@dbrn32 it’s all good thanks for the follow up 
If you don’t mind I have a couple forum related questions…
Is there a reason why the edit option disappears on posts after a certain amount of time once the post is created? I know of a couple edits I want to do on my previous posts but don’t have an option available
Is there a specific cap on how many posts/replies I can use in a single day on here?
Yes to both. The edit time is limited for a number of reasons but mostly because drastic edits after people have been posting in response can cause an entire topic to not make sense.
Post count limits can apply for a few different reasons. 1 if your trust level is low (new member) there are several restrictions to account to protect from solicitors and spam. There is also post limits without any other responses.
Welcome to the forum! Nice looking plants 
Thank you @Highgrow I appreciate that! Been a journey to say the least 
Leaving the Kiddie Pool - Veg Week 5
2023-11-20T05:00:00Z→2023-11-26T05:00:00Z
My they grow up fast don’t they!?
It is just about a month to the day that I put the seeds into rapid rooters and transplanted them into soil. After 4 weeks the height on these plants are getting to the point where they are eventually going to touch the lights - which is a big no no!
Alas I moved the plants into the bigger 5 x 2.5 grow room. Just to outline some specs… here is what we will be working with for the remainder of the grow:
`NOTE - The items in bold were upgraded later during the grow
Entering week 5, the feeding method is going to enter a bit of a change. After a while there generally is a concern for salt deposit buildup in the soil which in turn may cause a lockout of nutes or cause the PPM to spike higher than anticipated. Moving forward, we will be doing top watering (as I have already been doing), and then dunks, to feed the plants. The top watering will continue to be performed when the plant pot weights fall under 14 lbs, and until the weight reaches 16.5 lbs. Also by this time I am anticipating the soil pH to be pretty balanced out after dumping a bunch of 7.8 pH water on it thus far, so moving forward we will feed with pH water around 6.3 - 6.4, unless the runoff dictates otherwise
For the dunks, we will be dumping around 4-5 gallons of water into a large 10 gallon bucket, followed by our nutrient juice mixes (Yes I will be concocting another juice mix along with the veg juice - more on that in a sec), few pinches of epsom salts, and then pH balance it with pH Up or pH Down if needed. I will basically dunk the fabric pot up to the top of the soil for 10-15 seconds and then let it angle drain into another 5 gal bucket where I’ll collect the runoff from each pot for testing the soil… like so -
So along with the veg juice that I have been feeding with, I am going to start also mixing in a bloom juice mixture along with it. As this grow moves forward, I will slowly begin transitioning out the veg juice (Won’t be until a few weeks into flowering) to help ensure that the plants are getting the required nutrients. Early in veg it’s ideal to provide adequate nitrogen to grow out the plant, and as you transition into flowering it focuses more on needing potassium and phosphorous to help enhance bud growth. Each week I will reference the percentage that I’m adding to my feed water as this will fluctuate for the next several weeks
After my last feed in week 4 on 11/19, I opted to start with a dunk in order to finally collect some runoff values for the pH and PPM. Solid! The whole idea worked out great, however… the runoff numbers left me a bit perplexed and concerned -
I’ve been very adamant about ensuring the pH of my feeds were on point - to a T. So why after adding high pH balanced water for 4-5 weeks am I seeing such a low runoff pH? Granted I had some suspicions out the gate, but unless I saw these numbers go up I was beginning to think that I would need to water with higher pH water throughout the duration of the feed. Something to keep an eye on.
Also the PPM numbers were higher than I was hoping (Targeting somewhere between 800-900). So now I’m just praying that things stay alright
Lastly… the new grow room is having some trouble keeping the humidity up. This week since moving it has ranged around 45-55% RH. Think I might need to invest in a humidifier to ensure things keep growing properly here
Oh the joys and pitfalls of cannabis growing 
Grow Environment Specs:
Nutrient Feed:
`NOTE - Nutes are prepped in a 1 gallon container filled with 3/4 gallons of water
Veg Juice (90%) -
Bloom Juice (10%) -
Additional notes outlined below:
Hunger Strike & Resiliency - Veg Week 6
2023-11-27T05:00:00Z→2023-12-03T05:00:00Z
Well it was only a matter of time before I slipped up on this grow…
Last week was Thanksgiving and in typical rookie fashion did not plan accordingly for my plants while I was gone spending time with the family. The goal was to perform my first dunk which was on 11/22, and then hope that the plants wouldn’t need anything until I got home about 3-4 days later… Pushing it a bit I know… but the dunks caused the plants to weigh over 21+ lbs so I felt pretty confident that a stuffed belly would suffice
Well as anyone knows, with travel plans on one of the most popular holidays of the year, comes all the traffic that follows. So I ideally did not get home until close to the end of day 4 in the evening when the lights would soon be shutting off on my 18 hour light schedule
As a result… the plants were looking straight up depressed 
The plant pots weighed 9 lbs. That’s right - 9 lbs! Super light compared to what I’ve been working with. Also the humidity is still wonky even after feeds coming in around 45-55% if I were lucky. Fortunately though these plants showed how resilient they were! I dumped probably two top watering’s worth of feed on them, and within a couple days they bounced right back up -
So overall despite deserting them (hardy har har) they are still kicking and growing. Did some defoliation on the lower leaves some more, and continued to feed them accordingly with a dunk later in the week. The feeding/dunking at 6.4 is simply not giving me the results I need, and the PPMs are still a bit high -
For the most part… the plants look better after the feeds. However some of the higher branches are showing some weird colors/striping. The higher PPM on pots is concerning, but it may also be the height of the lights. I may opt to flush out the plants next dunk feed to see if that addresses anything
Been doing some research regarding my setup. First off the humidity being low is still concerning me so I ordered a humidifier (Elechomes SH8830) to counter that. Installed that on 11/30 and the humidity bumped up to around 65-70%. Solid!
