Indoor AB Fills the Tent!

[AndyBotwin]

Quick update with some pics. A few of the girls showed their parts & all of the plants have gotten serious about vegging. I figure with the cold weather and other issues things are 1-2 weeks behind where I would normally like to be. I like my plants short and fat, but I need to get some height and branching structure on these over the next couple of weeks. Looks like I will end up running into June with this grow.

There's good news and bad news on the dragon front. Duurty Dragon was going nowhere so it went outside for good. 8 hours later there were several red spider mites on it which has me spooked about cleanliness in my tent. Nothing comes into the grow space from outside anymore! One of the Magic Dragons dropped balls so he was unceremoniously yanked from the pot. But the biggest dragon popped pistils and made my day. I was due for a break on this grow & finally got one. I don't think I will have the heart to put her outside to battle the mites. It might get crowded in here...

Day 24






Magnum - Not much to say about this one but it's doing fine. A slightly lighter shade of green than some of the other plants, but doesn't look like she needs more food right now.




TD - This one showed pistils on day 23 and is just a very nicely proportioned plant.




WW - Dark green with a little clawing so she may need her food watered down a bit. Showed first pistils today & I get a vibe from her that she may be a bit temperamental...




Cobra - Growing just fine without a blemish or leaf out of place since the start.




SMR - Put on a couple inches of height in the last few days so hopefully she's about to have a growth spurt. The cut leaves are due to a fly trap I had in the tent for a few stray fungus gnats. Accidentally touched it to the plant while removing and it tore the leaf ends clean off.




MD - This beauty showed pistils on day 23 and I couldn't be happier. This could be a serious fat bottomed girl in the making. It's in a 2.5g nursery pot with Happy Frog soil & has had nothing but water and molasses so far. You can certainly see those black dragon genes shining through in that deep coloring. And those are some seriously fat fan leaves.



Thanks for checking in, everyone! :tiphat:

 

[Eyes on Fire]

Oh man,The BORG!!redmites,I frigin haaate red mites.I laughed soo hard cuz Ive done that too.touched a couple leaves to a stick something or another.ripped em righ off.Thats sucks man!sweet lookin garden buddy!!moving stuff around la la la la ooppps,riiipp.LOL!Im sorry to hear that Andy. well im on a loaner PC for the next little while but Im just trying to catch up.Been slackin bigtime worried about my goings on.tons of stuff goin down.I hope my harvest n stash will be just a fat this year.oil,smoke,eats food n fun man!!heck yes!garden looks outstanding my friend.I got tons of stuff to try n get to today before I gotta give the PC back.But,maaan looking killer as always man.Take er easy Andy man,ill see ya round the way buddy.

 

[AndyBotwin]

Thanks for checking in, EoF. I'm pretty easy going about my grows, but the prospect of mites has me a bit on edge. I have never had them myself but I helped fight a nasty case with my buddy that I grew with when I was shut down. Never fully got them under control. Last night I saw a single strand of web hanging from the tip of a fan leaf, so I spent an hour going over the plants in great detail. I tried every trick in the book & could find no sign of them, but I've got the neem oil and I'm on alert. I do have regular spiders in the basement where I grow, but none in the tent that I've ever seen. Could be a bit of web that got on it when taking it out of the tent for watering, but either way I will be watching the girls like a hawk to get a jump on the bastards if they show up. :ama:

 

[Eyes on Fire]

Hey Andy.Yeah Ive had em once for about a day er two till the 209 kicked in n they disapeared.Im sorry to clog up yer thread,but I never know what to say other than frigin killer looking plants man!!LOL!I try to take a very relaxed positon on my grows too,but I have soooo much riding on this one for me that I cannot fail,at all.everything Im growing is for me and a cancer patient whos got a few years to live at most and Im gonna try and help.ok nuff yappin.killer looking garden dude!!be well my friend.:Sharing One:

 

[Duggy]

Looking good Andy.. "AFN smoke out"

 

[GoAuto6]

:niceshot::Sharing One:

 

[SkatterBrayne]

With the weather warming up, sure enough the 'wild life' starts coming back. I am 90% sure I saw a fungus gnat the other day. I was at war with those things in the fall. I wouldn't underestimate the damage their larvae can do to your root system. With your girls already delayed, I would hit them hard.

I highly reccomend Gnatrol. Bacillus thuringenesis, like in mosquito dunks. It binds to the amino acids in the larvae stomach and crystallizes. The larvae don't stand a chance.

Pyrethrin is nice for the adult gnats. They fly slow and lazy, and are pretty easy to spray with a mistbottle. This stuff is like an insect neurotoxin extracted from crysanthemums. The little bastards fall out of the sky, convulsing in seconds.

I was like Bill Murray in caddyshack fighting these bastards. It got out of control quick.

Hopefully the spiderweb is just ordinary basement spiders moving in to an ideal hunting territory. And I definitely wouldn't introduce anything from outside to your tent. I was recently given a houseplants, and threw it out immediately. God knows what crawlers that whore of a plant from the home depot may have been carrying

 

[AndyBotwin]

Thanks for dropping by Duggy and GA! :Sharing One:

Hey SB, I am with you on the gnat hatred. I have been a devoted user of mosquito dunks for years, but this grow I switched to Microbe Lift:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Same all natural Bti bacteria found in the dunks or Gnatrol, but much cheaper and easier to deal with. One drop treats 10 gallons and it's available instantly with no dissolve time. The pest strip caught around 10 adults and I haven't seen anything else since the Bti soak. :smoke:

 

[SkatterBrayne]

Awesome. The buggers fall in love with my coco and the large buckets of runoff beneath them.

