First grow; vortex dwc scrog

So I figure I should quit lurking and contribute, if anything at least to document my first grow. Feel free to comment along the way.

I can't really dedicate an entire room so an awkward closet on the side will have to do. Even then, I can't risk anyone just opening the closet and seeing my setup and so I decided to only use a small side of the closet so that if anyone looked into it later, they wouldn't see plants and instead just boxes with some clothes. With that said, the depth of the closet is 6ft and so my workable area is 6ft in length. Depth is about 18-19" and height varies (again, awkward closet).

The Setup

Lighting: 400W CMH for vegging and 400W HPS (might upgrade these to 600W come winter) for flowering. Also have a 2ft New Wave t5 fixture with 4 6500k bulbs for cloning and germination.
Reflector: SuperSun 2 (selected after reading a great reflector thread over at icmag)
Ballast: 400W Harvest Pro Elite HPS/MH Magnetic (had to for the CMH, really wanted a Solis Tek or Lumatek. Oh well, maybe for the 600)
Fans: S&P TD150 and S&P TD100
Air Pump: GH Dual Diaphragm
Water Pump: Ecoplus 396 GPH
Meters: Bluelab Truncheon and PH Pen
Nutes: GH Maxibloom (also bought MaxiGro but don't use it)
Additives: CalMag and Pro-Tekt for silicon
Genetics: TGA Vortex and Timewreck (from the timewreck promo back in november... took me a while, heh)




Timeline

April 4th: Planted 5 seeds into rockwool. 2 Vortex, 2 Timewreck, 1 SLH bagseed. I just dipped the rockwool in ph'd water (about 5.4) and then poured some more 5.4 over it. After letting it drip a bit to not be soaked, planted the seeds. I put them in a chinese takeout plastic container as I didn't have my tray and dome at the time.

April 7th: Seeds all germinated. Took pics of two.



April 22: Took some pics of the progress. SLH is on it's own. Vortex in the back in the tub and timewreck in the front. The black tarp in the background is to cover a hole in the wall I made while running wires through studs for an outlet (20amp circuit).



Fast foward a bit...

Well, along the way I got some rootrot (found out my pump needed the diaphragms replaced) or maybe it was just brown algae due to light leaks. Was dumb and used bleach + h2o2 (read some information wrong) and long story short I killed that taller, more vigorous vortex on the back right in the previous picture. To remedy it, I wrapped all the non-black buckets with foil tape. SLH I haven't been giving much love to and the timewrecks I handed them off to someone else (both females). I'm still watching their progress it is just someone else's responsibility now. I just get to check in on them every once in a while. Currently, they're fuckin' huge because their grower hasn't had time to give them maintenance. Maybe I'll give an update on that in 2-3 weeks. So now it's just vortex to watch over.

I had to build my small side of the closet while they were vegging. Put down two 2x4s as "lifters" for a false floor , put antivibration pads under and above them. Then I put 3/4" plywood above it for a floor. Bought some more 2x4s and framed a wall. Left an opening for a 34" L x 24" H cabinet hinged (blum hinges) door/access panel. Used a scrap piece of MDF from an old portable closet as the door material. Cut ventilation holes and all that jazz. I put mud on some of the drywall joints to cover light leaks but I still haven't covered all the joints and/or sanded any of them down. I got lazy and just did 1 coat. I'd fix it now but the gypsum dust would go all over my plant (maybe I'll do it soon before the buds really start growing). Still gotta sand it, put another layer of mud, prime the wall, then paint it white to match the closet. ugh.

Along the way I built a screen out of PVC and some line trimmer cord.

June 5th: Took out the CMH and set my timer to 12/12.

June 13th: Took a picture during lights on to log the progress.




The radiant thing on the wall (forgot what it's called right now) is just there to cover the hole in the drywall from running the wire. I plan on patching it up and covering the cab with orca grow film once this grow is over. The screen stays in place via pressure from it being slightly bigger than the depth I have available. The screen is 36x18 if I recall correctly.

