The Garden 2023-2024

Lights - not enough room for all of them, lol. 650w 1900umol/s PAR light not shown. I've got three of them, need to sell two of them. Substrate - was 70/30 coco, but going back to good ol sphagnum peat moss via Pro-mix HP or BX - don't care of it's "M" or "M+" or this or that; whatever is cheapest. That'll be a 50% sphagnum peat moss and 50% the perlite that comes with it plus additional vermiculite to reach 1:1 ratio. Had some poorly buffered 70/30 coco+perlite this year. Just need to invest 30 minutes on the back deck in September to mix up substrate for the winter. I've used it before and unwisely mixed it up indoors mid-winter one year - Never again. Room setup rundown, examples of bud, et al in pictures... Growing is done for the year except a straggling 4x4 that will produce some feminized seed. Will be back up and running in 6 months, give or take. Next year's diary will have more specific information of an ongoing grow -- Two consecutive grows and a breeding run, if I find worthy plants. At this point I've got a process that consistently repeats in nearly all ways from cleaning/prep to setup to packing and storing. Got a constantly refined "Grow Bible" document file to cover details that simply slip away over 6-12 months of time between need - like the power and distance from canopy for my a multitude of lights and relative to each general stage of life, or which outlets correspond to which 15A circuit as I spread power requirements around safely. Breeding your own seeds is "the way." I have an inhouse cross of buttermilk biscuits x garlic storm that just grows monster plants with a nice sweet, flowery taste with the potency and thick coating of trichomes of its parents. Great nugs all the way down. If i grew a whole room with it, I'd rationally expect 1.6-1.7grams/watt and 60g/sq ft. The flavors are fairly consistent despite some variety. This is by far a wonderful compromise. The parents were great plants but nothing as robust as the offspring have been. Inbreeding too much leads to shit-ass plants. My 2 cents. The promises of consistency from it are rarely met and all you get is slower growth and occasional herms,. One of those things where the rhetoric doesn't match reality -- Feel the need to scream, "The king is naked! He is not wearing any clothes. WTF?!?" Growing consistently healthy seed-to-harvest plants isn't hard and is easily repeatable for anyone that can follow simlple instruction before they go off playing mad scientist. Just don't follow bro-science and other urban myhology in lieu of research that actually has integrity and evidence to back up rational conclusions. This one simply recommendation can allow a person to side-step a plethora of easily avoidable mistakes and false perceptions. These plants don't need anything esoteric or anything that hasn't been done to any other similar flowering plant before. These behaviours are rooted in pure hubris and hedonistic aims. Genetics is king and the rest is 99% us not stepping on our own dicks or flaps. I do like to be fair to both genders, lol. People sure like to take credit for something we have little control over - Overall quality of the plant. It's easy to grow well. It takes a great plant to have a great outcome. Otherwise, all you have is a well-polished turd. If you got an efficient light, you should be hitting 1.5-1.7g/watt and that will correlate to over 50grams/sq ft. These numbers need proper plants and not weak ones. Plant at least 150% of intended crop size. Kill the weak. Or, use clones of known quantities. If you reach these numbers doing simple things, then try a bunch of magic and see that all that magic doesn't do much else, It's then easy to avoid the magic. Form a good baseline of results before jumping on the bro-science crazy train. I've oversimplified. There are things out there that provide benefits not related to production. Autoflower growers, whatever you calculate per watt for these things, take 2/3rds of that calculation, since your "lower wattage" is also spread over 150% longer hours of operation - which is really about the same exact wattage per day to accomplish same things. You don't save watts with autoflowers. It ain't going to be much better and more likely lower efficacy and productiion values for autoflowers. They are weaker and less predictable plants that you cannot clone even if you did find 1 awesome plant. Truth is, shit happens when you grow. If everything was healthy and problem-free within your control, can always extrapolate based on your best plant (don't measure from the taint! make it relative to the space it inhabited and do the math honestly) to see if anything can be imrpoved. These numbers are about all the plants being rock solid and a lot of that has to do with things you just can't predict from early vege growth. Productivity, as opposed to production, needs to consider time invested too. Growing 150% of plants needed for a proper SoG would be too ridiculous, but would improve my prodcutivity. I bet I could get both grows done in 140days and shave roughly 3 weeks of time with same yield/production. The cost savings of that time would be significantly eaten up by having to double the size of eary vege requirements for a similar amount of time, ~3 weeks. More labor, not much cost savings... May or may not try it. Gardens with CO2 supplementation will need to compare to bigger numbers. 125-133% larger is my bet. In perfect conditions with all rock-solid plants, might push 90-100g/sq ft. The costs to achieve this may or may not warrant the extra production, fwiw. Probably ends up costing more per gram, so if production is your limiting factor, it's a good idea. If you got plenty of time and space to spare, just grow more with ambient co2 and it'll cost less per gram... and you won't accidentally suffocate, lol.