PsyCLown

I'd say get your plants right first before flipping to flower.

They still do not look happy and the slow growth is further proof of this.

I also like to pot up to 20l pots, I use those are my final pots.

Plants look as if they're being burnt.

Looking good! They look very happy indeed.

32 minutes ago, Bos said:

Contradicting opinions coming trough on this subject hahaha. In the end it's all up to the (New) grower, but they have to do some research (and there is a lot you can read up on the subject) about the different nutes, mediums and equipment required and obviously what the budget allows.

Then decide which way they want to go.

I agree completely, no reason a beginner can't start with any of those 3 and be successful.

Although I feel people are quick to push soil, quick to think it's the best thing since sliced bread and has all these amazing benefits and pros over other mediums.

I feel soil is a lot more indepth than people may realise.

3 hours ago, Ill_Evan said:

I started out with DWC and am now slowly moving away from it, mainly because I want to start getting into doing SCRoG nets and doing that with a standard DWC setup is balls to change the reservoirs. 

DWC was definitely super cheap to start out; literally just needed to buy the nutes, air pump and airstones. Cool thing is when I move away from DWC I can repurpose the airpumps for maybe a AACT system, or if I ever decide to go Autopots I can run the airpumps into the pots for some extra bang. 

Ironically, soil can be either even cheaper, or one of the most expensive options. Cheap if you pop the seeds outdoor, expensive if you go indoor with proper pots, bagged soil and Biobizz nutes, plus all the other equipment. 

But expense aside, I am having a blast using Freedom Farms Premium (Green Bag) with Biobizz. Some of the most hastle-free growing I've had yet, but I attribute that to all the mistakes I made while doing hydro. The great thing about hydro is that if there's a problem, you can immediately flush, throw out the reservoir and make your amendments. With soil, I feel like you really gotta know what's wrong before making a fix because from what I have seen, there's about a 3-4 day delay to actually seeing a result to a fix. Although, given all the buffers provided with going with soil, in order to have gotten into a really bad problem is a feat of it's own (at least nutrient wise). 

So I think I'll say, yes a beginner can begin with soil. Should they though? I think what a beginner should definitely do is buy the right soil. The biggest issue I see with beginners and soil is they either try to pop the seeds or transfer seedlings into soil that's way too hot, or the soil is entirely terrible. 

With hydro, unless you're using pool water, or live in an area with poor water quality, everything else is pretty much in your control and in a way, less can go wrong due to naivety.

Jissis I've literally gone back and forth in my head with whether to vote yes/no  

I'm going to take the question literally; should a beginner start with soil? I'm going to say no. I think a beginner should learn the ropes with hydro so they can attend to deficiencies/toxicity immediately and also learn the subtle art of 'less-is-more'. 

I have not grown hydro myself, although from what I have heard coco seems even easier than hydro and has pretty much the same perks as hydro - to a degree.

I feel coco is a happy compromise between soil and hydro. You do not have to be as hands on with coco I feel.

As you have stated before, growing in soil is the current meta with cannabis. So naturally people looking to grow turn towards soil, although whether that is really the best choice for them or the simplest way to get going and will provide great results... I am not so sure.

I have nothing against soil, I just feel people are too quick to turn to using soil and it may actually be beneficial for a newbie to use a different medium.

It will be easier for us to guide them as well if shit does go south.

3 hours ago, Prom said:

Good Morning ^^ late answer.. Thursday we play poker and smoke a lot 

You can skip the nutes with soil as a beginner. Why stress yourself.. just learn the plant, works without fertilizer. Starting to grow as a beginner.. get a quality bean (at least you will enjoy the smoke you produce), a bag of quality soil.. or 2, depending on pot size and just water it. Will still grow to a 2 meter tree in a good pot size. Can't grow easier than that..  

I get you, it can help keep everything simple.

Although let's be honest, mixing nutes is really not difficult. Measure of x amount of ml per L, throw it altogether in a bucket of water and then feed it to the plants (perhaps with checking the PH). Considering the difference this will make to your plants, I feel it's well worth the little bit of extra effort.

Also using coco, you have nothing to worry about in terms of inconsistent soil batches and you have full control over the process - as in you know exactly what nutes your plant is getting. No guessing about whether the batch of soil you're using is too hot or perhaps lacking in something. A new grower need not worry about the nitty gritty details, simply follow the feeding chart on the bottle of nutes (be it BioBizz or GHE).

No bugs will be coming out of the coco you purchased either, unlike with some soils.

Growth will likely be quicker as well in the coco.

Now for someone who started in soil and wants to improve and better their grow, what would you recommend?

They could try mix their own soil

AACT

Play around with different ratios and when making their soil and teas, perhaps try and reuse their soils and add extra amendments before using it again.

For someone who started with coco, well, there really isn't that much more one needs to do to improve upon it. They can start playing around with a few different additives and trying different "potions" to see if they like any of them or whether it makes a difference to their grow.

They could perhaps start to look at fertigation to improve growth even further and make their life easier by automating the watering - but it's not needed.

Am I missing something? I still do not see the extra effort and work required for coco. 

If anything I am of the opinion that it is simpler and easier as there are less variables. Coco is coco, it is inert.

Provided you are buying decent coco (which can be had for like R85 for 5kg brick, which is around 60 - 90 liters) you will not have to worry about bugs, you will not have to worry about whether the batch of coco you are buying is different to the previous batch. You won't have a problem with one batch being hotter than the other or having more of some nutes and less of others. The inconsistency is gone. It's a level playing field.

If a beginner grower does run into issues, perhaps they fed too little or too much nutes - this can be resolved by watering until runoff with the correct feed. Simple as that.

Is the inline fan blowing air into the tent or out of the tent?

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46 minutes ago, Ill_Evan said:

 

Assuming you will be doing the same strain. I'm not sure how to tell in advance if a strain is hardy or can take hot soil unless it's a popular strain with many grow diaries. 

I suppose if it weren't an auto flower you could pump through it but alas. Got my first autos recently so I'm learning from everyone's issues as much as possible 

I know my one Dinafem - Deep Sweet Grapefruit would have loved some hot soil cause I could never get it to show stress at all from nute strength. 

Even with a pack of 3 or 10 seeds, it's still a lucky packet in terms of phenotypes. So some of those seeds could be fine with more nutes than the other seeds.

Autos require everything to be on point, if you stunt an auto it will affect your yield. Not really beginner friendly.

I have grown in soil and currently prefer coco. Never attempted hydro though.

From a beginners point of view, we cannot expect someone living in Sandton, Clifton or Umhlanga to be experts at mixing soil and compost or to even be interested in making their own soil. People want quick and easy. So what you can buy from a store.

So we have 2 identical setups, decent quality lights, nice tent, good extraction and air circulation, temperature and RH is controlled perfectly. So environment wise, it's all good and the only variable is the growing medium and  the effort required on your usual "garden maintenance".

Both soil and coco will require you water at least every 2 or 3 days during summer when the plants are big, coco may hold a bit more water than soil though but that is besides the point. So the frequency of watering is the same. Soil can be purchased from a shop, as can coco.

Now here is where things start to differ, some people use just water and expect the soil to provide everything needed from start to finish, including flowering. I feel we can all agree that none of our local soils (which are stocked in majority of grow shops) will suffice without some additional source of nutes. This will be noticeable when compared to a plant which is receiving nutes or additional source of nutes.

Now for soil you have a few options:

• Liquid / powder nutrients which are mixed with water and fed to the plant
• AACT
• Soil amendments

Out of those options, I personally feel it easiest is liquid nutes, such as BioBizz. AACT will require someone to go through more effort, obtain more equipment and brew multiple times throughout the growing process and try source everything to go into a brew etc. etc.

For Coco, there really one main option which majority of people do - feed nutes from a bottle.

With coco you certainly have to check the PH, although in flower and once the strength of the nutes are high enough, this generally ends up within your ballpark so you do not actually have to try and lower the PH further with PH down. You do not even need an EC / PPM pen if you follow the feeding chart on the guide - so same as using BioBizz.

I do not see much of a difference between using soil or coco if one chooses to go the easy route, which I feel majority of beginner growers who have the funds available, will choose to do. If we look at people who want something easy which will "just work" I feel using bottle nutes is the easiest option, coupled with what you can buy from a grow shop.

