just do one box with it as a test. Each planter box will be planted with either 3 or 2 plants. Though if 2 ends up being too few that none are rootbound I'll bring them all up to 3. I'll be using LBT compost tea to start up the microflora, and I'll be feeding 2 applications each of fish and kelp hydrolase with a few foliar sprays. My watering will switch between creek water and molasses creek water. I plan to plant 5 seeds for every 2 weeks. All of my gear is assembled I am just waiting for tenants to leave for some privacy.
I hope it helps, and with only 1 week to go it'd be pretty hard to bomb the crop. Reading threads yesterday got me impatient so I prepared one of my "window" boxes. An inch of cocoa hulls at the bottom for drainage, a layer of compost and worm castings and then my soil mix on top. I also put 2 seeds into some tepid water. Hopefully the tenants leave today and the grow room goes up. Even though it's a medical grow our tenants are a bit psycho so we have to keep it on the dl. It's worth noting that I have a flock of ducks(10+) which is the source of most of my compost material. We started with 2 and it just worked its way up. I saw that someone had some fawn and white runners in another topic, props to all the duck herders. We have a few domestic breeds(pet/egg), Black East Indies(ornamental), and muscovies(cash crop). They get an all organic diet and are free range with several hundred square feet. If I can get a camera to work I'll take some adorable pictures I collect the feather casings by giving them two small plastic tubs which they dabble and bathe in(one is enough size for one full grown duck). Once they finish playing in these all that is left is very fine particulate which gets caught in their threshers, feather casings, and water. I usually either water a plant with that or throw it in the compost. Ducks need water to be really happy(well except for the muscovies which are rain forest ducks) so in addition to these cleaning tubs we have a broken hot tub which we converted into a duck pond. This is also where we get the duck poo as everytime we empty the water out of this pond(2 gallons at a time by hand, straight into our garden) there is a thick layer which settles to the bottom. There has been some duck blood added to the compost as well because we ended up slaughtering one of our ducks. He was a drake, mean, unattractive, and delicious. Anyways these ducks are my pride and joy and I'm happy to have their addition to my compost. Also have some chickens, not too fond of them they attack the ducks too much so they have their own enclosure now. I think I shall be adding some bee pollen to my soil because I eat it and love it. I have two plants that will be ready in two weeks are so, I'm considering flushing them with bee pollen water...
My fiancee was dividing a pot of comfrey into sprouts. I took the leftover soil and broken off roots for the compost. Got all my supplies in place when i discovered a weird residue on the walls and floor(white and powdery, a little crystalline) maybe it's calcium buildup? I saw a little bit of blue or rust colored discoloring, hope it wasn't mold. Guess I'll have to scrub it all first. Checked my seeds, poked them and they sunk, took them out of the water and covered them with a quarter inch of loose moist soil.
The house is mine! Seems like normal effloresence, guess I'll just brush and scrub. Next post will hopefully chronicle the completion of the grown room.
What has set me down the road of cannabis growing and breeding is the knowledge that correct application of technique and opportunity could help breed a cure. I am most specifically looking to treat bi polar disorder, but as this shares comorbidities with other psychiatric conditions I feel an effective medicine would probably give symptomatic relief to the whole family of mood disorders. This is all assuming that such a plant could be grown. I believe it can be grown because in my experience this plant has the capacity to heal or at least relieve a wider array of ilnesses than other more conventional treatments. So I have chosen the ryder mix because of the wide array of symptoms which the parent strains relieve. Constructions update coming soon...
Been interrupted twice in buildings, once last night and this morning. But two of the walls are up and a slit is cut into the trap door in my room so the power to down below flows. I just have the fixtures to hang and the other walls to tack up and then the grow will begin. Still trying to get a hold of camera so this isn't a text only journal. -BRIEF INTERLUDE- Ta-Dah The grow room has been built, the inside walls of made of plastic coated paper and the outside walls are made of black poly. Got one container with two seeds in there now, and I put two seeds into moist coco coir to see how those ones sprout. Now that the grow has officially commenced I hope I can get some scintillating pictures for you all. -MORE INTERLUDE- The 450w cmh was too hot. My grow space is a little under 3 feet by 6 feet but is only 3 feet tall. With the reflector and the amount of heat the bulb gives off there's pretty much no useable grow space from the damn thing. Instead next month I will be buying some quad spectrum leds to go with my grow. Probably continue to buy at least 1 led panel a month until I reach ~400w of quad spectrum LED lighting. - YET MORE- Lol, not CMH just a MH, must be why it's so dang hot lol.
