Indoor The Tempest Grove Farms experience

[HashyApache]

Hey dudes and dudettes! It's been a minute since I popped over to the forums, but things out this way have been busy..... and you're about to see why.
Last summer an incredible opportunity more or less fall into my lap when Sq. 788 passed in Oklahoma and the state implemented the most liberal mmj law in the country. The first day we were able to, I applied the license and began building my dream child, Tempest Grove Farms.
I wanted to be different from the other guys out there, clean, sustainable, with the health of the patient as a top priority. I would cultivate autoflowers using all organic super soils under COB L.E.D's. All of the years of closet growing and blowing up basements was about to pay off. The training wheels were about to be kicked to the curb and the games about to begin.

It would all go down on a farm in Central BFE Oklahoma. One 30x40' insulated outbuilding (with another on the way this winter) filled with 70x 300w 3000k COBs. The subjects of the story? Hundreds of autoflowers (95% from Mephisto Genetics) all seated comfortably in 5 gallon fabric pots filled with supersoil [we like to use an improved mix much like the Vic High mix, but at just over half strength] and feed with Great White wettable 4 Myco, Mammoth Microbes, and Roots Organic TerpTea in flower, and High PK guano added to the teas in the last 4 weeks of flower. Super basic, but definitely does everything we want it to do.

Right now we are between 2-4 weeks into flower on our second cycle, and things are off to the races. Now that things are getting dialed in, and we're getting into a groove I'd really like to take the time to invite you into my personal jungle, share ideas, help educate each other, and GROW!

This is the Tempest Grove Farms story!

 

[HashyApache]

We'll start this one off with the last grow. Let's just say that going from smaller 4 light grows to 70 was not the easiest transition to say the least. I underestimated just how much work it would be to sprout 700 seeds, phenohunt, mix up 1500-2000 gallons of soil by hand, transplant 300-400 plants, and tend to them all every single day...... with only a two man team.
Very quickly I saw how growing could go from being a hobby to becoming a nightmare. Over the next few months I lost a LOT of hair, but the 12-16 hour days 7 days a week finally began to pay off and the garden began looking SHARP!

As days progressed, the plants quickly filled up their spaces and began to explode with flowering growth.

And then swell.....

and a couple weeks later we began our first harvest.... I have a ton more photos, but I am having troubles converting them from my cell phone to the PC. Bear with me, and I'll dump some more!

Stilton Special looking downright gorgeous.

Non purple phenotype of Forgotten Strawberries doing her thing (have lots of photos of the beautiful purple phenotypes if I can find them!)

Chemdogging about 10 days out.

One of our favorites on the farm, White Crack on harvest day.

Creme bubbly starting to take on those purple hues near the end of flower.
I'll try my damndest to upload those other photos once I can figure it out....
Happy Friday guys!

 

[Trichome farmer]

We'll start this one off with the last grow. Let's just say that going from smaller 4 light grows to 70 was not the easiest transition to say the least. I underestimated just how much work it would be to sprout 700 seeds, phenohunt, mix up 1500-2000 gallons of soil by hand, transplant 300-400 plants, and tend to them all every single day...... with only a two man team.
Very quickly I saw how growing could go from being a hobby to becoming a nightmare. Over the next few months I lost a LOT of hair, but the 12-16 hour days 7 days a week finally began to pay off and the garden began looking SHARP!

View attachment 1116880

As days progressed, the plants quickly filled up their spaces and began to explode with flowering growth.

View attachment 1116881

And then swell.....

View attachment 1116897


and a couple weeks later we began our first harvest.... I have a ton more photos, but I am having troubles converting them from my cell phone to the PC. Bear with me, and I'll dump some more!


View attachment 1116898

Stilton Special looking downright gorgeous.

View attachment 1116899

Non purple phenotype of Forgotten Strawberries doing her thing (have lots of photos of the beautiful purple phenotypes if I can find them!)


View attachment 1116900

Chemdogging about 10 days out.

View attachment 1116901

One of our favorites on the farm, White Crack on harvest day.

