Naughty.Psychonaut

Looking good bro just wana give a quick heads up, you have probably heard of "pin holes" in your tent or "light leaks" - we talk about a hole in the material of your tent the size of a *pinhead, the amount of light that can come through that pin hole is enough to make your females go hermie. Usually on cheap tents the zips cause light leak or theres no inner flaps to cover the zips and that can be a big problem come flowering time. The reason I bring this up is, I see you got your plugs inside your tent. I see the multiplug got a little red light on it and the plug timer also got a little light on it. Not sure if you thought about this already, maybe I am a little late, but you either need to open the plug and remove the soldering on the tiny LED inside the plug, or you can try put electrical tape over it and just check up every now and then that it's still on there. During darkness you want complete blackout darkness, stray lights can give a big headache have you thinking it's genetics related or you caused the problem or wondering why there is seeds on your indoor plants. this is one people don't mention nearly enough.

wow how did I miss this herbcannasseur420 working with some absolute fire!! bound to be something real nice you got here! I remember he was asking for test growers in April, is this part of that same project or something different?

Just to clear up, the scientist type tinkering with his craft does not mean buying the cheapest bag of soil and trying his luck, that's just being lazy and calling it an experiment as an excuse. We don't pick apples from the citrus tree the exact same way we don't use azalea and hydrangea care products on cannabis plants. No "new frontier" information is going to come from someone buying already composed soil or products, as we all know each plant species demand their own specific kinda growing media, even within one genus like cannabis slight changes is needed. a tinkering scientist will be making his own soil, cause they're usually aware of the horrors of buying, well basically anything from the commercial nursery. experiment doesn't mean hitting google with a quick search and running to the commercial nursery for the cheapest product with that stuff in it. that's being lazy and wanting the quick fix. the more experienced you become as a grower the less time you spend running back and forth to the nursery or any grow shop for that matter. that's why we see the whole industry shift to biological control, living inputs. most nutrients your plants need is already in your kitchen and in the yard around your house

oh wait, you mean the leaves will make nice mulch?

lol it's just normal hay stalks that I use for the mushrooms. would have liked to use barley, but didn't have on hand

Ayy welcome welcome, hope you need someone to consume your research, always got empty jars for more weed Show us what you got going on Does your place of work also grow cannabis or am I misunderstanding that part?

I know the other Evan with the lights got a nice way to keep things dry under the canopy yet topsoil stays moist. he got some kind of plastic over the top of the pot. not sure right now if he grows synthetic or organic, but it'll benefit both situations. Oh hell yeah, good on picking up on that bro, that's the thing with auto watering systems and why I haven't gone down that route - It's the same as with most "weed knowledge" and I found a perfect picture on instagram the other day to describe it - we all went through this but we can replace the first and last picture with "watering by hand" and the one in the middle a guy ranting on about how a auto watering system is the best. Majority of growers start off watering by hand, then get to a point where auto watering systems will help them understand how media moisture works, then you hear professionals at the peak of their game talk about the "small private gardens", behind every big time guru is a private small garden grower that moves in silence. all the "new frontier" bits of information and methodology comes from a crazy scientist grower with no friends hardly every goes out and just tinkers with his craft day in and day out. those guys are the fuel to the fire we all gathering to catch some warmth from and they all water by hand. I also feel there's more authenticity to the bond formed between man and plant when watering by hand. anyway, joint almost finished so I'll jump back to the important bits. Yeah, auto systems work best when running one phenotype - clones of one mother. out of the random% of people that swing away from hand watering right from the start will get their motivation from synthetic growers. though these days I also see most auto watering growers letting go of their auto systems. not sure if they reached the next step in their journey or of they never got it right, but as of recent times, since no till living soil became the new focus, people have been using just clean water in the auto systems and it seems to work like a bomb. but then like you said, how do you manage when growing different phenos with different needs? I guess with synthetics in the res you can't cause of the fact that the feed goes with the water, but with organics the feed is already in the soil and you just giving clean water, the plants "self regulate" - take what they need and leave what they don't - in the soil. so you can grow different phenos. organics really just making everything easier for yeeeeeeears people wanted to pump organics through the auto system complaining organics is shit cause of this and that reason, but it's because people spend their time and money listening to retail floor staff that sell products, but doesn't even know 50% of the product they have in the shop. we forget where those people are and why they are there. I ask "where do you keep the aminos" not "would you please try your best to make up some randy shit trying to explain the depths of amino acids to me so your supervisor can see you talking to customers" and if I stand there listening to a guy explain to me how synthetics and organics are the same then that's my own lack of understanding will never forget how asking questions in the grow shop had one employee call the next employee call the next employee till the final boss master level employee came and still didn't even understand half of what I was saying

