WEED, The Official Thread

[Bobby Stainless]

It's just crispy is all. Perfect for extraction though.

[Greg_o]

Anyone have luck using DNF six packs (the dry stuff) to mix their own veg slash bloom fertilizers? I'm sure not lol.

IM doing a very basic soil (peat based) set up and find I need to add nutrients. I mix the DNF per their instructions and based on the last time I tried this stuff diluted it to a tenth of the recommended dose, phed it and a day later severe burns.

I find their dry ferts perfect for my aquatic purposes but have nothing but problems when used in this manner. Just a shame given how inexpensive these re compared to the liquids on the market.

[TBS]

I've got a indoor project that is currently kicking my ass. Ended up neglecting the tent some, and dried them out a little too much. Might just blast it all...

36th Chamber shat

It's the 'Tequila of Marijuana'!
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local...351582331.html

Illinois State Police have made several arrests over a potent drug that has made its way into the state.
The drug, called Shatter, is made by extracting and purifying resin from the cannabis plant, according to Illinois State Police. The finished product contains high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which can be six-times stronger than the average marijuana cigarette

Amanda Lewis is a medical marijuana patient and a reporter with Buzzfeed who said she's tried the drug. She also said making it is more dangerous than smoking it.
"It's much stronger, it's like the tequila of marijuana," Lewis said.
"Some of the effects people have mentioned are paranoia, anxiety, panic attacks," DEA spokesman Dennis Wichern said.

"You dont know what's in it," Lewis said. "You don't know how clean it is, it was probably made with lighter fluid that contains neurotoxic compounds that are now potentially in your brain."
Authorities say the high concentration of the drug can be extremely poisonous and destructive to human nerve tissue. Hallucinations, confusion, and violent behavior are some of the symptoms caused by Shatter.
Creating the drug involves chemicals and gasses which can, and have, resulted in explosions, according to Illinois State Police..

[Bobby Stainless]

the horror...

[Bobby Stainless]

Probably not enough...

[highangle]

Anyone have luck using DNF six packs (the dry stuff) to mix their own veg slash bloom fertilizers? I'm sure not lol.

IM doing a very basic soil (peat based) set up and find I need to add nutrients. I mix the DNF per their instructions and based on the last time I tried this stuff diluted it to a tenth of the recommended dose, phed it and a day later severe burns.

I find their dry ferts perfect for my aquatic purposes but have nothing but problems when used in this manner. Just a shame given how inexpensive these re compared to the liquids on the market.

Sounds like you set up for problems, rather than success. What's your point in using esoteric dry ferts in a medium known to have all sorts of issues with PH, uptake, and irregular cation exchange? Are you a Gentoo Linux user by any chance?

[Bobby Stainless]

lol. All my bags of ReadyGro say "peat free".

What is the financial benefit to mixing ferts, as opposed to buying 6 gallon jugs of GH Micro and Bloom?

[Greg_o]

Sounds like you set up for problems, rather than success. What's your point in using esoteric dry ferts in a medium known to have all sorts of issues with PH, uptake, and irregular cation exchange? Are you a Gentoo Linux user by any chance?

Ouch, just a newb who's still using soil. I've used the dry ferts for years with my planted aquariums with great success, tried using them for what they're designed to and failed hard.

[Greg_o]

lol. All my bags of ReadyGro say "peat free".

What is the financial benefit to mixing ferts, as opposed to buying 6 gallon jugs of GH Micro and Bloom?

Looks like I got some bad advice at the LHS and peat was a poor choice.

If we're talking dollars and cents the dry ferts cost ~$20 total which would literally last for multiple years. Shit is dirt cheap. I will look for GH Micro and Bloom, lesson learnt.

[DasBlunt]

Dude, that article was hilarious. Illinois is one strange state. Chicago is ok, little bit Richmond war zone, with nice people on the lake.

CO2 seems better than petrol, right? I like water. We need more inventions with vaporizing weed....let's move faster.

Bhang makes a good product and is superior to O-Pen. Open has their new "reserve" shit, but you can taste the gas if you get the wrong to high of temp .........I need the fine wine of vaporizers that allows me to not feel like a crack addict packing my bowl and plugging into a wall. More potent taste.........we need clean oils with great taste...someway to keep the rich smell in.

If you have gone a month without combusting, you will know the taste difference...... any shorter, or if you smoke cigs too, you are not getting the fine wine experience of fragrance and lingering taste..

the horror...

[highangle]

Looks like I got some bad advice at the LHS and peat was a poor choice.

If we're talking dollars and cents the dry ferts cost ~$20 total which would literally last for multiple years. Shit is dirt cheap. I will look for GH Micro and Bloom, lesson learnt.

Most any good fert is dirt cheap at the end of the day...Your biggest cost will likely be electricity.

Unless you want to go organic and have someone to help with the steep learning curve of growing well organically, it's best to treat that promix or Black Gold in your pots as a soiless medium.

