DesignatedDave

I use them for seeds in soil, it's nice because it dry's from all directions inwards.

Howsit, TopMax is just humic acid and fulvic acid combined - check out these two and you'll save a fortune: Humic Acid - https://www.greenhouston.co.za/products/humic-acid Fulvic Acid - https://www.greenhouston.co.za/products/fulvic-acid or these guys - https://gthydro.co.za/products/277-humic-acid-1liter.html https://gthydro.co.za/products/309-vulvic-acid-1-liter.html These are stronger than what's in TopMax, so you only use 2ml/1L of Fulvic Acid & 5ml/1L Humic acid On the note of the humic acid though, it's recommended to do it as a fortnightly drench but I've used it weekly together with fulvic acid Stop the humic acid at 3 weeks into flower, Studies have shown that humic acid reduces cannabinoid content (as it makes the plant want to grow rather than flower). Fulvic you can use right through. Ironically Bio-Heaven is Humic acid and amino acids, so I'm really glad you found a good amino acid replacement without the humic acid in it, I will definitely give that Canna Pro a try.

The plant looks happy to me. From your recent posts I'm getting the impression that you might be micro-managing your plants and possibly over loving them . These plants really don't need much, especially at this age/size, a little bit of nutrients and water with some good light is all you need. The leaves will change between different shades of green throughout the grow and this is because the plant will be shift movable nutrients around the plant and that does impact leaf color. movable nutrients are things like Nitrogen (N), Magnesium (Mg), Phosphorous (P), Potassium (K), and Nickel (Ni). It's only really a cause for concern when you start seeing yellow spots or yellow leaves. Outside of that they will go all shades of green at some point or another. If you look at your plant and the leaves are straight out or praying and it looks happy, then leave the plant, it's doing great and is doing what you asking it to do at it's own biological pace.

I've had endless root rot issues with those cups, no matter how many holes I make, I eventually bought the RapidGrow rooting pots - https://hydroponic.co.za/hydroponics/rapidgrow-rooting-pots-with-tray/ and haven't looked back since.

Don't worry about your runoff PH, its going to fluctuate in the coco coir. Runoff is not a good indication of what's going on at the root zone. To actually get an accurate ph reading you would need to do a soil slurry test from below the surface. You can also ignore the runoff EC, its always going to be higher than your input EC. You should only worry about your input PH value which should be around 5.8 - 6.0 Is there something wrong with your plants at the moment that you suspect a PH issue in your coco coir?

What you going to price your clones at? I would be interested in the Blue Cheese, Exodus Cheese, Mandarin Zkittlez and dosi dos 33

Dear Diary, It's been 2 and a half weeks since the last photo's, so here's an update. On the indoor plants, I created had an issue for myself on the 13th, I got up early, filled and mixed up the nutrient reservoir, PH'd it and off my girlfriend and I we to Cape Town for the Weekend. (Btw the way, we stayed in Bloubergstrand and was very quickly introduced to a place there called "Baked". Seriously, go there, sign up as a member (R200) of their club, and go order an indoor joint and a sativa infused Chocolate Milkshake... It was amazing. I ended up fucking unbelievably Space-X high, there is just no other way to describe it. That chocolate milkshake though is the be all and end of all of all chocolate milkshakes, it's epic. Then like 100m down the road is this place called "Tree of Life"... where I proceeded to buy a "Moon stick", which was a gorilla glue joint, rolled in chocolope concentrate and then rolled in a haze kief. You got to try one of these ) Ok back to the story (I'm so baked while writing this) - While we were flying high in Cape Town I had some issues at home... we had a 24h power outage, and a heat wave, so to his credit my step-son did manage the situation fairly well. When I got back the following Monday, the plants looked like something genetically suddenly went wrong with all of them. they have grown, but the nodes are less an a cm apart and they have all just like bushed in one place or another. After checking through everything I found that in my haste on the Thursday morning before leaving, I forgot to open the tap of the reservoir to feed the plants and they had now gone from the wednesday to the following monday without anything. I figured with the co2, the high temps, the lack of water it just culminated in the plants weird growth. To rectify it, I cut off a whole bunch of nodes to space it out a bit and then just let them grow it out. They have since recovered nicely and I have started pulling them down and out to start the growth of the flat canopy which will grow into the scrog net once it's up. The little outdoor plants I had in my tent in the first post have come along way. I've repot them into their 25L pots and they are now out on the grass for the outdoor season. I have two 50w flood lights on them at night and will be adding a 3rd this month so I that I can light them up 360 degrees. Blueberry Sunset Chempie x Purple Punch - This is by far the fastest growing plant I have ever come across. The Zombie Kush The outdoor plants will be feed a worm tea this week and hopefully they should settle into their homes nicely. These 8 plants are spread out nicely and I'm busy looking at building a 4m x 4m shade cloth canopy to try help with heat and hail. That's it for this update.

