Grow Journal - Possible Painkiller XL (RQS)

[Mr.furley]

Geo pot makes velcro pots.

https://www.monstergardens.com/Geopot-Transplanter-w-Velcro-Various-Sizes?language=en&currency=USD&gclid=Cj0KCQiAmuHhBRD0ARIsAFWyPwjXmwMXfSHNpUgz4JMO1QnxRYWoHSonxoZqk4aY0l7b_pNzH65gDkMaAsUeEALw_wcB

If you don't want or can make them.

[LurkingInTheGrass]

@eigholte

how much plastic is in the 'fabric'?

I had picked up some of the landscaping fabric for the wife - she wanted to make bags. she tried sewing, but this stuff wasn't taking that. she ended up using the Steam Iron (not on steam setting), put the fabric between 2 sheets of paper (just in case) and ironed them together. it worked for her plants (nothing as major as a cannabis plant, no daily moving, etc)

[Eigholte]

Thanks! I'll try and check on it tonight and see what kind of roots I'm dealing with. Based on the growth I'm seeing, maybe it really IS time to transplant at 12 days.

To be honest, I didn't go looking for the geo-textile fabric... it found me.

It feels weird typing this sentence, but a third degree contact dropped off a 15 foot by 4 foot diameter roll of geo-textile from his road building business as a 'donation' to a project a friend of mine was doing at my place (due to how large our yard is), where we were building a replica World War one trench for an event.

Unsurprisingly, my associate did not want to try and fit that roll into his car to take it back to his house, and it has lived here ever since. Spouse and I finally got the bright idea to cut it with the sawsall into three five foot rolls, so now it's easier to move around.

So, when I saw that the commercial smart pots were often made out of polyproplyene geotextile, it was just too convenient to start (poorly) sewing my own!
Just turns out I need to refine the design a little going forward.

[9fingerleafs]

Haha you are a genius. I just made a few fabric pots out of garden fabric (that’s the name, got it at Home Depot) and a Velcro side it’s just what they need.
About the transplanting don’t worry too much, you can take a look at the bottom of the cup and see if roots are growing out, you can always cover the cup with your hand with the plant between your fingers and turn it upside down, lift the cup and check if it’s ready or not. Happy growing my friend. And lots of patience

[Eigholte]

I have a question, if anyone is hanging around...

... what do other people use to determine when their plant is ready to be transplanted out of it's Solo Cup home?

Pixel here is hitting two of my criteria: Leaf span is as wide as the top of the cup. and small rootlet is poking out of cup drainage hole. So I prepared my next pot last night and set it in the tent. But I do wonder about the timing - this plant is 12 days old... I don't think I've ever transplanted a plant that young before, regardless of species!

I will be transplanting using my more successful protocol from last grow; from Solo Cup directly to 16" diameter homemade smart pot. It requires me to control the watering more accurately, but the plant that was transplanted into my 1 gallon smart pot first had a lot of roots go through the smart pot material which were ripped out during the second transplant. I think that the 1 gal to 5 gal move was a traumatic transplant for the plant in question, and probably contributed to the poor yield along with the pH.

I think someday I'll make new "medium size" smart pots that have velcro down the side, in the hopes that maybe that would reduce transplant trauma compared to "peeling" the pot off like a sweater...
Great news is that I have plenty of geo-textile material, I don't have to worry about testing designs. Just have to put in the time to sew them.

[LurkingInTheGrass]

I KNOW RIGHT?1?

stupid shiny packaging - have to hide it in a box

[Eigholte]

So on a side note... given that I was planning to use the Mega Crop for this grow I had ordered a few more things to supplement my existing sample. They delivered the new stuff I ordered rather quickly, and I have to say, they've really upgraded their packaging. Which might have something to do with how quick, relatively speaking, I got this order compared to the last one.

Last time, customs got super curious about the package. It was cut open and re-taped closed by the time I got it well over a month later. As I opened it, I think I figured out why - the old logo was very pot-leaf heavy. Given that at that point, Canada had already announce the legalization date, I suspect Customs couldn't do anything about a fertilizer sample with a pot leaf on it. But it may have explained some of the interest and delay.

Now, there's a almost complete absence of pot leaves, and it looks really spiffy... (pH pen for scale)

Ugh. Next grow. Must be patient... Must. Be. Patient.
Stupid shiny packaging!

[Mr.furley]

Got some good color, looking healthy.

[Eigholte]

Good Morning, GWE

Week one is over, and the tiny plant is looking very pleased with itself. After abbreviating the strain in my tracking sheet to "PXL", I have decided this plant and its clones shall be known as Pixel this grow. (The last grow was named Sprüht)

Not too much to report, overall. However, I took Mr. Furley's advice, and have been feeding with my AN nutes from my last grow, except for that first soak of the coir, which I am going to retroactively justify by claiming is was so I could get the cellulase they include in that formula into the coir to make reusing it 'safer'. (In reality? Just impatient to try something new).

• Seedling was started with a dome for humidity, which was gradually removed over three days.
• Tent humidity has ranged from 60% down to 35% at points, but averaging 45%-55%. I am doing a little misting of tent surfaces (not the plant) to try keep it above 45% or so.
• Temperatures are about 26c/79F during the day, cooling to 17C/63F at night.
• Lights are on 18/6, and started at 25" above the plant, and were slowly dropped to 18" over the course of the week.
• Plant was watered once, with Cal/Mag/AN nutrient solution at pH 6.3 / 445ppm (including the ~150ppm that naturally occurs in my tap water. So about 300ppm of actual nutrients)

Growth has really taken off in the last few days! That second set of true leaves has only been growing for about a day, and it's to the point that it gets 1/8-1/4" longer every 4-6 hours now.

