MaxGrow No.1 - Denial and Error

First things first! Big thanks to Barneys Farm! Amazing genetics, unkillable weeds! This strain yields frosty, beautiful looking buds, even when grown by an amateur. Additional numbers: Weirdo 50g A grade               80g B grade               100g trim Plant two 120g A grade                    30g B grade                    20g trim When I say "A" grade, it is relative to the plant it was from, not some market representation.  I would say only the "A" grade from weirdo is sell-able where as both A & B of plant 2, I would buy. Total dry weight could be considered closer to 200g if you factor in the above. All measurements were rough as I started consuming.(forgot to include the water cure aswell) The short: Went into my first grow ever with full head of steam! Sometimes that's a bad thing. What can I say, I am one who often likes to overcomplecate everything I do, growing cannabis is no exception.  a few rookie mistakes, a reliability issue  with my pump, and alot of denial and error later and here we are. The two plants were obviously two separate phenotypes from the early days, the plant I have named weirdo has always been weird.. She decided to self polinate due to stress, lighting, combination of everything🤷‍♂️ it's been a rough life. I was worried weirdo wouldnt yeild useable bud right up untill harvest day. I am glad I was wrong. As for plant two, I am happy with yeild and quality. She did produce seeds, but only a gram of good fem seeds. Weirdo has some micro seeds throughout, maybe a crackle or two per bowl, nothing horrible. I wont call the smoke amazing, but better than I am used too, so I'm happy. I wont report taste, quality or anything really as I didn't do this strain justice. The long: Let's start with setup; Lighting: My ts1000, great little light. Wall draw:154w @121vac Board draw: 118w When I bought it, for the price I payed, I really do think it was the star of the show. Decent efficiency and price even now adays. The PAR map they offer for this device is accurate, as far as I can tell. Highly recommended, buy goggles! Thanks Mars Hydro! Other than that, those octopus light things are fairly efficient aswell, the caveat being you need a metric ton of them to produce anything decent. They draw about 24w each, before the driver. They produce about 100k lux @3000k at contact with the plastic cover.  I may use them in my new room, one per plant for veg or something. Alot more LED enginerding to come😬 The nitty gritty: I started out measuring ph, tds, the whole 9. I dont do that anymore..   My point here being, using RO water and a mild salt solution will, as far as hydroponics goes, be just fine. Ph is obviously important, but testing can be eliminated if you mix the same recipe. Even further, understanding how your nutrients affect your Ph is enough to keep your plants happy. That being said, a ph meter, at least, is necessary to engineer that recipe. Ebb & Flow: Very good. Few things to consider, but good. When I go at this again, in the near future, I believe we can take full advantage of what this method has to offer. If you want a low maintenance system, intend to leave it for weeks at a time, then this may be for you. I went into it backwards. I wanted some sort of flood system that would take advantage of large surface area for root development and chose my medium poorly. Rockwool cube are an amazing product and work wonders when used properly. Using rockwool in conjunction with my surface area root mat approach lead to overwatering. I would use netpots and lay them flat on the tray in hindsight. I will revisit that one day, diversity for now. Carbon dioxide: Has it done anything to my yeild🤷‍♂️ Hard to say, a lot of variables involved. My understanding is, co2 can increase metabolic rates to a certain extent as long as equivalent light and temperature are provided. My belief in co2 comes from minimal research into the carboneferous period where ferns grew 100ft tall(30m), largely in part to the high co2 concentration in the atmosphere. The global  ambient co2 levels are well over 400ppm and I can easily keep my room at 200% these levels at the cost of about 200g of citric acid and baking soda monthly. I will continue with this "ghetto" approach, for now. Food: One thing I learned, most of us overfeed. Keeping in mind, testing has all been done with one strain, on 6 plants, the threshold between under and overfeed is a massive line. Your plants can have everything they need with half the salt concentration required to show signs of stress, maybe less. These are "weeds", after all. I will be doing "minimal feed" experiments to see how efficiently I can deliver the salt to the plants. So far, I'm seeing on par growth with 1/20 the concentration I started with. Another thing i did not consider going into this grow, the chemistry in a hydroponic reservoir is alot more complex than it seems. Many of the elements required by the plant have to be in a very volatile state to be readily available to the roots. Simply put, your reservoir is one giant mix of many chemical reactions that cause your food to deteriorate or be locked away from the plant. Less food, more water changes seems to be the way to go. Looking into efficient ways to drain to waste because of this. Vivosun: Yeah they deserve a sub title. I have purchased 8 things from vivosun, mostly rebranded Chinese crap but I am very impressed with literally everything I've bought. The 3x3 tent is high quality, no plastic corner pieces. Other things worthy of note are that they are my goto because of their availability though amazon and low low prices. Thanks Vivosun! I will probably add more detail as the days go on.