[MEGA]Community Growing advice, tips, tricks, & experiences Part 5 (2012-2013)

[Livinginthealps]

Its for my flowering room. Or do you mean area as in size? If so the room is probably 8 x 6 x 7, and I have the lights right next to each other.

Do you not think that the alternate color spectrum would help?

Hey, one of my grow rooms is close to those dimensions. I posted a pic a few post's above. One of my room is 8x8x7. I was using 4 600's but now use 4 adjustable lights. The range of the adjustable are 250-1150 watts a light. I only use them at 600-1150 watts though. I recommend 600's as it spreads light better than the 1000's and keeps the room much cooler. Not, to mention the power bill.

 

[yeahbutno]

Some beautiful photos in this thread

 

[tentram]

sorry for the shitty phone pics, guys, but just wanted to share a couple of the "big boys" of the lot i've got in at the moment.

this one is indica dominant (unknown strain, aka mongrel), standing around 7 foot at the moment unbelievably as the same breed only hit around 5 - 5 1/2 last year.

and this broad fellow is sativa dominant and more or less same height as the above, though, a lot more branching.

once i find my digi cam or acquire one i'll take better pictures which serve them the proper justice they deserve.

growing outside, chem free on the line of capricorn in southern hemisphere.

 

[Artificial Emotion]

Underfloor heat works really well.

 

[freehugs]

I meant the floor area, yes. What is the floor area?



Not in the way you are probably hoping, no. But if you could answer the question above it would help as I don't know which dimension is the height.

The height is about 6 and a half feet.

 

[justsayknow]

sorry for the shitty phone pics, guys, but just wanted to share a couple of the "big boys" of the lot i've got in at the moment.

this one is indica dominant (unknown strain, aka mongrel), standing around 7 foot at the moment unbelievably as the same breed only hit around 5 - 5 1/2 last year.

Hey your pics vanished? Yeah put some others up if you get a camera.

and this broad fellow is sativa dominant and more or less same height as the above, though, a lot more branching.

once i find my digi cam or acquire one i'll take better pictures which serve them the proper justice they deserve.

growing outside, chem free on the line of capricorn in southern hemisphere.

Hey your pics vanished? Maybe put some more up if you get a camera.

 

[Artificial Emotion]

The height is about 6 and a half feet.

Approximately 50W per square foot of floor space is the ideal figure to aim for.

If the floor space 7 feet by 8 feet that's a total of 56 square feet.

That would mean you would need a total of 2800W (2.8kW) to get exactly 50W per square foot. So you would ideally use three 1kW lamps. You could either light a smaller area or get two extra 1kW HPS lamps on top of the one you already have but using your T5 in addition to the light you have won't be enough either in wattage efficiency to light the area properly.

 

[ShaggyFin]

I believe in stress growing. I am going to stress my plants (just like you would any other psychedelic plant) to raise the Cannabinoid content at harvest. I have many methods I am trying. Is it ok to post videos of a grow and the techniques here?

I watered my bud with milk 2x now.
I used ashes as fertilizer on all of them once, and dumped TONS of ash on one plants soil since transplant.
I over nuted and planted them in a single container for harsher conditions (which is the idea of stressing for strength), and they are now coming back strong :D
I may top and FIM soon, and I will probably super crop.

This is what I CAN tell you, the list of stuff I CAN'T tell you is stuff I haven't tried yet, but will scare the shit out of you. So be ready for those :D

 

[freehugs]

I believe in stress growing. I am going to stress my plants (just like you would any other psychedelic plant) to raise the Cannabinoid content at harvest. I have many methods I am trying. Is it ok to post videos of a grow and the techniques here?

I watered my bud with milk 2x now.
I used ashes as fertilizer on all of them once, and dumped TONS of ash on one plants soil since transplant.
I over nuted and planted them in a single container for harsher conditions (which is the idea of stressing for strength), and they are now coming back strong :D
I may top and FIM soon, and I will probably super crop.

This is what I CAN tell you, the list of stuff I CAN'T tell you is stuff I haven't tried yet, but will scare the shit out of you. So be ready for those :D

Trust me man, don't fim or top.

Just low stress train, and feed organic. That will give you all of the cannabinoids that you could ever want.
Plus too much stress = hermies = less cannabinoid content

 

[ShaggyFin]

Trust me man, don't fim or top.