damn more than half a year, a lot has changed... since building my own soil and moving away from bottled nutes things have been looking different. got a small batch of 5 different phenos of the Strawberry Sugarcookie by our local master @Totemic will be cloning them all, looking for the best out the bunch, after this gona dig to find a good male to knock up a lady with. time to start crossing, also got sts long time ago to do some reversing, gotta pull my socks up and get busy! plant is about 30 to 45cm high and throwing leaves bigger than my hand. one finger one one of the girls leaves made a duck foot, not the whole leaf, just one finger bottom left finger

Harvested, trimmed and weighed. No smoke report yet will be running all these again, not happy with my trip up right before the finish line. Grape Diamonds Ethos Genetics DaggaFarmacy cut, terrible expression due to my fuckup so not best representation of this pheno. will try again. Heavy grape terps coming through still, straight grape no other smells, love it! 90g buds in jars about 15g popcorn along with the sugar leaves in the hashbags. Platinum Silk Inhouse genetics cut from a friend, bud in the photo is the polyploid mentioned earlier. same story, not satisfied with expression. will try again, fun thing about photos you can run that exact pheno again. Chem terps, kinda gross how much like actual glue this shit smells, sticks to your fingers all day gona be a hard hitter. 88g in jars and also about 15g popcorns. chek the alien bud lol Peanutbutter Breath ThugPug Genetics DaggaFarmacy cut. This is a keeper, anyone getting clones from DF do yourself a favour and try their PBB. haven't smoked it yet and can already tell it's a keeper. It's got ALL the terps, it just smells like straight up DANK weed. Got savoury notes, fruity notes, gassy/chem notes.... really hard to describe this deep rich terp that makes me high just smelling it. smaller yielder, but makes up in terps 75g buds in jars and no pop corns The winner for this round - Garlic Sherbet Inhouse Genetics cut from a friend. Name makes the terp clear, candy garlic and it's very clear hahahah stink up your whole house offensive smell but you wana keep smelling it! She was the smallest plant of the bunch with only about 5 main colas, but she made some heavy rock solid buds. had I vegged her for longer and given her more space she will knock the PBB yield way out the park, cause with only 5 main colas she gave me 68g, no popcorns. Group photo Next round is in Forbidos Inhouse Genetics Dagga Farmacy cut. Forbidden Fruits x Dosidos. tent is on 18/6 till she fills the space then flip. 1 plant 60L pot. first time I do avo tech cause I got worms, spring tails and isopods moving around and I believe the pot is big enough to play around like this. Soil treated over a long period of time with all kinds of SST, LABs, FPJ and AACT. mixed with my own worm castings and jamies elemental blend that's it for now blessed week for all, smoking more helps to stay warm