View attachment 1116903
Creme bubbly starting to take on those purple hues near the end of flower.
I'll try my damndest to upload those other photos once I can figure it out....
Happy Friday guys!

amazing bro living the dream

 

[HashyApache]

amazing bro living the dream

It was always a dream of mine to be a commercial grower, but more or less a pipe dream. It was always "could you imagine if...." or "how awesome would it be if..." and now it is my reality. Sometimes dreams are nightmares, but lets be honest nothing has changed, I just put my dreams into motion.
Never thought I would or could for that matter. Its been the hardest thing I've ever done, and looking back if I knew just how hard it would be, I'm not sure I would have done it, but I'm so happy I did!


Still struggling to upload to my computer, but I do have a couple more pictures of some gorgeous creme de la chem that I had from last run. Absolutely nutty strain. One I will be running for quite some time in the future....

Photos simply do not do this strain justice. At the end of their lives there were phenotypes which turned black purple, others beautiful shades of violet, lime green and everything in between. Some showed beautiful fall colors at the end of their flowering cycle in a rainbow of purple, red, green and gold.
Stoked to say we have 70 more of these bad bears running this run. Surely we will find PLENTY more gold where that came from.

 

[HashyApache]

Now that you guys kind of know the backstory, I figured it is time for me to actually fill you in on what we are doing now....
As of now we have ~350 autoflowers in 5 gallon pots full of supersoil really getting the ball rolling, about 40-60 days in from sprout. We staggered our planting to both better handle the workload as a small 2 man operation, as well as to stagger the harvest by a couple of weeks so that we don't get overwhelmed like the last time. While this method certainly has its benefits, it also has its drawbacks. The environment I like best for veg/early flower is a good bit different from what I use for the end of flower..... Hang on to your pants guys, this is about to go full tangent......

-In veg I like to get my temperatures way up (because it speeds up microbial activity which increases nutrient uptake... mainly phosphorous; and it opens the stomata wide allowing for more gaseous exchange, which is especially important when using Co2.) and with the higher temperatures I like to match it with high humidity to stay with in the right side of the golden zone on a VPD chart [generally 80 degrees and 65% humidity for veg] and blast the C02 to 1200 PPM.. If you have not heard of Vapor Pressure Deficit, and grow with hopes of good yields, give this chart a quick study. (Learning this chart inside and out has likely made the hugest impact on my growing out of anything I have learned in the past 8 years or so. It is a game changer.)

-Later on in the last two weeks of flower I like a much cooler room, with much lower humidity to match (around 70 degrees and 50% humidity... sometimes a hair lower). Also, at around 7-14 days before harvest we cut out the Co2 to prevent foxtailing and continuous flowering instead of ripening.


....Obviously the environments are different, so how does a grower divide his grow to keep the environments dialed in for each specific stage of growth? Long answer short; without false walls they can not really. So what does that mean? We have to compromise. We shut off the Co2 earlier than I would want, and drop the temps earlier than I would like on the later cycle. It definitely robs the plants of their full potential, but until we can expand as a business, that's just the way it is.

At this point in the grow we have some Northern Cheese Haze, Alien Vs. Triangle, and Fugue State that are nearing the finish line, but we're still keeping the Co2 on blast... Hopefully the girls ripen up naturally, and don't get all wonky. The other girls are certainly a bit further behind, but are exploding upward and outward, just about done with stretch and filling in with flowers.

We are currently spending much of our days defoliating, and feeding the girls through nets. I've always liked this kind of work, but when dealing with hundreds of plants, it becomes arduous..... and fast. It's a constant, never ending cycle until the chop.

Enjoy yourselves a shot of a fat row of Creme de la Chem, with a row of White Crack behind it. Off to the races!

....And with that, its back to the old grind for me.
Happy Saturday guys!