Every Tuesday I feed them 7g/gallon of Maxibloom, 6-8ml of Protekt, and 6-8ml of CalMag. Before I started using calmag, they were really stunted and I was having all sorts of issues. I found it weird considering I'm using tap water (my ppm in .7 scale is 170ish). I usually add calmag and protekt until 0.4ec and then with the nutes it ends up around 1.8-2ec (so 1.4-1.6 of nutes). With this mix, my PH ends up at 5.8 dead-on without needing PH down. Thursdays and Saturday, I usually have to put back 2-3 gallons of ph'd water. Then on Tuesday, drain and repeat. The water pump makes it not so bad.

That's it for now. Not much to show since they haven't really started putting on buds.

im subbed for this one. looking great ....

you know where youre saying about you have to finish sanding painting ect. will the plats be there when you paint. if so becarfull as it can be harmful to them. ok if youre ventilation is good you might be ok. its still a risk.

spitsbuds said:

im subbed for this one. looking great ....

Click to expand...

Thanks man. Really appreciate it.

spitsbuds said:

you know where youre saying about you have to finish sanding painting ect. will the plats be there when you paint. if so becarfull as it can be harmful to them. ok if youre ventilation is good you might be ok. its still a risk.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that is what I'm worried about. With the way that opening is built, I can't really move the plant out with the screen and bucket all intact. The plant has gotten too big for that.

One possible approach I'm thinking of is shutting off all ventilation and sealing the door with tape to ensure no cracks for dust to get through. I'd also then close the intake and exhaust vent louvers as well as tape something over them just in case. I'd then proceed to quickly sand and paint at the start of the 12hrs lights off. I have two 1300CFM industrial fans, so I can have one blowing air/fumes out of the closet and the other blowing that air away from the grow. I'm just not sure if 12 hrs of venting that air out is enough.

Whatever I do, I figure I better do it ASAP because I really don't want to have drywall dust flying around when the buds are developing. Smoking drywall after dropping almost $2-$3k on everything so far would be a fucking waste. Especially since I gave up smokin' daily since March 30th so I could fund all this.

Maybe I could order some panda film and put it on the inside part of the opening as well to ensure the dust stays out. I figure the dust is more of a problem than the fumes, but I could be wrong and they could both be equally bad.

Finally got around to charging my camera and decided to take some pictures.


Timewreck and SLH:

Got a chance to snap some pictures of these for you guys. The SLH apparently gets very little love and is usually off to the side. The timewreck was cut back and bent to half its size cause it was just too big. I think they're gonna be switched to flowering starting tomorrow. (They were sleeping/reseting when I turned on the light for the picture, they're not that droopy normally)





Vortex
Lights off pictures this time.









Clones
Two weeks, I took some time out to build a dyi ez-cloner using one of the two water pumps I had. About a 8-9 days ago, I put two of the lower side shoots I trimmed off from the scrogged vortex into the system as well as the top from the other (admittedly, way too small and young) vortex I have flowering just for the hell of it next to the scrogged one. The two cuttings from the scrog'd vortex have rooted and the one from the other vortex currently has bumps. All unlabeled clones are from the timewreck (some were burned from being too close to the CMH). Tomorrow I'll probably trim their leaves a bit. As for the cloner itself, I have to lightproof it better (need to buy some more foil tape), but aside from that it works great. If I eventually need more misters later, I have 20 left in a bag. For now, four is enough. Also, I'm not using clonex or any rooting powder, just plain pH'd tap water. They are under the 2ft t5 fixture. It only has one bulb in it because I figured burning the others is needless for clones.

When I went to check on my plants today after just before lights off, the temperature was at 100F!@%$. Had to immediately setup a portable AC in there. I had it setup before but @ 800W AC + 800W for lighting + fans and pumps and the t5 fixture, my electricity doubled for two months (was vegging with 2x400CMHs + running AC constantly to maintain 79F) so lately I've been trying to not be so wasteful. Oh well, has to been done when regional temps are above average. Mind you, 100F was only 5-8F above ambient. I was freakin' sacrificing sweating while my plants were getting cooled.

The other small vortex in the closet, who's black bucket you can kinda see in the underskirt shot, turned out to be a male so I culled it. No point in wasting nutes, space, and cutting the air going to the scrogged plant in half for nothing. If I had stayed on top of it, I probably could have noticed earlier, although it was still pretty early.

While examining my plant, I also noticed that two fan leaves which belong to the main top are growing pistils/bud sites in their center. A quick search in various forums leads me to not worry too much about it. I'm just wondering if it is a desirable trait that one would want to keep or an instability which is best to get rid of. According to Marijuana Botany by Robert Clarke, it's just a peculiar leaf mutation. (Source) Still, I'd like to hear your opinions on it.

I'll take some pictures of the progress tomorrow. So far, we're on week 3 day 2.

Damn it, another crazy hot day. Room temps reached 100F, ambient was around 92-95. Portable AC was worthless. The compressor constantly kept turning off after running for 2-3 minutes. I hope I won't have to abandon this grow but if this heat continues, FML. I have two window ACs I can use, but no windows near by. The closet is literally in the middle of the house.

To make matters worse, the more powerful of the ACs is too big (height wise) for the windows near the grow. I could run a smaller AC in the opening, but it's about 25ft from the closet so I figure it'd just be wasting electricity. Ugh, this is annoying. 2 days of 100F...

Took out the portable AC and setup a 8k BTU window unit on the ground. Next to it, I setup an industrial fan blowing air at the AC. This should help keep it cool and blow the hot exhaust air towards a window where I've setup a window fan to have all air flowing in that one direction. When I walked in this morning, thermometer said 91 (that was with the portable AC). Now, it's reading 86 with the window AC being on for under an hour.

EC right now is 2.8 (!) but that's because they drank a lot of water. pH is stable at 5.8. I'm going to pH some plain tap water and add a bit of calmag to it right now. I've been getting a lot (5-10) of yellowed, dead fan leaves under the canopy. Not sure if that's normal or not, but I'm going to give a bit of extra nitrogen just in case.

Not much to write about. Now that ambient temperature has settled down and I raised the light a little bit, the temperature is stable at 72F-76F. I'm seeing a lot of dead leaves on the bottom and some of the little growth below the screen is growing pretty yellow. Not sure if I should give in and give a one time shot of veg nutes for extra nitrogen or if I'm good as is. So far, I'm just watching them vigilantly to see if anything progresses too dramatically. pH was dropping for a bit 2 days ago (weird), caught it at 5.0, now it's at 5.6-5.8 stable.Since I'm approaching the halfway mark, and now that all my clones have well established roots, I began feeding them a bit of nutes. My goal is that when this vortex comes down, the clones will have grown enough and been trained enough to put under the screen and flip to flowering. I still have to order some equipment to get the veg side of things going so I'll be doing that this week.

Vortex @ Day 22










Timewreck (week 1)

Update time.

Upgrades
Got a 50ft roll of orca. Way overkill. I probably just needed about 15, so the 25ft would have been fine. Waste of the $40 difference. Also bought another GH dual diaphragm air pump for the veg unit and the cloner (to prevent the death of future clones).

Clone Apocalypse
So all the clones died. Kinda really sucks in that it fucks up my timing for the next batch. I wanted to get the clones into a veg unit/area for early july to be ready for flowering by end of july/start of august but I guess that's not going to be happening. I had moved the aero cloner unit they were in out from under the light for 2-3 days. They all had rooted but I didn't have an area prepped for them at the time.

My theory is something started growing in the water as a result of this heat (90+) and poor oxygenation of the water (I didn't have an extra air pump at the time). Their leaves started to shrivel up, twist in weird directions, and turn brown. Tried to put em under a dome but that didn't help. The stalks also started to turn yellow. When I looked at the roots, they seem to have something light brown-ish on them. Also, the water seemed to always something in 2-3 days after changing it out (I tried changing it twice after I noticed it). Today I gave up and threw them out.

