Em-dog DWC

This update is way overdue, but holy shit it’s been a crazy week or two. On Thursday 12/30 we were evacuated due to the Marshall fire in Colorado. We lost power shortly after the fire started and honestly this plant was the least of my concerns. Our house is still standing but many people very close by have lost everything. That said, this plant survived no light, no bubbles in the water, and temperatures under 40 F for four days. To my amazement, it was still alive when I returned home and power and gas service were restored. I turned the entire system back on, and while the old growth looks a little sad, the new growth is happy as can be and the roots are white. Now let’s see if we can finish what we started with this resilient little lady. Updates should be more frequent from now on.

What a difference a week makes. It’s hard to believe that a week ago I was nursing this plant back to health after it survived against all odds. She’s really bounced back. I changed out the water yesterday, which was about 2 weeks old. The water level had dropped a little and I think the EC was getting a little hot. Once I changed it out she perked right up again. I’ll be changing it out once a week from now on. I was mostly trying to wait until our water was safe again after the fire and now that its good to go hopefully there are no more setbacks. I will be topping this girl this week and starting to build as flat of a canopy as I can. Stay tuned.

I’m a little overdue for an update but there’s plenty to report. First, I topped this girl and started training her. I have attached some adhesive cable clips to the bucket lid to hold my wire ties for training and it’s a perfect solution. Second, I found out that this girl is a cal mag hog. I suspected that she might be with the way she would droop before reservoir changes, but then she showed some real signs of calcium deficiency. I had to pump up the amount of base nutrients and also the cal mag in the water, which pushed the solution to about 700 ppm. She seems happy with this. Finally, I will probably be topping her a second time this week and I will try to keep spreading the canopy as much as I can. I would like to get at least 8 tops and I’ll see how long that takes for veg time.

Once again I’m pretty overdue for an update. I’ve mostly been up to a lot of plant training. I had already topped once to start a main line in my last update. I waited for 4 nodes on each side and then topped again, but I kept nodes 1 and 3 on each side which created 8 tops. Then I had a plant training accident and accidentally broke off one of the new tops. I should have waited just a little longer to bend those new ones. Lesson learned. Now I’ve just been bending and tying the 7 remaining branches into place and making a nice, flat canopy. She is really filling out nicely and I’ll need to clean up the middle again and remove some larger fan leaves. I’ll let her veg for another week, maybe 2, before I flip to bloom. I also have had an interesting nutrient dilemma in which I needed extra cal mag but the Botanicare cal mag product has 2% nitrogen which was causing some slight nitrogen toxicity. I switched over to Calimagic because it has half the nitrogen and about twice the cal mag, and that seems to be the way to go. More again in a week or two and I promise weekly updates during the bloom phase.

Nothing much going on this week except just keeping track of the plant training and making sure everything is the same height. This plant is now screaming for me to start flowering and I am planning on switching to my 600w HPS and flipping to 12/12 tomorrow. I think this is one sturdy girl and I expect her to plump up nicely in flower. Apart from losing a branch due to a mistake in training, this is the best plant training I’ve ever done. She should fill out the tent nicely. I’m excited to see what the next 8-9 weeks brings.

Week 1 of bloom is in the books. It was pretty uneventful as week 1 of flower tends to be. For this particular plant, stretch seems to be pretty minimal. I’ve released her from the bondage of her training ties and I’m letting her spread her wings. I thinned out some of the larger fan leaves and some of the lower growth tips that weren’t exposed to light. You’d never know by looking at her, especially from the top. This lady really just wants to be a bush. The speed with which she fills in any gap of space with massive, hand-sized fan leaves is pretty impressive. There are some side branches that are filling in the middle of the canopy and I’m currently debating whether or not to remove them. I’m kind of waiting to see how the stretch continues, because I don’t want to eliminate flower sites that will increase yield. At the same time, I want to see the mains really plump up. Decisions, decisions… I’ll be back with another update in about a week.

Not much going on this week. I’m a little behind getting this update out so there will be yet another over the weekend to catch us up. Mostly just managing the stretch in this particular week. I did end up getting a little nutrient burn, which was really surprising since I’ve been feeding very lightly and only topping off with plain water to help keep EC low. I’ll continue to be very conservative with this girl and the nutrients as she does not seem to be a heavy feeder at all. More in a couple days when I change out my bucket for another week and I can get some more pictures out of the HPS.

Really just keeping things simple and conservative. Really don’t want to over feed this girl and she seems happy with a very gradual increase in feed. Next week, barring any over feeding, I’ll try to bump the feed level just a bit more. This is a very thirsty plant, and she is probably drinking at least 1/2 gallon of water every day. I expect this to increase as we get closer to harvest. Should have another update this weekend.