In your case, I would recommend googling "Lucas Method 0/8/16". You will find an archive somewhere of Lucas' original posts introducing and describing his methods of pulling >1g/w of Trainwreck in 50 days of flower. It's not a hard read, but he's very deft, so study it until it's under your skin, and then you'll know what you are doing, and why you're doing it, every step of the way.

Apropos to this, and considering you already bought fertilizer, I suggest running your fertilizer's Guaranteed Analysis through the spreadsheet you'll find associated with any good Lucas thread or archive. This will give you your mix ratios to achieve 100% cannabis nutrition. Proper feeding ratios and drainage in a soiless medium at ph 5.8 should get you rolling and make most problems you might have the result of environment, rather than what's inside the pots.

In line with all the above, get your fertilizer ratios correct, then flush the fuck out of your peat mix with your correct ferts to "set" or "buffer" your medium. At least 2x the volume of your pots poured through, 4x or 5x is probably better. The bulk of cation exchange between ferts and medium takes place in less than 15 minutes, so the smart way to do this initial buffering is to do it over over a couple hours rather than in one pour.

Then go forward with the Lucas Method: wait for the pot to lose significant water weight, then plain water ph'd to 6.0 with minimal runoff for the next two irrigations (accumulated salts should lower that to 5.8 or so in the pot), then full feed @5.8 (assuming full light) and test the EC & PH of the runoff.


Happy growing.

[Bobby Stainless]

The H3ad Formula (Lucas variation) is pretty cheap and easy too.


Blue Sonja in 5 gallon buckets of Coco. H3ad Formula (with my own tweekings). 6800 watts of mixed spectrum. Just under 13 lbs.

[Game Over]

Your biggest cost will likely be electricity.

One of the reasons I want to learn how to grow--> I have been looking for a excuse to install a micro-hydroelectric system off our small creek. I'm thinking free electricity would greatly cut costs.

[Bobby Stainless]

More Glue going to a couple rooms.


Also started some new gear.

[KQ]

Our second marijuana store opened today - they have sign twirlers standing on the street corner advertising. LOL!

[Bobby Stainless]

You need to open a bong store.

Or you could make a fortune with your baked goods.

[highangle]

The H3ad Formula (Lucas variation) is pretty cheap and easy too.


Blue Sonja in 5 gallon buckets of Coco. H3ad Formula (with my own tweekings). 6800 watts of mixed spectrum. Just under 13 lbs.

With all due respect, I know H3ad is even easier than Lucas, but assumed it was too late for padawan Greg_o to change mediums at this point. Grateful H3ad assumes readers have already read Lucas anyway, or have enough experience to be tuned in to what's going on in the root zone. H3ad is "Lucas for coco", devised using Lucas' (Ed Rosenthal's) spreadsheet.

Also, until a grower gets a grasp of cation exchange and how new coco will suck ++ca and +mg away from the plant and give off p and k until the cation exchange is satisfied, coco will produce deficiencies in the first few weeks. It's harder than other mediums to start flat-footed.

Cation exchange is measured and represented in units of mass per volume of medium, it's not intuitive how that relates to ppm or EC meters. Stupid fkn stoners who've pulled a couple microgrows in their ghetto apartment closets trying to explain it on icmag doesn't help things either...

The attraction and bond of new coco to the ca and mg in your nutes is stronger than to your plant's roots. One has to feed the coco in the beginning until enough mass of ca and mg (and iron) has been absorbed by the coco so it doesn't "magnetically attract" those elements away from the plant you're trying to feed. But if you're too good at it, or try to do it in one fell swoop, you'll end up overdosing your plant with the p and k released to balance the charge of the ++ca & +mg ions you just fed. On top of that, things are further complicated by the hardness or softness of the water used, and the fact that H3ad is a low ppm mix in general, which indirectly means less mass of the ions you need to balance the reaction per gallon of water...

I'm all about the coco. But even if a newb lucks out and can find expensive pre-buffered loose bagged coco that doesn't have Sri Lankan dog dick flies living in it, coco is likely to make his virgin learning curve a little steeper than a medium he may be more used to gardening with.

Gardening is great. But gardening $3000 plants is a grip.

[highangle]

I want some of the og roadkill skunk from back in The Day. The kine so skunkstinky and dank, it got everyone who cropped it locked up.

Preferably with the cbd, thc, cbg, point of origin and manufacturing location clearly marked, along with a best buy date.

[Bobby Stainless]

Highangle: You said something about shopvaccing my run off. Is that really going to be worth my time, and what are the nutrient use implications?

I've got a few big rooms. Logistically, it will take forever.


Staging room after transplant.

[Greg_o]

In line with all the above, get your fertilizer ratios correct, then flush the fuck out of your peat mix with your correct ferts to "set" or "buffer" your medium. At least 2x the volume of your pots poured through, 4x or 5x is probably better. The bulk of cation exchange between ferts and medium takes place in less than 15 minutes, so the smart way to do this initial buffering is to do it over over a couple hours rather than in one pour.


Happy growing.

Hey thanks for all the info here, I'm going to have some questions but right now I just want to confirm this flush. You're saying it's better to flush immediately with (with a proper fertilizer) as opposed to water?