So I only start giving calmag for the coco coir about 3/4 weeks after I start feeding nutrients, After that I typically I use 1/4 (hard water) or 1/3 (soft water) the recommended calmag dosage on the bottle once a week, just to keep the coco coir buffered. Then obviously when you want to actually feed your plant calmag, you just up the calmag dosage.

You are correct sir, I went through all of them one night with the lights off and covered all the little leds and shit with the aluminum ducting tape. The only two things that are still displaying is the Inkbird and the co2 monitor. I'll cover those up closer to flower. (or turn the co2 monitor off if I follow Prom's advice). I also need to completely close up the Window which currently just has a towl in front of it, I just need to go pick up sticky velcro and some blackout fabric (I want to be able to remove it in the day if I need to). This will then give me complete darkness with no light leaks. I also can't wait for the Zombie Kush, a strain with 20 awards should be great right? She is growing very strong and I am going to need to repot her soon.

The co2 allows the plants to go up to 32 - 34 degrees and be fine, however, you shouldn't run your plants at those temps though... the co2 bags are like a heat safety net. However in saying that, if I don't use the aircon, the temps will sit around 30 degrees in the room now already, let alone come Jan/Feb. Generating heat in there isn't an issue. So yes, during load shedding the co2 ppm is high and the temps are high as well for those 2 or 4 hour periods. However this has been this weeks temps under the lights: Are you not thinking of the old vented HPS lights?, if you google "co2 LED grow lights", there is no vented LED lights, only 1000W+ LED bar lights similar to mine. The room is sealed mostly, I can maintain a very high co2 ppm. A split wall air conditioner would solve the problem since it would only reticulate the air inside the room and maintain the co2 levels. However I wouldn't be able to connect it to my inkbird, which has a probe that I can use to monitor the "leaf temp" per-say under the lights, and control the cooling around that being about 27 degrees. I'm not completely writing off a split unit aircon as a solution, I just need to do some more research into it. Right now though, having my plants get high co2 for 12 out of the 18 light hours per day is acceptable to me for now. How much it impacts the growth I have no idea, but since I already have these co2 bags they can hang out there for now

Hi, thanks why would I run different lights for co2 and what different lights would I run? These are 700w Samsung LM301H LED lights, that's 1400w over the 2.4m space... Or am I missing something here? Thats awesome to hear, thanks man

