Whats in Santa's sack?

[B.]

Well, I suppose you will have to wait until December for the answer, but I am going to try and at least influence the outcome... for I would like santa's sack to contain mostly cannabis.

Anyway, seasonal joviality aside... if you haven't started planning for christmas... wtf? Its October man... you know christmas starts in October... won't be long now before the T.V is awash with marketing types attempting to cheer us up with old Slade tunes and images of crystalline winter perfection.

So, I have decided... I don't particularly want to pay for bud over the xmas period, and seeing as circumstances have conspired to lead me to this point, I may as well indulge.

I say conspired to lead me to this point as I seem to have a situation on my hands that involves an ever improving growdrobe and 5 cannabis plants... you see I rekindled my interest in growing earlier this year by purchasing a 125w envirolite and installing it into an old wardrobe, rendering it capable of cultivating marijuana... a capability I demonstrated, mainly to myself, by succesfully growing and harvesting 3 plants for about 3/4 ounce of dry bud. Not a bad result for a beginner and under 125w of cfl power... well about 165w in the end as I utilised a few household type bulbs... but I expect they may not be necessary for this.

Anyway, a certain amount of uncertainty hangs over this project... so don't expect anything groundbreaking. In fact, if by January this thread is 4 pages long and hasn't had a response since November... read on as a definitve guide of what not to do.

First of all I know cfls are not ideal for flowering under... but it is all I can afford at the moment so bear with me... I do plan on purchasing another red spectrum enviro before flower, so results shouldn't be too bad. And when fortune favours me more I am going to move onto HPS lighting, but I value the things I am learning from these small grow projects.
Secondly, the genetics I am going to be employing may be unstable to say the least... I have one plant that has been resident in my drobe for a while now, she is a clone of a plant that my friend recently grew out with magnificent results. I took a cut of this plant as it had dwarfed the rest of his grow from an early stage and continued doing so right through to harvest. His grow comprised mostly of Big Buddah Cheese with a couple of bagseeds thrown in for good measure... this plant was one of the bagseeds and it turned out an absolute, sativa dominant if I'm not mistaken, monster. I'm just a bit worried about how flowering such a sativa dom plant under cfls will go... but we'll soon find out
Now to the other four. The other four are still only babies, my plan is to wait cunningly until they are just about ready and showing pre-flowers... then, hit 'em all with 12/12'ness until they give me fat buds. Maybe utilising LST tactics to allow for the massive head start the sativa bagseed gal has had. Anyway, my main concern with these 4 seedlings is their origin... you see, my friend recently harvested his grow and the Big Buddah feminised cheese plants all gave out seeds... no real evidence of hermie type action except for the odd naner on the odd bud... but this is the origin of these 4 little seedlings... seeds from an apparently partially-hermied feminised BB cheese crop.

As you can imagine, I have no idea how these plants are gonna turn out... especially considering that 3 out of the 4 got stuck in their seed shells after germinating and since have grown in a deformed fashion, but still I maintain a strange air of confidence... I don't know why, maybe its the relief from terminating my last grow project... this featured 2 bagseed plants torturing me with allsorts of problems that may have been fungal in nature, or maybe nute related, for what seemed like forever before I decided they looked male and chopped them in favour of caring for my newly aquired, and definately female, bagseed clone!

But things look good, after suffering without any air movement I finally got around to installing a basic in/out involving 2 p.c fans and a weird tube like device that I can't put a use to other than growdrobe extraction. The sativa bagseed seemed to develop problems while my 2 unhealthy males where around, but soon recovered after I disposed of them (and repotted her, fed her epsom salts to cure the obvious magnesium defficiency etc etc...)

The morale of the story is this, I have started paying a bit more attention to what I am doing after a summer of hazy weirdness and intend on getting some sort of harvest from whatever comes of these plants I have... surely the worst that can happen is a mason jar full of seeded bud... the cheese comes from feminised stock and the sativa thingy is definately a girly, so something has to happen... right?

Currently vegging under a 125w, 6400k envirolite... should eventually be flowering under about 290w of mixed cfl power, or whatever I manage to concoct... shall be interesting.

Pics and updates to follow.

[B.]

Pics...


First a groupshot... larger plant is my bagseed lady, 4 cheese hermy seedlings live on the speaker for now.





Some cheesy closeups, complete with beercans for plantpots...





Forgive me for my growdrobe lid is made out of cardboard, and lightleaks need to be addressed before any sort of flowering can occur... lol, I do plan to improve... but for now, you can't fail to admire the weird tube/fan device that is serving as my extraction... can't remember where the hell i got it from, it works great though!

[farmergiles]

Nice.

Cfls can be used to good effect during flowering, just you don`t get the penetration of light you do with HID. A bit of lst will likely bring benefits.

I don`t think there is any particular issue with sat dom plants and cfls except maybe a tendency to stretch.

who knows if you will get a herm issue? Only one way to find out . The fact that the seeds came from a cab full of (supposed) females indicates that there is a possibility but like you said you`ll still get some bud even if they herm like mad.

[sevengoals]

Super!
Nothing like growing your own bud.

[B.]

Cheers guys, quick update...

Haven't done a huge deal other than move the seedlings closer to the bulb for more lumens!
Growth has been fairly slow but I sort of expected this from the deformed seedlings.

