First Grow - LSD DWC

This is my first grow. I actually smoke very little, but I'm interested in the science behind growing, so for me, this is like a chemistry set for big kids. I wanted to jump right in to slightly more advanced growing techniques than most first time growers. I know there will be a lot of errors along the way to correct and improve upon, but that's how science works and that's what attracts me to growing. I'm disappointed that I don't have a set up that is appropriate for supplemental CO2, but maybe I'll build something else if I stick with the hobby. I've probably smoked less than an ounce in my life, so I'll hopefully have the problem of figuring out what to do with my extra product at the end of all this. I actually started about three weeks ago and promptly murdered 3 of 4 plants. One stunted girl survived and I started two more seeds which are doing much better, so I actually have one plant at 3 weeks and two at one week. I started the first plant off in rock wool and the switched to Rapid Rooter for the other two. I sprouted the seeds by soaking them in water for one day and then moving to the paper towel method. All the seeds started roots within 24 hours of being in the paper towel. They then went into a humidity dome and from there were moved to their 5 gal DWC buckets when the second set of true leaves started to come in. I'm using distilled water. I started off with pure water and then slowly the PPM up to 100 over several days. The older plant is at 300 PPM. I'll work on lighting that doesn't over expose my photos so much and shows the color better next time. The light is a Mieemclux 1500 LED. It's a cheap burple light from Amazon. I have a relatively cheap Hydrofarm PAR meter and while the light does provide good results directly under it, it has almost no spread at all. The PAR drops way off just outside of the space directly under the light. I originally ordered two of the Mieemclux lights, but after testing its results, I sent one back and ordered two Mars TSL 2000 Led lights. Hopefully they'll get here before the plants outgrow the area directly under the current light. I've got the plants at about 500 PAR right now. You'll notice that the older plant has some brown spots on one of the leaves. Those have been there since I almost murdered it along with its sisters on my first try. All the other leaves came in fine and I haven't seen any other obvious issues. We'll see how this experiment goes. I'll work on having better lighting to show true colors next time.

This update for the last week is a few days late. It was a week of many minor errors, but I don't think it's anything from which the girls can't recover. I saw some brown spots in the middle of the lower leaves and felt this was likely calcium deficiency from using distilled water. I added General Hydroponics CaliMagic and also Bio-Cozyme in the amounts specified on the bottles. This sent my PPM through the roof and I wound up with what I feel pretty confident is nutrient burn. (see pics) I've swapped out all my water now and went city water that I ran through a KDF hose carbon water filter. I then went back to just the General Hydroponics three part nutrient system. After reading that manufacturers tend to push the maximum limit with their recommended amounts, I diluted this amount too. My PPH out of the faucet, after the hose filter was about 300 and is about 850 now. I'm hoping this will correct the nutrient burn. My Mars TSL 2000 lights finally shipped, so hopefully they will be here soon and I'll swap them out for the Amazon burple light I have now. I also discovered that the Home Depot buckets I was using let a lot of light through. First, I tried to remedy this by painting them with some Plasti Dip. This still let an awful lot of light through, so I wrapped the buckets in black Gorilla tape and that solved the problem. I also think I planted my seedlings too low in the net pots. I guess it's too late to fix that without damaging the roots, but I'll know for next time. I'm brand new at this, so constructive input is always welcome.

This was a good week. The girls made progress with correcting my nutrient burn error. The nutrient burn isn't any worse. As a newbie, it's my understanding that it won't heal and go away. However, all new growth looks good to me. My Mars TSL2000 lights came in and I'm very impressed thus far. They put out significantly higher PAR than the old light and cover a much, much wider area with it. I bought two to cover my 4'x4' tent, but since I only have three plants in there now, the one light easily covers it. It doesn't get very hot either. I couldn't be happier with them thus far. In the next couple days, I think I'll try topping the plants. I may top all three or maybe just the one that didn't show any signs of nutrient burn to be on the safer side, not sure yet. I'm also considering trying to clone these tops that I trim off. I know it's not ideal, but I've read of it being done successfully. After all, what do I have to lose other than a small dab of Clonex? If that experiment actually works, my next decision will be should I go ahead and veg them with these other plants that are 3 weeks further along since I don't have a good space for more full size plants? Since these are photoperiod and I have plenty of room I don't see that it will hurt to have some extra plants in there even if I flower them early and don't get much out of them, but that's a decision for well down the road if it comes to that. I'm pretty happy with how my first grow is going. I'm learning and that's the most important part after all.