I took new cuttings from each flowering plant to make up for it. Took two from vortex (day 32), two from timewreck #1 (somewhere between day 10 and 1, two from timewreck #2 (somewhere between day 10 and 1, and 1 from SLH (somewhere between day 10 and 1. Hopefully the vortex one works. I might crack a seed just in case. I have 10 jillybean, 7 vortex, 8 timewreck, and some freebies. Thinking about ordering mosca's c99.


Vortex (day 32):
Starting to get frosty.


(dunno where the camera got purple from)


(tried to color correct it)


(plant shot)

Quick updates

The vortex is almost done. It has about 7-10 days left. The buds have swollen up to about twice their size in the last picture I posted. I guess this is a shitty pheno because, to me, it doesn't smell much. That, or maybe my carbon filter is just doing too good of a job... hah. She's drinking about 1.5 gallons a day now. EC is at 1.2. PH at 5.4.

The timewrecks were pushed down with a screen about 2-3 days before they were flipped. The huge one on the left stretched A LOT and now every branch is pretty much reaching the light. Thankfully the aircooled hood is doing it's job and the tops aren't showing heat stress. Problem is it is block the light that is supposed to reach the timewreck right next to it and the SLH. The other two are bending as much as they can to where some light is able to reach them. But... since these are my roommate's responsibility, all I allow myself to do is watch.

All of the new clones have rooted. The non-vortex ones have rooted REALLY well and have about 8 inch roots all over the place in a DWC tote. One vortex has a tiny 0.5 inch root and the other has nubs everywhere, so hopefully they'll pull through. I'm retarded and didn't notice the roughneck cloner was leaking everywhere and only noticed when the pump was making a funny noise. That's why the 2 vortex clones did not root/did not root well. I stuck them in the dwc tote to see if they take.

I'm in the process of acquiring new genetics. I've ordered e$cobar's Chocolate Rain and am waiting for Cheeseberry Haze and some others to restock. Also waiting on some c99 crosses and a santa maria release he said are coming soon. From TGA, I plan on getting 5 packs of Ace of Space and Space Dawg. From DJ Short, I plan on getting Azure Haze. From RP and G13, I plan on getting single fem seeds of OG#18 and Pineapple Express, respectively.

Next update will be when I'm chopping the Vortex down.

Sad update

Since it's my first grow, I figured I'd take two side colas and chop a week/week and a half early to compare to the rest.

While I was trimming, I found some very immature/tiny small round things in some of the calyxes. Some calxyes have 2-3 green ones, others have 2 seeds that are starting to brown up even though they are really tiny (just as tiny as the green ones). They are about the half the size of a pin head needle.

Guessing it self-pollinated about 2 weeks ago. Oh well. Going to wait until next weekend to chop it down.
--
Q

Last Saturday I took down 2-3 side colas to experience the strain at 7.5 weeks. Side benefit of that was the quick drying experience I got.

Saturday's cuts got the worst of it. They were subjected to 88F-92F temps on Sunday. It wasn't my intention but that's what happened. On Sunday I moved them to a different area that had 45-55% RH @ 75-80F.

Sunday's cuts went were in the same harsh temps for about 4 hours but then were moved as well.

Tuesday night, jarred them up. The Saturday cuts were very dry. In a too dead or cripsy and yet hard and not crumbly kind of way. When jarred up, after 3 hrs the jar had 49% RH. Originally I had not planned on jarring up the Sunday cuts but after seeing the impact the drying time made on the Saturday cuts I immediately did just that.

They last night after 3hr, the RH in the jar was 59%. Checked on it today and it was at 66%. These buds actually have a smell and are slightly sticky. Success! So today I cut them off the stems and jarred them back up. I'm thinking 62% should be the target.

