Indoor AB's latest grow log - Launch of the Badboy!

[Noods]

Nice work Andy! Your updates are always refreshing.

Considering all the pH Fighting you've been doing, your girls look really fine. (I deliberately said "girls" since I'm sure the PAK is gonna show her titties soon.) It's hard to see how they could be growing any better had you not had problems!

Your fat green thumb is stickin' out dude! :thumbs:

 

[AndyBotwin]

Thanks for the kind words, guys. I think these plants are around 5-7 days behind where I'd like them to be based on past grows. But I'm fairly confident that while they may take a bit longer to finish, I haven't stunted them to the point that my yield will take too much of a hit. In retrospect it's probably a good thing that they spent a few days out in the cold & that they didn't get tiered until two weeks. That ended up buying me some extra time to slowly get the pH back on track before I needed to start with veg nutes.

 

[Noods]

Well, they may be a little stunted, but they're so healthy looking and appear to be some tough bunnies. They might be a little smaller, but they are going to put out some quality bud - fat and juicy. You can see it in them!

What's your tap water like? I was using it too for the last half of my last grow. I liked that they were getting the extra minerals that they weren't getting from the distilled water. The 12-24 hr bubbling took care of the chlorine and even though our water is considered very hard at ~15.5 dGH it was just fine.

 

[AndyBotwin]

What's your tap water like? I was using it too for the last half of my last grow. I liked that they were getting the extra minerals that they weren't getting from the distilled water. The 12-24 hr bubbling took care of the chlorine and even though our water is considered very hard at ~15.5 dGH it was just fine.

My tap water is around 140ppm which is pretty good from what I understand. Low enough to not interfere too much with nutes, but still containing some minerals. One issue here is that we have chloramine instead of regular chlorine, and it will not evaporate during bubbling or even be removed by the RO process. So I treat it with Amquel which is what aquarium owners use to remove the chemical from the water before it kills the fish. It breaks the chloramine down into chlorine and ammonia, both of which then evaporate during bubbling. A positive side effect of this is that the pH goes from from ~8.5 to ~7.5 after the water has been treated. There has been some question about whether these products can harm plants, but I sent emails to several organic nutrient companies and they all said it was the recommended method to deal with chloramine, and it would not harm the microherd or the plants.

I really know so much more about my whole setup that I did when I started last year. The first time I watered without removing the chloramine at all, thinking that aerating the water was all I needed to do. I now know that I was instantly wiping out most of the microherd in my soil, which caused a lot of issues. Then with my last grow even though I was adding myco as a root innoculant, I was using synthetic pH Up/Down with each watering. That's also not conducive to creating a healthy living soil, so I had to be much more precise with nutes and pH. This time I've been dealing with very low pH in the soil, yet the plants are not being ravaged by deficiencies that I saw on my first grow with similar pH levels. I am convinced that the little beasties in the soil are buffering things so that my roots are still getting what they need. That's why I'm leaning heavily towards going all organic from now on.

 

[DubV]

Hey Andy after catching up from my short break the girls look good brother! I personal know to well about chasing the ph dragon my friend! I used the general organics bio line on my last ten plants and didn't adjust ph on the first five because there were some reports saying you didn't have to but at week 6 to 7 it all went haywire! The flower nutes dropped my ph to below 5.5 in promix and I had to fight the lockouts from then on. With my second 5 plants I switched to ph'ed my nutes to 6.5 every feeding and all was well with just some minor Cal/mag issues. Personally I have switched to AN ph perfect line to see if this stops the headaches. I still feel that the GO line is a good product but you will still need to adjust ph on a regular basis bro. Green and girl karma sent your way!

 

[Noods]

:smokebuds: :thread:

 

[AndyBotwin]

Thanks for clarifying, Dub. And just to be sure nobody is misled by my comments, I don't mean to imply that pH doesn't matter or that you should throw away the meter if you switch to organic nutes. I always pH and log both my inbound and outbound water, and I'll never stop doing that. But from what I've seen this grow and learned from reading many other journals, having a healthy & living soil gives you much more room for error. Instead of everything being an emergency with pH swinging all over the place, I want to get to a happy medium where I just keep my feedings at a reasonable pH range and don't have to panic if the runoff drifts somewhat. If these plants can stay this green down in the low 5 range, I wouldn't need to sweat it if I'm in flower and they drift up or down a few tenths of a point.