 

[AutoWonders]

We'll start this one off with the last grow. Let's just say that going from smaller 4 light grows to 70 was not the easiest transition to say the least. I underestimated just how much work it would be to sprout 700 seeds, phenohunt, mix up 1500-2000 gallons of soil by hand, transplant 300-400 plants, and tend to them all every single day...... with only a two man team.
Very quickly I saw how growing could go from being a hobby to becoming a nightmare. Over the next few months I lost a LOT of hair, but the 12-16 hour days 7 days a week finally began to pay off and the garden began looking SHARP!

View attachment 1116880

As days progressed, the plants quickly filled up their spaces and began to explode with flowering growth.

View attachment 1116881

And then swell.....

View attachment 1116897


and a couple weeks later we began our first harvest.... I have a ton more photos, but I am having troubles converting them from my cell phone to the PC. Bear with me, and I'll dump some more!


View attachment 1116898

Stilton Special looking downright gorgeous.

View attachment 1116899

Non purple phenotype of Forgotten Strawberries doing her thing (have lots of photos of the beautiful purple phenotypes if I can find them!)


View attachment 1116900

Chemdogging about 10 days out.

View attachment 1116901

One of our favorites on the farm, White Crack on harvest day.

View attachment 1116903
Creme bubbly starting to take on those purple hues near the end of flower.
I'll try my damndest to upload those other photos once I can figure it out....
Happy Friday guys!

Now that is a forest I would love to frolic in with reckless abandon. Great job.

 

[HashyApache]

Now that is a forest I would love to frolic in with reckless abandon. Great job.

Thank you man! I've had worse jobs in my life for sure.... to be able to frolic every day is a real treat.

 

[HashyApache]

I've only been back so long, and I've already let my journal go to the wayside.... Whoops!
Lots has happened in the past couple of weeks, so I figured I would at least post up a quick little text update.
All of the NCH, AVT and Fugues have been harvested, and almost everything else in the garden is ripening up nicely and racing ahead to the finish line. Earlier this week we chopped a couple dozen Bubbly Livers, some Sour Alien Livers (LOVE this strain!), our first Samsquanches, Hubbabubba's, some of the ripest CDLC and even a few White Crack. Hoping to harvest some more in about 3 days, another big wave in 5 or so, a huge harvest in 7-10 days, and the final stragglers will be harvested before the first of December.
As of right now, this is what I think about what we have pulled so far....

-NCH has beautiful flowers, but are generally small, and some are quite clustery like a classic haze. Plants grow incredibly tall and branchy, which give them great yield potential, but overall flower structure robs the plant of that potential. Flowers are very frosty and have eye popping colors, but not much in the way of a smell. Maybe I messed this strain up awfully, but at this point I'm not very impressed. Maybe it would have produced better under HID's, topped and LST'd heavily, and pumped full of synthetic chemicals, but that's simply not my style. May have to try this one again in the future for my own personal med garden, or may just have to dust some lowers with some Gold Glue Reversed pollen to help up her flower size and yields as well as making her size a bit more managable. (I'll keep you all updated on that project in the future!
-AVT was a beautiful plant, and a real pleasure to grow. Untrained, she grew into a beautiful christmas tree between 2.5-5 ft tall, loaded with flower heavy side branches. Some girls grew tight, dense, classic OG kush buds, others fat sticky cones, and even a few phenotypes expressed tight, incredibly resinous cookie like traits. Smells vary from specimen to specimen, but all are dank, either hashy and piney or a unique mix of sweet and gas. It's a damn shame that she is no longer in production, because I know she is one my patients will love!
-Fugue is an interesting little plant. About half of the ones we grew switched into flower without almost any veg phase and miniaturized, finishing out at about a foot tall. The others grew into beautiful compact plants loaded with fat frosty buds. Grow structure was kind of lacking on most in my eyes, as they never really seemed to fill out their 5 gallon containers at all (again, this could very well be a ME problem. Stress quite often stunts growth and can lead to miniaturization in autos). While the growth may have lacked, the flowers she produced were large and frosty. Some phenotypes expressed more spongey flowers, where others formed into fat, denser nuggets. The resin content of this girl is outstanding.... absolutely dripping from top to bottom. Smells are not insane, like a very light floral or sweet melon smell. Overall, I liked a lot about her, but there were definitely some things that could use improvement... something I'll be exploring at a later time.

