1st grow - Grandmommy Purple - *Now DWC*

12/18 - 12/24 Week 15 (week 7 after cloning) 12/24 - Ok, so a lot went on this week. On 12/19 I officially switched the lighting to 12/12 and adjusted feeding times along with some air pump adjustments all to accommodate the flip. I don't really consider this the first week of flower though. To be fair, I am confused as to when to actually mark the beginning of flower. It seems to be debated. Some mark on the flip day and others wait for a week or for signs of flowering? I don't know. In my case, and for this diary, I will be marking the first week of flower next week as the plants would have had 1 week to transition into flower and would then be in the flowering stage. At least, that is how I am going to play it. This will also come with the bloom nutrient feeding juices to be used for the next feeding and that coincides with me marking the first week of flower. The plants are recovering very nicely. My plan to implement top offs of replacement nutes is going well. I did up the ppm to 1018 for the feedings and the plants are taking to that nicely. They have completely filled out the space of the tent they occupy. I can not really take pictures of individual plants anymore due to how they fill out the tent. Wall to wall coverage. I don't know how I feel about them touching the wall... well, yes. I know how I feel and I don't like it. lol. Full disclosure I think 59% rh was way too high for these bushy plants, so I have been trying to push the humidity down by upping the exhaust. This makes it colder in the tent though. As I am also fighting with cold basement temps. I am shooting for around 52% for now and will continue driving it down a little bit more into flower. I will most likely need to get the dehumidifier ready. Temps at night are harder to keep in the upper 60s. I usually was able to easily maintain 69f at night but it has been dipping to 66f sometimes. Colder temps overall means colder during lights on as well. Temps now max out around 77. However, the light is not at 100% power yet. I think it's at 80% power and the plants are getting ~550 ppfd / ~32-35 dli or so and the light is around 22 inches above them with about 18 inches left to raise it. So I plan on letting them grow into and closer to the light which will increase the ppfd and dli they receive as they will be closer to the light while they stretch. So for the problems... I uh... can no longer take the net pots out of the buckets. This has been the case for at least a week now. The roots have formed a mass that is wider than the bucket because of the ring in the bucket that delivers water from the reservoir. This causes a taper and the roots are harder and wider under the ring. I can't even really cut them because of how it is. The only way to get it out now will be to cut the short connector tube and pull it all out. This is what is going to have to happen. Unfortunately, I will have to abandon this ebb and flow design and do an emergency transfer to DWC to finish out the grow. I have come up with a plan to do this though. Basically, I am going to buy some more buckets(ones that I haven't spray painted yet -_-), then cut out a lot of the bucket so they act as a riser for the net pot. I will be taking the pumps out and the rack in the reservoir out to put the net pot in the reservoirs. But they have to sit on something. So buckets. And to get water to be able to be all up in there... I will use a saw to cut the buckets like I did for the reservoir lids. Then I will put the net pots in those buckets which will sit in the reservoir. I'll fill the reservoirs up to an inch or so under the net pot and run air pumps 24/7 right under the roots. This way, I guess I'll just top off the reservoirs when they get low and adjust ph as needed. Maybe I'll change the reservoirs sometimes, too? I actually know very little about the upkeep of a DWC system and the finer details that go along with maintaining that type of system... lolol oh well. I can't really think of any other problems. I mean the root thing is a problem, but I have a solution. The deficiencies are close to gone and are going away. I plan on upping the ppms of feedings anyways so we are good there. Oh, I did notice something weird... some of the new growth on the plants smell like sulphur. This was especially more prominent on the parts of the plants touching the wall. These were high humidity areas as well and goes along with the main reason I am not liking the plants touching the sides. The smell is a little bit strong. I am hoping the flower doesn't smell like sulphur like this otherwise I would just trash all the weed. lol.. but seriously I don't like that. This was the main driving factor in me pushing down the humidity and upping the exhaust. Oh, I can't believe I didn't mention this yet. The defoliation. This is also because of the humidity and smell. I decided I needed to totally clean up and air out the plants because of how clustered and condensed the growth is. This, in addition to raising tent humidity, causes a lot of transpiration condensation buildup on leaves. Like leaves are always wet if you move the plants around since so many touch each other and overlap. So I looked into pre-flowering pruning, defoliation, and all that. I started with Sawtooth and cleaned her up just a little. I was a lot more timid cutting her up. I did that on 12/21 or 12/22 I forget. The pictures know. Anyways, every thing looked good after doing that so I really dug in on Plant D. It was closest to the door and easy to get out. This one is structured totally different than Sawtooth because Sawtooth had fasciation of the main stem and grew like a weirdo. So I went to work on Plant D pretty hard. I think I did a good job. I hope I didn't take off too much. But then again... I think about taking off more. There are so many little floppy shoots that I will watch to see if they keep up with the canopy. Plant D is kind of an experiment. I did that one yesterday, 12/23. The plan now is to do Plant B and C today. Then maybe go back to Sawtooth sometime before the next feeding on 12/26. That will depend on how Plant B and C shape up. I really want to clean them up like Plant D because I think this will greatly help with the humidity issue and help keep branches off the sides of the tent. So the plan is this: Finish defoliation of plants B and C in preparation for flower. Change system to DWC. Then hopefully, try and put in a trellis net to help support branches in flower, even canopy, and then make final defoliation at week 3 flower easier. That is the plan. I typed the breakdown below because it doesn't come through in the above nutrient breakdown above. For the reservoir composition: Epsom - 10tsp Silica - 75ml Part A - 150ml Part B - 150ml B-52 - 75ml Cal-Mag Xtra - 50ml Then the supplemental reservoir composition: Epsom - 5tsp Silica - 40ml Part A - 85ml Part B - 85ml B-52 - 40ml Cal-Mag Xtra - 40ml ======================================================================================= UPDATE: 12/24 - I liked how Plant D turned out after defoliating her, so I did it to Plant C and B. Also, I went back and cleaned up Sawtooth to be like the others. At this point, I have the saw and the buckets. So we are good to go with the transition to DWC. Next weeks update will be somewhat interesting, I believe. At least for me.