First Grow

[90Gizmo]

Don't harvest early. Dieing is just another word for drying. You just don't want disease or mold. Is that a little humidifier? Unless you're in a desert you probably don't want that turned on at this point. If your pH meter is reading high then you've been give too low pH not neutral. Flush with lots of water with half the ph-down you've been using and some cal-mag. I think you'll easily get another week or two out of them. As SoOrbudgal says, I've done this my first three grows. Slow learner.

 

[Rootsruler]

Was confused for quite a long time but finally realised why the plants didn't recover. The PH meter I've been using wasn't calibrated properly, it's telling me my tap water is about PH 8 when it's normally about dead on 7, so I've been given them pretty PH neutral water all along. For next time I'll pick up some test strips as recalibrating the meter doesn't seem to work, but I think these plants are now pretty close to harvest? About half the pistles have gone brown and the trepenes are pretty solidly white, I've included a couple of pictures I took with a cheap USB microscope. Would love some opinions on this, given the poor health of the plants I'd like to harvest as early as possible incase they do die and I lose the crop, but also don't want to harvest too early and waste it.

Also sorry about the picture quality, dropped the phone a couple of weeks ago and now the camera doesn't want to focus properly 😔

Judging from your pictures I'd say you have around 2 more weeks before harvest. Your trichomes should all be milky white without any glass left in them. Your yellowing leaves look like normal leaf senescence. I wouldn't worry.

The ebay link you posted shows the setup you have. I noticed that setup includes a controller. Is your controller setup to run your fan? The controller should be able to handle the fan speed you'll need to be at to arrive at the setpoints you want. I haven't read anything where you mention getting your stats from your controller so I'm not sure if you set it up or not.

Is your tent in a bedroom or room inside your house or in a garage? The room your tent is in is called your lung room. This is where your tent will pull the fresh air it needs. To lower or raise temperature and/or humidity in your tent you'll need to condition the source air that is coming from your lung room and enters into your tent. Do you have a way to cool the air in your lung room?

As was mentioned, you need to exhaust the air inside your tent outside of the lung room otherwise you'll slowly recycle the humid hot air back into your tent. You want frequent air exchanges in the tent so that your plants have fresh CO2 to photosynthesize with along with moving out the hot humid air and whatever other gases like ethelyne that your plants produce. Rule of thumb is 1 - 3 air exchanges a minute. Your tent is 2 x 4 x 6 so you have 48 cubic feet of air you need to move at least once a minute. The more the better. Your 4 inch fan will pull a maximum of 205 CFM(Cubic Feet per Minute) but real world numbers are probably more like 160 - 170. Add a filter on it and it'll drop your CFM another 20% so more than likely your fan is pulling around 110 - 130 cfm with duct drops and bends. Basically the fan is pulling a couple air exchanges a minute which should be sufficient.

Your light is rated at 200 watts which should be enough for your 2 x 4. Not sure of the physical size of your lamp but it looks like it'll give you the coverage you need. I prefer bar lights as I grow photo period seeds in a 5 x 5 tent and use a SCROG method so I like to do wall to wall grows and bar lights allow that to happen. I suggest you download an app called Tent Buddy. It has a light meter that will show you how much light you're giving your plants. It will also convert LUX to PPFD and umol/m2/s so that you can apply the correct amount of photons to your plants in the growth stage they're in.

I'm going to include some charts that you can follow and will make your grow much more enjoyable. Some of this will not really apply to autos. Autos don't require a light change to signal flowering like photoperiod plants do as it's been genetically modified to do it once it reaches a particular level of maturity but if you decide to run a photoperiod plant then these charts will come in handy.

This site has some very experienced growers but if you really want to get in the weeds(Sorry, No pun intended!:wink check out a site called https://www.budbuilders.org

Vapor Pressure Deficit(VPD) chart

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[Rootsruler]

5 x 5 I just harvested....

3 different photoperiod cultivars. I use an AC Infinity T6 6" fan with Controller 67 to control temperature and humidity in the tent. The controller does VPD so I don't have to do calculations but I check that it's reading correctly doing leaf temperature readings.

 

[Mitzi]

Last little update, based on the advice here I held off for another week before paranoia got the better of me and I chopped. Buds hung and dried for four days and have now gone into their jars, humidity meters reading a good range. After the dry it weighed about an ounce and a half all together, which for a first go I'll take as a win. I've also had a few test buds and the gorilla glue is good, tangerine dream is maybe my new favourite strain.

Little annoyed with myself that two of the three big mistakes were easy to predict and avoid, I should have checked the PH meter calibration properly, and should have remembered to switch nutrient quantities when the stages changed. The lessons have been well learned now though, and I'm going to wait till the middle of August to start the next grow so the area will be cooler by the time the light intensity is going up and generating more heat.

Thank you so much everyone for all the help with the grow, I would have definitely killed them off before harvest without all your guidance.