Indoor-Outdoor Desert Grow

ROFL,4U2Smoke! I DID leave detailed written instructions for my hubby. Unfortunately, he just didn't understand the concept of keeping water in the bottom of the carts for humidity, and instead, filled the carts a few inches deep every day, so the pots were sitting in the water, not on the river rocks.

Poor man felt terrible when he realized he'd goofed, but I felt even worse knowing how hard he tried to do his very best by the plants, using the moisture meter on each one every day, and hauling them inside and out morning and evening. I just wanted to minimize his feeling bad about making such a simple mistake, when, for the most part, he did everything else right. No way was I going to jump down his throat for a simple mistake, when his heart was in the right place.

SwiftTGT, great questions!

"how many hours daylight are you getting now?"
Only about 6 hours, before it gets just too hot outside and growth would stop. Then I bring them inside, and they are under fluoros and CFL's for 12 hours, with 6 hours of dark during the night. Before it started getting so hot here, I had them out about 10 hours a day, from dawn to dusk, then back inside under the fluoros overnight.

"Do you know what relative humidity is outside?"
Yes, it's 7% right now. Hideously dry. That's life in the middle of the Mojave desert. So, to augment as much humidity as I can, I line the bottom of the rolling carts I keep the 3 gallon pots in with river stones, and keep an inch of water in the bottom. Inside, I now remove all the plants from the carts, put them on the floor of the garage, and have two humidifiers going 24/7. I have about 30-40% relative humidity in the garage growing area right now.
Closer to 30% now that I have to leave the kitchen door open so the air conditioning will keep the garage cool enough for the plants to continue growing.

"what is your water sourse like, are you using a well, or just normal tap water?"

You're singing my song! I had some major Ph problems early on in veg due to using tap water that had sat out for 24 hours. When I finally got a Ph tester, I was horrified to see how high the Ph of our tap water was. So, I immediately began using bottled water, which has a 7.0 Ph, and flushed all the plants well, and have since used ONLY bottled water.

"you might be able to get a pump set up with a timer to spray a fine mist of water on your outside plants like every 5 mins, should keep the temp down abit during the day,"

Yes, we can get misting systems, and setting one up is not a problem. But I was concerned that misting water on the leaves in that intense sun would be very problematic, and burn the leaves. Also, I was concerned about the foliar feeding effect of that high Ph water, since I can't use bottled water for the misting system. Hence, I have been misting them before the sun comes up, and every hour in the late morning, when I put them under the shade tent.

My in-house grow room will soon be finished, and I'll be able to put the plants in the COOL house (73%) by next week. I plan to let them veg a couple weeks longer, to help fill out the leaves they lost during the flood, then change bulbs and start them on flowering. The culled plants (the 10 that took the worst beating) are outside now, and I'll just keep them out there until they die. I'm sure they won't last long in this heat. In another couple of weeks, it will be 110 degrees during the day, and only going down to about 95 degrees at night. Way too hot for the plants. But, they are the ones slated to die anyway, since I can't flower 21 females inside!

On the tip for painting the pots white: great tip! I did this when I lived in a more friendly climate. But it is not enough in this dry, extremely hot climate. We can't keep any potted plants alive unless we double-pot them, with wet moss or newspapers between the pots to keep the roots from boiling in the desert sun.

So what I've done is to wrap thick layers of wet newspapers around each pot to help keep the soil and roots cool. And I re-wet the newspaper every hour they are outside.

Thanks so much for your responses--it's so helpful, and I appreciate all the time you spent reading and responding. I'm deeply grateful!

hay mojavemama
yea sounds like you have to battel totaly different weather condions
then i do! its quite wet and cold here!
average temp is 55f and rh average is 80%!
what lights are you going to have in your new flower room?
so what was the ph of your tap water,?
here is a link to a water treatment system,

http://cgi.ebay.com/0-PPM-7stage-100G-RO-3X-DI-Reverse-Osmosis-Water-Filte_W0QQitemZ120417497595QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item1c097131fb&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50

its good value at $100,
it should save you money buying botteled water!

Hey SwiftGT! I envy you living in such wonderful high humidity and cool. About this time of the year, I'm ready to move into my refrigerator.

Our tap water Ph is 8.5!

I really appreciate the URL to the reverse osmosis water unit. You are right, it would be a savings. I'll definitely be checking into this asap! Thanks so much for taking the time to find that for me. I'm very grateful!

As for lights in my growing room, alas, this year I will only have 16 fluoros for the top and will put 6 cfl's vertically on each side, with 4 single fluoros on the floor to help penetrate through the lower canopy.