Just note - the most important roots sit right under the surface of the topsoil, the "feeder roots" as they are called do most of the nutrient uptake and should be more active in a cultivation setup for production purposes, roots that go downward are "drinker roots", plants will still grow but nutrient uptake is less. for synthetic growers it's advised to keep the whole soil media moist at all times, it dries much much faster than soil and if you got an active plant you'll have to water a lot more frequent than organic growers, but to avoid salt build up from residual unused nutrients drying up and turning back to salt around the roots. (salt build up = root burn) you need runoff to flow away when feeding synthetics cause everytime you feed the old nutrients should be flushed out and replaced with new. not sure how the bottom feeding works with this, cause it's kinda how the ebb n flow setups work, flood and drain.... but the thing there is that it drains, the plants soak up what they can and the rest gets drained, it doesn't stand in it. if you look at the professionals who grow with salt in rockwool cubes you'll see they cover that cube as much as possible to keep it from drying out at all. only the bottoms of the cubes are exposed to do the soaking up and then the rest drains away. I know mr.Third Evan the master grows with salt, maybe he can confirm this or tell me how far off I am. either way I know that a big factor to using synthetics is auto drip and watering systems that'll go rancid with organics, but auto watering system will make it that much easier to avhieve perfect moisture levels. organic media dries out slower than hydro media, but for organic growers it's a must to not let the topsoil dry out at all, so we mulch and cover crop and what not, cause the most important part of the plants rhizosphere is the finer feeder roots. that's where all the action is, we topdress and most living organisms thrive there cause of all the organic material and the desired balance between oxygen and moisture, and because oxygen is just as important to the roots as water we can't saturate the media each time or it'll sit in stagnant water, suffocate and cause other root problems. so what we do it water juuust enough to actually keep just the top soil moist, (almost the same way a drip irrigation system works for synthetic setups) what amount of water goes to the bottom of the pot is enough for the drinker roots. and this way we don't flush any life out of the soil.

I think most important part of breeding with autos is knowing how stable the parents are. just remember F1 = highest number of recessive genetics. F2 = fewer recessive genetics F3 = even fewer recessive genetics It's only really when reaching F5 where you lock in traits, or you gotta select the chosen one and BX it to lock traits. recessive genetics can come from anywhere up the lineage, could be parents of the parents' parents genetics coming through here. The parents, where they stable or also just F1's? breeding with F1's is almost the same as pollen chucking cause you not really working with genetics that's been "worked" or "stabilised" so the genetic pool you unlock is vast.

What's goooood bud, hope and trust all is well on your side For autos going through the HST you threw at them you got great results! Generally the rule of thumb with autos is "just add water" and it's not too literal, I mean they do need nutes, but the notion goes - you want to cause them as little stress as absolute possible. in most cases even LST will be too much for an auto to handle, things like topping and training is considered fringe practice when talking about autos. for the most part, you don't wana touch them. you don't wana defoliate them, you don't wana top them. you don't even wana repot them, that can also be too much stress for them. so going by the "just add water" thing, it's best to never have fluctuations in the soil, this will happen much easier when you're relying on yourself to understand how synthetic nutrients work. there is a point of growing you reach where you understand soil so well that you really do only have to add water, those will be your best growing conditions (talking rhizosphere) and it will be the safest bet for growing autos as everything is "pre-balanced" you literally just give clean water. don't get me wrong, some dudes achieve MAGIC results with synthetic bottled nutes, they have their place, but seeing as you starting out you in a very good position to decide to "go with" one thing or "go with" the other thing. in the long run, it's just a matter of time before synthetic nutes will dwindle and become obsolete, some huge movements being made in the world of organic growing. the misconception based around plants growing faster with synthetic nutes is based on the fact that people actually follow recommendations on the bottles instead, the marketing sector has mislead the masses into synthetics, cause there's a higher profit margin on these products than with organics, organics when done right will keep you away from the grow shops. and trust me, the grow shop is the very last place you wana go for growing guidance, those guys are there to sell a product and up their KPA within the company, they don't give a hoot about you aslong as you come back to buy more products. Anyway, as I was saying, you did great here brother. Probably got better results from that auto than I would have. I've never tried autos, cause of the -no time to forgive mistakes- characteristic all autos come with. I still run into hickups with each grow I do. Learning every day still. Just another note, those plants got stunted at some point right, and a stunted plant will obviously not be taking up nutrients the same way as a raging prolific plant. so maybe rethink the way you're cross referencing and approaching the next grow. the leaf necrosis you see there might be from root stress. nutrient lock out from not being able to use the nutes you gave it, cause it was spending time standing still from the HST you put it through. What may have saved you is that you planted directly into your final pots, so root space was more than abundant, but as the knife cuts both ways, it's also very easy to get the watering wrong when dealing with any small plant and big pot. even with photoperiods, most new growers over water their plants when starting out. the moisture levels and the watering technique for organic growers and synthetic growers also differ a bunch, but in both situations it becomes harder when it's a bigger pot and smaller plant. so with autos it becomes that much harder as they don't allow any slip ups. so yeah bud, pat yourself on the back, you did great here! If you going same route next grow one thing I would suggest is leave the training completely. those photos of Mr.Canuk training, not sure if it's autos, but if it was he probably mentioned that autos shouldn't be trained but he is taking chances, I would argue that it's based on his skill and experience level. that man knows exactly what's going on in his soil, I've probably watched all his videos and he also knows exactly what to do and when and if he runs into problems it's a matter of hours before it's resolved. If you're at the level of being one step ahead of the plants then you can take the chance to train an auto, but I wouldn't recommend it for beginners. Honestly I wouldn't recommend autos at all for beginners, you can't clone them either. so it's a one and done, what's the fun in that? also a bit counter-intuitive if LST/HST is meant to increase yield, but try it on an auto it'll cut your already smaller yield into half or even worse you only yield like 20g best way to get the most out of an auto is no training, no stress at all and then still you wont be able to achieve the yield of a photoperiod. one should never expect photoperiod results from an auto not even if everythings 100%