Dear Diary, Today I decided to finally start this diary and share my growing with other community members. This diary will cover my indoor and outdoor growing, but lets start with the Indoor Grow Room. After much effort and time I finally finished off my indoor grow room: You can see the full YouTube video tour of my Grow Room HERE To explain what you are seeing here: The space itself inside is about 3.2m x 3.2m x 2.3m high. All walls have been covered in Diamond Mylar and sealed with Aluminum ducting tape. I'm using the tent pole frames of two 1.2m x 1.2m grow tents. In the far back corner, I have a 12000BTU aircon connected to a Inkbird ITC-308 Wifi unit and vented through the ceiling. This unit controls the aircon based on the temperature under the lights, It's set for 25 degrees as optimal. When it reaches 29 degrees, it turns on the aircon and brings the temperature back down to 25 degrees. This leaves me with average temperature of about 27 degrees on the leaf surface. On the back left, I have a GMC Air Purifier with a medical grade HEPA filter, this is used to filter the air on the Grow room and remove things like Powdery Mildew spores. It can cycles the rooms air one every 30 minutes or so. How much of a difference this is actually going to make in the room is still questionable, but I'm trying it out. In between the grow lights hangs three senses. One for the Temp / Humidity sensor on top of the first light ballast. The 2nd sensor is for the Inkbird controlling the aircon. The 3rd is a Inkbird IBS-TH3 Wifi provides me with the temperature and humidity readings on my cellphone with reporting. For this grow, I bought myself some Sunplus Sundro 700W lights (https://plantliving.co.za/products/700w-led-grow-light-lm301h-8-bar-quantum-with-uv-ir-sunplus-sundro), these are connected together and linked to the Touch Screen LED master controller (https://plantliving.co.za/products/sunplus-master-led-controller-touch-screen). These lights run their Blue, Red/Far Red and UV on 3 different channels so they can be controlled individually.. from the touch screen... Like Sunset and Sunrise... this shit is like cool. Currently the plants are vegging under 70% blue, 20% red, 20% UV for 18 hours a day. Using 3 Wild Spirit CO2 bags, the keeps the CO2 around 2000ppm for the most part of the day. However when the Air conditioner kicks in, it extracts a lot of air from the room, lowering the CO2. I'm not to sure how to get around this since a wall mount split aircon can't be connected the Inkbird Wifi controller. Any suggestions welcome? The 8 plants are using the Autopot system and are Feeding off an 85L reservoir sitting in the front of the room. The grow room is connected up to a 3kVa Inverter connected to a 4x massive battery UPS . The exception to this being the Aircon and Air Purifier which are on normal power. When there is load shedding, I drop my lights to use 15% power (Well I press the "Cloudy" button on the touch screen controller, fucking worth every cent yoh). The UPS can hold the grow room like this, my Internet, PC and girlfriends PC for about 2h30m. If its a 4 hour load shed during the day, I can remove the towl from the window and get sunshine into the room which provides more than enough light. As for the indoor plants themselves, these are all clones from cannaclones.co.za and we: 2x Terple - InHouse Genetics 2x Zweety Inzanity - Ethos Genetics 2x Critical Cheese - Unknown 2x Dozi Killer - Jungle Boys Genetics I'm currently feeding these plants NutriGold (Nutriplex) hydroponic nutrients, with Silicon, Calmag and Fulvic Acid and the plants are planted in the Atami High Porosity Coco. Then for my Outdoor Grow for this year, so far we have: 2x Planet of the Grapes - Ethos Genetics 2x Mandarin Cookies v2 - Ethos Genetics 2x Blueberry Sunset - Unknown 1x Chempie x Purple Punch - Ripper Seed Genetics 1x Zombie Kush - Ripper Seed Genetics These little guys are planted in freedom farms green bag and chomping on Biobizz fish-mix for the moment. They spending the day in the Sun currently and the evening/night in the Tent to make up the 18hours of light. In November, I will plant them out into their 25L/30L pots using the Freedom Farms Green Bag amended with the Elemental Blend from Dirty hands. From here they will spend 100% of their time outside. I will be using a combination of Biobizz and Dirty Hand liquid nutrients, alone with some top soil amendments, Bio Boosters and all the Organic goodness you could ask for from an Outdoor grow. Well that's it for now, I will update again once I have some more content, let me know if you have any questions.

If I hadn't just put my order in for 2x sunplus sundro 700w lights, I would actually consider these.

So that's what I thought - I've just finish doing all the walls in diamond mylar and I'm testing out using the tent frames as a structure to hold the lights, scrog nets, co2 bags, etc. If it works well, then I will order 25mm camping polls and build my own frame that's more sterdy and perminant. Means I can reclaim my tent polls and sell my tents. Also I dislike tent growing and not being about to get to every plant easily. Now I can literally walk around them.

Sorry to bring up a dead topic, but these lights are now available in the country. They brought in by Syntech and Plant Living (https://plantliving.co.za/collections/grow-lights?page=4) has the best pricing on them so far.

They both come with dimmers. The first one has a standard dimmer and a dimmer for "UV & 730nm IR" (To be honest, I have no idea why they bundled these ends of the spectrum together on 1 dimmer... The 730nm says "stretch" and the UV is like "nah bro... don't do that"), I guess the UV does have the benefit of increasing THC production. The Lumii has a dimmer with set values (240w, 400w, 600w, 600w+boost (ie: 690w with 720w draw) thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.