There does seem to be a problem with my drobe though, can't quite put my finger on what it is... maybe the compost I'm using, it is a bit old, have planned to get some new stuff... will get on it!

The problem being some form of fungal infection, at least thats what I think it looks like, that has been the scourge of all the plants I have grown over the past year.

The Sativa clone seems to keep developing mild cases of it before I lop off the offending leaves, now as sods law would have it, the 1 out of 4 seedlings that wasn't deformed by getting trapped in the seed shell has also developed it! So now I have 3 deformed seedlings, 1 non-deformed but unhealthy seedling and one mother plant that has the potential to go out of control in flower!! Good stuff...

Pics...

Unhealthy seedling.




Groupshot, closer to the light!




Any ideas on what my leaf patch annoyance could be will be much appreciated!

[Shaggy_420]

i do believe santas sack contains
santas balls
one green one red

the thanksgivingday turkey however has some fine nugage in her sack

[SpankyMcLankey]

very nice man, should be an interesting grow! I've got a clone and a seedling(okay not so much seedling any more) but I've got two plants I'll be flowering in november. keep us posted mang.

[B.]

Aye, quick update... things are going very slowly at the moment... the leaf yellowing problem got much worse and the seedlings actually nearly died.

I still can't understand what the hell is wrong, I have done a grow before in the same drobe with the same everything (minus the extract, that is new... and genetics, but they is proven already minus the possible hermie problem)

It could be nute related as the compost is a mad mixture of some stuff I nicked from my grandmothers shed (lol, if only she knew!) and a smaller amount of some new stuff that a friend bought from a hydro store.

The stuff from my nans shed is really old and was like a brick, but I broke it down and mixed the new stuff in with it, gave it a good shake up in a plastic bag before planting into it... I thought the old stuff would be pretty devoid of nutrition by now, but the addition of new stuff would help with that.

The problems do seem like a massive N defficiency, but also I keep getting little brown patches on the leaves and also some leaves have purple running around the edges... which doesn't look quite right.

I decided to give them all a good feed, as I had only been watering up to this point, and it seems unnatural to give such young plants nutes... but it did have an immediate impact, new growth was more forthcoming, and more importantly... green!
This seems to be pretty temporary though, after about a week they have started getting yellow and unhealthy looking again.

I gave the bigger plant a good trim to get rid of all the dead leaves and she looks kind of bare now, but I do plan to train her to keep her inm check while the cheese catches up, so its not too bad. I also plan to go and buy some new compost tomorrow as the 4 little guys will need repotting soon and I want to make sure I can cross dodgy compost off the list of suspects if it carries on afterwards... fingers crossed this might sort it.

Anyway, slow going and a tad frustratin, but I still reckon with a splurt of new growth after repotting I can bung em into 12/12 and have them ready... well, probably after xmas now... but still, at least they're still alive!

[farmergiles]

The leaves are clawing up on the larger plants and looking crinkly on the smaller ones.

What are the temps and humidity?

What is the pH of the water you are giving them and the pH of the water which runs out of the bottom of the pots?

Could also be some kind of nitrogen lock up in the soil or something.

[B.]

Have been pretty slack of late, I think the problem has been resolved though... I think the compost I had them in must have been lacking in some nute or other due to its age, my attempts at feeding them probably resulted in N lock up or something along those lines...

Anyway, I decided to get em all out of their pots and get rid of as much of the shit compost off the roots as possible and have repotted them all in some Bio-Bizz allmix kindly donated to me by a friend to see if it worked.

Results have been astounding, in the past weeks they've all sprouted tons of healthy new growth and are looking happy again.

The big sativa clone had also become rootbound so have potted her up and she is now getting a bit big for the drobe... have started with a bit of LST type shenanigans, tying all of her branches back with fishing line! She seems to be responding well.

The 4 cheese plants are still small but coming on strong, 2 of them have stopped growing a main stem and have branched out sideways instead... giving the impression that they've been topped, but its due to deformations caused when they got trapped as seedlings... will be interesting to see how they go.

The other 2 cheese are growing in a more regular vertical fashion.

Anyway, lesson learned... don't gamble on shit compost!!

I've wasted about a month of with slow growth and other things being more important
Time to get my shit back on track

Pics to follow!

[B.]

Before I forget, I found this pic of the sativa clones mother... at somewhere around 6-8 weeks I think... cannae remember.

[farmergiles]

Repotting = good move, random soil is just taking too much of a chance.

I'd put the sat clone into flower soon, she may stretch a lot.

[B.]

Definately, on both counts!

Just potted the 4 cheeses up again, for the final time... gonna put them on 12/12 in about a week... so xmas bud is definately out the window. Probably looking at early/mid Jan for the little 'uns and reckon the sat clone will probably go through into Feb... she takes a good while if I remember from my mates grow and may take longer again under cfls... we'll see!

Anyway, at least its still going... heres a few pics... crazy how small the little cheeses are still considering they're nearly 2 months old now... but they did pretty much stop growing for a while back there.



Apologies for the darkness of this little groupshot, having light issues in the box room at the moment... my wardrobe is fine, but I can't see for shit!

Anyway, two double headers front and right... lanky one at the back and the one on the left is a real stinker!



Heres the lanky sat clone, deffo gonna need more tying up during flower... I can see her getting way out of control but I suppose its a challenge!

Will update again when theres something to tell!

Ciao for now!