For the lighting after doing some research regarding light coverage, I had the suspicion that I perhaps did not have adequate light coverage in my tent with a 300W light. I factored in the square foot calculations of my space which was 5ft x 2.75 ft = 13.75ft. I took that number and multiplied by 30 to get 412.5. This is the wattage I wanted to shoot for to meet the recommended wattage quota, and opted to order a more powerful light. I settled on ordering a new Spider Farmer G4500 450W light.
Lastly I wanted a bigger inline fan, and saw one from Vivosun which would allow me to control everything in my tent including the oscillating fans, inline fan, and all my lights (Both the Mars Hydro and Spider Farmer lights were supported) so I opted into purchasing that as well.
Everything should be in next week - so that’ll be fun!
Grow Environment Specs:
Nutrient Feed:
`NOTE - Nutes are prepped in a 1 gallon container filled with 3/4 gallons of water
Veg Juice (80%) -
Bloom Juice (20%) -
Additional notes outlined below:
Love the detailed notes! 
Maybe try going in with the water ph’d closer to 7 to raise it from the mid 5s
Funny that you mention that suggestion… stay tuned
I eventually figure this out a couple weeks later and I’ll make a note of that
Water at 6.5 w/ soil until you get a liberal runoff.
New Equipment & Project Canopy - Veg Week 7
2023-12-04T05:00:00Z→2023-12-10T05:00:00Z
For the record - despite some time getting to know this forum, I’m still baffled why the admin of a thread can’t edit their own posts beyond 10 minutes after it is created. Seems like a bit of a moot effort to prevent spam or what have you.
Wrapping up my previous week summary, I realized that I did in fact do a dunk on day 41, but more or less to help flush the soil. I only filled the 10 gal container with pH balanced water up to 7.4 in an attempt to not only get the PPM a bit lower, but also raise the pH of the soil. Based on some of the leaf activity I am wondering if pH fluctuations have been setting afoot amongst my plants
Alas after doing a dunk with just water, I got the results I wanted -
So here’s my thought process now… since the soil is “balanced” then I should be able to water with pH balanced water between 6.4 - 6.5 and hold serve here. We will see how next dunk’s runoff goes and figure out how to water moving forward
Fun news! The new equipment showed up late Sunday. Pretty much felt like a kid on Christmas getting excited to add some more lighting power to the tent and hopefully automate things more with the GrowHub functionality. Here are the components that I upgraded in the tent:
Setup overall went pretty well. Used the old straps to swap out the 4 inch inline that I already had in there. Overall things look pretty good -
So when a powered up appliance that connects to the GrowHub, it starts using the sensor to get the temps and begins to work. Vivosun has a pretty interesting app to say the least. It offers different recipes for each phase of the grow which was cool. Made setup a bit easier especially since I’m still in the veg phase. Also like that it provides a VPD rating based on your temp & humidity settings which is cool.
I setup my veg recipe as follows for now -
• Set lights to run at 75% capacity in order to acquire PPFD ratings
• Set inline fan/duct to run automatically for keeping temps between 70-85 F & RH between 60-70%
• Set oscillating fans to run using Natural Wind mode to replicate outdoor winds
Later in the week I performed another dunk of the plants and added nutrients again. Again I figured with the pH balanced from the previous dunk/feeds it should allow for me to water with my target pH of 6.4. Turns out now that although the PPMs are between 800-900, the pH sunk right back down into the mid 5 range. Ridiculous! How does that even happen!?
Moving forward, I’m just going to feed with water balanced out at 7.4 to keep my soil in the target zone. I really don’t want to keep dealing with any pH fluctuation setbacks - as it was the bane of my existence on the last grow and drove me nuts! I’m so paranoid with the levels that I’m literally calibrating my pH/PPM meter before EVERY feed
From here on til bloom, the goal is to build the canopy and keep training using LST. I’m going to also keep watering/dunking with the PPM of my feed water using 80% veg juice and 20% bloom juice until we flip as well to help further grow out the branches to the lengths that I want
These posts won’t have much detail outside of what was covered here, unless something drastic happens. Hopefully not though
Grow Environment Specs:
Nutrient Feed:
`NOTE - Nutes are prepped in a 1 gallon container filled with 3/4 gallons of water
Veg Juice (80%) -
Bloom Juice (20%) -
Additional notes outlined below:
Around the middle of week 7 here I finally realized that feeding with high pH water was the ONLY way to maintain the soil pH that I wanted. Crazy, but hey it is what it is. Now I know if I ever use this soil again
Plants still look good. In my noob opinion. I do believe it normally takes a couple waterings to get the ph to maintain itself. Anyone feel free to correct me if i am wrong.
Im lucky enough i havent had this issue, that i know of.
Happy growin
Thanks. Well for what it’s worth - I’m 19 days into bloom and well… watering with the higher pH water has made them look pretty
Advanced nutrients ph perfect you wouldnt need your ph meter. Goku
Thanks I’ll keep that in mind. Think it might just be PTSD from my previous growing experience. More of a “better safe than sorry” approach, ya know?
So I have had a couple requests for pics showing where I’m currently at on this grow. I’ve got about maybe 6 more weeks to fill in here and I’m doing it when the time allows for it
If you want to keep tabs on where I’m at - I’ll add my updated photos to this thread for your “hopeful” viewing pleasure
The way that I see it, there are three types of fertilizer formulation.
Liquid- nutrients are immediately available. They are available for a relatively short span of time. They come as a salt and can accumulate, resulting in pH issues
Slow-release- Sulfur-coated or polycoated nutrients, the coating is of variable thickness resulting in more of a time-release mode. I am seeing more of these becoming available to grows now
Water insoluble- nutrients are tied up in organic matter and require microbial activity to release.
What I strive to accomplish is an integrated approach to feed my girls. All three are useful in balance.
In your case, maybe apply a topdressing of Fox Farm Happy Frog all-purpose granular during veg and Fox Farm Happy Frog fruit and flower.
I started with AN pH perfect with soil on my first grow and experienced nutrient lock out due to pH. I recycled the soil’ for the current grow, introducing a multitude of fungi and bacteria as well as assorted amendments. I have experienced no nutrient problems. I tested runoff yesterday, it is 5.8 to 6.3 for the three pots
When a LST Session Goes Wrong - Veg Week 8
2023-12-11T05:00:00Z→2023-12-17T05:00:00Z
So I did something bad… really really bad when trying to LST a branch
I’ve had my fair share of slight branch bends and snaps… but this one literally took the cake. Granted these branches have had their fair share of torture, but they have more or less recovered and continued to thrive despite all that. It is really astounding the amount of resiliency these plants have.
So this leads me into my current “shit-uation” if you will. I had an entire branch snap pretty bad (Not completely off), but to the point where it can no longer support itself. At first I thought the worst of this entire situation and was a bit upset. Tape and zip ties were also not gonna be sufficient here to keep the branch supported
Remember those chopsticks? Well they came in SO clutch here -
For what it’s worth - I’m impressed this even worked. I was sure that this branch was a goner. I believe this photo is maybe a week since installing said chopsticks, and it’s already repairing itself (hence all that white residue around the break point). Granted though it is making dunk feeds a wee bit more challenging to ensure that I don’t dislodge them from the soil
Also it seems like after a few feeds of water & nutes balanced at a pH of 7.4, things are finally starting to go back to normal and am seeing some decent growth on these plants. The middle area of them shows a lot of newer greener foliage appearing which is great. Seems like all the pH fluctuations have stopped and things should only look more appealing from here on out
Did experience one slight problem with light burn on the top of the plant. I had to be sure that it wasn’t some pH based issue, and only observed the taco curling on the top leaves after the week had gone by. The light is still new so I’m getting used to it, but the plants growing, and it seems to have a “sweet spot” when the lights are about 2ft above them. I’ll have to keep a closer eye on that
Otherwise things are still moving forward in the right direction. Just gotta keep on keeping on!
Grow Environment Specs:
Nutrient Feed:
`NOTE - Nutes are prepped in a 1 gallon container filled with 3/4 gallons of water
Veg Juice (80%) -
Bloom Juice (20%) -
Additional notes outlined below:
I get it growmie just thought I’d throw it out there to a fellow Saiyan.
Thanks growmie I always appreciate any tidbits of info people have on this stuff
Also I showed that pic to a buddy of mine - and we now call it Super Sativa Goku
