My first grow. Kind XL 750. Mystery strain.

Hi,

here is a bunch of pics from my first grow. Its still going, about 3 weeks into flower. Its a mystery strain from some buds I bought a few years ago that had seeds in them.



Grow is in a 4'x4' tent under a Kind XL 750, in 2p Coco 1p Perlite. I found it was good to give the perlite a wash first to get rid of the powder. I flushed the combined mix in just tap water, just to reduce the amount of brown in the run off.


My tap water is 37 ppm (at the moment).



I sprouted my seeds in cubes in a sprouting chamber. Some shot up in 2 nights, some others took nearly 2 10 days.



Heres some shots of the tent. 4'x4'x8'. Got a 125mm exhaust fan with the carbon filter on it. I decided that running the filter from the beginning was a bit unnecessary so I didn't actually attach until well in to veg, I walked into my garage one day and it a vaguely plant smell so I attached it then.

I eventually got a better sprouting chamber, one that had vents on the top. I also a little 10W heat mat to go under it (its winter here).



I think I went from chamber to pot a bit early. Looking around at other people early grows they leave them in there until there are quite a few leaves on. I have a bunch of basil sprouts in the tent at this stage. When I was buying my tent the shop guy tried to explain to me that the tent would really only support 2-4 plants. I didn't listen I sprouted 7 cannabis and a lot of basil and 1 tomato. I also got a snow peas seedling from Bunnings (which did really well in the tent). The idea I had was that if anyone peaked in through the window they would see a tomato and/or basil right up front. However I sprouted the tomato to late so it never outgrew the weed and in a few weeks became this annoying lanky plant that kept creeping into other plants space. I chopped it down a few days ago, the only "alien" in the tent now is the snow peas.


In a few weeks I had these! I'd finish work every day and watch them grow lol. I had two runts and one weird mutant plant that kept growing deformed leaves.

In the beginning i was hand watering the little pots. Everything was in a drainage tray but I didn't make much use of it. Each pot had its own little catch tray under it. This became pretty tedious quite quickly. Eventually I put a pipe on the bottom of the tray which drained to another tray outside the tent (as waste). This was a bit messy. My waste "reservoir" was actually just a big pot drainage tray and it was super awkward to empty without spilling water everywhere.


The culling! All the basil/etc was removed. The first pic has one cannabis plant in the bottom left, the other large pots (geopots) are snow peas and Vietnamese basil. The viet basil has since been removed and is now in a window planter, it grew super lush. The second pic you can see the mutant and one of the runts are still in pots. Ultimately they both went into 3lt pots and are still in the tent, I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. Note the heat bars I have hanging. My garage is btw 8-15 degrees in the winter. Heat bars in a tent thats exhausting are next to useless, they really can't influence the air temperature with that much air exchange going on. I had 3x80w in there. The Kind XL 750 contributed about 3 degrees of warmth, but that warmth only went up and didn't come back down to the canopy. I explored some options later in my grow.


Around the time I went to flower I was completely sick of hand watering. Not only is it a chore you need to remember to do it becomes really difficult to get at the base of your plants (particular the ones at the back) once the vegetation really takes off. Drainage now goes back to my reservoir. Reservoir has two air stones in it and the pump.

Heres some shots of the vegetation. My mutant (shown on chair/bench in yellow pot) ended up growing quite tall so its in the middle. My runt stayed runty so I made a little stand for it, its off the side, off the irrigation and drainage. Not ideal.


I got in and did some pruning a bit into flower. Anything that didn't look it was going to be at least near the canopy got the chop.


Here a super-hazardous attempt at solving my heat problem. Its two of those 80w heat bars (they are 60cm long) sitting inside the intake vent. After two days there was very faint burning smell so I got rid of that!


I then switch out to this slightly less dangerous radiator-in-box. The intake draws from this box of hot air. The main hazard here is theres no intake fan so I rely on the negative tent pressure to draw air in. If I open the tent i need to turn off the radiator or it will get very hot (like covering a radiator). Its been working well. Light off my temp (at the top of the tent) doesn't drop below 18 degrees (cent). With the light on things are 21-22. The radiator is only running at 6 of 10 so I can go warmer. It also reduces the humidity by about 8-10% which is a nice bonus.

Finally here are some shots of my buds so far. I think i'm at week 4. My coco seems to have finally stopped buffing my ph up to 6.2 at last. Last few watering cycles my water has stayed at 5.8, yay!

Every single seed I sprouted seems to have come up female! I'm a little disappointed as I would liked the experience of seeing a male.

I've been using Flora Nova organic veg and bloom. At the moment i'm using 1.25ml per litre (which the bottle describes as suitable for early growth). This gives me about 550ppm then I through in 1ml/lt of GrowEasy (cal-mag) which takes it up to about 740 ppm. I've been using the cal-mag since very early on when I was too noob to control my ph and I started seeing deformations in my leaves. I probably dont need to keep using it now and will leave it out of the next refill.

Most of my gear came from Epping Hydroponics, nutrients and plumbing all came from Living Jungle Hydroponics. Living Jungle was great, one of the guys there (I think his name was Sam) was just so awesome at helping me get my plumbing going. I just described what I needed and he cut it all up right in front of me all while passing on sage advice like how many litres per day to water, how strong my nuts should be, canna coca is apparently not the best coco etc.

Oh and feedback welcome

It looks good bro i need to put a reservoir but i dont have the room right now.

Its life changing, allows be to go away for the weekend! My tub is 65 lt.

This week I've been fiddling with my water/nute supply. I found that some of my feeders were just dripping vs feeding. I've had an issue with burning on my leaf tips, given my nutes were pretty low (1-1.25ml/litre) and with advice from im4satori I've changed my feeding habits from 2 very short (1-2minutes) feeds to one big 20m feed. The theory is that my coco was building up salts because I wasn't putting enough solution through it get any run off. To begin with when I tried a longer feed my PPM was going up and Ph either not moving or going down. I eventually just did two reservoirs of fresh ph'd water and just flushed everything out till my run off was around 250ppm. Cleaned out my drainage tray, gave the reservoir a scrub and made a new batch up at around 950 ppm (815 of bloom). The ppm went down straight away to around 770, the next day after a 20m feed its at 738 so its looking promising. I'm hoping tonights feed shows another drop in PPM.

I've also put some risers under my fabric pots to get better (proper) drainage and i'm getting a soggy bottom area on it anymore. All up a pretty therapeutic week for the girls.

Heres a shot of a bud I took, plenty of trichomes around now