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This is my second grow in a complete RDWC setup: Green Gelato.
The Vegging tent is a 4 x 4 with two 52 litre tubs that can veg 5 plants each, it is water cooled and uses a 1200l/m pump to circulate the system. Aeration is via a 45 watt pump using Corundum air stones. Tower fan to provide circulation. The lighting is from YXO, it uses the Samsung diodes for a full 4k spectrum and draws 180 watt from the wall.
Flower tent is a 4 x 8 with 8 15 litre buckets. It is cooled and aerated in the same manner as the vegging tent. Added Co2 using Exhale and Aussie mushroom bags. Lighting is 4 YXO lights that are 3k with 660nm red drawing 180 each; there are also two fixtures from Figolite that are the same specs but each board draws 240 watt. I vent cooled air directly into the tent when the lights are on and switch it to fan only when lights are off. The water cooling equipment in the room keeps the tent at 28 degrees when lights are off and with the air con during lights on the variation is only 1 degree more when lights are on.
My ultimate goal is to go for the biggest yield that is possible.
End of week 4, beginning of week 5. This will be my second complete grow in a RDWC system. I have just over 18 months experience in growing. For the first year I had a few plants that I grew whilst doing my homework. I'm still applying my learning's but I think the pictures are enough for me to claim I've done pretty well completely on my own. Still undecided in defoliating but that top shot I have is a pretty damning photo. My idea is to let the plant choose by removing sicker leaves in there that I can pull off easily or feel damp and soft from humidity. In saying that...it's been healthy all through atm. I think the lights below really help in keeping the humidity down a little and also negating the shade response from how thick it is. Anyway, still experimenting, lots to learn.
Starting week six of flower. Conducting a defoliation experiment. It has good controls being a rdwc single strain grow in a 4 x 8. So defoliated half the tent and leaving the other half untouched.
This is my second full grow. My first harvest yielded 3.5 pounds from a 3 week veg (clones) 2 months flower grow. This grow is on track to cracking five pounds. What kind of yeilds is average for a 4x8 tent in 11 weeks start to finish?
Beginning of week 7 in flower, only two more weeks left if they ripen like they did last time. Plants are beginning to smell, develop triches and fattening up. They're not going to get any taller but compared to my first grow they're double in size. It's getting really intense. I'm in there every day checking humidity (on the no defol side) and I'm starting to struggle keeping up with the feed. During lights off I've found the plants eat the most food. I topped up the res, added 25% more PK. I try to keep the plants at 700 ppm and in the space of four hours it dropped to 600 ppm (towards the end of lights off). I stopped directly loading with Calcium Nitrate and instead used a regular calmag. I'm about to go overboard with Calcium Nitrate again and bump the ppm up to 1k. Will see how far the ppm drops the next day.
17/02/20 Update: The plants are beginning to smell a lot more, it has that kind of fermenting pungent smell from a red paw paw but applied to a mango. Very sweet, it literally smells like I'm growing some kind of tropical fruit. Still struggling with the feed, I added close to 40g of calcium nitrate and the plants still dropped the ppm lower than when I boosted it. I find it really frustrating that Dual Fuel only sell as a pair. Part 2 is amazing for late flower. Potassium sulphate and Magnesium sulphate, it's the perfect PK boost and I don't know anyone other nutrient like it. The other PK boosters always have too much P.
18/02/20 Update: Still battling my plants and the efforts to keep up with them is still frustrating me. Ran out of potassium Sulphate and bought Bio Diesel Rhino K 0-0-15 as a substitute, talk about expensive but I was desperate.
19/02/20 Update: Uploaded how I pump calcium into my plants this late into flower. They eat more than what I showed daily. That's 100+ ppm of Ca everyday! I don't know how much pectin this plant has now but the Brix would have to be through the roof compared to my first grow.
20/02/20 Update: finally got the feed right for a twelve hour period. I'm using two times the amount of K any bloom booster recommends and I'm probably using ten times the amount of calcium easily. I'm also going to feed as minimal N from now on, I'd cut it out completely if I could but I rely on Micros for the macro nutrients. Spent $65 on that bottle of potash and I used a third of a bottle for one nutrient change, think I'll stick to using powered water soluble potassium sulfate. My main concern is that I won't be providing enough iron with the little Micro I'm giving it. Going to throw a couple of rustry nails into the res. I'm about to do a top up...dropping the Micro super low, putting minimal part 2 in. Along with all the fulvics, humics, kelp and other acids my ppm only sits at 244. Which gives me plenty of room to load up on calcium. Top up the mag cause what was in the part 2 wasn't enough then load K.
21/02/20 Update: The plants finally stalled and took a breather yesterday. Didn't upload any photos cause it looked the same as the day before. By the end of the evening it looked like the explosive growth started back up again and the photos from today will show it. The ppm was creeping up not down this time...finally over feeding them. Dropped the extra loading of calcium and potassium to regular bloom phase levels and bumped the chelators up instead.
Update 22/02/20: plants aren't eating what they were. Ppm is remaining stable at 800. I won't dilute the res just yet. Still holding off to see if it goes up again. If it goes down I'll refeed the same formula as last time that has reduced calcium and potassium.
I don't believe I'll need to do any daily updates for the rest of the grow. Everything is dialled in and I'm ready to use what I've learnt for the next grow. I will be adding to this week in regards to writing up a summary of everything I've learnt so far and how I expect to improve upon the next.
Final week, things got really easy for a few days. The plants are eating less and less each time I check the ppm at the end of the day. It will be RO water only when topping up the res for the rest of the grow. Made an effort to lower humidity as much as possible seeing as I can't do cold stress. Triches are pretty much all cloudy and just waiting on some amber to show.
Only seven plants made it in the end as a revegged plant was out competed and basically it might give an ounce.
1.235
2.440
1.920
1.385
.940
1.075
Combined wet weight: 8.99 kg or 19.8 pounds
Was disappointed by the end result. Not even close to their maximum. Will come back and clean up this diary a bit but already thinking about how to apply what I've learnt from this grow already
@Coughy, My non defol side had only 3 plants, as one was a cutting that I tried to reveg in time but didn't make it. It still yielded as much as the defoliated side. I defoliated in week 5 flower so my experiment wasn't really a valid one as defol should be done in late veg early flower to give the plants time to recover. Not defoliating your plants looks scary af tbh. I was running a 20L per day dehumidifier to keep the humidity down. However, I also think loaded on calcium helped a lot too. I also ran some lights underneath which may have helped. I don't plan on taking a single leaf off this time unless it's about to fall off itself.
@Coughy, I found the best way is to figure out what your plants maximum range is. Mine were around 700 pmm but I reckon I could have gotten more Ca into them. This is kind of the feed process I go by, it is a daily maintenance task, most of the numbers I use are just an example:
Step 1. Mix the base solution close to the plants max range, as an example I will say 700 ppm. This will vary according to the plant cycle. Check the ppm after all nutrients have been added and has mixed well in the system. 720, a little bit too much but will see how the plants respond the next day.
Step 2. Check the ppm after 24hrs. In this case it went higher at 750 ppm and they drank 30 litres of water. To dial in the feed I would Top back up with RO water until the ppm drops back down to 690, 20 litres. I will then top the rest of the rest of the res up with a new base solution that is closer to 690 ppm, 10 litres. This base solution is exactly the same as the first in regards to ratios.
This is why it becomes a daily task, because your base solution will always change. However, by doing this, it is a lot easier to pinpoint what the plant wants. I'm still experimenting with the ratios and learning how much the plant eats of what so I can't give you exact numbers. Once, I've added to many nutrient adjustments I'll usually start fresh. However, if you do it daily, it is possible to get your feed spot on. If you look at week 7 of my grow, I recorded the one day I had a ppm swing of 3. Over the course of my eight week flower grow, I started from scratch 5 times. I only do a really short veg so most of my knowledge is on that phase of the grow. If you look at my other diary, I basically neglected it. I started pushing them a few days ago, added nutes to the base solution and the ppm was around 720, haven't check it since nor the ppm and pH...better do that now lol.
Nice set up that bro nice bit off bud coming your way soon.... What lights u using there. Not seen them b4 what they saying?? My next one I'll be upgrading everything so kinda checking ever led light out there. Spider farms it is up to now they look smart asf
@Blueboy2019, They're from aliexpress. The thinner ones were what I started with as they were cheaper in total price but the other ones are pretty much HLG knock offs but half the price.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000718303152.html?spm=2114.12010612.8148356.21.5b272690hswFLU
If you have the money and want to go something that's good value but also and awesome light, this one is making waves right now...brand new.
www.youtube.com/watch
Mospeada