Everything still left to ripen up is being fed a mix of Roots Organic Terp Tea bubbled for 24 hours with HPK guano, and Mammoth P, and appear to be loving it. Had a minor set back with out water going back a few weeks and some plants got locked out for an extended period and are looking a bit scaly and ugly, but after a few waterings of distilled water I think we are finally back on it.

Other than watering 350-400 gallons of water by hand every 2 days, my days mostly consist of being a janitor (what you really are when you decide to go commercial!). I sweep, mop, vacuum, and remove yellow leaves every other day. It is tedious, time consuming, and annoying but ESPECIALLY on a large scale, a clean grow room is a happy grow room! The plants mostly just grow themselves in your little clean space!

Aside from the obvious, I am also working on a bit of a little side project which I will delve deeper into at a later time. Back a few weeks ago as my girls began to flip into flower, I went through the room and plucked a bunch of sucker branches from the bottoms of the best looking plants, and dipped them into clone gel in hopes of sprouting roots. While it's always been said that "you can't clone Autoflowers", I can say for a fact that is in fact a total lie. While you may not be able to clone autoflowers to grow more full sized copies of the mother, you CAN however clone autoflowers for breeding purposes. Clones generally finish small.... 4-8 inches tall in most cases, but load on enough pistils to produce dozens, if not hundreds of seeds per clone. I've done this a few times before to make some seeds without contaminating my grow, but this time I took things a step further. Of those cuttings, I looked back at the parents (who were now a couple weeks further along, showing flower structure and potential resin content on pre sex calyxes), and chose the absolute best one or two from each strain, and set them aside to be sprayed with Silver Thiosulfate with the intention of producing reversed pollen and feminized seeds.
The cuttings were sprayed ~10 days ago, and are just now starting to show some signs that they are about to explode with male flowers. Stay tuned for the next few days, and I'll post a more detailed post with pictures and in depth explanations as I go through the process, regardless of if it is successful or not.

It's time for me to get back to the garden, a long day of janitorial work and trimming begins.... NOW! I'll be sure to take a bunch of pictures today so y'all have some bud porn to enjoy over the next few days.
Until then my friends!

 

[hairyman]

I've only been back so long, and I've already let my journal go to the wayside.... Whoops!
Lots has happened in the past couple of weeks, so I figured I would at least post up a quick little text update.
All of the NCH, AVT and Fugues have been harvested, and almost everything else in the garden is ripening up nicely and racing ahead to the finish line. Earlier this week we chopped a couple dozen Bubbly Livers, some Sour Alien Livers (LOVE this strain!), our first Samsquanches, Hubbabubba's, some of the ripest CDLC and even a few White Crack. Hoping to harvest some more in about 3 days, another big wave in 5 or so, a huge harvest in 7-10 days, and the final stragglers will be harvested before the first of December.
As of right now, this is what I think about what we have pulled so far....

-NCH has beautiful flowers, but are generally small, and some are quite clustery like a classic haze. Plants grow incredibly tall and branchy, which give them great yield potential, but overall flower structure robs the plant of that potential. Flowers are very frosty and have eye popping colors, but not much in the way of a smell. Maybe I messed this strain up awfully, but at this point I'm not very impressed. Maybe it would have produced better under HID's, topped and LST'd heavily, and pumped full of synthetic chemicals, but that's simply not my style. May have to try this one again in the future for my own personal med garden, or may just have to dust some lowers with some Gold Glue Reversed pollen to help up her flower size and yields as well as making her size a bit more managable. (I'll keep you all updated on that project in the future!
-AVT was a beautiful plant, and a real pleasure to grow. Untrained, she grew into a beautiful christmas tree between 2.5-5 ft tall, loaded with flower heavy side branches. Some girls grew tight, dense, classic OG kush buds, others fat sticky cones, and even a few phenotypes expressed tight, incredibly resinous cookie like traits. Smells vary from specimen to specimen, but all are dank, either hashy and piney or a unique mix of sweet and gas. It's a damn shame that she is no longer in production, because I know she is one my patients will love!
-Fugue is an interesting little plant. About half of the ones we grew switched into flower without almost any veg phase and miniaturized, finishing out at about a foot tall. The others grew into beautiful compact plants loaded with fat frosty buds. Grow structure was kind of lacking on most in my eyes, as they never really seemed to fill out their 5 gallon containers at all (again, this could very well be a ME problem. Stress quite often stunts growth and can lead to miniaturization in autos). While the growth may have lacked, the flowers she produced were large and frosty. Some phenotypes expressed more spongey flowers, where others formed into fat, denser nuggets. The resin content of this girl is outstanding.... absolutely dripping from top to bottom. Smells are not insane, like a very light floral or sweet melon smell. Overall, I liked a lot about her, but there were definitely some things that could use improvement... something I'll be exploring at a later time.