Hey Andy after catching up from my short break the girls look good brother! I personal know to well about chasing the ph dragon my friend! I used the general organics bio line on my last ten plants and didn't adjust ph on the first five because there were some reports saying you didn't have to but at week 6 to 7 it all went haywire! The flower nutes dropped my ph to below 5.5 in promix and I had to fight the lockouts from then on. With my second 5 plants I switched to ph'ed my nutes to 6.5 every feeding and all was well with just some minor Cal/mag issues. Personally I have switched to AN ph perfect line to see if this stops the headaches. I still feel that the GO line is a good product but you will still need to adjust ph on a regular basis bro. Green and girl karma sent your way!

 

[AndyBotwin]

Hi everyone, time to squeeze in a quick TGIF update before a busy weekend starts. The plants are really vegging like crazy now, with loads of new foilage and height being added daily. I picked up some GO BioThrive nutes and Earth Juice natural pH Up/Down, so I guess I'm officially all organic now. The girls got their first light taste of the Grow nutes earlier in the week along with some Big Bloom, and they responded just fine. So today I hit them all with Muddy's recommended feeding regimen for these products: 2tbs Grow and 1tbs BioMarine, and I also added in some Kangaroots myco boost since it's been a couple of weeks. I'll continue the Grow/BioMarine feedings with every watering throughout veg, unless the plants tell me it's not enough or too much.

One thing I've noticed is that the pH seems much more stable in the solution when compared to the nutes. After mixing several gallons, I found that each batch tested almost identical to the others, and it stayed that way even after sitting around for a while. Grow Big and Tiger Bloom seemed to be much more inconsistent in how they effected pH, so every batch I had to spend time tweaking how much pH adjuster I would add. Hopefully this will continue to save me some time. Speaking of pH, today I fed with 6.5 solution, and all the runoff from all 4 pots was between 6.1 and 6.5. So I think I've finally gotten gotten it under control for the long haul. I'm expecting to see a huge growth spurt for all the plants in the new couple of weeks. :smoke:

Day 33



PAK - This girl seems to be in no hurry at all. I finally saw the first pistils a few days ago, and she seems to pop maybe one or two new ones a day. There's nothing even close to being considered a bud site yet, so this is a strong candidate for last finisher. But it's a lush and bushy plant with a thick stalk and good branching, so hopefully the nutes will get things moving along. Height is around 8" right now and she's got a sweet green smell.








AKR - This plant has potential to be a real beast if I can get max growth during veg. Right now it's about 8" tall and 19" wide with a stalk the size of a nickel, and there are at least a dozen bud sites started up. If she can put on another foot or more of height, I think the yield will be excellent.










SR1 - This one is over a foot tall and putting on an inch of height per day. Looks like the common single cola SnowRyder that I've seen in so many journals. Tons of pistils already and it's got a strong, skunky smell.








SR2 - This little gal is doing fine, though still small. But I've pulled an ounce off plants less than a foot tall, so it'll be interesting to see how things progress. I may experiment with this one by harvesting it at a different period of trich development than it's larger sibling...







Thanks for stopping by!

 

[Jackal]

Lookin' good AB that AKR is nice and bushy. Hope your new nutes works out for you.

 

[AndyBotwin]

Lookin' good AB that AKR is nice and bushy. Hope your new nutes works out for you.

Thanks, brother. I have seen mixed reviews about the BioThrive stuff, and Rip and Muddy liked it but weren't raving about it. Someday when I get a system in place to deal with my tap water, I'll probably end up with the pH Perfect line that you're using. Until then, the BioThrive is a fairly cheap way to go organic, and if I don't like the results I can always switch and use the rest on the veggie garden. :thumbs: