RQS Green Gelato Grow 3

15/03: One week into flower and the plants are going great. They look like they've doubled in volume. The feed has been the most exciting part. I'm going to make my own custom PK booster to the exact ratios I want it at. Foliar feeding made a difference...hard to compare or know how much of an affect but super tight internodal lengths and lateral growth everywhere. At the moment I don't know if any growers on here are able to get their plants to each as much calcium as mine do but it is my primary focus on the feed while maintaining adequate levels of everything else. 16/03: I wanted to avoid a res change but I want to get ahead of the clogged pipes. Will be draining the system and installing bucket crates over the outlet. Hopefully it'll be enough so I won't have to worry about it for the rest of the grow. If I waited another week my pipes would have been clogged. Now that that's sorted I can go all out with the scrogging. Haven't changed the res yet. I added a lot of seaweed extract to give the roots another boost. May sound odd but instead of giving the plants a feed, I gave them 15 litres of tap water that was loaded with Ca and Aminos. I run RO the whole grow but whenever I do a res change, I just use regular dechlorinated tap water to flush it. 17/03: Fig 1 - This is my first attempt at making a PK + Mg booster. It was just to see if I could get the salts to balance. Started off with RO and added yucca, then paper filtered the water. Just wanted the saponins in the yucca. I just guessed it but I went P > K > Mg. I took concurrent readings as I went along and it kept adding up. At this point the solution was pretty clear apart from a yellow tinge, similar to calcium. So I added the fulvic to chelate. A tsp of each for a total ppm of 3692. I haven't sat down to work out the math yet as I was expecting to see the minerals interact at some stage of the mixing process but it looks like the yucca really worked. Fig 2 - How I do a res change. I run the outlet from the water chiller into a hose that runs off into the bathroom and while that's draining I'll be flushing at the same time with dechlorinated tap water. Then I fill 30l of RO water and drain it as much as possible. I then pump premixed solution straight back in and the change is done. Fig 3 - Results from my attempt at making a bloom booster. On the left is 1ml/100ml of Liquid Kool Bloom. On the right is my own attempt. Pretty close. About to mix up the batch for the res change. 12 hours earlier I thought I overfed the plants. I loaded even more calcium and upped the PK +Mg. The ppm still kept dropping from a starting point of 700 down to 567. From today I'll be making a permanent increase in certain ratios based off of last week. Silica, Micro and fulvic will remain the same. I'll be going a 4 - 10 - 10 ratio for another 10 days. After that I'll drop the N, P and up the K to 3-7.5-15. 18/03: Took a day off, checked the ppm and pH but that was it. 19/03: Added the next scrog. It's probably overkill and maybe even detrimental but I don't want as much vertical growth as last time. I might just do what I did on the first scrog. Use the small square scrog to keep them spread and set for a couple of days then swap it over with a big square scrog. 20/03: Plants are drinking more again. When I first flipped to flower, they were drinking 15 litres plus every two days. By the end of the week I was adding 15 litres a day. It's past the half way point of week two and the plants are now up to 25 litres a day. First signs of flower began today. Fig 4 - Rejigged the ventilation. Hung the CO2 bags. On opposite ends, short ducting is run from the port holes to the fan below. This way, fresh air is being drawn in semi actively while not disrupting the CO2 that sinks below. To ensure this I have run extraction ducting from the centre of the tent, actively through two 450cm2/min fans. Overall, there is negative pressure. 21/03: Last day of week 2. I currently am tossing up whether to start threading the branches through the small square scrog or if I should repeat what I did the first time and replace it with the larger squares. The CO2 bags I have are pretty much new so they're not producing much. Which I why I found it strange that I'd see a CO2 spike when the lights turned on. It ended up being the heat and humidity. The combination of both put my plants into respiration. Which is a really bad thing considering it should be photosynthesising. I was probably losing an hour a day. I've changed it so climate control kicks in an hour earlier to balance out the temp increase when lights go on