Just low stress train, and feed organic. That will give you all of the cannabinoids that you could ever want.
Plus too much stress = hermies = less cannabinoid content

I've got a 1000w HPS so even hermies will be dank :D

 

[Artificial Emotion]

Whoever told you stressing your plants is a good idea is taking the piss I think.

Also ash is a no no in container plants IMHO.

And watering with milk? Is that right?

 

[ShaggyFin]

Whoever told you stressing your plants is a good idea is taking the piss I think.

Also ash is a no no in container plants IMHO.

And watering with milk? Is that right?

I know stressing plants works based on research on San Pedro, Phalaris and marijuana itself.

Ash is fine.

Milk is fine. Milk counters the acidity from the Ash. And it also adds some phosphorus to the grow :D

 

[Artificial Emotion]

I know stressing plants works based on research on San Pedro, Phalaris and marijuana itself.

Cannabis is a completely different species to San Pedrop or Phalaris 8( Just because stressing one might cause it to produce more psychoactives does not mean that cannabis will. They are completely unrelated plants that have nothing to do with each other. All stressing your plants will do is make them unhealthy and yield less. Trust me, I've been growing long enough to know. But if you think you know better then more power to you.

Ash is fine.

Okay then. They're your plants, you can do what you like with them.

Milk is fine. Milk counters the acidity from the Ash. And it also adds some phosphorus to the grow :D

Since when is ash acidic? You're getting basic chemistry wrong, so no that's not correct.

 

[justsayknow]

Will stress cause flowering to occur more quickly? Obviously that would reduce yield and quality but if the aim was haste maybe it would be an option?

I'm probably (read definitely) not going to feed with milk pretty sure the fat would go rancid, I have used charcoal and wood ash in containers before without any ill effects that I could notice- didn't check the ph though so its quite possible it was raising it. I've heard people recommend charcoal in containers rather than ash though. Pretty sure the aim is to increase microrganism habitat and filter out any nasties rather than induce stress.

I would like to see an experiment on the stress thing. My guess would be potency is genetic but flowering time might be hastened.

 

[Artificial Emotion]

No more quickly than if you just flipped to 12/12. If you're running 18/6 lighting some strains will flower under stressful growing conditions but it's not common. The issues is that even if you're not using feminized seed, if you stress your plants during the flowering period you will invariably cause them to turn hermie (or intersex), ruining what would otherwise have been a good sinsemilla harvest. And of course yield will be massively cut down. The way growers push up their yield is by purposefully and specifically growing under as low low stress an environment as possible. This is why methods such as scrogging and LST (low stress training), if done right, can be so productive in comparison to harsher training and pruning. It's basic growing 101 which is why I find his suggestion that stressing his plants can a good thing to be surprising.

For the most part unfortunately potency and cannanbinoid profile are pretty much fixed and there's really not a lot you can do to significantly change it apart from using the technique I talked about in the above post. Some people have experimented with UV-B bulbs late in flowering (with safety goggles of course) with success, emulating high altitude conditions where some strains thrive and produce potent weed. Not all strains react positively to this treatment though and for most of us the best way to make more potent plants with more THC or CBD is simply to breed the plants for these traits right from the start or just to grow out a whole pack of seeds to find a potent keeper phenotype by smoking the resulting bud at the end of the grow.

Once you've grown the plants and you're about to harvest there is some leeway to harvest early or late to change the nature of the high, although this isn't because of varying levels of CBD like is commonly believed but is more due to CBN and terpene content.

Justsayknow charcoal is a definitely good in containers but only in small amounts because it can alter the cation exchange capacity of the medium. Charcoal and wood ash are definitely not to be confused though. Ash can contain quite a lot of basic substance in it and they even used to make potassium hydroxide from it to make soap. Really this sort of thing is better in the ground than in a container, but I wouldn't be surprised if you got away with adding some to a container in small amounts.

Look into something called Biochar:

Biochar is a name for charcoal when it is used for particular purposes, especially as a soil amendment. Like all charcoal, biochar is created by pyrolysis of biomass. Biochar is under investigation as an approach to carbon sequestration to produce negative carbon dioxide emissions.[1] Biochar thus has the potential to help mitigate climate change, via carbon sequestration.[2] Independently, biochar can increase soil fertility, increase agricultural productivity and provide protection against some foliar and soil-borne diseases. Furthermore, biochar reduce pressure on forests, though the degree to which results offer long term carbon sequestration in practice has been challenged.[3] Biochar is a stable solid, rich in carbon and can endure in soil for thousands of years.[1]

 

[ShaggyFin]

Cannabis is a completely different species to San Pedrop or Phalaris 8( Just because stressing one might cause it to produce more psychoactives does not mean that cannabis will. They are completely unrelated plants that have nothing to do with each other. All stressing your plants will do is make them unhealthy and yield less. Trust me, I've been growing long enough to know. But if you think you know better then more power to you.



