Crown Royale DWC grow

chopdoc Good day fellow growers/stoners. I would like to introduce my newest girl :) She is a Crown Royale strain from Crop King Seeds. It took two tries with two seed to get one to germinate. The first seed after 5 days it didnt look like it would ever sprout so added a second seed to the paper towel. Next morning the second seed was already sprouted and about 12 hours later she had a very nice tap root growing. I planted this into some rockwool and placed it in a propagator. A day or so later she was pushing for the light. Two days and her leaves was in the plastic dome and roots coming out of the bottom of the rockwool. This is my first hydro grow. Im always looking to get the most out of any grow and one day I will get close to what the seed company claims they will produce! After lots and lots of reading I decided to give the DWC setup a try. Seems the easiest and simplest. Should be a good learning experience. I picked up the DWC bubbler kit off of Amazon for around $80. Comes with everything needed to get going except covers for the holes you wont be using. It says it is 8 gallons in size but once filled it will only take 6 gallons to get the level right at the bottom of the cages that holds the medium. I would reccomend the setup. Been looking forward to trying hydro growing for a while. This is gonna be a fun grow :)

chopdoc Awesome week for this Crown Royale girl. Once her roots hit the solution, it was off to the races. Massive growth in just a couple days. Gonna start some training this week. The way she is growing, she will be a monster of a plant. Chasing he PH has been fun. Keeps climbing almost daily. Slowly increased the nutes last few days. Think she is at full strength now.

chopdoc She is coming along nicely. A week ago I topped her and she has 4 nice nodes going now. Waiting for them to get a little bigger and then I will top those four. Today I started adding 4 oz lead weights to start training her to grow flat and level. Im in no rush to flip her to flowering and am gonna take my time and train this one right. Had a little problem with root rot. Added some extra hydro guard and recharge and she recoved fine. Some of the bottom leaves developed blotches on them from it but trimmed them away and the plant seems fine now.

chopdoc This week she got her first flush. Been fighting root rot and believe i have it now. Down here its impossible to keep the liquid in the tank below 75. Usually it stays around 77 so I changed the air stones to some longer ones, replaced the air pump with a 950cfm pump and added a third air stone to the tank. That seems to help a lot. She is a hardy plant. All my goofs she seems to forgive easily. Been working on her a lot with LST, topping and today am planning on defoliating some of the lower leaves. Another week or two and will flip to 12/12 lights. The way she is now I should be able to get a dozen or more main colas on her once she is in flowering.

chopdoc Lots better this week. Root rot seems to be contained for now. The extra air bubbles helped a lot. Flipped her to 12/12 lighting now and did a system flush with sledgehammer flush tonight. I have her growing pretty flat right now and with all the topping I been doing to her she will have at least a dozen main colas once she starts making buds. Waiting to see how she looks in a couple weeks with all the stretching she is gonna do. For the time what I am doing to try to keep her growing flat is I been using 4 oz lead weights with some soft ties.Once she gets bigger will go to a scrog net.

chopdoc She is growing fast. More than doubled in size in a week. I am using 4 oz weights to keep the branches low for now but am going to let them start growing upward for about a foot and then put the trellis in place. I have a real nice frame work going on and she has about 16 main colas that will produce. been working on moving things around so some of these smaller colas can get light too. Wouldnt mind stretching it to 20 main colas from one plant.

chopdoc This is one tough lil strain. Its hard to believe she is still making it and she is thriving despite all my screw ups. This week I added a poor mans chiller. Found a 48 qt cooler on sale, took 100 ft of dark vinyl tubing and cut a couple holes in the lid of the cooler and ran one hose to a pump and the other hose as a return to the reservoir. Attached it to a temp control and its working great. I keep a bunch of coke bottles in the freezer and swap them out every 12 hours. Once everything is cooled down, a couple bags of ice will last a couple days. Keeping her at around 67 solution temp. This week been letting her stretch upwards with a little tying down of a couple branches. Trimmed a lot of the lower foilage that wasnt getting any light. If I can keep her in check growing the way I want for another week I should be able to put the plant on auto for the rest of the grow without needing a scrog net.

chopdoc This week she grew a lot. Nice flat plant with tons of bud coming on. I been working a lot on her training and have her about they way I wanted. This is turning out to be my best grow yet. One of the problems I ran into this week was with the cooler pump. It had a short in it and I was getting shocked from it. Rewired the temp controller thinking that was it but in the end changed the pump out. Also not trusting my PH meter. Have some powder coming so I can calibrate it. Upped my solution temp a little to 69. From all I been reading that sounds like optimal. With my poor man cooler, I been using frozen coke bottles and swapping them out every 12 hours. Seems to be working well but I am looking into a peltier cooling rig and keep the water chilled in the cooler and not have to do bottles anymore. 3 full weeks in flowering, 6 more to go :)

chopdoc I think the three week stretch is about done and now she is going to concentrate on just making buds. Plant is coming along very nicely. I defoliated a bunch of lower stuff that wasnt getting any light and last night I gave her a good flush. That should be the last flush until right before harvest. Almost didnt flush her and let it ride for another week. The EC was only at 2.8 which is a bit high but acceptable but I figured she is done with her stretching and I wanted fresh nutes for her to make big buds with. The poor mans cooler is working out great. I figured out that 12 to 14 frozen 16 oz coke bottles of water will keep it cool for 24 hours. In the last week or two since I installed the cooler there has been no signs of root rot.