I already have a 3kw inverter and 4x deep cycle batteries, holds 1200w for about 2 hours. In the new year I’m putting the whole house and the grow room onto solar. so…

Hi Guys, So I been growing in 2x 1.2m tents using Generic 640w - 8-bar lights running samsung 301H and osram 666nm diodes, with 730nm and UV and they look like this: I can't say that I have been overly impressed with them, they work fine and have produced some quality flower, but... I then decided to buy a Lumii Black 720w LED, as I was going to do some cloning/mother stuff, but then decided against it, However, buying this Lumii light has started a head spinning series of testing which has left me feeling rather undecided. So first off, this Lumii LED is monster bright, but in the region of around 12 000 lumens brighter than my existing 8-bar Samsung 301H lights. The lumii spectrum is 50/50 red blue (3000k + 5000k), while my existing lights are more a 70/30 towards the warm side of color spectrum (3000k+3500k+4000k). The only real advantage I can see with my 8-bar lights over the Lumii is that the 8-bar light has UV & 730nm IR on it's own dimmer, however in my past 2 grows, my plants have shown foxtailing and I'm suspecting it's due to this. My grow space has now gone from 2x 1.2m tents to a 3m x 3m grow room, in here I have placed the frames of the two grow tents (to hold the lights) and I will be growing 8 plants in this "2.4m x 1.2m" tent frame area, so I will be utilizing two lights at once. So here are my options and I would like your options please: A. Continue with existing 8-bar lights because Lumens isn't going to make a difference and you better off the 730nm + UV. Also it has pretty purple lights... B. Buy another lumii 720w LED fixture and run two of them (Feel the POWA). C. I wouldn't do either of those, If I had R25k - R35k to spend on grow lights, I would rather buy 2x ___________________________ lights. D. ooooooo Look at the pretty purple lights....

This does make sense and I did notice that after about 4 hours the co2 was back up their again. At first I thought it might be a temperature thing with it putting out less co2 when it's cold and more when it's hot in the tent, but the breathing you explain does make more sense. I've got the bags in the tents now, I just rigged my extractors up to timer switches, so every 4 hours from 6am to midnight they come on for 5 minutes and just clear out the excessive co2 and just cycle the air. I'll stick with this until my Inkbird devices arrive. The humidity hovers between 10% and 30% during winter with warmer days being below 20% humidity and October being the worst month (lip-ice sales soar in JHB come september/october ). For flowering it's easy to manage, but for veg you basically running humidifiers all the time. For lights I have: tent 1 & tent 2 - 700w Samsung 301H 8-bar spydr light tent 3 - 720w Lummi 6-bar light I'm currently running all lights at 400w at roughly 60cm above the plants. So here's my logic right for VPD and the way I run my RH. So for veg it wants to be warm and humid during the day and cool and "dryer" at night , essentially simulating a tropical climate. So at the moment I run my tents at about 28 - 30 degrees with a RH of around 75% - 80%, then when my lights turn off at midnight, the humidifiers stop and there is no more air extraction. The humidify in the tent drops slowly with the temperature until 6am in the morning when its about 18 degrees in the tent and 50% humidity. At this time the lights come and by about 8am the tents are at about 25 degrees and I come in and turn the humidifiers back on. Doing this allows me to slide my plants up and down the early veg VPD line with the temperatures going through their normal warm / cool cycles. So far my plants are growing at a good steady rate, looking healthy and are praying nicely to my lights. How much my VPD antics are influencing their current health and happiness is debatable, but I do think "simulated summer environment" is helping with the growth rate (or at least it is in my head, which is all that counts right? ). This is my first time using VPD as a measurement factor and so far things seem to be coming together nicely. I promise I will post the grow diary of it soon, but here is a 8 day apart photo of one of the tents:

All good my guy. So I'm based on the west of Joburg and today it's reading 13% RH outside - I permanently grow with humidifiers during this time of year and then dehumidifiers in summer. Right now all my plants are in veg and I'm currently running my tents in a good VPD zone for early veg of about 28 degrees and 75% ~ 80% RH (during lights on that is, when the lights go out, the humidifiers go off). So interestingly enough today, I'm only getting a reading of about 1000ppm coming out of the bags, I have them back in the tents and co2 is sitting at about 850ppm atm. So maybe this was just an initial activation burst of co2 or something? If you say they only pump out hectic co2 for about 2 weeks or so, then hopefully I will be able to get use out of them. Thanks for the info, greatly appreciate it.