Okay then. They're your plants, you can do what you like with them.



Since when is ash acidic? You're getting basic chemistry wrong, so no that's not correct.

Cannabis is different from those plants yes. But alkaloid production all works along the same lines. You even have Cannabioids in your brain, and they are released I the same basic scenarios as increased mescaline production in a Cacti or DMT in Phalaris. So it only makes sense that to increase Canabis Alkaloid production you follow the same principle.

And do some research. Have you heard of super-cropping? Or Topping and FIMing? It's all PERFECTLY acceptable stress practice because it has been tested OVER and OVER by thousands if not millions of people. I am just introducing some new (but they HAVE actually been done before) not so well known techniques.

And I got the information on the Ph of ash on a grow forum. I bounce all this information off them ass well :D

 

[Artificial Emotion]

I've been reading some of your other threads and it's obvious I'm not exactly dealing with the next einstien.

Cannabis is different from those plants yes. But alkaloid production all works along the same lines. You even have Cannabioids in your brain, and they are released I the same basic scenarios as increased mescaline production in a Cacti or DMT in Phalaris. So it only makes sense that to increase Canabis Alkaloid production you follow the same principle.

Cannabis has NOTHING to do with cacti. They are NOT released in the 'same scenarios' as mesaline in cacti. They are DIFFERENT PLANTS and the only connection is that they produce psychoactives. They're not even in the same family or genus as cannabis! It's not a hard concept to grasp but based on your other posts I'm really not surprised you're having difficulty with this. I might add your theory is irrelevant because stressing your plants, as I said, won't make them more potent.

And do some research. Have you heard of super-cropping? Or Topping and FIMing? It's all PERFECTLY acceptable stress practice because it has been tested OVER and OVER by thousands if not millions of people. I am just introducing some new (but they HAVE actually been done before) not so well known techniques.

I've been growing for years so I don't need to do any research on those growing techniques as I'm already well familiar with them thank you very much. If you'll go through my old posts throughout the years it's obvious I'm aware of what supercropping, topping, and FIMing are. You're completely missing the point.

I can't believe I'm having to explain this to you but concentrating one one of those stated methods - topping for example. It doesn't produce results because you're stressing the plant you idiot. You are manipulating hormone production in the tip to produce multiple shoots so that the plant produces multiple colas instead of concentrating all efforts on one single apical shoot. And instead of having the leggy colas reaching up towards the light you have a much lower profile that makes better use of the light available, increasing yield.

And I got the information on the Ph of ash on a grow forum. I bounce all this information off them ass well :D

You have no idea because you are a clueless know-it-all newbie.

 

[justsayknow]

No more quickly than if you just flipped to 12/12. If you're running 18/6 lighting some strains will flower under stressful growing conditions but it's not common. The issues is that even if you're not using feminized seed, if you stress your plants during the flowering period you will invariably cause them to turn hermie (or intersex), ruining what would otherwise have been a good sinsemilla harvest. And of course yield will be massively cut down. The way growers push up their yield is by purposefully and specifically growing under as low low stress an environment as possible. This is why methods such as scrogging and LST (low stress training), if done right, can be so productive in comparison to harsher training and pruning. It's basic growing 101 which is why I find his suggestion that stressing his plants can a good thing to be surprising.

For the most part unfortunately potency and cannanbinoid profile are pretty much fixed and there's really not a lot you can do to significantly change it apart from using the technique I talked about in the above post. Some people have experimented with UV-B bulbs late in flowering (with safety goggles of course) with success, emulating high altitude conditions where some strains thrive and produce potent weed. Not all strains react positively to this treatment though and for most of us the best way to make more potent plants with more THC or CBD is simply to breed the plants for these traits right from the start or just to grow out a whole pack of seeds to find a potent keeper phenotype by smoking the resulting bud at the end of the grow.

Once you've grown the plants and you're about to harvest there is some leeway to harvest early or late to change the nature of the high, although this isn't because of varying levels of CBD like is commonly believed but is more due to CBN and terpene content.