Everything still left to ripen up is being fed a mix of Roots Organic Terp Tea bubbled for 24 hours with HPK guano, and Mammoth P, and appear to be loving it. Had a minor set back with out water going back a few weeks and some plants got locked out for an extended period and are looking a bit scaly and ugly, but after a few waterings of distilled water I think we are finally back on it.

Other than watering 350-400 gallons of water by hand every 2 days, my days mostly consist of being a janitor (what you really are when you decide to go commercial!). I sweep, mop, vacuum, and remove yellow leaves every other day. It is tedious, time consuming, and annoying but ESPECIALLY on a large scale, a clean grow room is a happy grow room! The plants mostly just grow themselves in your little clean space!

Aside from the obvious, I am also working on a bit of a little side project which I will delve deeper into at a later time. Back a few weeks ago as my girls began to flip into flower, I went through the room and plucked a bunch of sucker branches from the bottoms of the best looking plants, and dipped them into clone gel in hopes of sprouting roots. While it's always been said that "you can't clone Autoflowers", I can say for a fact that is in fact a total lie. While you may not be able to clone autoflowers to grow more full sized copies of the mother, you CAN however clone autoflowers for breeding purposes. Clones generally finish small.... 4-8 inches tall in most cases, but load on enough pistils to produce dozens, if not hundreds of seeds per clone. I've done this a few times before to make some seeds without contaminating my grow, but this time I took things a step further. Of those cuttings, I looked back at the parents (who were now a couple weeks further along, showing flower structure and potential resin content on pre sex calyxes), and chose the absolute best one or two from each strain, and set them aside to be sprayed with Silver Thiosulfate with the intention of producing reversed pollen and feminized seeds.
The cuttings were sprayed ~10 days ago, and are just now starting to show some signs that they are about to explode with male flowers. Stay tuned for the next few days, and I'll post a more detailed post with pictures and in depth explanations as I go through the process, regardless of if it is successful or not.

It's time for me to get back to the garden, a long day of janitorial work and trimming begins.... NOW! I'll be sure to take a bunch of pictures today so y'all have some bud porn to enjoy over the next few days.
Until then my friends!

Awesome thread,, looking forward to the instalments

 

[HashyApache]

Awesome thread,, looking forward to the instalments

Thank you so much Hairyman! Looking forward to having you along!

So uhhh.... sorry for completely letting this thread go! Things have been real busy on the farm, being one of only two people who are running the show. Regardless, I have a long awaited update for you all.....

I tried to reverse a bunch of auto clones with no success. Almost all of the cuttings rooted just fine and almost instantly switched into flower, as I expected. I have cloned autoflowers once before, just a few months ago in a regular (male and female) breeding project with fantastic success, producing thousands and thousands of seeds off of just a few dozen small cuttings. This run I wanted to try to instead reverse the sex of those cuttings with Silver Thiosulfate in an attempt to produce a large number of feminized seeds to play with in the greenhouse this spring. For some reason, even though I sprayed the STS on the cuttings not once, but twice, I had ZERO luck reversing the girls which has me a bit flabbergasted.... Oh well,since the clones are only 2-3 weeks in flowering and still loaded with white pistils, I think I am going to make lemons into lemonade and further my reg seed breeding project, Right now I have pollen from a regular of one of my own autoflower creations that I am working on..... White Crack x Breeding auto #1 (Spanish White Widow x Headlights Kush #5 [Haze Pheno]), and a few Photoperiods (Sundance Kid, Peacemaker, Cali Cannon). With that I will make some auto seeds, as well as some F1 Fast finishing strains for next season's greenhouse grow..... Can't be too mad about that!