My gnat genocide expenses were too high. Awesome recommendation, I just picked some up.

 

[AndyBotwin]

Back again with another update and some interesting happenings. First of all, there have been zero signs of any mites over the past week. No visible bugs, webbing, or damaged leaves at all. So thankfully that appears to have been a false alarm but I'll stay vigilant moving forward. Conditions have finally been ideal in the tent with temps in the 70s and humidity around 50%. That is until yesterday, when winter made a reappearance and we had a hard freeze. The low overnight in the tent hit 62, which isn't great but the plants have certainly weathered far worse during this grow. Tonight will be another cold one & then spring hopefully returns for good.

Clearly these plants have been slow due to the environmental factors early on, but in the last week they just seemed off (none of this includes the Magic Dragon, which I'll get to later). Droopy, slow growing, and generally not as vibrant as I would like to see. I decided to do a ppm test on my runoff at the last watering because it looked like overnuting, despite the fact that these plants have only had three small feedings in their life. The results showed anywhere from 1200 to 1600 ppm (2.5-3.2+ ec) which was good news and bad news. The good news is that it tells me that I have a thriving microherd that is effectively mineralizing the organic nutrients, and the bad news is that I've got way more nutrients than I need in the soil. I guess with the slow start I really need to be treating these plants as if they are 2-3 weeks old, not 4-5 weeks old for feeding purposes. So I performed a flush on all 5 until the ppm of the runoff was down in the 300-400 range. All the plants responded very well and have grown an inch or two in the last couple of days. So at this point I'm in a wait and see mode with the feedings, but in general they seem to be pretty happy. Hopefully they'll stretch some more because they're all still under a foot tall. I like my plants in the 18-24" range which seems to be the sweet spot for dense buds under the T5. Much taller than that and the lower buds start to get too fluffy. Whether or not I can coax these girls into that before full flower is yet to be seen.

I also made some improvements in the tent recently. I grow in a 4x2 tent with a 4x2 light, and in the past I have had problems with heat damming up under the light rather than being extracted by the fan at the top. With negative pressure the sides of the tent suck in on the edges of the T5 fixture and effectively make the tent into two separate chambers. To remedy this, I attached one of the tower fans directly to my light to blow the hot air towards one end of the tent. It's on the end where the intake flap is located. On the opposite end, I attached some 4" brackets to the light that keep that sides of the tent pushed away to allow hot air to rise upwards. Seems to be working well so far, but the true test will be late in the grow when summer arrives.

While I had the light out of the tent for maintenance, I also installed a wireless webcam. Since my plants grow in a basement, I usually only get to see them for a quick peek once or twice a day, or when I need to water/feed them. Now I can keep an eye on them anytime, which is something I've never been able to do. It's nice to be able to watch them swaying in the breeze for a few minutes, and I've also been fascinated by how much they move during the light cycles. The Magic Dragon, Cobra, and Sweet Mango don't change a whole lot on a daily basis. But the Think Different, White Widow, and Magnum all droop considerably starting around two hours before dark, and perk back up within an hour or so of lights on. This is extremely helpful to me since now I won't misdiagnose a plant that is sleeping for one that has a problem. The pics below were taken about an hour before lights out, and you can see the three sleepy ones already prepping for darkness.

The low-res webcam view isn't all that great, but it's good enough to see the general state of the plants as well as if one is growing up into the lights. I attached it to the light fixture so I never have to adjust it as the plants grow. If anyone is interested in doing something similar, let me know and I'll give you more details. Here's a still shot that also shows the fan I mounted to the lights:



I guess that it for now - here are a few pics of the gang:






Magnum - This plant is the shortest and the only one that has not shown any pistils yet. It has grown about an inch since the flush & I expect it to be the last to finish. Very sweet smell almost like banana pudding.






TD - Think Different has always been a happy plant and it's doing fine. Probably the smelliest plant of the bunch with a definite skunk hit that you can catch from several feet away.






WW - It doesn't show from this sleepy pic, but the WW has responded great to the flushing. Almost 2" of growth since then and any signs of unhealthy leaves have gone away. Smell is straight up cat piss.






Cobra - This one was a slow starter but has stretched quite a bit recently & caught up to the others. She just showed pistils yesterday so there's a long way to go. Really no smell at all right now.






SMR - This plant was the first to show pistils and it's heavy into stretching and preflower now. The smell is pretty skunky but there's a sweetness underneath that seems to be developing.






MD - Oh my, what a fat little bush this girl is turning out to be. Just under a foot tall and around 18" wide. She was transplanted into Happy Frog a while ago and has loved it. The runoff was next to nothing with I flushed the other plants, so she got some veg nutes and cal/mag recently. Very strong green banana smell. This plant would be ideal for outdoor growing due to the generic bushy appearance and low odor, and that was my initial plan. But given the pest issues I am fighting with my outdoor vegetables, she's just too precious to risk by pulling her from the tent. The other plants are just going to have to deal with their chunky big sister hanging out for a while.






DD - A final goodbye to the oddball Duurty Dragon that has been outside for the past week. It stretched quite a bit in the sunshine and recovered somewhat, but it was hit hard by mites and general neglect. Yesterday it showed balls so it got the chop this morning after a final photo. And there ends my brief outdoor experiment. Though I do have a ton of seeds so maybe I'll be tempted to try a couple more just for fun later in the spring.



Thanks for hanging in through this long update, friends. :Sharing One: