The Garden 2024-2025 Part 1

Total Days: 71 Flower: 31 Vege growth is stopped or very slow at this point. Might eke out another inch or two. I'll raise the lights as far as they can go soon (only 3-4" for the 650w light on right), but with the higher operating RH%, I've yet to see any pistil burn. The light shit to accomodate the painters definitely stressed 2 plants. One was removed. The second i am retardedly going to keep. I stripped off lower weak buds that had the nanners. Pruned a few weak axilla, too. The nearby plant pistils are lily white, so it should be fine. The pistils will be changing color soon, so that will no longer be a good way to assess the risk going forward. Meh, I know it was caused by light stress, so any seeds not selfed I'll probably keep them. Overall, I'm relatively happy with development. Need to adjust some procedures in next cycle and maybe a few more tweaks in winter 2025-1. Second irrigation went well, but i did find a partially clogged emitter. Probably a plastic bit from hold-punching. With 8 emitters per pot, the overkill makes it irrelvant and the pot wasn't the slowest to finish. A few emitters has some roughly milled inlets. I'll inspect them all over the next couple weeks and replace some as needed. ----- Early update before end of week upday: So, I've been procrastinating replacing the irrigation setup. It's slowly gotten worse each year (3rd ongoing), but never had the dripper devolve into a dribble. I've been hand-watering 1 or 2 pots the last week or so. Replacing the mini sprinkler heads only fixed 1 of the problem-pots. Think the fittings are leaking on the one that did not improve. All the pvc is gone. All the 1/4" manifolds and tubing are gone. The per plant adjustable nonsense is the worst idea ever as all it does is cause pressure changes and endless tweaking of all the little sprinklers, because changing one impacts all the others, or a speck of dirt might cause a new imbalance that requires adjustments etc - Fucking nightmare of useless repetitive behaviour. Still have the 3/4" ID lead-in, heavy duty, 450psi graden hose with ball shut-off valve and pressure regulator. That is now connected to a 3/4" wye with two 1/2" irrigation tube adapters attached to each end. This forms a loop around the pots with a 1/2" tee per pot that leads to a gate shut-off valve and eight 2-gph pressure compensating emitters - 96 in total. Will do first test run on Sunday. The great thing is that this is all plug and play when I switch to injectors. That'll require some sort of pvc manifold and check valve at the utility tub, but otherwise just connect hose, and it's golden. That's the next step. I'll also re-incorporate the wifi-enabled solenoid valve at that point. Getting rid of the 55-gallon reservoir and pump would be nice. One less thing to maintain (rez) and less things that can break down (pump / powerhead). ------ Sunday Test Flawless first run. Time will tell if they are resistant to clogging, but optimistic at this point. 18psi operational pressure at the irrigation loop. Didn't even need the regulator. The mesh strainer at the pump intake doesn't have the typical, small air-bubble, so the last setup was letting a little air in. The last setup was fatally flawed. Pressure compensating emitters for the win. They didn't even squirt wildly as the air was expelled from empty tubing on first run. Took ~4mins or so. Some pots finished a bit sooner, but that's because they don't drink as much per 24 hours. I can live with that kind of waste. I'll get the timing down to reduce water usage even further. I don't need to wait for every pot to exhibit runoff as that is beyond 10% runoff needs. Might be able to get 4 fertigations before refilling reservoir instead of 3. We'll see. I don't like the minimum ~12-15 gallons sitting over night. It fouls the reservoir faster at low volumes. Anyway, super geeked. They better not clog easily, lol....