Any help appreciated...learn from my mistakes

[BuddyLuv]

My ques is either poor genetics or something is a muck with your nutes. May I suggest buying some quality genetics from the 'Dam. I mean for the amount of money you guys have invested in this med grow you could easily buy 100 beans of some quality genes that are not hand me downs of a friend of a friend. This will also allow you know what strain you are dealing with and the ability to ask advice from other memeber who has experience growing that particular strain.

 

[DomsChron]

Lookin better buddy! Make sure to take it easy on each strain and slowly bump it up and then once you find the level, bring it down just a little. That is the key ppm for that strain.

 

[growfox]

You are right. I would rather have a more common strain and get big results from each pull, but its a complicated situation. This particular strain goes for a lot more on the market than most others. Until we get our flower dialed in, we dont know the potential of this strain. We made a huge improvement from our last pull where we only got popcorn sized buds to where we are now with giant dense colas, some of that improvement came from your help.

EDIT per request of domschron

Im sure that if I spent less than $100 on a bomb strain and it showed results, then we might switch over. I actually would look forward to trying to grow a new strain but keep in mind it would have to be isolated from the rest of the plants until sexing is done which would mean I would need to either build my own ghetto wrig or be super responsible and water it right on time and in exactly the right amount, etc. I stay home most of the time as you can imagine beucase this area has had a few break ins so hand watering might not be a problem, but I a pretty certain that I would forget and the whole thing would go to hell.

One of our other friends intends to start growing but he doesnt know anything about growing so we are building the rooms and taking care of the plants so that might be an opportunity to try some new strains. Really we are just borrowing the space.

Ill take some of these ideas to my friend when he gets back. Hes about 200 miles away right now.

 

[growfox]

I flushed it out, put fresh water in there and bumped the ppms up to 1000 and only added a dash of kool boom. Ill try taking it up either tomorrow or the day after up to 1050, possibly higher. I've seen it take 1800 without any changes at this stage so maybe I was wrong and it really needed higher ppms, but in any case, all the hairs are still white and the roots are looking beautiful so we have time to try a few things before it starts aging out.

 

[DomsChron]

That is probably where msot of the money that we make off of this recent pull is going to go.

We actually don't sell here...might wanna edit that?

 

[Elven]

Just my 2 cents. I am still working on my first grow but I am using Fogponics and I am using the full Humboldt Nutrients Master AB feed schedule and now that I have my system fine tuned. I am getting tons of growth, but we will see. Good luck and hope to see some good bud pr0n!

 

[growfox]

The leaves are continuing to become purple, but I did a little research on my strains(Afghan x Bubba Kush) and purple leaves might be normal, however, I am still going to explore the possibility that it is a PH problem or a Phosphorus defiency. The leaves seem to have stopped curling as much since my last resivior flush. The fan leaves and some of the smaller leaves are still increasingly turning purple however, I just realized that its only 1.5 weeks from their typical harvest time so as I said before, it might be normal.

I will post some pictures later, they are sleeping right now.

 

[growfox]

End of week 6 in 4 light room:

I bought a PH kit and the ph checked out. I believe it was between 5.5 and 6.

Some of the fan leaves are still turning purple as you will be able to see from the pictures.

I bumped the PPM's up to 1400, and its been like that for the past few days so it looks like the higher PPM's are helping. Today I also bumped the Kool Bloom up after adding some more water beucase I recently figured out, from reading the label, that Kool Bloom has Potassium and Phosphorus which is one of the suggestions I have recieved about fixing the purple leaf problem and it seems to be working. I have also swapped out water twice in less than a week beucase I was overdue on flushing/cleaning the resivior the first time by 1 week so I wanted to even things out a little bit. The plants have been pretty low maintaince aside from flushing. The leaves are still green and there is a lot of foliage so spidermites seem to be taking a vow of abstenance.

A note of concern though: I noticed a small layer of some kind of crystals forming on the top of my resivior. :doh: I previously attributed this to a PH inbalance, but since I recently found out the PH was normal, that rules PH out. Im guessing it is some kind of nutrient lock Either between A and B or between A/B and kool Bloom. Im not really sure what to make of it.

 

[BuddyLuv]

It is salt build up. That is why you should clean your res everytime you do a change.

 

[growfox]

salt as in sodium chloride or salt as in a metaphore for crystal substance?

is there anyway to decrese this? other than rinsing the resivior?

 

[gettinggray1964]

looks like nute burn.........

 

[SmokeyTheBear]

What is your watering cycle? To me it looks like more nute burn and to much watering. I found on my last farm that 6-8 times a day and for 10-15min at a time. The crispy look on the leaf looks most def to much nutes. The curling of the tips is to muching watering. But I dident read the start of your fourm cus lol I dident want to read that much atm. But over all man your crop looks good as ****. :hubba:

 

[BuddyLuv]

The waxy look and krinkle look of the leaves is caused by the pyrethrins spray you are using to fight the mites. I just tried some on a few big buds that were not invested to see what would happen. My leaves now look just like yours'. As far as the curling under that is definantly a nute problem. You should only be feeding your plants once a week. When you change your res you add the nutes to brings it up to the proper ppm for your set-up. Then as the res goes down in level you top it off with just plain water. When the week is up you dump the res, clean and start over agin with your next week's feeding schedule. You should not be adding nutes in between res changes.