As for the garden, since I last posted, about 90% of the garden has been harvested, in exception to a handful of Creme de la Chem, 3 Bears OG x Beary White (freebie from earlier this year), A few huge Glueberry OG's, and some Dinafem White Widow Autos. It's very strange seeing the room all empty, I've got to say.
Overall it looks like we achieved some pretty good yields in the room, certainly better than the last round. Plants harvested between day 70 and day 80 for the most part. From what I've seen of the dried and trimmed material thus far is beautiful. Flowers were not as dense as I would like to have achieved, which I attribute to bad water which caused some nute lockouts, cold temps, and lower PPFD than I should have in the room. We live in a rural area of Oklahoma which has extensively been hydro fracked for oil. What that means is that oil companies injected thousands of gallons of salt water to force oil out of the ground, which destroys soil fertility and ruins the water table. Our water is so bad that it completely gunks up our filters with salts and calcium in no time at all, even though it is one of the larger and better units on the market. I am going to change out all of the filters over the holiday weekend to bring the PPM of our water out of the RO from a whopping 450 PPM to ~10 PPM, and I will just have to remember to change the filters out every 45 days or so.... Oh well.
As for the lack of Par Photon Flux Density (a measure of light intensity), that too is an incredibly simple fix. I will be adding 30 more 300 watt 3000k cobs to the room, all while keeping the grow space the same size as the last run, which should markedly increase flower density and yields in the room.

I also think that a huge cold snap that lasted weeks out here cooled the concrete in the room to a point where bacterial/fungal activity slowed on a halt, which locks out phosphorous in your root system as your microherd is not breaking it down into a bio-available form which the plant can uptake. Yet another simple fix.... For this next run we will be elevating the pots off the ground a few inches onto plastic wrapped wooden pallets. Being elevated off the ground should keep the roots at room temperature instead of the temperature of the cold concrete. Winter is coming, and I could forsee this becoming a real issue in the future.

Another project I am working on in the in between time as I finish out this grow is setting up a drip system to automate watering. Watering the garden is a real time consuming process when watering 350-700 plants, taking as much as 8 hours every 1-3 days. Being able to put the plants on a drip system would cut down the time I would have to water in the garden tenfold. I would just need to fill up the reservoirs, Mix nutes (if any are needed), plug in the sump pump and let her rip!
The system is incredibly simple. About 40 ft. of 3/4in. PVC pipe that is attached to a sump pump, and goes from one end of the room to the next. The end opposite to the sump pump is capped to build up back pressure, which pushes the water up into a series of Octabubbler manifolds, watering each plant with individual drippers. The system is simple, cheap, and effective. Will keep y'all updated in the future as the process progressed.

Anyways, enjoy yourselves some budshots from before harvest.

Forum Stomper early and chunky phenotype. She was short and less branchy than others, but produced some huge, dense flowers.

A more purple phenotype of the FS

My personal favorite Forum Stomper of the bunch... Her flowers were not the largest, but she was probably the frostiest autoflower that I have ever cultivated. I would say she would hold her own against 90-95% of the photoperiods on the market. Truly impressive.

Canopy of 3 Bears OG x Beary White a couple weeks before harvest.

Creme de la chem FLEXING! This strain is hands down the stinkiest auto that I have ever grown. Gassy as heck! Smells like new shoes dipped in gasoline.

Cheap and dirty hang drying! 10 x 20 ft Scrog nets loaded with full plants! Hands down the most efficient way to dry the most ganja in the least amount of space.

To my American friends, I hope you all enjoy Thanksgiving, and to the rest of you.... I hope it is a great weekend!