Hey all, So when i first started out growing, I grabbed a "Small Because Nature" co2 bag and when I got my co2 meter, I found that it wasn't really putting out that much co2, I wrote them off as gimmicky. For my new grow where I am doing a little bit of min/maxing with plants, I came across the WILD SPIRIT CO2 MYCELIUM BAG - It says on the package that only 1 bag is "needed" for a 1.8m³ space, I have a 1.2m x 1.2m x 2.0m (2.4m³) so I figured it might a bit low, but I would give it a try. They arrived yesterday afternoon, the first thing I noticed is that they advertise 3 different versions of mycelium, Grey Oyster - Quick release co2 King Oyster - Medium release co2 Shiitake - Slow release co2 The bags that were delivered happened to be the King Oyster variant, which I was super stoked about. To activate the bag, you have to pull these orange clips that separate the two and then break up the mycelium and "massage" it down into the substrate. I do this at about 15:00 yesterday afternoon and go pop them into my tents (I have 3 tents, so one bag per tent). I figure they probably going to take a week or two to start colonizing the substrate, but I'm just curious, let me charge up my co2 meter and check it. Now... Either I am losing my mind here or this shit is just straight up, fucked up. I put my co2 meter into one of my tents at lunch time today and it reads 3000 ppm. "No ways... let me check the other tents....tent #2 - 2800ppm, tent #3 - 3500ppm... ". So thinking this can't be right I take the co2 meter outside, it resumes back to around 450ppm, walk back into the grow room, 800ppm, into the tent, 3500ppm I decide to fire up my extractors and just bring in some fresh air. Nothing like three 150mm extractors sucking harder than a hillbrow hooker. I get the tents back down to 500ppm, turn off the extraction, zip up the tents, close the grow room and off I go to the shops. 19:00 tonight I decide to go "troubleshoot" this strangeness. On my walk there, I think that it's impossible that 24 hours after activating this mycelium bag that the ppm would be this high. I unlock the grow room, walk inside and the meter instantly clocks out at 5000ppm. After resetting the co2 meter outside the grow room, I go back in, clocks out again at 5000ppm. I instantly fire up the extractors, open the windows and turn all fans to flush the room. After about 5 minutes or so the levels have dropped to about 1500ppm. I have removed these bags from the tents and put them on a table outside for now. I tested my meter in one of the tents after I have run the extractors and it stayed at around 750ppm, so it must be the bags. I held the sensor again the facbric breathing hole of the bag and it immediately climbed over 4000ppm. However, could 3 of these mycelium bags in a 34m³ be producing lethal amounts co2 24hours after activating it? Is my co2 meter fucked? (its reading 450ppm for ambient air outside and if you breathe into the sensor, it climbs accordingly. How can 1 bag be "needed" for a 1.8m³ space when in a 2.4m³ space it's already at 4000ppm within 24 hours? Am I going crazy, or are these things really that ridiculously potent?

So the interesting thing with CHS is that there doesn't appear to be a consistency in it. For example, there are real cases of people who get sick if they smoke bud which has been sprayed with neem oil, but don't get sick if they smoke other bud where neem wasn't used. But there are also cases of people getting CHS from none-neem oil cannabis or even synthetic cannabinoids when there is over usage. Some say it's people just prone to CVS, but then why does hot baths or showers relieve it. I'm finding it very interesting and in reality, I'm not sure why this bothers me, I've probably smoked kilograms of weed sprayed with neem over the years and suddenly now that I know about this, I'm like

The argument is that neem oil is absorbed into the plant when sprayed during veg and isn't just a top spray.

For those using bioneem or neem oil, what is your take on the controversy of Neem Oil being linked to Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS) ? I'm a bit undecided on it, I think I constitute being a "heavy" cannabis user (I go through about 5 duk joints a day and way more on weekends), I've never encountered CHS.

Did you get as far as people using manure in organic farming and how it's fucking up the phosphorus in the soil in these large organic grows? He doesn't advocate for the use of either, he explains where he sees organics working, where people are fucking up organics on a mass scale that its doing just as much damage as synthetic nutrients and how organics can work, but it needs a more scientific approach. He mentions where he sees synthetic nutrients being used and how its useful in controlled metered environments or when instant change is needed to correct deficiencies in plants. It allows people to experiment with the different elements, for example, upping the sulphur individually to see the impact on terpene production. I shared the video more for informational purposes, you never know, someone new might land on this page from google and the video might be interesting for them, it wasn't specifically aimed at you. My guy, I really don't doubt your superior "GrowAwesomeness" or knowledge in anyway, I'm sure you know your shit, grow the best weed and there is probably a lot I could learn from you. I don't thinking anyone here, including myself is questioning that. However, could I ask you to stop being an Organic Elitist for just a second here and understand that maybe, just maybe someone like myself might find this shit interesting and would like to experiment with this? I'm not entirely sure why this is bothering you so much, I'm not against organic in anyway what-so-ever, in fact I rather enjoy it, it's like you completely ignored the fact that all my other grows, and future outdoor and greenhouse grows are organic with top feeding