 

[growfox]

right now it is at 45 minute waterings twice a day spaced 6 hours apart. each cycle does an incremental fill of the buckets so its not really 45 mintues of complete watering really, its more like the bottom roots get the most water, the middle roots get like 20 minutes and the top get 10 minutes. Once the buckets drain, the hydroton begins to dry slowly from top to bottom usually taking a few hours.

I'll take overwatering as a factor into consideration, however I think it used to be at 30 minute waterings when the problem was more appearent.

Thanks for your praise Smokey.

Me and my friend decided to do a complete overhaul on our whole operation. We had a 3 hour discussion on what is wrong and what can be improved. If you have been keeping track of our progress, then you should know we really should be getting more weight than what we are getting right now, especially considering the size of our operation.

Here are some of the changes we are going to make starting from clone, ending at flower:

Clones will now only be taken a few at a time. Each clone will be dipped immediatly in root powder or rooting gel. On some of the larger cuttings, we will remove a little extra layer of the skin to allow better water consumption in the rockwool-submereged part of the stem(tested this once so far and it seems to work). We are going to have joe-the-handyman make a small shelf area where there is a retractable table to water the clones. We are going to remove the cloning trays that have individual slots for each clone beucase they sometimes become wedged in the slot and makes it difficult and potentially harmful to the plant to pull them out. Plus the regular flat trays are much easier to keep sterilized. Ambient tempature and humidity will be raised by whatever means we can to promote faster rooting and healthier clones. Mold and bugs will be monitored closely. Clones will be watered veg resivior water a few days before transplant to give an easier transition.

Veg will no longer be planted until we have enough rooted clones so that plants are not larger/taller than others. We already installed a light rail to promote an even grow across all the plants. Tempature will be incresed slightly to stimulate growth. Plants will be sprayed with insect/fungi killer at least once during the veg cycle and always right before transplant to flower. Water in our veg will be cleaned out more often. Ph will be monitored more closely. Our light has already been switched from 18 hours light and 6 dark to 24 hours of light and 0 dark. This will also increase veg speed. We are going to try Sensi Grow instead of our mixture of miracle grow, super thrive, maxi grow and other nutes in our water.

Flower will have constant CO2 from beginning to end. We are considering getting a CO2 controller, however these run $400 for the cheapest so its still up for debate. We will be purchasing more CO2 tanks to cover this demand. Lights will be adjusted to the point of tip burn at which point they will be moved back. We still have not honed in on an ideal distance for our initial transplant so we will start out at least 2-3 feet, and move in closer.

We will be purchasing a few items to make a small experiment section where we will be pushing our plants to the max of what they can take as far as PPM's, Nutrients, and Light. This will not be an exact duplication of the conditions but we hope it is close enough to properly simulate our current setup. I will probably be posting pictures of this witnin the next week or two, depending on when I can get the materials.

Im sure there were a few other items we discussed but I cant remember them all, ill try to get some pictures once we move our veg and start our new cycle.


EDIT:

Just saw your post buddyluv. I keep track of the flush days on a whiteboard calendar, so ill be sure to only do it one week after each previous rinse and not add nutes inbetween. I actually did this yesterday, ended up adding too much and pushing it to over 2000ppm. I wasnt too worried tho beucase its almost time to pull them, however, I added fresh water anyways to get it down to 1800-1900. Its been like this for 2 watering cycles with no ill effects, I will monitor them closely though for any signs of change.

We dont really use spray to kill our mites for fear of sickness to the smoker but I will talk it over with the boss and see if he wants to chance it. We dont really have many mites as long as we keep the room cold so its never really been a problem anyways.

 

[BuddyLuv]

It is fine to spray for the first week or so but after that I would use a Doktor Doom fogger or Safe's Soap on a sponge and coat the undersides of the leaves.

 

[SmokeyTheBear]

What up man ya just try bring down the the time on the water just by a min or two. You said that you are cloning? Between the larger and smaller clones you dont have to do anything different. The longer that you have fresh cut clone in the air the higher chance of it dieing. For the larger clones you dont have to scrap the skin of the stem to make it produce more root all that will do is put it into shock or kill it. If you shock it your product will be half of what it could be. How many ladies do you have? Why I ask is there are many different ways of cloning on this web site. I suggest doing it the most simplest you you can. The more you do the more problems you will run into. But if you want to try different ways try it on one plant and do something different on another one, and always clone the whole plant in one sitting. Never do a part of a plant and then a part later. I would also recommend building a clone bubler or a clone mister. Its the best way to promote new root groth. What is the temp of your grow room. 68 to 78 is the best temp for fast veg. Your mite problem really sucks >< Do you already have another cycle in the works? If not i would , do suggest take everything out and cleaning it real good and sprey, bome, do what you need to do tp get the mites out. They are almost impossable to get rid of you you dont take everything out. I think there is something else but dont remember. Hope thing work out

 

[growfox]

My friend had been scraping the skin for quite some time before this and he had a 99% sucess rate. We changed a few things and our sucess rate went down drasticly. I actually didnt believe him at first about scraping the skin but I tried it on one of the larger ones that was looking sad and had 6 or 7 nodes and it bounced back within 2 days. I only did that to help it get more water though, not to promote root growth. We have 3 ezclone systems but we only get a 10% success rate when we transplant. I am going to convert these ez clones into an aerobed by replacing the srinklers and using 2" net pots and making a few other chanes.

We take cuttings from our veg, and we have 80 plants in our veg right now, 12 of them are either stunted or taking their sweet *** time growing so we have to wait for at least 4 more to perk up before we move 72 of them into flower. I could probably take another 200 clones right now if I wanted to but we really dont need them, we have about 100 right now and that is more than enough to fill all the pots. Our problem is that they are not rooting fast enough and they are eventually dying which is why we are going to put some TLC and some money into fixing our cloning system. We both think that this is the reason our plants are so fragile- they had a rough cloning process and therefore are not completely healthy. It will probably take another 2 months to figure this out but at least with our situation, we can try several different methods of cloning beucase of the size of our operation.

 

[BuddyLuv]

I have an aero-cloner and get a 100% root rate. The only time I lose one is when my stoned butt isn't careful when transplanting it in the hydroton. I get roots in 5-7 days and then I let them sit in there for about a week till the roots are 2-3 long.

 

[NorCalHal]

In an operation of your size, Clone stock and Mother plants are KEY to being succesful. Trust me.

You need to DIAL in your cloneing. If you are able to take an extra 100 clones, DO IT. Practice different methods until you find one that works well for you. Do not let an oppertunity to take cuts pass u by. Take them. Even if you throw them out. Keep taking them until u get it down.

Preparedness. Once you are confident in your clone taking, you will have an idea of how long it will take to shoot roots. Plan this in your timing of replacing your flowering plants.

Pick 1 or 2 strains. Do not do more then that until you get your room DIALED.
Running one strain per room is a key factor in optimizing your yeild. Keep plant hight uniform. Do this by supercropping.

From the pics I see, your room temps seem to be cold. That will make that Bubba cross purple oput in the leaves. That is what is causing the that, imo. Overnuits is also a factor.
Throw away all your supplements. Use one Fert line, and use just the basics part of that line. Use HALF of whatever is recommended. You will suffer alot more by overfert rather then underfert. If you "underfert" , you will still hit at least a lb a lite. Whereas, if u overfert, u will get less, and less quality bud.

 

[growfox]

Thanks for the advice guys. Heres a little story to our cloning, so you know how and why it got to this point...learn from my mistakes, even if they are pretty stupid. :hitchair: :doh:

Our clones were moved from our hallway where there is no AC to our veg room where there is a 24k btu ac to keep them cool during the summer and Fall where temps reach 100+. The first time we realized keeping them in the hallway was going to be a problem was when we went to go plant our clones and 50% of them were killed from fungus and overheating. As you can imagine, we went to drastic measures to prevent this from happening again, so we moved our clones into the veg room where it was air conditioned, we bought new trays with adjustable breathing holes on top to control/lower the humidity and made a few other minor changes.

Looking back, maybe we went a bit too far which is why we have been having so many problems, plus once we made the changes, we never bothered to look back and ask ourselves "is that really necessary anymore?" For example, the highs for this area are currently 80 F and lows are around 50 F. An air conditioned room really isnt necessary anymore. Also, since the temperature dropped, that also means there wasnt really a need for the breathing holes to be open anymore. Our plants never got fungus, but we traded it off by having them dying from never rooting properly.

BuddyLuv, I tried the ezclone once, and I had decent results,but had to abandon it for various reasons. I recently decided to mess around with it and turn it into an aeroponics but I look at it now an realize that everytime I put rooting compound on the cutting, it gets washed away. How do you get roots? Or does the rooting compound work immediately? Maybe mix it with the water for a few days?

Norcalhal, Ill be sure to take more clones, right now we are up to about 150, with about 20 of them well on their way to being completely rooted. Ive made a few adjustments with our trays and temps to make it more ideal for the babies.

As far as the flower, we seem to have that finally dialed in. Right now we are pushing over 1800 PPMs with no ill effects. No additional purple leaves, no tip burn, nothing. I am guessing this is due to some of your suggestions and also due to some guessing on our part. Im not really sure which changes make this possible but I am glad it is finally working out.

We should be planting our veg into flower soon. Hopefully this time we will be able to put all of your suggestions into practice and this harvest done right.