Day Thirty Update
The news is not good! The forecast of winter arriving this weekend came true on Friday. It suddenly got bitter cold and the situation inside the tent suddenly became critical...
That was the lights out temp on Friday. I spent time during lights out on Saturday and Sunday installing new heaters around the outside of the tent and testing them. I’ve got the temps back up to 15 degrees but this has taken over 800 watts worth of heaters. The new tube heater should arrive early this week and will hopefully buy me an extra degree. But considering it’s only mid November, I really don’t know what hope we have for December...
I used to grow indoors so winter was never a concern to me. I moved into the loft about four years ago and every year I’ve suffered the same temperature problems during winter. The unfortunate thing is that I can only harvest so much from the DR60 each time which forces me to grow all year round.
However I’ve been giving it a lot of thought recently and I need to accept that realistically, my growing window is from late March until late October. It is just too cold outside of this and having to run multiple heaters and still not manage to keep the temps right is too much. I could stretch this window to the beginning of March by running 24/0 for the first four weeks. This gives me a total growing window of 8 months (or 35 weeks) which with the right choice of strains would allow me to get 3 runs in.
Tme for some math
My average harvest is in and around 8 oz a time (strain and numbers dependant) and I usually squeeze five runs in a year which is a total of around 40 oz a year. Dropping two runs would mean I would have to up my average harvest to nearly 14 ounces each time which isn’t possible for me. That number in a DR60 takes a lot of effort (my best is 11/12 oz) and I have a crazy job and can get called away for days at a time which means getting the perfect run has become a rarity.
As an example, my last run was 2 x Heavyweight 2 Vast 2 Fast (or vice versa) and I got called away with work for what ended up being 8 days, meaning they went without water for nearly 10 days during the stretch
They didn’t have a green leaf left when I got back but I somehow still got two ounces from each. It wasn’t the greatest smoke I’ve ever had though...
But anyway, back on our original off topic topic
With my revised growing window, it has become clear to me that my DR60 no longer serves my needs. Plus if I’m really honest, it is a ball ache to grow in sometimes. There is just no space and it suffers from the extremes of absolutely fucking everything (temps, air-flow, etc). I still love her to fucking pieces and have pulled some great harvests out of her but tent love aside, I need to up my production and to do that I need a bigger tent.
A DS90 (90x90x170) fits in my new loft and would allow me to comfortably run four plants a time. And with a conservative estimate of 3.5 oz a plant, that’s 14 oz a harvest or 42 oz a year. I reckon that is more than achievable under my 400w. But then I got thinking – What use is a 400w in a 3x3 space? I mean really? An area like that needs at least... 1,000w
So that’s the plan for the New Year – A new DS90 tent and a new lighting set-up! This doesn’t mean the DR60’s days are over. Oh no, I have big photoperiod plans for her involving a reunion with a certain Blue Widow...
But anyway, enough rambling Hardon! Back to the actual topic...
I’m not sure if the cold is having an effect yet or not to be honest. The stretch has definitely started but I think I was expecting a little more... I dunno, aggression maybe? They are currently on a 4 day feeding schedule and I’m hoping to reduce this down to 3 days. They were nearly ready for a feed last night but I decided to give them an extra day so hopefully from here on...
On the subject of nutes, big thanks again to
Dirty Buster who made me realise (just in the nick of time!) that I had been working off the wrong set of NPK values. I was using the values from their original range instead of the oldtimer range I’m actually using. Plant Magic haven’t responded to my e-mail yet regarding the crappy PK ratio in the oldtimer Bloom but rather than just moving to a different bloom feed entirely (and risk losing any sort of synergistic effect), I’ve decided to continue using it but mixed equally with BioBizz bloom which has a higher PK ratio.
I’ve also decided to ignore Plant Magic’s recommendation regarding starting the Bloom Booster on week 3 of flowering and instead started it today at double the recommended dose. They got fed with 5ml Bloom, 2ml Bloom Booster, 1ml Silicon and 1ml Cal-Mag. Just FYI – All these are per litre and each plant is taking 1.5 – 1.6 litres each feed.
As you can see, the positioning is starting to take shape nicely. Unfortunately we lost one of the top shoots on #2 last night. It had grown down in a mad shape around the screen and I barely touched it and it snapped. The loss of it, the branch of #3 and one of the top shoots of #4 has left us with a few spaces to fill. The space at the sides will get filled with the strongest shoot and back right will be filled by one of the lower branches who is on a charge to the screen...
Whilst we’re on the topic, this screen was not the one I wanted as it has 5cm holes. The actual screen I wanted had 10cm holes but the place stopped selling them (and yes I’m far too lazy to actually make one
) I’ve decided to leave the front two rows empty as it’s here I have the tube heaters installed so I need to leave some space around them.
OMAFG that is a lot of text! Sorry for the massive update, sometimes I start typing and just can’t seem to stop. Overall I’m happy with the progress so far despite losing three potential colas! It's the temps that are really concerning me... Hopefully by the next update, they’ll be down to a three day schedule and we’ll have the rest of the screen filled out.