Where is the difference? How is coco more difficult? The amount of work and effort required is the same, the only possible difference being checking the PH of your nutrient mix before feeding it to the plants. You may be able to get away with it when using a good soil which is buffered.

31 minutes ago, SkunkPharm said:

I don't have any issues with soil. It is the easiest way to grow. AACT are also a cost effective way to feed your plants. Seed sprout tea is just as eazy. Maybe I should put up an easy grow section on the forum. Easy soil recipes, aact and sst recipes. 

 

Please do, I think this will help a lot of members.

So considering the amount of threads we have on the forum of people having issues with soil, I was wondering how the majority of the forum members feel about a beginner starting with soil.

Should a beginner grower start with soil, or should they rather look at getting started with coco or hydro?

This is more applicable to indoor growers, although I am curious!

Very nice tent, how do you find the budbox pro tent so far? Quality seems good? Any concerns or issues?
Thinking about getting one as my next tent.

You want the fans to oscillate inside the tent to ensure that there is air movement and no stale sections of air within the tent where humidity could build up and so forth.

Is your 6" fan extracting or do you have a separate fan doing extraction? You want to move the air inside the tent out, to avoid a build up of oxygen and to help get rid of excess heat etc.

As your plants get bigger, or as you fill your tent humidity inside the tent will likely increase a bit too due to the transpiration from the plants.

Monitor the plants once you have adjusted the fan and see if it continues, the damage does not seem terrible.

Otherwise so far it's looking pretty good and you have a nice setup!  

Eish.

Soil, I think there are more soil queries and problems on this forum than anything else, yet people continue to grow in soil. lol

There are soo many variables and unknowns, it makes it difficult.

If that is 3 weeks for an auto, you're going to have a very small plant and yield won't be great. I have never used soil from Zootly back when I was using soil.

What sort of PH is your run off? What is the PPM / EC from your run off? Have you used any nutes or just plain tap water?

27 minutes ago, ORGANinc. said:

Yes money is something we need to consider, maybe one day we can approach a more permanent solutions. But for now,  we scrape pennies. think I need to re-answer your HOW MUCH YOU SPENDING question.

Anyways i'm actually fortunate to say the least. 

All the pasteurize / sterilize equipment you've listed above leads me to think this is nowhere near as simple as I thought it was. I did some forum searching and this particular topic had many people in stitches as to the costing modeled by something so simple ''they claimed'' (in the US) . Excuse my ignorance. Shouldn't believe everything you hear right.

But then there are other methods but i have no clue as to the amount. But a good indication of how long it would last.

This one involved 5 gallon bucket (closed off system) airstone in -airtight pipe out for distribution of CO2

4 - 6 cups sugar 

1 1/2 Gallon water

2 tablespoon yeast

last 20 days, how effective, who knows.

Will watch the video later when I get a chance to.

Is this for the mycelium or for using yeast?

Pressure cooker is one of the pricier pieces of equipment, this can be used to sterilise the medium, a smaller pressure cooker will simply take longer to sterilise all the medium as you wont be able to fit as much inside.

If the mycelium is sufficient to get upto around 1500ppm CO2 then it could be a cost effective way to achieve this as I believe purchasing and using a CO2 canister is not cheap and does not make financial sense.

Welcome and enjoy your stay!  

Wait, you lost me.

You want to know about growing some mushies in your tent to increase CO2 and want to do this yourself because of the costs involved in purchasing the bags?

Well, firstly growing mushrooms isn't hard per say, but you need to be very sterile and have additional equipment to pasteurize / sterilize the medium(s) you are working with and you do not want any trich at all as that will fuck you over big time as trich is a very aggressive colonizer and will cause tons of issues for you.

Trich is something which is not uncommon for cannabis though, it is contained in a few of those mixes which are promoted as helping improve plant health etc.

It is included in that black liquid, forgot the name at the moment... Will come back to me in a while and a few other products.

Unless you have a separate room to get the bags started in which you can thoroughly clean and let the mycelium fully colonize the medium before putting it in your tent.

Growing mushies isn't necessarily expensive once you have the equipment, really just the medium which will be required to be replaced. Not sure if all strains give out the same amount of CO2.

What about cooling as you want to keep the air exchange to a minimum from inside the tent to outside the tent and that makes extracting hot air out pretty much impossible. Got a link to the video?