Yeyeyee that's the thing, and then also when you get into lab testing, most tests will use somewhere between less than 0.1g up to 0.5g for taking a reading, but the next becomes very obvious if you take any 0.5g part of the plant, you not getting a good sample. so as with all things run through proper lab testing and sequencing you need to do a field test, you look at the plant as "a field", you need to collect as much variety out of "the field" to capture all data efficiently, run the tests and cross reference them and then find an average. so what you end up doing is taking a bud sample from the top buds, middle buds and lower buds. they all get tested seperately and for extra measure another seperate test with all 3 samples mixed. the same as with humans, considering your point on how our ecs fluctuate, a plant is also a living thing, it's not made on a production line where all 100 is the exact same, it's not an object that comes out the machine the same every time, as I was saying same as with humans the same with plants, they're living things and because of that you'll have situations where the top buds are of way better quality than the lowers and all that stuff, bringing us back to why you test multiple samples in a lab an not just one. when we smoke, that's not what we do though, we don't take little bits from all over the plant and smoke it all together, we take one bud and break it up and smoke it, that bud coming from the same plant as the bud next to it will have different lab results... cause it's a plant. You can even go finer detail and look at one bud alone, inside the bud the resin will look different than the resin on the outside, cause it's basically never been exposed to direct sunlight and once a plant isn't growing anymore and UV from the sun hits your trichomes it degrades them, usually also the first trichomes to ripen and the trichomes inside the bud will be more "fresh" and "prime". so obviously, different compounds inside them.

the same person smoking the exact same flower at different times of the same day will feel different each time they smoke it. that should be enough info

hehehee that's why AK47 was saying what he said, he was commenting on me saying this in the previous message, but yeah true is true hey Even with all that said, harvesting indica at "peak" harvest or sativa at "peak" harvest time does not mean the sativa is day time smoke and indica night time smoke at all. That's where the misconception stems from, but it's all a bit backwards. Father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, dubbed the term "Sativa" to the first Cannabis species found, because it means "Cultivated" and the cannabis plant, at the time, was highly cultivated for it's industrial uses such as hemp fiber, paper, medicine and a whole lot of other things. Indica means "from India", it was dubbed the name cause this variety of the same cannabis plant was found growing basically on the other side of the world with a whole different growth structure and grow cycle and wasn't used for industrial uses, so typically they had to call it something else - Indica was born. Ruderalis means "from Russia". The day time night time smoke is based purely off misconception created by false marketing. You only look at it like that when one does not understand trichomes. We have a window of time to play in, when you see buds are matured size and minimal white pistils (if you see white pistils is means bud is still growing, when less than around 10% of pistils are white the buds stop developing) you can start looking at trichomes once the buds stop developing. This gives you a window of time, not lunar time as in one day or one week or one month, we talk about time here the way the plant see it, so we need to learn how to speak plant. Only way is go to the plant every day and have a look at what the trichomes say. So what is "peak" harvet? I put it in quotes cause it's not a real thing. The deeper you get into it, you realise you harvest when you wana. Some like 10% amber, 70% milky and 20% clear, some like 80% amber, 10% milky and 10% clear. But in actual fact, the plant does not die in an instant when you chop them, for about a week or two theres still "movement" inside the plant after harvest. so if you see what you like today and then harvest, by the time you smoke the bud the trichomes will all look different. sooo......????? That's more of an answer than anything, but if it still doesn't make sense, look at it like this. Every genetic is different, when we talk trichomes we don't mean a chair that is a one simple object *mass produced on a production line in a factory, trichomes are like individual living things. Some have longer stalks some are shorter, some have thicker walls some have thinner, sommer are glass-like in texture some are more plastic-like, some have more resin inside, some have higher concentrations of different compounds inside their resin... they're all different. that's why you get stickier plants, granular resin plants, plants that dump resin, plants that don't look resinous but is potent as fuck, plants that are covered in trichomes that don't make you high at all.... all this comes down to the trichomes and what they look like under the microscope, they mature in different ways and at different rates and speeds. so yeah, that should say more than enough. for example (just an example, not a true thing) the trichomes on your cheese plant will stay clear till week 7 and then over night they all go milky in a couple of hours. and then right next to it you got SourLemon that's been throwing milky trichomes long before buds are finished forming, but no ambers. and then after all this, take those two phenos and just to razzle dazzle yall, do the same thing in someone elses environment/setup you may get different results again. so yeah, the indica and sativa stuff is just info for the guys starting out. I would suggest listening to or reading up on as much of Frenchy Cannoli's information about bubble hash making that you possibly can. That man will help anyone to understand a trichome better than they can understand their own dick.

Same as all other compounds with all other gene pools, thvc will differ in each plant too. And then also same as with all lab tests for basically everything in the world that humans consume, a sample is tested and a number is given - that does not mean the sample you sit with gets that same lab result. Even with compounds mainly focussed on like thc we still bud test a sample of the yield, could be a clone of the same plant and thc% may differ and it's all based on plant geoplasticity and environmental factors. If what the breeders described was ever true why do we still test our buds? If the description say so it MUST be so, so why do we still test our buds for thc% if it's already mentioned on the pack? I think it's cause we all kinda know the truth, we just have wishful thinking when reading a breeders description.

what makes you want those seeds specifically? I can 100% guarentee you'll find something way better locally. 7% thc is on the very very low side, so at its most potent, how potent can it really be? Local genetics testing 15 - 20% thc, but theres lower stuff too around 7% if that's what you going for. Besides that, the descriptions breeders give are all selling points and marketing tactics based on the selected breeders cut. The sativa/indica only indicates grow style and nothing else - short or tall plant, thick or narrow leaves, long or short flower time - no cerebral high no body high type stuff, that's nonsense. All that will depend on the state of the trichomes when harvesting - early harvest will be more cerebral high get your mind going sometimes leading to anxiety and late harvest will make you feel sedated like a body high and you feel weak and tired. Another thing I can 100% guarentee you is that the seeds need to be extremely well stabilized and then still with the most stabilized F5 and higher gene pools still give you phenotypical variation. That's why when you pop a bag of 10 seeds from one strain you get 10 different plants. That's why we phenohunt. It's a luck of the draw game, next thing to look at is - say you got a clone of the breeders cut, your grow setup, techniques and approach need to be so fine tuned and consistent to get that plant to express exactly the way the breeder described it, more often than not if we use generic soils and nutes and do the bare minimum in the way of technique then we can grow the same clone of the same pheno and get different expressions every time, because conditions fluctuate. I got many plants here, looking at indoor if I harvest during summer I get green plants and if I harvest during winter I get purple plants. Not only does the anthocyanin production increase during colder months, there is a whole different end product, the taste of the bud changes and the overall expression of the plant changes. Clear indication that environment impacts outcome. I prefer green buds as they taste better and because I like the taste better I feel higher, cause of the entourage effect and the fact that it's not only the psychoactive properties of the thc that gets you high. That's why extract makes you high for 30min and flower makes you high for several hours, the trichomeless plant material does something too. I would suggest if you want something good look at what the hype strains are at the moment you wana buy, see if you can get a clone first. If you really neeeed to buy a seed, a good rule is the cheaper the seed the more you need to buy and "dig through" like a small phenohunt to get the keeper. Generally the more you spend the fewer seeds you gotta pop to find a keeper. With that said the local guys got extremely crazy fire genetics for crazy good prices so you can buy a butt load and be sure you gona find a winner.