I think the two best lessons I'm applying from my last grow are

A) Check the pH. No seriously, check it again! - and -
B) Don't over-water. I remembered how light my 5 gallon coir could get without a single sign of wilting, and I thought twice about giving the seedling a second watering. I'll hold off for a day or two.

Photos are just a touch grainy, but I'm using my older camera rather than my cell phone, as I am not sure I want these pictures in the cloud. It was a reasonably nice point-n-shoot camera back in the day, but that was almost 10 years ago...

[Eigholte]

Thanks! It's a pleasure to be here.

I'll probably end up popping in on Sundays to update this thread, since that will be a full weeks worth of growth for this little project. I'll try to keep it well photographed and mildly entertaining.

[LurkingInTheGrass]

Eigholte
Welcome to the party

subbed to your grow

[Mr.furley]

Oh believe me I am a cannabis cutting, branch bent, light moving, leaf taking, plant starving, nothing is ever the same except the color of my tent kind of grower.
But there is truth in less is more with cannabis growing, you get a system that is fail proof, then add the new levels pushing the envelope. Keep what worked and trash the bad ideas next thing you know it's easy Breezy.
Look forward to watching you grow no matter how.

[Eigholte]

Welcome To the other side of the Forum Eigholte
Most of us don't bit!
nice write up you have here and I look forward to seeing you make it happen. Definitely two nice Cbd strains whichever one it is.
.
The good/bad part of this side of the Forum is peeps like me talk back at you directly, so I'm going to suggest if you can keep your nutrient line up the same for your second world do it, you will be working with one less unknown.

Good luck and I'm stubbed in.

Thanks!

See, I KNOW you're right about the advantages of consistency... but I'm definitely the type that likes to "tinker" with things. It's so tempting to just tweak something here, try something new there... The only upside is that while I tinker, I'm usually pretty good about documenting it, at least. But keeping the 'nutes the same would not only give me a more apples-to-apples comparison on this 2nd grow, it would let me use up my old nutrients before I switch over to something new... hrmm...

The sprout just got above ground today, so I have a little bit of time to waffle on what my final choice should be.

[Mr.furley]

Welcome To the other side of the Forum Eigholte
Most of us don't bit!
nice write up you have here and I look forward to seeing you make it happen. Definitely two nice Cbd strains whichever one it is.
.
The good/bad part of this side of the Forum is peeps like me talk back at you directly, so I'm going to suggest if you can keep your nutrient line up the same for your second world do it, you will be working with one less unknown.

Good luck and I'm stubbed in.

[Eigholte]

Good Morning, GWE.

Long time lurker, first time signing up and posting. Given that GWE managed to accidentally coach me through my first grow, I figured this would be a good place to document my second.

As a recap, my first grow had quite a few pH and soil problems, and my first plant which was impacted by them all ended up rather stunted and yielded a rather meager 10g harvest. However, I started a second seed 5 weeks in that was spared a lot of these early issues, and that plant gave me 52g (1.8oz) which I figured was quite respectable for a first grow in a 5 sqft tent under a lower-powered (116 actual watts) LED light. About half of that was good bud, and half of it was fluffy bud and trim. The fluffy trim made a nice green dragon. This was with just some LST for both plants, and no other training/defoliation techniques. I would like to be a little bit better about "undensifying" my plant, as a lot of that fluffy bud was fluffy because it was hidden deep in the interior of my plant and never got quite enough light to fill out, I think.

So here we are at grow 2. You'll notice I called it a "possible Painkiller XL" in the title? I am not completely sure which seed I germinated. I looked at the key on the back of my package and suddenly wondered: "Is the key set up so that it lines up with the seeds when you're looking at the back of the package, like I am now, or does it represent the front of the bubble pack?"



So, as you can see above, I'm either growing a Painkiller XL, like I expect, OR I might be growing a Royal Medic. If anyone has any personal experience with the RQS mixed packs and could help me figure out what I may have actually planted, that would be great!

EDIT: MARCH 10, 2019. Mystery Solved - this is a Royal Medic!

So the seed was soaked 12 hr, then kept in a moist paper towel on a seedling heat mat for 24, at which point it had a rootlet so it went into the coir solo cup, and 24 hours after that, we had a sprout! So I guess my seeds have a decent chance of being fresh, as that was a quick germination!



This grow, I'll probably try the Mega Crop I got. I was going to use it for my first grow, after I realized I needed to move from pH 8 soil to coir if I wanted my plant to live... but Customs got really interested in it, and held up the shipping by about a month. By that point, I had the basic Micro-Grow-Bloom nutrients from Advanced Nutrients, so I stuck with those for grow 1. I plan to supplement with some Cal-Mag, the MC PK booster in flower, and use some of their "sweet candy" additive as well, just to see how I feel about it.

I'm planning on doing more training as well. I saw a thread, I think on here, about a double manifold technique that looks promising, so I think I'll give that a shot, and I will root/clone the part of the plant I cut off. I'm hoping to turn my one plant into at least 3. 2 to flower, and one to play with for creating female pollen. I'd like to try and get self-sufficient for seeds, because they always end up being around $15/seed after shipping and currency conversion and such. It's a little pricy, given that I'm not selling to grow and am not exactly a connoisseur.

In all reality, I only started smoking this year, and still don't smoke much. The ~2oz I got of my first grow looks like it might last my spouse and I a whole year. But I really like growing plants, as my living room can attest, and I've found cannabis to be a really fun plant. (It grows so fast and is just so trainable.) So if I keep up all this growing I'm doing, I just might need to make new friends to give away my produce to.