Insane_in_the_brain

I lied. Make it 2000.

The following is an email to a grow partner of the past. Don't feel insulted. He has limited knowledge and it's okay. He might choose to grow in the future. I figured this was a good description of what's going on. I removed a bit to get rid of personal stuff. I figured it out. I used the same method I used for growing mushrooms. Try as many different types as you can simultaneously to find the one that works for you. I'll be happy to pass on the unique grow gear if you ever get to the point where you want to grow and are allowed. It's highly unlikely that I'll grow again for multiple years. If ever. That's a single plant inside those hot glued pieces of wood and colorful rope and torn apart wire hangers. I'll remove all the internal pulls soon enough and lay out some more wire hangers to push things around. I won't loop anything around branches. I try to turn all the top buds down and let the side buds come up. Occasionally I crush the neck of a top bud to reduce the backflow of auxins that suppresses the rest of the branch growth. But not that much. I've given up on individual bud handling. There's too many. Sun grow number 4. I always use that as the grow medium. Don't waste your time with anything else. I don't care what effort you have to make to go get it. Go get it. Pay double or triple for it compared to anything you see next to it. It's worth it. Random tiger Bloom or big blossom or whatever nutrient mix. I'm haphazard about it. I try to stick with a single one until the bottle runs out. Calcium/magnesium. Honey. They love their honey. Epsom salts when I'm trying to push green. I try to stick with organic to start off with. The sun grow plus tiny bits is plenty for the first month. Once I move to flowering all bets are off. I cut feeding at least 3 weeks before harvest and I do extensive flushing at the end. Tastiest smoothest smoke I've ever had came out of this room from the autos. Of course the perfect humidity and pitch black slightly windy cure room helped. I stopped using a bong, I simply enjoy my pipe. No water filtering required. I give tiny taster doses when they are very young to stimulate their ability to absorb the nutrients later. It works like an immunization shot. It notifies them that these nutrients are available and they build the receptors to absorb them. Initial mycorrhaga from Plant Magic. I've used multiple other mycorrhages. They're not as good for me. And I'm not going to figure out how to spell that, I'm leaving it. Super thrive plant vitamin. This is a cargo cult thing. I used it early on in my growing, it seemed to be better than when I didn't use it, it worked for me so I stuck with it. Occasionally I didn't use it and it didn't work as well. Did I imagine it because I didn't have a control to compare it to? I have no idea. But I'll keep using it if I ever grow again. First in white fabric bags, then in 3 gallon and then 10 gallon black ones in the bins. I never transplant, I plant one bag into the next bag. I never touch those roots. Deep high skinny bags to start off with. Give the roots the room immediately. I have a significant amount of fish tank filter plastic balls at the bottom, root level and then at each transplant level. There's a huge amount of air inside those huge chunks of dirt. It was about 60 lb. moist, not dry, not wet, weight to start. At this point it's probably about 80 lb when you add in the root and plant matter and the fact they're always filled with water and then it goes to about 100 after watering. I built a rolling dolly for it. I will not try to lift it again. I will end up removing the mats from the room because it's too tough to roll on them. And I push all the other bins around as I rearrange and it's too tough on those mats. I'm about to build a bunch more dollies. I have all the cabinet doors from the kitchen that I took apart that I will reuse plus lots of random rolling feet. I barely fed. I've screwed up over feeding in the past so I'd rather let them starve and add nutrition as needed rather than burn them to start off with. Some plants are okay with that and some plants hate it. I don't care. They love when I do additional epsom salts to catch up. Plants love epsom salts. I should tattoo that to my eyelids. Don't forget: Plants Love Epsom Salts! I water with a filtered hose. It removes pretty much everything such as chlorine, chloramine, and the various metals that show up. At least couple gallons a day for that plant. The whole room as well. Since I barely feed and never too much, I feed highly concentrated solution over the top and then I let the filtered water run over it to the point of totally soaking the dirt and filling the tub a few inches. The sun grow number 4 absorbs a huge amount of water. If it went more than a few inches in the tub I would drain it out. Sometimes I fill that whole bin and then drain it out for a total root ball soak. I bail it out with a highball glass. I should pump or siphon it but I haven't bothered. Then I let the plant suck it back in. I water 2 days later and dilute it and run through that process every couple of days for a week and then I do it again. I don't pH balance anymore. I don't care. Find the plants that are happy with whatever I throw at them and stop screwing around with mixing up batches of nutrient water and then lifting buckets or figuring out a water distribution method. If a plant is picky on me, it can be replaced. Be prepared to rip a plant out if it annoys me. I will not do anything special for any single plant other than scoop raw epsom salts on top of its dirt and water it in if it's looking too yellow. Be okay with quick small leaves that grow and then die. They're passing their nutrients to the level above. It's okay. Do not panic. Or if it goes too far, kill that plant. Do not fall in love with a single plant. Move on. Wind. Whirlwind and reciprocating wind and standing wind and so much goddamn wind you can't possibly imagine. Box fans