[highangle]

Highangle: You said something about shopvaccing my run off. Is that really going to be worth my time, and what are the nutrient use implications?

I've got a few big rooms. Logistically, it will take forever.


Staging room after transplant.

You probably know more about it than I do, but since you asked..

I'd start off with 4x4 or 4x8 trays, like for flood & drain. I'd get the trays slightly off the floor so they'll accept an elbow under the drain hole. I'd put a slight grade so runoff will flow to the drain. Then I'd run individual black drain tubes to a common manifold tube, which connects fairly well with the shop vac with duct tape or bushings. After a feeding when the runoff collects, turn on the shop vac for a minute or so to clear and dry the lines. Try to empty and rinse out the shop vac before shit sours in there.

Since I'm running my mouth, I like to use smaller pots and multifeed with top drippers fed by a $20 submersible pump on a digital timer. I want my chickens so rootbound they can't go 6 hours lights-on without an irrigation, a la Hundred Gram Oz or Don Juan Mataus. I don't need big pots with coco. In fact, my yields went up with smaller pots. I grow 3-foot plants in "2-gal" trade pots, which only hold 6.5 liters. People regularly grow 2-3' plants in slabs with drippers. I could probably grow 3-footers in stadium cups if I really wanted to dangle 3 feet of roots in a bucket, but the reason for smaller pots with multifeed is more oxygen to the roots vs larger pots & less frequent watering. It's hard to multifeed properly with big pots anyway, until late flower.
Oxygen in the root zone why hydro grows bigger plants and yields more than soil or organic soil ever will. Big oxygen to the root zone (and lots of bare bulbs) is the central focus of everything Heath engineers... His results make it look like he's on to something...

The secret to top feeding drippers in a larger room is to make all tubes fed by the same pump the same length. That way everybody gets the same dose, and you don't have to fuck around with one or two pots that didn't get as much as the others.

Runoff and nute usage: DTW uses more nute solution than maybe any other method. How could it not? But it doesn't really use that much more, and it's not that expensive (it's actually free).
Smaller pots make a big difference in how much nutes one uses in a grow, as you put in less and it takes less runoff to keep nute concentrations ideal in the root zone, even though you do it more often. Runoff in multifeed doesn't really flush as much as it keeps concentrations constantly ideal, which is what I want.

With slow feeding like soil, nute concentrations spike as the pot dries. With carrots and multifeed systems, the pots don't dry. Carrot feeders though, require an occasional flush of the medium during the grow as there's no runoff and excess salts accumulate in the medium. If the plant's not taking them up, where do they go? They don't go anywhere until you manually take them out and realign the medium with a flush.

I like to make sure the volume of runoff equals the volume of the pot in 4 days. That's 6.5 liters of runoff per pot in 4 days. There's the amount of "extra" nutes that goes with multifeed DTW. It's still cheap, because it's plant health insurance, and because it produces superior yields compared to methods with minimal runoff.

Hope you're still awake after that monologue.

[highangle]

Hey thanks for all the info here, I'm going to have some questions but right now I just want to confirm this flush. You're saying it's better to flush immediately with (with a proper fertilizer) as opposed to water?

Yep. Your medium is out of whack, which is why such a light dose of ferts made problems. You need to buffer it with nutes so your ph in the medium won't oscillate out of bounds. This should get it so the nutes are actually uptaken by the plant in the proper proportions.

Read Lucas. Understand the proper ppms and balance of all the major nutrients to grow cannabis. Then figure your proper mix of your ferts based on Rosenthal's target numbers for NPK and the micronutrients, and the Guaranteed Analysis of your fert. Use the spreadsheet to do this. It may take a couple iterations, but it should tell you how many grams of dry ferts to mix per gallon of water. The Lucas Method is not confined to GH nutes. It will work with any fertilizer capable of approximating the scientifically derived target nutrient values.

Once you're solid you have your nutes mixed properly for cannabis, go to town on buffering your medium by flushing the full strength nutrient solution you just engineered through your medium. Then continue on using the normal Lucas method with your nutes.

HTH

[Bobby Stainless]

Thanks for the input. Chances are I will see how the shop vaccing goes.

I've got maybe another couple of Coco runs in me, and then I am going to a Undercurrent style setup. Coco is too much of a pain.

[highangle]

I can see you're working hard. I wouldn't want to manually vacuum up that runoff once a day, multifeed would work you to death. Automate the scutwork!

...

DWC is unforgiving. Pith, or even a boned nute mix can wipe you out overnight. I do like Heath's concepts with undercurrents - high flow, high O2, low ppm - but I'd start small until I tapped it out, then I'd be careful trying to scale it up. Looks a little noisy too.

I look for problems though. It's obvious it works good as shit in the right hands...

[Bobby Stainless]

Yeah. Heat Robinson is more or less why I started looking into it.

I ran a 8 site water farm for awhile, that I had modified. Areoponics before that. Definitely a pita.

The undercurrents look good though.




Ill definitely start with a 8 site, and get it dialed over the next few runs.