Funny Monk

@Cultus,it's all good, the diary sharing going on right now is epic!

@Cariboo_OG, Ha! i musta been particularly baked when i posted that reply on @nomnom 's post. Sorry about that!

@Cariboo_OG, thanks bud! i will check yours out too👍

@NomNom, cool info thanks. I am a big fan of DIY stuff. I work alot with my hands, building custom rc's and shit. I recently did a bunch of custom wiring of Phillips hue smart strip lights on some display racks and in my kitchen with motions sensors. So i am no stranger to a soldering iron. If i can ever find the space for another tent i am sure i will build my own!

@Cultus, Right now that light is 2 feet wide by 4 feet long, running 8 strips at 3000k and 8 strips at 3500k, 16 strips total. Each strip is 2 feet wide and the total power output of the driver is adjustable upto a maximum of 240w. You can see in the image there are 8 "pairs" of heat sinks, each pair has a 3000k and a 3500k side by side. You can also see a switch on the bar right above it, this is so I can turn each individual strip on or off, useful for smaller plants that I don't want to light the entire tent for, or if I just want to run the 3500k during veg. This light is about to get upgraded though, I'm adding 4 more strips to it (2 @ 3000k and 2 @ 3500k) to bring it up to 20 strips total and then it will be edge to edge light as well. I will also be adding a 2nd driver at that time to increase the output to a maximum of 480w. I already have a light in this configuration in my 4x4 tent, I'm just expanding this one to match that one. I also have two lights that are in a 2 foot x 2 foot configuration that run 240w each and they run 10 strips total half 3000k and 3500k. The 2 foot x 2 foot ones are getting some modifications to them right now to move the AC to DC converters out of the tent/room for summer, currently all the AC-DC drivers are mounted to the lights. Once that is done they will be placed in this tent over the laughing buddha. This current 240w 2 foot by 4 foot light will come out and get its upgrade/modifications and move into the 4x4 tent over top of the Atomic Bomb, Northern Lights, and Painkiller I have growing in there right now. It's a chain of upgrades to the lighting/grow setup over the next month or so.

@NomNom, oh, very interesting, now i need to learn more. how many strips are in there?

@JUNGLE_B4RNS,yup one of those crazy hosers

@NomNom,I see , 4 plants limit, so yes I agree, you need to grow some serious roots if you wanna get the fruits that you need ! You’re in Canada ?

@JUNGLE_B4RNS, Thanks for the compliments and kind words. It's much appreciated and great to hear from someone with your experience. I agree with you that growing 4-6 plants in this area and only vegging them for 6-7 weeks would yield a similar amount of bud, and would do it 5-6 weeks sooner. Why I grow big plants like this is because where I grow it's legal for anyone to grow with limitations. One of those is a 4 plant limit, and I try to stay inside that 4 plant limit. I've worked hard over the years to buy my own house and I don't want to loose it to the piggies because I got busted for growing a few to many plants. What I'm doing is growing 4 large plants at the same time, right now I have this girl (Laughing Buddha) in a 2'x4' then and I also have a second tent (4'x4') that I'm growing 3 other plants (Atomic Bomb, Painkiller, Northern Lights). I'm a little behind in the diaries. For me grow area is virtually unlimited with only 4 plants to accommodate, really what I need to look at is the amount of bud harvested in grams/week. So with my first diary I cloned a plant twice, so that I had 1 plant that had virtually 3 start dates that were the same pheno. What I realized is that vegging for 10-12 weeks drastically increases the amount you can yield from the plant but only adds 4-6 weeks to the overall grow time. Seedling time (first 6 weeks), flower time, and drying time (1 week) all stay static, so on something like this Laughing Buddha that has a 10 week flower time running something in seedling for 6 week, then 10 weeks flower, then 1 week drying you are looking at 17 weeks total. Running this out to 12 weeks veg increases it from 17 weeks to 23 weeks total, adding 35% more time to the grow. But what I've found is that I got about double the amount of bud in the end. 35% more time for 100% more bud is math I can understand. Simple as that, just trying to get as much grams/week as I can. Cheers!

@Cultus,Thanks, but the gnarled mess always seems to happen when they go into their flower stretch. I'm not there yet so I still have time to end up in a gnarled mess too. My Blueberry was a massive gnarled mess, but she did produce a huge crop of excellent bud so I forgave her.

@NomNom, Woah, 20 ppm tap water! Haha we are kinda in the same boat. I dabbled with bare nutrients too, some calcium nitrate and magnesium sulfate etc. In the end I felt like nothing really matters much; I dont really have deficiency or apparent toxicity issues and am also happy with the way things go. Totally agree about the environment, much more important... sounds like you are in an area that gets hot summers. I'm blessed that the hottest days here are usually 'only' 90-95 F, and not common. Using many led strips to spread the current has helped me keep normal leaf temperatures. Good luck with the next grow my friend 👍