This was a great week. I'm not sure if it's mostly the new light or the girls are just hitting a spurt, but they're growing like weeds (unimaginative pun intended). Even after topping, they put on 3.5 inches this week. They're also quite thirsty these days. The roots have made a lot of progress this week too. As mentioned, I topped them early in the week. It didn't seem to slow them down. Just as an experiment, I tried to clone the three tops I took off. I don't see roots yet, but other than just being a tad wilted as expected, the seem to be doing OK. I didn't put a lot of effort into the cloning. It seemed a waste to throw away the tops, so I thought I might as well throw some Conex on them and put them in the humidity chamber to see if it worked. I wonder if I should switch to flowering soon. I'm also thinking that maybe I should be trimming back some of those big fan leaves down low. I'll be researching those topics this week and any input will be apreciated. I'm pretty sure that all the leaves that have yellowing and brown tips are from earlier in the grow when I gave them nutrient burn. On that note, I discovered one more dumb error I made. I wasn't sure why my PPM readings were through the roof earlier. I noticed that I had my PPM meter on the wrong setting. LOL The rest of my body has done well with aging, but it has been hell on my reading vision. I'm also making my first attempt at growing psilocybin mushrooms. I'm using the PFTEK technique and just moved them to the fruiting chamber a week ago. today I noticed my first pinheads popping up. I included a couple photos even though it's a bit off topic. I've never even tried shrooms. My first trip will be on ones that I grew.

It was another productive week of learning. My gals are still growing like crazy. They are drinking about a gallon a day from the DWC. I pruned the plants and added my screen for ScrOG. My dumb mistake of the week was that I made a 4'x4' frame for the screen since it was advertised as a 4'x4' grow tent. However, after I was already committed on the size of my screen frame, I remembered I hadn't confirmed the size of the tent and sure enough, it came out to 47"x 47". It's just as well as I had made the first frame from 2x2 lumber and when I made the replacement frame I used 3/4" PVC pipe, which was much easier to work with, lighter, and made stronger connections. I used 2"x 4" welded wire fencing for the screen. I just wrapped loose sections of wire that I trimmed off to wrap around the frame. If I did it again, I'd have trimmed it without loose wires hanging off and just attached it with a bunch of zip ties. Using wire left lots of sharp little wires poking out everywhere and was much more tedious than using zip ties would have been. I made all the wire edges point up so they won't scratch me when I'm under the screen tending to the plants, but it still isn't ideal. Pruning was intimidating. It's a little nerve racking to cut so much off, but they really needed it and have reacted to it well. I previously had portable A/C unit in the tent with them, but moved it out as they need the extra room now. I'm regretting putting the tent so close to the wall. It's quite hard to get to the far corner to tend to that plant. If I'd left enough room to get between the tent and the wall, I could have unzipped the access panel on that side and it would be much easier. With three plants, lights, fans, filter and 15 gal of water, it probably won't be practical to just slide the whole tend sideways without pulling it all down, but I'll enlist the help of the wife to do it steadily and at least give it a try later. (update: it actually moved rather easily pulling it on my own across the carpet, kinda like pulling a tablecloth out from under a set table.) I'm switching the light schedule to 12/12 at the start of this next week for flowering. I'm wondering if there is any usable trichomes on the leaves I pruned off or if that it's only worthwhile sifting it at harvest. I put the leaves in the freezer and will give it a try if it looks like all those leaves will be of some use. Like last week, I included a pic of some of the mushrooms from my side project. I took about 35 grams (10x normal dosage because they are fresh, not dried and 90% water) of the first flush of my home grown Golden Teachers. It took a couple hours to really kick in, but I enjoyed my first trip ever on shrooms.

This was the first week of bloom and things are still going well. The tops have just blasted through the screen, so I adapted a little LST to the ScrOG and tied down some of the taller parts to even out the canopy. See before and after photos. It has gotten so hard to water the plants, I cut off a section of 1 1/4 inch PVC pipe and I stick it at the base of the plants and then water it through the other end above the canopy. This is working well. Am I the only one who does that. Though still a challenge, it's much easier to get a peek at the water level and check PPM and PH than it is to get the 1 gal of water per plant to them that they drink every day. I'm glad I went with 5 gal buckets rather than the 3.5 gal bucket kits I almost bought starting out. Between the huge mass of nice white roots they have and the gallon of water they drink a day, they'd probably almost drink themselves dry if I only watered them once a day. For my next grow, I'm definitely switching to huge plastic totes for the DWC. It will be easier to fill and check a couple of those at the front of the tent than it is to tend the three individual buckets. I never expected three plants to fill a 4x4 tent so thoroughly and quickly, but I'm sure not complaining. There seem to be potential bud sites everywhere. My goof up for this week is I let them get a little light bleaching. They are growing so quickly that they got away from me and got too close to those awesome Mars TSL2000 lights I switched to. The tallest bud sites had some yellowing when I got up and checked on them a couple days ago. I think I caught it quickly and it's early in the bloom, so I'm optimistic that I haven't done too much harm. Between raising the lights, doing some tying down to even out the canopy, I've got my PPF down to about 850 at the highest points and there still a good spread so that it only goes down to about 400 to 550 at the outer edges of the canopy. The lights are easily adjustable, so I can turn them down too if I need to.