that are strapped together and hang in perfect positions to create a whirlwind to suck all the air off the lights and the top level of the plants. Then tower fans and clip-on fans strategically placed on a bar and various round floor and shelf standing fans at various distances and reciprocations with overlap. Additional fans shooting through the airflow channels that I create when I arrange the lights together. I smoke. I used to blow smoke to follow wind paths to figure out what I should do. I can't do that. That smoke is gone immediately. Now I crawl into position and feel the wind. Yep, that's good. The plant will like this wind. You have to do this under full lights, including red which includes infrared, and hover for a bit to determine if I'm sweating under the light. If so, more wind. Or move the light back. Less heat, more open air flow. I wind beat the plants early on to build their stem strength so they can support the buds later, also, it widens the base which allows more water and nutrients to flow. Plant movement is pump action which helps water and nutrients to flow around. Now I do it to make sure that there's no chance for mold to grow and to constantly alter light paths to stimulate everything everywhere. Those buds will be dense and need high velocity wind pushed through them to keep them from getting moldy. 4 months of vegetation. Simply because I have a deadline for the final harvest. I could let it grow. I could double this in another few weeks if I had let it veg. Once you cross the threshold of tail end vegetation, the multiplication effect is phenomenal. If the root ball is big enough and you can give it enough water and light this plant could keep on vegging for a long time. I used to do 3 months because when the plants stretched they'd grow too high and that's all I could fit in whatever grow space I was working in, and then it was incredibly tight. In the old days when you had to add in the air flow for your incredibly hot lighting, it was horrible. Led lighting allowed that to compress somewhat, but you still had to give a couple of feet of hang space and ventilation space and then distance to the plant. That 1000 w hid on the light moving rail we had set up was insane. And our production was mediocre. I now envelope a single plant with about 2500 w of flat panels. Happily. I have a constant supply of outside air from Washington State in the winter. You'd think it would be very wet, but I am at a unique location that my humidity is less than the state average. Not much, but enough to make a difference. I still need lots and lots of wind at all times. I have a whole house industrial fan sucking the air out of that room across the hallway and out of the bedroom. And I have automated thermostat controls with remote controls to plugs so I can control anything anywhere. Which means I kick fans on as needed for extra wind push into the room. I have an air mover outside that roars continuously pushing through a 10-in wide HVAC tube from the window. The neighbors initially complained about the smell but after bit adjusting it was all better. They don't mind the noise, I asked them. All the lights and fans and heater and anything electrical is controlled from my phone. My whole house lights will blink and turn red if there is anything wrong in the grow room as far as temperature or humidity is concerned and my phone will send me a message. Also if the door opens. I targeted 68°. This was supposed to be a cold grow. It's hitting about 72 now. Oh well. I'm not putting any AC in the room. Some plants hate this windy cold environment. Screw them. Rip them out. Or move them to the corner with less wind and a bit warmer. When you have enough plants that you can ignore, you have enough plants. Ignore them. Let them sit aside for a while. The best thing you can do for a plant is to ignore it almost all the time. That's only when you have enough light. In this case, there's so much light, everywhere, they don't know which way to grow other than not down. So they fill everywhere. This plant has only been flowering for 3 weeks. Pretty much all the plants in my room behave this way. They are very short, under 3 ft, no stretch, and very tight nodes. Lots and lots of extra nodes compared to anything I've grown in the past. 500 watt Four-Sided expanding batwing lights were 5 a piece. It costs me :text.08 per kilowatt hour. I won't bother you with the math, other than to say it's worth it. Times a few thousand. Plus I have these incredible red/uvb bars from some random company called Enjoyyield from a few years ago. I was never able to use them until now. They don't make them anymore, at least I can't find them. If you ever see them, buy a couple. I also have a fluorescent UVB bar from Migro. Serious burn level UVB. I have a test card so I can tell how strong it is. The autos that I harvested from this room were wonderful and are rock hard. They filled internally and compressed. They go THUNK when I drop them on the tray. When they were about a month old the autoflowers went into flowering so I upped the lights. That meant all the plants in vegetation had far more light than I normally would give them. This pushed their growth. Phenomenally. It pushed their node production up. It kept them short. When I flipped to flowering it still kept them short. No stretch whatsoever. But this one, critical orange punch, really took off in the environment.

At least 2,000 w in winged flat panels surrounding as much as I can. Lots of far far red. Lots of UV from different sources from both LEDs and the real tube from migrow. This plant is starving. All my plants are starving. Please don't comment on the horrible condition of the various color of the various leaves of the various plants. I starve them all on purpose. The goal here was nodes. How many nodes can I generate from a single plant? Indoors. In dirt. Watered from a hose. Being very lazy with nutrition. I'm quite happy with the results. Let's see what really happens now.