HELP! Vacation planning options

[ocgreen]

Hi everyone I have a problem. Right now I have 8 FastBuds in soil which should finish before I leave but not doing well. Long story short i want to try and start fresh from seed in hydro but only have 9 weeks until I leave for vacation.

Here are my options as far as I see it:

1.Plunk 8 BlackBerry by FastBuds (supposed to be 8 weeks from seed to harvest) and:

A) let it go 9 weeks and hang to dry as full plants for 11 days from last day before I leave. Trim and cure when I get back. OR

B) harvest at 8 weeks, wet trim, dry for a week and then get someone to help me burp/cure while I'm away.

2. Choose a strain with longer flowering time and teach a trusted friend how to refill reservoirs/perform maintenace every other day. Harvest when I get back.

3. Keep going with these sad looking soil plants.

4. Pull the plug for the summer.

5. Transplant the 8 soil plants to hydro (not sure this is a thing) and try to recover then.

I am leaning towards 1B.

Any other ideas? Which option would you choose?

[SirSmksAlot]

I'd say if option 2 is a possibility, that would be my choice. I had to teach my 73 yo father who has never smoked in his whole life how to do water changes lol. I think he really enjoyed it! Either way I wish you luck

[ocgreen]

I think you're probably right. I have a couple people in mind and one is my 81 yr father in law so I'm glad that's a proven strategy lol. I'm thinking seeds with 11-12 week flowering would have him tending to them after stretch but before harvest; could probably get away with a visit once every 3 days to just top up dwc reservoir with cold ph water.

[uncledoug]

You could do #1 and teach a trusted friend, In my short time growing I have found that seed to harvest times are usually at least a couple weeks longer than what the seed supplier says, the times they give are under near perfect growing conditions.

[ocgreen]

You make a good point. This is only my 2nd grow so it's fair to say it won't be perfect.

[uncledoug]

I'm sure your grow will go fine as long as you don't do like I do,lol. I've made a lot of mistakes but with the great growers we have here on this site there is plenty of help. Good luck on Grow #2.

[Wink]

Hydro it up. It's pretty easy to set up any size resivior you want and drip feed them with a pump and a timer. Just run a drain tube to a waste bucket or let it drain into a bucket under each plant. Ph to 5.5 right before you leave and you can get away with a week to 10 days never having to look at them.

[MarkyJ]

I’d keep the sad ones going and get them to a happy harvest 😂

[HappyDaze]

I've use a similar idea to what Wink suggested with my DWC setup. I put a barb fitting through the rez wall at the maximum water level and piped it back to a 5 gallon "controller" pail full of nutes. I use the pump from my aero-cloner and a timer to top up the rez once a day from the controller. The line from the pump is just clipped to the **top edge of the net pot without a dripper. I've only used it for long weekends, but it does the trick and didn't require much $.



** When I set this up to try it, I stuck the line from the pump into the rez, tripped the timer, watched it circulate for a couple seconds and then went away to do something else. When I came back, the pump was off and the rez had syphoned back through the pump overflowing the controller bucket. OOPS Lesson to DWC operators, watch how you position any tubing to your rez, this can happen with your air lines too.