Sour Diesel Grow Journal / Microcontroller Datalogging Experiment - 480w LED RDWC

[jerry]

Day 50

It's only been one day after the flip and it already seems like its stretching, I wonder what I've got myself into with a sativa strain in hydro




Believe it or not, there's branches under there!

[jerry]

I made a bit more progress on the datalogging yesterday. I was able to get my PPM and PH sensors to work! They aren't calibrated yet, but they are at least responding to differences in PH and conductivity.

[farmerjim]

hell yes... now for some nerdy-follow-up.... are you using 2 controllers - 1 for ambient readings and 1 for res or do you all your sensors going into the same controller?

[jerry]

It's all on one controller! I had to add multiplexing support to expand the number of analog inputs to be able to do it. The controller reads all of the sensors in sequence over the multiplexer, then transmits a JSON message with all the data over wifi to my computer

[jerry]

Day 55 - 6 days into flowering






Now that my sensors are starting to give stable readings, I can take you through an average day in the life of my plant!

Yesterday, 19:00:

Lights on
Reservoir change, mL of cmplus/micro/gro/bloom used: 2/2/1.5/3 in 5gal water.
The drops in humidity for the next couple hours are from me opening the door to the grow room. I live in a really dry environment

07:00

lights off, temps and humidity start to drop
Interestingly, the EC actually starts to increase after the lights went off, indicating a more concentrated nutrient solution! my theory here is that after the lights go out, the newest growth is absorbing lots of water and not as many nutrients. I noticed much lower water levels the next day, supporting this.
The next drop in humidity was from opening the door to the grow room at around 13:00

15:00

Adjusted PH with ~1mL of ph down solution (the ph sensor is still giving inaccurate readings at this point)
Here I realized that the ph down solution actually increases the concentration of nutrients available to the plant! This blew my mind a little bit, although it would explain why it states to use RO water on the label.
With this knowledge, from now on i'm going to add water into the reservoir whenever adding ph down solution!
The humidity is pretty much constantly low for the rest of the day, I left the grow room door open while I was in and out tinkering with the datalogger

19:00

Lights on, temps start to rise for the day
Added ph down solution as well as some extra water
I think I was able to get my ph sensor readings to stabilize a bit more here! fingers crossed it stays accurate...

[Campesino]

Interesting data and analysis, I like it

[jerry]

Day 65 - Two weeks into flowering

This thing has been growing steadily since the flip. The other day one of the branches sprung up faster than I could tuck it and got a bit light burned, but the rest of the plant seems to be doing okay.

Looking at the logs from my sensors has been really interesting! From the nutrient concentration logs I noticed that the plant actually drinks most of it's water during the dark hours, and feeds on nutrients most readily during the day.


Light burned branch




look at those long sativa fingers!






Ain't she pretty?

[jerry]

Day 77 - One month into flowering

It looks like the stretching may have finally slowed down almost completely. It stretched up to over double its height, even despite all the scrogging! I did a bit more defoliation in the past few days to try and free up the bud sites for light, now that they're showing themselves.

Things smell really good right now!

[Camk]

looking real nice!!
it will be fun watching this grow

[jerry]

Day 87 - Around 5 weeks into flowering

I hit her with a healthy dose of bloom nutes up to EC ~1.3 after keeping it around half of that for a while, and the plant seems to love it! The lower bud growth especially seems to have almost doubled in density and coverage in just a couple days.











As an added bonus, the yellow branch that was light burned before has almost completely recovered after moving the lights further

[jerry]

Day 98 - almost 7 weeks into flowering

Did some heavy defoliation 4 days ago and have been giving almost no nutrients to allow it to recover. The lower buds already seem to be fattening a bit with the extra light. Just changed the reservoir and brought the nutrients back up to around 0.75 EC, should be interesting to see how she grows over the next few days

[jerry]

Added better pictures, click to zoom in on each individual trichome!

[jerry]

Day 102 - 7 weeks into flower

for the past 4 days I've doubled the amount of florabloom and halved the amount of nitrogen, and the trichome production really seems to have taken off. Dare I say possibly only a couple weeks until harvest!?

[jerry]

Day 124 - 11 weeks into flowering

I think she's finally ready for harvest! starting to see a few discoulered yellowing trichomes, while most of them are milky white and clear. It's still putting out new white hairs every day!

[Campesino]

Beautiful!
Go by Trichomes!