Though not ideal, my hope is that if I can continue to get 5 hours of early morning real sun on the plants, that they might turn out okay. I realize I won't get heavy, tight buds, but even light, airy ones--small ones--will be most welcome.

Next year, though, I plan to get two of the convertable HPS/HID lights. This year I'm committed to putting my veterinarian's children through college. <G> So this is essentially my "learning curve" grow, the grow I can experiment with, make major mistakes with, and hopefully learn as much as I possibly can.

Thank you so much for your response!

I am stunned. It's been 5 days since I arrived home after vacation, to find my plants sitting in swampy water and full of root rot, yellowed and burned-tip leaves.

I culled 11 of the girls, putting them outside to die. But they aren't doing a good job of dying, and instead are starting to fill out again, with hundreds of new leaves sprouting up at every node.

Here's an example of the worst of the plants, and what they look like now.
These are the most incredibly resiliant plants. It's just unbelievable to me how they are thriving. Though they are still yellowed, and the Ph is not yet balanced again, they definitely ARE thriving.

i too had a battle wit PH isues lil while ago wit my current grow. but they surprised me. 8 outta 12 were still female and all pulled thru it. i always find myself undereestimatin their power.
sorry to hear of the mishap tho
hope they pull thru for ya...

ha you envy me eh, not if you lived here all your life!
wow 8.5 thats quite high! do you have ph down?
i like to use Phosphoric acid as its a great sourse of phosphate's as an added bonus!
yea they look like there fighting back!
well you doing very well so far!

Wow, Swiftgt. Phosphoric acid, huh? I'll have to try to find some. I don't use a Ph down, though I do have some. I just flush with neutral Ph water, and the re-adjust pretty quickly, at which point I can give them a light feeding of nutes and then they are stable. But the high Ph is why I only use de-ionized 7.0 Ph bottled water on them. We don't drink the stuff, either.

Yep, I'd still envy you living in that cool climate even if I'd been born there.
Imagine putting on oven mitts to be able to touch your steering wheel in the summer, even though you have blackened windows and an insulated sunscreen on the windshield.

Imagine pavement so hot that a dropped egg will immediately fry to "over hard." Imagine your skin feeling so dry that no amount of showers and lathering all over with skin lotion helps keep it from cracking. This is not a human-friendly climate in the summer months. Count your blessings. Sounds like where you live would be HEAVEN to me!

Thanks for the encouragement, SwiftGT! I really appreciate it. I'm learning tons, and even though mistakes in this climate can be disastrous, I have enough plants to experiment with pushing to the edge.

It was an exciting weekend for me: finally got my grow room functional, with panda cloth up, lights up, fan and humidifier. Last night (05-18-09) put the plants on 12/12. Took plants outside for 5 hours of sun this morning before it got too hot, and back into the grow room for the afternoon.

I just went through all the plants with my jeweler's loupe, and sure enough, the two plants I suspected might be male or possibly go hermie 3 months ago definitely developed balls in the past 24 hours. Balls and pistils: hermies. These were two plants that went through several major stress periods, both had broken necks and were patched back together, and also didn't handle the flood well. I'm not at all surprised, and I uprooted them and sent them to balls and nanner heaven.

My grow room is air conditioned, and the humidifier is holding the room between 50% and 60% humidity--heavenly for me, since we're in single digit humidity here in the desert now. When I go into the room, I feel like I'm back in North Carolina. Love it!

The plants love it too. Some grew an inch over the past 24 hours, some two inches. I'm down to 16 female plants indoors, and have two outdoors just to test and see how they hold up in the heat full-time.

Here's a pix of my grow room and one of the smaller female plants. Please don't laugh: I know it's very slapdash, ghetto, and unprofessional. Plus, I'm only using T5's and T8's plus augmenting with CFL's on the sides. I do have two banks of 5 double lights over the top, and will be putting up 10 more fluoros on the sides this weekend.

Had a blast totally lightproofing the room. Ended up using sticky-backed black felt around the door jambs, and as a bottom door brush. There isn't a hint of light when I'm inside, and I lose my direction, feel like I'm inside a cave. Cool!

Those ladies look real green mama, I won't laugh at you.

Awww, you made my day, Stonedrone!

Well that just makes me giddy.

Well, in spite of every error under the sun that should have killed most of the plants, all 21 survived and thrived. Of these, only two went hermie (and were uprooted), but these also had their necks broken and were the two that took the most beating in the flood.