chopdoc Its been a good week for my girl. I swapped out the 480 watt light for a 600 watt one. I put in a net and tried to get most of the buds as level as I could get them. She is drinking over a half gallon of water a day. And had problems with my pump for the cooler twice this week. Both times it lifted to high to pump and was just making noise. Keeping an eye on it now and pushing the hose down every time I change the ice which is nightly. The buds are really looking awesome and they are very sappy already. Not muc of a smell to the plant itself but after having my hands in it they reek from the plant. The way she is going, its gonna be one hell of a crop :)

chopdoc Pretty uneventful week for my little girl. She is going strong and the buds are getting very frosty and sticky. Been chasing the PH this week. Keep finding it low. It never went below 5.5 that I seen. 3 more weeks to go!

chopdoc This week she been going great. Hard to believe only two weeks left. The buds are getting fat and sticky. Think I figured something out this week that maybe I been doing wrong. After a flush I would give it full nutes for 5 gal res. The next week same thing yet she didnt drink 5 gals during the week. Yet I am wondering why my PPM is so high. In the future I think I am going to give it nutes only for the amount of water it drank in the week. Never seen any discussion on this so am gonna have to wing it.

chopdoc Eight weeks of flowering down, 1 more week to go! CKS says this strain takes 9 weeks in flowering and the buds are looking very sexy and sappy. I checked them out with a mag glass and tricones getting cloudy. I like some red ones when I harvest. Love the couch lock. The buds feel dense so should be a great crop. The most that happened this week wiht my girl was chasing PH. Everyday it was diving and took me around 5 days since the last feeding before it would settle in at 5.97 I am not going to feed her this week except maybe a lil chaching Monday. Next week will give her a flush before harvesting. Im estimating two more weeks. Next week for most people it would probably be ready but I like to let them go a bit longer until I see a noticeable amount of red tricones.

chopdoc Well guys its time! Buds looking beautiful. July 12th I flipped her into flowering and thats 9 weeks. I took a bud off this morning and in about three days I will give it a try and then start harvesting the rest of her. Way its looking, Im gonna beat my record of 148 grams from one plant. The goal was 200 grams from my first hydroponics grow and I might hit that. High hopes! The one bud I cut this morning will weigh in at around 12 grams dried I am estimating and I have a dozen just like that and a lot more. Update: Started the harvest. Seeing a fair amount of red tricones on the buds. So far I have 30 grams curing, 250 grams drying (should be @70 grams dried) and maybe another 200 to 250 grams to harvest yet. The smoke on this is amazing. Flavor kinda sucks still. reall grassy with a dirty undertone but its not cured yet and thats expected. The effects, wow. Im use to some primo good herb. This is top notch. One hit and your going for a couple hours. Two hits and your taking a nap. Outstanding head high with couch locking but not the full body buzz. Great for pain and the stress just rolls off you with it.

chopdoc The seeds was hard to germinate. Took a couple tried before one popped but CKS sent me 7 for the price of 5 so its all good. Once she did germinate it grew slow until the roots hit the solution and then it was off to the races, Very easy plant to train and I trained her to grow flat so during the whole grow cycle she never got over 16 inches above the base. As my first try at Hydro, my DWC grow was a huge success. The goal was to break 200 grams and i didnt make that goal but the second goal was to beat my previous best of 140 grams from one plant. Did that with ease and am sure future grows will be even better. The smoke from this strain is amazing. Its not cured yet so really cant say what the flavor will be like but the effects is really good. Fill a bowl and take one toke and you are off to the races. Real good cerebral high. Two tokes and you are going to take a nap until you get a little use to it. It has a decent couch locking to it without the feeling of being in cement when you have heavy couch lock. Its really good fro stress and anxiety. You know you still have your problems but when smoking this those problems just are not so intimidating. (had a sibling pass away recently, this helped a lot). And its good for pain. The bursitis in my shoulder was killing me last few day. A toke or two and it stopped bothering me. Well guys, I been growing non stop for a year now. Probably harvested 10 plants this year and its time for a break. Im disabled and retired so its a hobby for me and with any hobby, over doing it isnt a good thing so I am gonna take a month or three off from growing. Seeds for my next grow have been ordered, white widow fem and blue cookies fem seeds and I will try out this new grow technique called fluxing with them that I been reading about but not sure I will do anymore grow diaries.