It was a smooth and productive week. I did some more bending of the plants to get the high spots down and even out the canopy as well as provide optimal position for the bud sites. Even so, they still measure 7" higher than last week. Almost every square inch of the screen is covered except for a few inches in two corners. They are still drinking about a gallon a day. I did some more defoliation of bottom leaves that aren't getting much light. Since I don't have many updates for my narrative, I put some more effort into my photos. Even though I know nothing about photography, I tried to give them a little artistic flair.

The biggest problem I seem to have with the grow right now is I'm concerned that if the plants continue to grow at this rate, the might take over the world, start harvesting people, drying us out and smoking us. At the end of this week I did some defoliation. See the before and after pics. I had some trepidation with this, wanting to do enough to be effective and increase my yield, but not going too far and harming the plants. Under the screen was already cleared out. I tried to trim the fan leaves that were blocking buds. The more I cleared, the more buds I found and the more leaves that needed to be cleared to get light to all the buds. I'm looking for input as to if I need to defoliate more. Buds are starting to form, so that's exciting.

Sit back. Grab a box of tissues. Hug your dog and read this tragic tale of this last week. Two of my three plants were having a hard time. One has recovered and one is on the verge of being good for nothing but compost. 😥 I defoliated at the end of last week. Two of the plants started showing signs of stress soon after that, which didn't surprise me after defoliation. The nutrient levels in their 5 gal DWC buckets started climbing out of control. There were also some brown spots on the leaves which I thought was calcium deficiency. I guessed it was nutrient lock and even though I add Cal Mag to my water, it made sense to me that it could also get calcium deficiency if it wasn't taking up the nutrients. I flushed the pots of all the plants and nothing changed after a couple days. I began checking around and noticed that there were problems with the air lines to the two affected plants. One hose had a kink. The other had a leak. and the pump had somehow been bumped down from the normal max output. There were still bubbles coming to the surface, but I had not noticed before that they weren't as strong as they used to be. I fixed these issues and even added a second air rock to each of the containers. One of the two sick plans recovered after this, but the last one was getting worse, wilting and looking almost dead. I cleaned up all the dead leaves and kept looking for issues. I found no signs of pests. However I noticed that even though the sick plant was in a warm spot in the far back corner. Even though there was a small clip on fan right by it at the top of the canopy, I think it may have just been recirculating hot air. I lowered the A/C in the room and moved the clip on fan to point up, pulling fresh cool air from below the canopy and left it to the large fan in the opposite corner to circulate all the air above the canopy in the tent. This dropped the air temperature from about 83 F at the screen there (possibly higher a few inches higher in the canopy) to about 76 F. Water temperature has stayed steady at 71 F. I also added a small dehumidifier, which dropped the humidity from around 80% to about 63%. It occurred to me that this could be Root Rot, but they roots looked and felt fine to me. I have a terrible sense of smell, so I probably wouldn't notice if the small was off. I added some H2O2 for a day and a half and I'm now flushing it again and adding Hydroguard. So far, her condition just keeps getting worse. My best guess is that it was a combination of these many small factors building up along with the stress of defoliation until it was pushed over the edge. I'm pretty much at a loss for where to go from here. It may be too little too late. I included a pic of the roots as best as I could show while flushing the bucket. The other big disaster I had this week was that I have some clones I took of these plants that I made just as an experiment. I have them in a closet in a half-ass grow. I decided that it would be easiest if I switched from 5 gal buckets to big plastic storage bins. I put them all in a new rugged looking 40 gal bin that I bought. I only got it filled about half way when it ruptured, spilling water everywhere...everywhere. I cleaned up that mess and have the plants set up in an alternate solution and they seem to be thriving. The bright spot is that the two healthy plants seem to be taking over the space the dying plant is vacating, so maybe it won't be too big of a hit on my total harvest.