Now in day 4 of flowering, I still take all 19 outside every morning to sun. It's 100 degrees outside now, but the plants are still thriving and growing. I put their pots in rolling garden carts packed with newspaper, with each pot covered with layers of wet newspapers, then plant pots and cart covered with shade screening. By afternoon, when everything else in the backyard seem to be wilting, the girls sunbathing in the nude in the carts just seem to be showing no stress at all.

Here's a couple shots of the girls in the carts. You can see I did some LST on a couple of the girls in one of the pictures. These are the ones that are a bit taller, have a bit more sativa in them. The ones in the other cart are bushy but low in height.

"I" think you're doing great! too MJMomma.. your persistence will prevail

yea i dont know what i would laugh at, it all looks good to me!
your plants look super green,
im sure its hard work havin to move outside let alone work!

Hah! True Dat, Swift. It's more work than I ever expected, but I figure it's all part of my education. If I manage by some miracle to get them through to harvest, I will know I have earned every heavenly puff the hard way!

And next year, may all my dreams be answered by a couple of nice HID's so I don't have to do all this in-and-out stuff constantly.

All 18 of the plants, including the ones I thought were too damaged from the flood to survive--have grown and thrived beyond all expectations. I thought for sure I was down to a nice even 10 plants, which I could handle. But noooo, all 18 of the girls decided to try to outshine the next.

When you have 18 beautiful girls, how do you choose which to kill, because you just can't take them all to harvest? I had no problem killing the 3 hermies, but these girls are all showing beautiful pistils now, and I can't bring myself to do any of them in. Plus, they struggled for life so valiantly!

Can anyone share what to look for in lesser plants? What might make it sensible to ax one over another?

I can't grow them outside--other than to covertly sun them for a few hours during the day, but live in Suburbia and will have to stop doing that once they start getting the heavenly scent and getting bigger. But for now, they are enjoying the sun, and enjoying the nice 12 hour dark nicely humid and air-circulated grow room at night.

How do I choose which ones to kill, and which ones get to live? I know it's getting late, but realize I can still clone any of these girls. How do I choose the mother plants? I think the tough decisions are rougher than the 4 hours of work a day it takes me to keep up with these ladies.

Attaching a couple of thumbnails of the COG grow, with all 4 carts in a row, and a close up of one of the plants.

Wen I choose a 'keeper' mother/donor, I like to take cuttings from everything, marking ea. to correspond w/ the seed plants. Then flower out the seed plants. Observing anything that I consider important to "my" preferences. Resilience, resistance, vigor,...
Last but not least, the "final product", yeild, potency, color, whatever fits best to "your" personal preferences.

OMG! I couldnt bear to kill any of them, either! Look...rather than kill them...why not "single cola" the ones you would kill...and at least give them a chance at life, sniff...and they wont take up hardly any room! sniff, sob! OH GOD DONT KILL THEM! LOL...I mean...jeeez, how many DO you have room for? 10? So, 8 "extras"? What about this...uuummm...get some tall narrow containers, like 2 liter soda bottles, say...cut the top off, spray paint them (Im assuming the roots dont like light?), fill em with your grow medium and pop in the girls. Remove the side branches... squeez em in there?

It just breaks my hear to kill a living thing.

I may be in a similar fix soon enough. My 11 "kids" are still in veg, but another couple weeks and it's flower time. Im hoping a nice 5 or 6 or even 4 fem, but what IF more are? I know I wont be able to kill any of them. Now that Ive thought of using 2 liter bottles...hmmmm... At worst, they die, but at least they'd die of...natural causes, LOL.

Come to think of it...really, the Universe has given you a tremendous gift, letting them ALL be females. I hope you can find a way to not kill any of them.

Bless your heart. I know this is just killing you.

Lass

Great insight, Hick. Thanks so much. I'm truly honored you took the time to reply to my post.

You gave me a lot to think about. After your post, I went outside and looked at all 18 plants and thought about which ones had proved they had great resistance, vigor and resilience. Three of them, though they have truly rallied, are more stunted than the others, and not throwing huge fan leaves or an abundance of flowers. If they were all I had, I'd probably be happy because they seem healthy and thriving now. But since I have to choose some to cull, your insight gives me much to think about and makes the decision a bit easier.

Also appreciate the wisdom on cloning, and will follow your advice.

So now I'm down to 15 plants, and every couple of days I'll see if there is one that's just not quite up to par.

Thanks again for your help. It's greatly appreciated.

Hey Lass, you're a girl after my own heart! You sure understand what kind of agony this is for me. I wish I could keep them all, but there just are not enough lights for me to take all of them into full bud.

OTOH, you are doing great with your babes, and I KNOW you (with your fancy new light!) will have an outstanding crop. If you get tired of that light, you know where you can send it. Hahh!

Grow on, gal!