Justsayknow charcoal is a definitely good in containers but only in small amounts because it can alter the cation exchange capacity of the medium. Charcoal and wood ash are definitely not to be confused though. Ash can contain quite a lot of basic substance in it and they even used to make potassium hydroxide from it to make soap. Really this sort of thing is better in the ground than in a container, but I wouldn't be surprised if you got away with adding some to a container in small amounts.

Look into something called Biochar:

Yeah the reason I used the charcoal was because I saw a doco about that terra preta that biochar is based on. It was from a pile of ash from years of fire remnants so it probably would have had some potassium hydroxide left but no doubt a lot of it would have leached out. I prefer to grow in the ground if I can and I suppose its just applying the same technique to container growing which isn't necessarily the optimum. I may try the biochar product though- looks good.

For me the interest in the stress inducing flowering was for outdoor growing in situations where you are unable to see it through until the end of autumn. It seems the more effective way is physically increasing the hours of darkness where possible and nobody wants hermies. Apparently I don't have to worry as the indica strain we were talking about is happy to start flowering with just over 10 hours of darkness outside. I'm pretty sure others need 10.5 or 11 though.

That UV scenario sounds full on, I'm not too worried about the potency side of things more interested in the whole spectrum of smells and flavours and effects.

 

[OriginalCrazyone]

stupid question, that has probably been asked before....

I have tried to grow on a couple different occasions, nothing serious, only 1 plant at a time and each time have had the same results... I sprout the seeds for 3-5 days in moist paper towels, and then plant them indoors in a soil medium and use natural spring water from a mountain stream to avoid any chemicals that may be present in the municipal source. My soil is usually 20% sand bottom, a layer of natural stone containing calcium and phosphorus ground up across the top of that, about 5% and the rest consisting of around 50% dark natural top soil from the creek bed, 10% ashes and 15% planting soil (if fertilized, the kind for roses) mixed. the natural soil is sifted to remove any other plants or roots that might be in it, using 18 hour light on 6 hours off schedule. the seedlings are planted about 3 inches deep, and at least 6-8 inches of soil above the sand layer. Well, the plants shoot up to about 12-14 inches tall within 2-3 weeks, before any leaves form, then it gets 2-3 leaves at the top of the stem, then the plant just seems to either fall over and die, or they turn yellowish and dry out, either way it is just before I am ready to change the lighting timing to 12/12 to flower the plant. What am I doing wrong here? the plant is well wateredthe roots in the soil look good when I go through them, I am at a loss here...

-OcO-

 

[Artificial Emotion]

For me the interest in the stress inducing flowering was for outdoor growing in situations where you are unable to see it through until the end of autumn. It seems the more effective way is physically increasing the hours of darkness where possible and nobody wants hermies. Apparently I don't have to worry as the indica strain we were talking about is happy to start flowering with just over 10 hours of darkness outside. I'm pretty sure others need 10.5 or 11 though.

Unfortunately there's no easy solution to that. Believe me if there was an easy way to flower plants outdoors much earlier people would jump on it straight away.

There are two methods that you are no doubt aware of that are the only real solutions:

* Blackening out the plants artificially. To do this you would have to live by where you plants are and you would put them in a darkened box (has to be completely dark with no light leaks) and take them out 12 hours later. So you would put them in the box at say 8 or 9PM in the evening and take it out at 8 or 9AM the next morning to ensure the plants have had 12 hours of uninterrupted darkness. You really have to be on the ball and you have to do it at the exact same times every day (think several alarm clocks) and you cannot miss out a day here or there. If you can do this then it is the perfect solution because you can even flower some sativas in your climate. Because UV levels peak in mid summer bud harvested during July-August will be quite a bit more potent than bud harvested in autumn. And you won't suffer from mould nearly as much as an autumn harvest.

Some people go as far as making automatic darkening greenhouses for this very purpose, although building such a contraption can be expensive and technically difficult.

* The other solution is to grow autos. Especially 'super-autos' or amazonian autos that flower much longer than your conventional autoflowering strains and grow much larger and have a much larger yield.

Personally if I had the resources I would go for the first option because that is the best way to grow the most potent, high quality bud possible. But otherwise the best way to get the best terpene content with the best smells and tastes is to give the plants good, organic soil with good organic fertilizers, because with the help of sunlight the plants are made from these very materials. Well grown bud grown outdoors in good soil with sparing use of fertilizers will give you the best results.