After cramming all the useful info on light spectrum useage by plants I could find for 48 hours I have made my choice of bulb. I have decided that I will be getting the 130 watt dual actinic bulbs which covers the 420-460nm(blue) spectrum better than any other bulb. For my red spectrum I'm going to go for all red LED panels. So for next months purchases I'll probably go for 2 of the dual actinic bulbs and 1 of the red LED panels. Also a trichome scope and a computer fan for ventilation. Some of that bioVAM root culture too... Then the month after I'll probably get 3 more LED panels to mount.
i can't wait to see some plants shooting out of the ground! LEDs are nice....I'm loving mine. where are you planning on buying the all-reds? See if you can get one of the major companies to put together an all red (w/ a couple of different wavelengths) panel....that would be neat then again, i'm high..seems like you have the resources to make something like that happen..kind of a pipe dream....maybe a little blue in there for good measure best of luck on your grow!
Iirc there are a few companies that sell all red LED panels(usually for traffic use). The thing with LEDs is they have a narrow spectrum. The all red panel is usually around 650nm and that'll have significant light output around 642-658nm-ish. Which if I've done my research happens to be around the overlap of chlorophyll a and b energy absorption in the red spectrum. Yes there are parts of the spectrum which they might absorb better, but this hits them both and so do those double actinic bulbs(which is why I don't need or want any blue LED). Each board is only great for about a square foot of light distribution so I'll carpet the walls gradually, hopefully see yield go up as I do. Thats really the only way I see putting it together short of breadboard soldering the whole thing. -Update Got a guy on craigslist to match the price for a 72'' 4x96w orbit fixture. So I'm picking it up on Friday, once I get dual actinic bulbs in there almost all the light from those bulbs should be useable by the chlorophyll. Right now though they're all under 1 t5 that was originally supplementary to the 450 w mh. -Update On second thought the guy put new uvl bulbs which are either 420nm bulbs(just fine) or super actinic whites. The super actinic white's have a little bit of yellow orange and red light but the blue spectrum is about half as strong as the 420nm bulbs.
Well I went into the room today after being unable to check it yesterday. One of the seeds that was in the coir sprouted it cotiledon and ialready has mini first leaves, I transplanted that into the tray. One of the seeds in the tray is mia and the other grew a cotiledon and the cotiledon shriveled. Don't know if it maybe didn't get enough water. I gave it some, hopefully it'll perk up. Can't wait for tomorrow and the awesome fixture! Oh, a be sure to check the last post for edited in updates. I got sick of having so many posts in a row. --- So I believe fungus gnats may have eaten the poor girl's roots. Sprinkled diatomaceous earth on top of the soil to take care of it. Probably means the soil isn't draining well enough, guess I really should add in some perlite or vermiculite for the next trays...
There are two happy sprouts under the t5. I also successfully made my purchases this month. And with that I was finally able to get a soil mix that I'm really happy and now I have 4 trays with prepared soil waiting for seedlings. The fixture will have one daylight actinic bulb which I was not able to afford replacing yet, but other than that I should be getting every supply I need in very soon. Some Ful-power will arrive with some WuJinSan(not for the garden lol)and a better root enhancer with a reccomendation of LD. For my soil mix I got some dolomite lime and perlite. Perhaps I should've gone with pumice, but with the giant bag of perlite I got I might as well use it... Anyways these boxes look much better than the first so I'll probably adjust the other box's soil.
Woo, I got the 380watt fixture in place, I broke part of it in my quest to hang it. But my sprout is finally getting some real light besides the t5. Gave the one sprout a myco inoculation today. And the fixture is using it's own fan to also fan the room. Hoorah.
There are a total of 7 plants now. I had some troubles with zinc lockout so I added more dolomite lime. Problem sorted out with the largest of them hopefully the other 6 will perk up come tomorrow when I next check on them.
Haha well some time has passed since my last post so I guess I'll give an update. There quickly became 4 main plants whom showed their strengths. Two of them are male, one of them is being kept inside the room to pollinate for seeds. The other two are female, about 4 inches tall and developing bud. I kind of got depressed and anxious about the indoor grow for the last week so my tending has not been stellar. In addition I am regenerating one of the plants that I already gave the chop to it. But there is a great hope in the future! Aye, moving into a new room which has a walk in closet, going to turn that into my grow room. That way I will have full headroom and being in my house I'll be more motivated to watch and care for them. In that space I will be using the aquarium fixture and a 1000w HPS from my friend.