Results are fairly consistent up until the R50 - R80k mark.

Thereafter you most likely find the growers with bigger setups and/or people who have been growing indoors for longer and who have invested in some quality kit.

No harm in using it, just ensure you pH your feed after adding the Biodyne.

Or perhaps try it on some of your plants - that way you can compare the plants which had biodyne against the ones which did not receive any Biodyne.

Welcome, we will need more info to assist.

What LED light are you using to grow and how far away is it from the plant.

What medium are you using? Is it soil or coco and which one?

Are you feeding it any nutrients, or literally just plain water?

Do you PH your water / feed?

Have you sprayed anything on your plants or gotten the leaves wet with water / nutrient mix?

On 8/14/2020 at 5:55 AM, DamDave said:

Thanks @growopz and.@TheUltimateNoob. I'm not gonna be fiddling or adjusting anything. Just learning a bit more about the light and spec's.

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@DamDave Part of the beauty with LEDs is the fact that they can be adjusted soo easily and this helps improve overall efficiency in ones grow.

Why run 240W when you have seedlings and are veggings when you can get away with far less?

Dim that 240W LED QB down to say 40w for seedling, bump up a bit as the plants get bigger, and once you've started flowering you can incrase it even more.

Also despite the fact that your typical QB is rated around 240W, running it at that is not necessarily needed and is likely not going to give you the best efficiency.

LEDs are more efficient when run at lower watts as @growopz has mentioned. Heat will decrease the life of your diodes (cause them to degrade quicker) and will also lead to higher power consumption. PPFD output is not linear, yes the PPFD will increase as the watts increase but you end up with diminishing returns as you get closer to the max rated power of the diodes.

My last grow I ran my QBs at 60W each during flower, as opposed to their rated power handling of 120W and results were pretty good. Obviously everyones situation is different and the size of the tent and number of QBs inside the space etc. all make a big difference to but I ended up with an efficiency of just over 1.4g/w and I had some hiccups with the plants I was running and some strains were poor yielders (one yielded a mere 7g dry, my best yielding strains were 140g dry per plant) in comparison to the others. So it could have been improved upon very easily by running better plants and filling the space (one was a male, and another was very small but couldn't put off flowering for one more plant). Perhaps I will repeat the test when I do another grow - see what I can achieve with 60W per QB (half power) and will post up the results... but this will be in a good few months unfortunately.

@SoloKush  have used EM Pro Soil and Environoc (made by Biodyne) - same concept, they're a microbe inoculant to help get the microbes going in your medium.

If you were to make a tea like @SkunkPharm then a little really does go a long way as they will multiply heavily during the tea brewing process as they have everything they need - food source, oxygen and heat. Alternatively just add it to your feed or do a watering with it.

Coco and perlite isn't the best medium to use as there isn't much in terms of a food source for the microbes, also people say using all the good nutes and PH up / down kills the microbes. If you have it, use it!

Take note that it does drop the PH, so add the Biodyne before you PH your feed.

Very nice!

Which breeders are Slurricane and Orange Kush Cake from? In House Genetics & Ethos respectively? 

Did not Top it.

Looks so nice.

Can I only determine sex in flower? Going to wait another week before going to 12/12.

Have you been adjusting the PH on your feed?

Edit: you also don't wanna stress the plant, if you want to see the sex flip to flower or wait a bit longer and she if you get any pre-flower pistils.

I'd suggest wait until you're happy to flip them, then flip to flower and monitor during week 2 and 3. Anything with pollen sacs can be tossed. Flipping to flower to determine sex, then back to veg will just slow down your grow a looot.

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A group pheno hunt? Like with some of your friends who also grow?

I feel it's a good idea, it also makes it easier to keep specific phenos as each person can keep a mother plant.

Pure sinewave should not be needed for majority of equipment in a tent.
It generally all passes through an SMPS which converts it back to DC.

Led driver
Extraction fan
Both of these normally have their own power supplies. This is typically what you'd prioritise to keep running during load shedding.

Items with motors which run on AC, that's where problems can occur if it's run on a modified sine wave inverter.


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https://www.acdc.co.za/products/600w-pure-sine-wave-inverter-12vdc-230vac-c-w-charger?variant=30469828492
And you can get batteries for R2350 for 12v 110amps