Taste The Rainbow

DAY 1: Gorilla Grow Tent - 5'x5'x8' 30 Gal Living Soil mix- HF/Perlite/Castings/Gypsum/NLS Autoflower Blend (Six 5-Gallon Root Pouch Fabric Pots) Lighting - Migro 4x4 Array Water - Well water PH'd to 6.8 in 5 Gallon Reservoir feeding 6 Blumat Tropf sensors. Hands off auto-watering once it's dialed in. Humidity Control - Levoit Smart Humidifier set to maintain 70% Ventilation/Temp Control: AC Infinity S6 Pro w/ Controller (also have a small space heater hooked up to maintain 73-77F currently) This controller is awesome for managing all the variables individually, loving it so far. Lung Room Conditions: 60-65F and ~45%RH Training/maintenance plans: LST only, bending and leaf tucking until eventually some defoliation/lollipopping is called for. Considered a trellis/SCROG setup, but I don't really wanna screw with it. I may regret this if they get as big as I hope. Genetics: 6 Barney's Skittlez OG Seeds My Background: Had a few small grows over the years, always very cobbled together setups. Had some successes and some failures. This is my first true investment into a high quality setup. Also my first run at growing in living soil with no bottled nutes. Both of which I am very excited about. The deep dive into understanding organic soil has already been very insightful. Ready to learn a ton more, that's the main goal with this one. Overall Plan/Goal: To make my setup as automated as possible and reduce the variables I need to micromanage so I can focus on maintaining soil/plant health and respond to any issues with confidence that it's not due to things like overwatering or out of whack Temps/Humidity/VPD etc... I am really excited to dial everything in. Already been running it for a few days while to soil cooks and things are stably in healthy range now. No specific goals in terms of yield, just looking to get them to the finish line healthy and harvest a high quality end product. Current thoughts/concerns/ideas: - Current lung room conditions (Winter in the basement in the great white north) makes it a little tough to maintain proper RH/Temp inside the tent when intaking/exhausting the proper CFM, but it's workable with what I have. This should be less of a problem and more of a boon when humidity levels are running up and need to be brought down rather than now where I'm struggling a bit to maintain solidly in the 70% range. Should have nearly ideal conditions for drying stage. - Water supply is not the greatest. 8ish PH with a decent hardness (cal/mag Bicarbonate type water) So I am weighing the potential pitfalls and solutions. Held off on adding any additional lime and added a healthy dose of gypsum to the soil to help balance out the excess. - Being it's my first time using Blumats, I am weary of over/underwatering at the start. Haven't seen much, if any water come out yet, but it's still pretty moist from initial mix up so I can't make any adjustments to it just yet. I'll be monitoring this very closely over the next few days as it gets more dried out. - Considering a mulch to top the living soil off. I have some clean straw I could soak. May wait until the plants are a bit more established and I'm certain my watering with the Blumats is dialed in. - Since I shouldn't have to worry about feeding much (except maybe late into flower) if all goes well, I am investing some time into researching other beneficial things I can prepare to keep the plants healthy and growing strong. Foliar sprays etc.. open to suggestions - Working on a spreadsheet schedule with rough outline of plans at each stage and timing to adjust parameters. - Many more thoughts and ideas lingering I can't think of right now and this post is long enough already. Conclusion: I plan to update at big milestones or anytime something new is going on. I will also be keeping a more day-to-day journal/notes for my own use. I am very open to hearing feedback, ideas, others experiences etc.. so feel free to share your knowledge. I am also open to answer any questions throughout the grow so ask away. Looking forward to big things in the near future, stay tuned! _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ DAY 2 UPDATE! Seeds went down yesterday under my little glass humidity domes (ran out of cute mason jars an had to use a kitchen glass. Interestingly the glass seems to be shit at holding humidity compared to the mason jars. Soil stayed nice and damp under all domes overnight, so all is well. Lights on and a little mist to the surrounding soil this morning and we're stepping away. Excited for the future, wishing there were more I could do to spend more time with the grow haha. Caught myself sitting on the couch just staring at the outside of the tent sipping coffee this morning in my dingy, industrial basement room and laughed at myself for how much I was enjoying it. I turned down temp overnight to start simulating natural environment. Not sure I need to do that again until they're seedlings. Probably best to keep the temps nice and warm for now 24/7) Still no water from Blumat and the soil is very moist. I am concerned that I started these with the soil too wet, so when it finally does dry out it's going to dump water like crazy or it's going to keep it too wet overall. I marked the bucket this morning to make sure I know if any water is being delivered. Currently it doesn't look like any has been delivered still, which makes sense considering it hasn't dried out much. Keeping a watchful eye. Humidity has stayed in the 70-75 range, other than last night where I let it go down to around 69-70, temps have stayed between 73-77. VPD around .8-1.0 Not much else to report for now. Time to take the dogs for a walk. See you tomorrow. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ DAY 3 UPDATE! No sprouts yet. Parameters are looking good, I did some more rough math on the CFM, turned it up a bit and messed around with my cycle to get it to more appropriate levels of exhaust/intake. This led to a slight overall humidity drop so I may need to dial it in a bit more or find a way to increase humidity. A different humidifier may be the answer unfortunately. I love the smart controls on this one, but it just doesn't pump it out fast enough with one fogger. I wish the Cloudforge wasn't on back order for over a month. Still waiting for significant watering from the Blumats to see what if any adjustments need to be made. I did get a little bit of water this morning in two pots, but this was immediately after jostling the reservoir around checking the levels. Maybe I have an air bubble? I am waiting for two parts to arrive that may help, the bleed valve they didn't send initially and some distribution drippers. I had ordered some drip rings as well but there seems to be some issue with that order and the distribution drippers might just be better overall anyways for my setup. Other than that, I am just keeping the domes and top soil moist with a mist here and there and waiting for these girls to pop. Hopefully we will be seeing green very soon. Until tomorrow, good luck and happy growing everyone! ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Day 4 Update: We have liftoff! 5/6 seeds sprouted today! We do have a bit of a helmet head situation, but nothing too serious. Must've planted them a bit too shallow. None of them are fully encased so I just put a single drop or two of water onto the seed shell and hopefully they resolve themselves in a day or two. If not, I'll step in and help them out very carefully. I educated myself as much as possible on the Blumat system and found some helpful troubleshooting steps. I found some air bubbles in my carrots, and I had also ordered a bleed valve for the end of the loop. So, I ended up redoing the entire setup, ensured I had no air bubbles (as best as I could) then bled the system and re-calibrated the heads to the freshly moistened soil, removing any perlite soil from the carrot holes and filling it with clean soil. I think I had my soil at a bit healthier level of moisture this time around, so hopefully that does it. We will see in a couple of days if it's watering evenly. It's a bit frustrating to not know right away if these things are properly set up, but the whole process of growing is always a balance of excitement and practicing patience for me. Once they're dialed in, it's going to be awesome and all the work will be worth it. The conditions are looking great, keeping humidity high and temps in the mid-high 70's. I finally got my cable to hookup the light control to the AC infinity system. I am a bit confused/disappointed with the controls though... the driver for the Migro has 0/20/40/60/80/100% and the app has settings 1-10... but the closest setting to the 40% I'm currently shooting for seems to be setting 2. I flicked it back and forth to test and it would get significantly brighter on 3 vs 40% and still seems a tad brighter even on 2... so I am confused. I reached out to Migro since they seem to have experience working with AC infinity and the only answer I got so far was to only use settings 0-8 ... I'm still unsure exactly what % I am at using the AC and unfortunately I don't seem to be able to separate scheduling light with the AC app and brightness levels. It's all or nothing. I may just use a smart plug or external mechanical timer and keep the light separate as Migro has already laid out where to keep the light, the levels and the PAR at those levels. I don't like the guesswork. Maybe I'll get a PAR meter someday, or try that Photone app. But I'd like to keep it simple where possible. Anywho, super excited to have my seeds popping up and the consistency of them all popping on the same day is great. Looking forward to taking care of these girls for the next few months. They're going to be fat and happy. That's all for today. See you all tomorrow. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Day 5 Update: 6th seed sprouted! All my little ladies are moving on up. I resolved the helmet head on all seeds except the newest which is still more horizontal than vertical. Most of them were hanging on by a thread and gently brushed off. Only had to add another tiny drop of water to one and it loosened right up. Nature mostly did her thing and I just gave them the tiniest bit of assistance. They all look really healthy and it's a wonderful feeling. Soil is still healthily moist from the Blumat reset. I'll probably mark the reservoir at this point to make sure it's delivering water as the soil dries. Not much I can do except wait to see if my reset worked. As far as the light goes, I got Photone working pretty well on my girls iPhone, It kind of sucked on the Android. I got it 300-400 PPFD at about 18" off the leaves, so we'll see how they respond to that. I'll mostly use what the plants are telling me to adjust from here rather than obsess over the exact numbers. Again, keep it simple. But it is nice to have that app for 6 bucks when it's nearly as accurate as a $600 tool. Conditions are looking great, everything working as expected so no complaints there. That's the update. Hope everyone had a great day. See you tomorrow. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Day6/7 Update: Missed my update last night, but there wasn't a ton to share. As of this morning (12/22) everything is still looking great, conditions are perfect and everyone is happy. Especially me as I just started end of year vacation and I can spend time hanging out with the plants (and family I guess.. ) As the soil dried to a level I felt water should be delivered at, I made very slight adjustments to the Blutmats and got 3 of them them to drip a bit. This made sense as the two closes to the heater and the one closest to the lower fan were the ones that dripped and were noticeably a bit more dry. They stayed dripping slowly for roughly an hour and delivered an acceptable amount of water for a seedling. Tried to push them off to the side a bit, not directly at the root zone to see if I could encourage a bit of travel from the roots. I think distribution drippers will be the end all be all in terms of needing to hand water at all if I can get those dialed in. For now I am still monitoring closely, but the plants show no signs of any issues so I'm not concerned. Lowered the light a bit as one of the girls seemed to be getting leggy and the rest weren't show any type of stress. Again, I'll be watching closely throughout the day today and tomorrow to see if they start turning down leaves or show any other issues. Still want to do the mulch layer, but I'd like to get some bokashi to mix-in and also set up my other drippers first, and just generally be more sure about the Blumat water delivery since the straw will obscure the visual. Excited to get into week 2/3 and start training these girls and having a bit more active involvement. For now, I am just watching and letting them do their thing. Hope everyone has a merry Dankmas, I'll try to continue regular updates through this week, but they may be delayed by a day or two. Talk to you all very soon! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________