My option - build a light using a design that saves the life span of the diodes and the driver aswell as provides better coverage and penetration for your canopy and because the light runs cooler you may have to put a very very small room heater on a timer for about 4 months of the year. You guys - build a light that runs so hot it needs external cooling, taking into consideration that it's being externally cooled which means it's already running hotter (more W to heat less to light output, simple grade 1 stuff) so you already wearing more on the light plus you gotta get and run a AC for the rest of the 8 months of the year, cause you can only run your lights druring the day. Must be nice having so much money you don't really have to put that much time into thinking. School fees, especially for indoor growers, can get kak high. Best to at least try and take the right approach from the start.

unbuffered coco lacks cation exchange sites which means all nutrients will have less of an effect. you'll reach a point where giving and giving means nothing, you'll end up with salt build up cause the plants roots can't acess the nutrients. shock treatment with calmag does not resolve this, plus a shock treatment of Ca/Mg where there are no cation exchange sites in an inert medium may cause root burn and nutrient lock out aswell. best would be to scrap the synthetic stuff, you can't buffer that medium while there is a plant in it, take about a 3rd of the top of the coco medium off, get lekker worm castings and top the pots up with organic media and shift over. a lot of people start their plants in an inert medium then "build" ontop of that as they go. but wait, it's an auto.....? with autos it's always a "one more fiddle and I give you the finger" lol I've never tried an auto cause I feel my skill level isn't quite up there yet, to grow a nice auto you gotta be ontop of your game. minimal mistakes, minimal fiddling. Maybe ignore everything I said, do what you can with this one, but with the next batch I would suggest get yourself some photoperiods. that way you can also clone them and have a second, third, fourth, fith .... heck as many chances as you want. also, they allow you to make these mistakes and be forgiven, you can turn a photoperiod around right at the grave. and I would also suggest to move over to the organic side. salt growing is quickly becoming a thing of the past, not only cause it's been proven to not be as great as people claimed in the early 2000's and infact is a big contribution to killing the planet, if you wana know more about how terrible salts are check this out .... as a cannabis grower I just cannot turn a deaf ear to this, it's heart breaking, trying my best to spread the positivety

Biggest threat is PM due to the fall of the FAE and no air circulation. Not light schedule. Natural outdoors RH goes up at night, naturally higher in tent too as they get their air from outside, no power to push air around or exchange the air is a WAY bigger concern than if the lights are on or not. This whole thread is a bit backwards. You can watch my threads bud, I grow indoors with loadshedding with no gennies no inverters none of that fancy stuff, cause I am one step ahead of the curve. there are ways to combat and navigate the high RH, but it's got nothing to do with your lights. and you gotta stop thinking you already know the answer.

Holy hahahah so you still don't understand that things that give off heat grouped together build up more heat than when those same things are spread further apart???? You're kidding me right? Yeah. I am sooooooo tense man, ooooh you tense me up reeeeeeeaaaall bad man, aaaaahh soo teense!!! hahahah The fact that I have a QB on a heat sink - which it needs to dissipate the heat - and the bar light that doesn't need a heat sink, cause it runs coolers is more than enough information I need to give you. you just gotta stop THINKING you know better and open yourself up to learning from those ahead of you, I'm reaching a long arm out trying to help you still after you giving me shitty attitude, you should thank your stars, but don't worry, as you grow through what you go through the truth will catch up to you. I never said you HAVE to build it this way, I just say theres a better desing than QB or PCB. If you don't already know this then you stuck in the past and reluctant to move forward, you went on to disagree with me and now I am trying to help you understand something that I have dealt with a really long time ago and you going off a hunch and have no experience in the field. I'm not about to let your emotions tell me I am wrong about something I can measure. It's clear you not ready for this big step of accepting information that might help you, sometimes letting go of what we used to know is scary, I get it man. Just get busy, build that light you speak of forget about anything I said, don't let new information stress you out. like mentioned before by a couple of us - you probably gona do a rebuild once the answers reveal themself to you. and we're all here to watch and support it all when it happens

Hell yeah bud, nice to see you studying the right stuff remember not to take 1 bit of info and neglect all the rest, everything has to be in balance with everything else, you need to consider the given. The given being the given amino acids inside the soil, because perhaps the most important part you mentioned is "at a cellular level" - the higher up you move in science the more you realise how little you can witness the cells with the naked eye, you need lab equipment to do soil analytics to read the given compounds in the soil. then based on what that info tells you, you can then see if the soil is in need of more amino acids or not. the plant will react accordingly. Hope this video does not give you insentive to run to the nearest grow shop and grab some aminos just to go add it to your regime. If anything, all these soil science videos should start off by saying "If you don't know what's going on in your soil, get it lab tested before watching this video, because there will never be a video that can accuratly cover all bases of soil science" that being said, experience will bring you closer and closer to be able to guage these things with the naked eye and less and less need to have soil tested. Some old soil gurus I've worked with smell the soil and tell you very very close to what lab results will give you. Fact is, the longer you work with soil the more you realise how important lab results are, even if you're able to tell from smelling it it's still a shot in the dark. Best of the best growers get their soil lab tested, cause they have put their egos aside and accepted the fact that they can't see at the cellular level.

Hey bud yeah it's the loadshedding that's a problem. As with all big businesses they gotta look at generators and with the main push behind mushroom production being to reduce carbon footprint it's kinda counter intuitive to run off generators. Also the bigger scale productions all focus on Agaricus species, such as the portebellos and portebelinni's - they're all mycorrhizal fungi, the cultivation setup to grow those are muuuuuch much different than the cultivation setup I need to grow the Pleurotus species that I am growing such as the Oysters. I use waaaaay less electricity and have not run into issues yet. This is true to that old saying, "the bigger they are the harder they fall", like with those big setups an hour or two of loadshedding hit them quite hard and running that off alternative power will hit just as hard. My small scale production I can still get away and manage with the loadshedding.

he's gona be running his lights during the day. heat wouldn't even be only from the lights. why it's so much more important to go with a design that doesn't heat up, don't know why people are so reluctant to accept help

That's the whole point!!!! The heat needs to be displaced, like you said - so if you know that then what are you arguing about????? you know how heat build up and heat dissipation works, right? if you group ANYTHING that gives off ANY kinda heat it will build up more heat than when those exact same things spread further apart, bacause the heat is allowed to dissipate more freely instead of building up in one spot - basic knowledge dude. you learn this shit before going to school. the fact that you're an engineer doesn't even come into play here, this is basic preschool knowledge. the principle is true doesn't matter what lm/w doesn't matter the quality of diode doesn't matter any of the kak you gerting lost on. lm/w may be great indication of efficiency, I clap my hands for you smart man, but sadly ALL diodes, ALL lights, ALL THINGS IN LIFE SUCCUMB TO THIS PRINCIPLE. I'm gona say it again, try to read carefully here - ANYTHING THAT GIVES OFF ANY KINDA HEAT WILL HAVE MORE HEAT BUILD UP WHEN THEY'RE GROUPED TOGETHER THAN WHEN THEY ARE SPREAD FURTHER APART. If you can't understand that there's probably a bigger problem at play here. I didn't ask you why heat sinks are used, your mind is like a gold fish. You read a word you think you know something about then you don't read the rest or howcome it's so hard for you to understand basic stuff??? You the one that said you don't wana get technical then went and got as technical as you possibly can and then play victim and say sometimes some of you wana get technical and ask if I have a problem with it bro what are you on? It was never even technical to begin with. I pointed to heat sinks and external fans being used, because of the importance of heat displacement and that there are better ways to achieve even better results. You know about the difference in "active cooling" and "passive cooling". If you know about heat displacement, next thing for you to start learning about is how to achieve best heat displacement. There are better ways and worse ways. You'll learn in due time my friend. Build your light, I'm excited to see how long it takes before you realise I was trying to help you and you just neeeeeeded to protect that ego hey this will cost you in the long run, rather you than me.