I went up to 1 tsp/5ml per gallon of FloraBloom and still saw nutrient burn spread, but flowers developed a lot and even more stretch happened. Because if the nutrient burn seeming to spread I backed off and went back down to 3/4 tsp/gallon, which is about 1/4 strength of the GH recommended dose. Some plants want less and I get that. I may still try to push again next week but we’ll see. I want to minimize stress and I have seen no sign of deficiencies. This girl can drink 2/3-3/4 of a gallon of water every day and she has taken over my little 3x3’ tent. I will likely defoliate a little bit more and then try to ride this thing until harvest. See you in a week…

I tried to go back up a bit with the flower nutrients and immediately saw more burn so I’ve backed off. Based on how things are looking with 4 weeks to go I don’t anticipate a huge yield. This is two HSO plants in a row that have grown massive but just haven’t delivered in terms of really stacking up massive colas. I know OG plants aren’t typically big yielders anyway so whatever. I may try to grow something in DWC next time that I know can deliver some big juicy colas just to prove I’m not doing something wrong. At this point I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing until it’s time to draw back the nutrients and flush. Not my best photography this week but the frost is coming in and I’m getting excited for harvest.

I’m really just in autopilot mode at this point now that I’ve dialed in the feed. With about three weeks to go, it’s now time to take away the veg nutrients. This plant is a little weird, that’s for sure. It’s the only plant I’ve ever had that has nicer flowers on the side branches than the tops. If I grew this same plant again I’d probably just top it once or twice, spread out the canopy and just let all those side branches rip. She really loves to throw out side branches. I’m really curious to see how this one finishes. The calyxes are swelling now and the late flower stank is coming on in a big way. More in a week…

Well I’m just cruising along until the finish line. Drawing back the nutrients and I’ll start a flush around 4/26 or 4/27. I think I have some environmental factors contributing to lower yields in this setup. My temperatures can get up to around 85 F and I also live in a low humidity area. At least one of these issues needs to be cleaned up. I’m exploring my options and also thinking about converting to an RDWC setup to make things a bit more lazy. Anyway, about 2 weeks to go until chop. See you in a week…

Pretty standard late flower week. Some pretty colors are coming in now that I’m pulling back on the feed and getting ready to flush. I’ll be starting a flush on 4/28 and harvesting on 5/1. This will be about 68 days of bloom time. This plant is so stinky my carbon filter can’t keep up. I’m pretty disappointed in how this plant has not filled out. The buds are all skinny and airy. They look super dank but it just never filled out like I hoped it would. I’m reasonably sure I’ve just been very unlucky with the last two phenotypes I’ve had from HSO. I actually read about someone else who got a similar pheno. It is possible there is something I could do better that might be affecting yield. More on that below. Next grow I will be making some changes. First, I’ll take my existing buckets and convert them to a waterfall RDWC system. Second, I’ll be switching to an LED to bring my flowering temperatures down. The 600w HPS puts out too much heat for DWC in my setup. And third, I’ll be building out a gravity fed top off reservoir so I can make this very lazy work. I’ve had to top off almost every day during bloom and sometimes she drank almost a gallon each day. Makes it tough to leave town the way things are right now. If all goes well with the bucket RDWC I will take it a step further in future grows and do it right with some larger tote containers and bigger undercurrent returns.

Well this was an interesting grow. I’m really not sure if this was the second low yielding plant in a row I’ve gotten out of HSO seeds or if this has something to do with my current setup (more on that later). This was a plant that could easily yield half a pound if it filled out the way I hoped it would. It had a lot of really skinny, airy buds and I wasn’t super impressed. And this particular plant was also pretty sensitive to nutrients. Again, this could be the environment but I’m not so sure. I was only feeding at 1/4 strength and any attempt to go beyond that resulted in burn. All that said, changes must be made to my grow tent. First, the temperature topped out around 85F during flower with my 600w HPS lamp. This is way too high for DWC. I’m planning to get an LED board to solve this issue. I’m looking at an HLG 300 Rspec. My suspicion is that the higher temperature, combined with low Colorado humidity results in more nutrient uptake which makes it easy to burn plants. It also doesn’t help with water temperature in the reservoir. Second, I’m working way too hard during peak flower and I can’t leave for more than a couple days without needing someone to top off the bucket. Also, I’m hauling buckets of water in and out of my crawl space. This has got to stop. So, I’m going to do one of two things. Once I have the LED I’m going to test and see how warm reservoir gets. Depending on what happens I’ll either turn my buckets into a basic RDWC system or run a larger tote, but no matter what I’m going to set it up so I can easily pump water in and out. Also, I’ll be building out a top off system with a float valve so I can leave and not worry about plants drinking themselves dry. Since I only run one plant at a time it doesn’t need to be fancy. Lastly, I’ll probably run this strain again once I’m a little more dialed in for DWC, as I think there’s some really nice plants in these seeds. For now though I’ll be turning away from HSO strains and I want to try something I know should be a big yielder just to prove I can do it in my setup. Veg has gone great but the yields in flower have me scratching my head so far.