@BillMonroe, Thank for the info, I've read a lot about PH and PPM, I know about the 1 EC = 500 ppm or 700 ppm issue, that's why I always quote ppm's rather than EC. I haven't calibrated my ppm meter, that is something I should probably do, but I do have 3 ppm meters, from 2 different manufactures, and they all agree within ~20 ppm's. The PH I've read that I should be 5.0 to 6.0 and 5.5 to 6.5 and 6.0 to 7.0, I tried running down in the high 5's before and I had more issues. I tend to feed around the ~6.2 PH and that give usually give me a nice run off in the mid 6's. However my Painkiller XL (Naughty Nurse diary) I had to feed up in the 6.8 range because the run off was always in the low 6's, not sure why that plant went that way but it did. She still did very well and so in my mind it validates the whole 6.0-7.0 ph range that I trying to stay within. I had a lot of issues in my first grow and into my second grow with odd deficiency issues showing up on the leaves. I read a lot about PH, PPM, and different things to try. I ordered bare nutrient elements so I could add extra bit of just certain things. I played with PH and knew I was missing something but couldn't figure out what for a long time. During my 2nd grow I actually stumbled upon a article from someone who was using reverse osmosis water, they were having these weird issues like I was having. It turned out that the water was too clean and he lacked the micro nutrients that are usually in the water. My water here is very nice, clean, and low ppm, it comes out of the tap at 10-20 ppm. I started adding micro nutrients to my grow and immediately the plants did much better, were way happier, and the weird deficiency signs I was seeing on the leaves disappeared and have never returned. I'm not saying I'm growing the best or "correct" way, but I seem to have found a nice balance that the plants like and they give me good yields. My mind is open to change and I'm just starting a grow with BioBuzz nutrients, but it's a bit hard to make changes when I'm getting great results and not showing deficiencies or problems. To be honest I'm more looking at environmental solution now. I have an A/C and 2 dehumidifiers, in the summer humid heat during flowering when I need the humidity down the dehumidifiers push the heat up as the A/C is trying to pull the temp back down. It's a vicious circle that I haven't got balanced yet and is expensive to run. In the winter when the cooler temps it's easy to keep the room in check temp and humidity wise. I feel there is more for me to gain with optimizing my room air flow/humidity/temp/etc right now. I'm starting to look at CO2 options, they apparently can help extend out the heat range of the plants better. But that is a lot of investment in more equipment, and to be honest I'm now drowning in weed for the first time in my life and I'm not sure I want to keep growing at the pace.

@NomNom, Cool, thanks for the info! I'm growing in a similar medium From what I've gathered over the months, when it comes to runoff, peat seems to be the most mysterious medium. Check out this interesting article about PH and peat from promix. https://www.pthorticulture.com/en/training-center/myth-series-water-ph-relates-to-medium-ph/ Personally I try to keep the runoff near the level of the input water. I don't really know how it works, I guess some elements get stuck in the soil due to cation exchange and other things. When my runoff is 1.2 EC and I add some 2EC water later, the runoff doesn't immediately change. Oh well, as long as it works :) BTW is your PPM meter calibrated? I have a cheap PPM pen and used some EC1.413 calibration solution to test it. You may know that these PPM pens actually measure EC and apply a conversion rate to give a PPM value. There are 2 standard ratios, 1EC = 500ppm (NaCl) or 1EC = 700ppm (KCl). Well, it turned out that my meter was closer to 1EC = 360ppm. So for over half a year I was feeding about 38% more than I had intended to. 😅 (since the TDS 500 scale is based on NaCl, you could make your own test solution with distilled water and salt)

@NomNom, thanks man wishing you all the best friend for harvest day!!!

@G4NJAG4NG,Awesome, never tried her just picked the strain based off the reviews. I'm a big sativa fan myself. I'll be looking at your grow for information on how much to leave to accommodate the flower stretch. Good luck!

@NomNom, very nice dude, she will love having that space all to herself! And no this is the first time I've grown it, was inspired after trying laughing Buddha on a trip to Amsterdam, it's one of the best highs I've ever had, each to there own of course but I'm a true sativa fan and this strain was just pure bliss 😄 taste and aroma is beautiful, I had the best shower in the world after smoking LB hahaha

@NomNom, Im not sure but you're looking at a good amount you did some real good work training her and that will pay off huge for you :) Looking forward to seeing the end results ! Thanks for taking the time to respond ! -Happy Growing!

@The_Projexx, Yup 1 plant, 1 tent, how much will she produce?

@NomNom, look nice and green week 3 thats great. Hopefully my grow helps you out, as thats the whole point! if you would like anything specific i'm not providing or want in greater detail feel free to hit me up. Havent had any problems with the RO water yet so hopefully none transpire . look forward to seeing the grow progress my friend. until next time 👋

@JohnnyBlaz3,Hi, thanks for the kind words.I've been following your grow since you started it because I was planning to run this strain. You're blazing the trail for me to follow. I'm very interested in seeing how much stretch you get going into flower so I can have an idea on what to plan for. I'm behind on this diary, I'll be updating it several times over the next couple weeks. I'm planning to switch to flower sometime around the start of April. By the way I see you are running R/O, if you start getting deficiency signs you might need to add in some Micro nutes to your feed or water. The R/O takes all the micro out and depending on the nutes you run it might not have enough of them. Just a heads up, speaking from experience here.

@SativaKid, Thanks

@Burnweed, Thanks, and I'm glad you found it helpful. I try to be honest and fair in my diaries because that's the information I'd like to get. We have found no seeds so far in the buds, and we are about 1/2 way through the harvest. So the banana's were most likely immature and couldn't pollenate anything.

@Cultus, I’m a bit behind on the diary she is already harvested and dried so I know the answer. But I’ll tell you what my honest guess was pre-harvest. I expected 13+ oz and thought that it would come in at 16oz. My guess was based off of the light wattage, figures it’d come in somewhere between 0.9 and 1.1 grams per watt.

@GrowingisFunkO, Thanks, hopefully it pays off in yield and quality, figures crossed.

@Hydro_sweetness, Thanks, not sure it's a skill, more like no life and an obsession with the plants. Cheers!

@Dehghan, Thanks, I'm a bit behind on the diary, spring is here and there is so much to do in the garden and around the house I don't have much time to update right now. She falls next week Thursday, I hopefully will get a chance soon to put up a bunch of updates back to back.