Overall I'm glad I did that as now I'm pretty sure I won't mess up the main harvest. I'll shoot for 2-2.5 days dry time. Might take a little more but certainly not 3 or 4 days. As for the Saturday cuts, I'm storing those away for a while. I figure if I don't mess with the jar, the buds will have a better chance of retaining what little moisture they have left. I did open it today to stick the hygrometer in it. I figure I need a way to track progress for it. As a result, I ordered some more hygrometers so I can have some evidence of their progress. I also ordered some Boveda 65% humidity packs to calibrate them by learning their offset.

As for the immature seeds, none really developed but they're definitely there. Most fall out while I grind the bud up but still... they are there and that alone is unacceptable.

So, I'll not be running the rest of my Vortex seeds just yet. Instead, one maintain one of the two clones until next spring to see if it was the pheno or my inexperience at the time.

Instead, I'll be placing some orders:

Sannie's:
e$kobar:
- Chocolate Rain
- Holy Princess (Santamaria x C99) [soon/when available]
- Blue Rocket (Apollo 11 x blueberry) [soon/when available]
- Chucky's Bride (Cheese x C99 pineapple male) [soon/when available]
- Santa Maria Fem (freebie!)
- Another freebie (forgot)

sannie: Extrema Fem

Tude:
reserva privada: og#18
g13: pineapple express
seedism: diesel
+ whatever freebies/promotions


In the mean time, I've been taking time to apply what I've learned. Once the timewrecks are done around mid/late august, the setup will switch to a more perpetual nature where 4 seeds or clones can be ran to get a single plant to harvest every 2 weeks. First run will be the timewreck clones, then either jillybean or one of the above. I want to give mainlining a shot and this will let me do so with learned adjustments being made every 2 weeks instead of 2-3 months.

thanks. enjoyed reading. i'd guess the seeds resulted from heat stress, ya think?

That is certainly possible. I had two clones of the Vortex and kept only one. I plan on running it again on the perpetual schedule.

I certainly should have done things differently... I should have not done a scrog this first grow and should instead have grown 3-4 mini plants out to find the better pheno. Once I had it, I should have kept only those clones and THEN use a scrog on them.

Thing is, I don't think this pheno is particularly worth keeping. Not much smell while growing, not particularly impressive, hermied on me, etc. I'll give it a try again to see the difference proper temps make but after this run it'll become a bonsai mother for a couple of months until I run crack 4-5 more vortex seeds.

I left the plant going for a week longer after cutting the tops on Aug 27th. It kind of helped on the "new" tops but the lower nugs still needed 2-3 weeks more.

Currently the harvest is drying in a basement that is at around 64-68F and 50% or so humidity so at least the drying will be better.

Looking at the downside, the bud has no flavor what so ever (even when you weed out the many tiny seeds). The good thing is it gets you pretty high and has done so consistently for 1.5 weeks.

Just thought I'd give this a proper finish by showing some of the finished product and giving a bit of a write up.



Overall, this grow was just "okay".

I learned I need to have better canopy management and not let the stretch go crazy. It ended up looking almost like I was growing wheat .

Also, scrogging isn't for me, at least not yet. Scrogging an unfamiliar strain from reg seed in a cab you can't pull the plant out of without cutting it wasn't smart. I'll scrog once I've found my keepers, never again while searching for them. With my recent seed purchases, I may possibly be searching for a while...

I learned heat is a real bitch. In my current location, summer growing is out of the question. If I'm here next summer, it needs to shut down between May/June and August.

I learned I don't really like waiting for harvest. I'm switching to harvesting 2 smaller plants every 2 weeks. No clue what to expect yield wise but given that it's all personal and will start stacking up, it doesn't matter much. It's between that rotation or 2 medium plants and 1 harvest a month.

So for next time: CMH for first 2 weeks of flower, seedlings get mainlined, clones get very roughly mainlined, perpetual harvest, no summer cycles, and if possible never run just a single female from reg seeds to get more than just one expression of the strain.

How did the Timewreck turn out? Smoked any? How 'bout a smoke report. Mine is still 6 weeks away.