Boosted my hash-making setup a little bit by finding the blue lid & cutting a hole in it. Should make working with the 1-gallon bags into 5-gallon buckets a lot easier. My last upgrade was to get a 5-gallon 220 bag to add to my original 1-gallon set.
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Did some minor maintenance on the main cab - added some velcro to the back left corner & to the left wall to hold the wire harnesses against the walls a little better:
Pulled out my light trap to vacuum off the intake filters (pic is before I cleaned them) :
I moved one of the suction cups for the bubble wand to offset it from the pick-up tube from the pump, to keep the pickup from sitting on top of it:
I made a replacement foam floatie out of foam board insulation for my humidifier. Should be much more durable than the stock styrofoam floatie, which likes to fall apart bit by bit during cleaning. Also I upgraded the wire-holder sticker to a cool little mountain goat. The bubble curtain wand for my hydro bucket is kept going in some water to keep the pores open:
Cab is ready now, but I’m going to take at least a couple more days before putting anything in it:
First I feel like making some bubble hash…
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Ran the frozen trim from the past two grows through the bubble bags & ice water. 25um, 73um, 160um in the pic. (Plus a finger hash ball from later). Only did one wash, since it was just trim. The 160 is a little green partially because I was messing around with the 220 bag for too long. Also, I use an electric mixer for the first 3 minutes, which doesn’t help. After that I stirred for 4 minutes by hand, & then spent too much time getting stuff to filter through the 220 bag.
The lid with the hole in it made running the 1gal bags over a 5gal bucket a lot easier.
After I made the hash from the trim, I cut up the plants.
Plant from the left of the cab: This one would be almost dry enough to jar. Some stems were snapping, & some were close to snapping. Net weight no main stems of the left plant was around 6.5 oz. I gently broke up the buds a little further after the pic, & got a decent finger-hash ball off of my nitrile gloves.
Plant from the right of the cab: This one is a little more damp. Nearly none of the stems were snapping. This might be more of a ‘fresh-frozen’ result. Maybe cleaner but less product than if it were drier. This one isn’t as hashy as the other plant to begin with, so I’m expecting less from this one anyway. I carefully cut up the buds further after the pic. Net weight of the right plant is around 4.2 oz, no main stems. But, they both are a little damper & have more leaves than when I would normally weigh fully trimmed & dried buds, so from around 10.7 oz net between the both of them now, (not including the paper), it all might lose another oz or more before I would start saying dry weights. Not too worried about it, but I like to have some idea of what the cab has done. I’m guessing around 9 oz is probably a close guess, if I dried them down a little more.
The bucket is in the freezer right now, & I plan to run the plants individually for two short first runs, & then combine the slurry for a second wash.
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Bubble haul:
Left to right is 25um, 73um, & 160um.
Top row is the trim run, then the tall/left plant, followed by the short/right plant, & the last two rows are two runs of the combined two plants.
The cakes were pressed out between paper towels & a rolling pin & have been air-drying for 24 hours, & are pretty dry, but not totally. I jarred them up with a silica pack each & plan to burp them daily for the next week or so, & I’ll probably check the weights again once they are dried out. Not sure how close these numbers will be, but I got around 15.5 grams off of the trim, & around 56 grams from the buds. Not sure I would do this again without drying for longer, although I wanted to try it. The first runs of the buds didn’t release many heads, & I had to do two more runs on the combined slurry before I saw most of them had finally broken off. I probably got around 15% of what dried bud weight would have been, so can’t complain too much. Most of the cakes are pretty chewy & dense with trichome material. The 160 from the final run started to get a little pithy. The 160um from the final two runs (& maybe the others) will probably go to some hash brownies as I have found the 73 & 25 from previous runs more enjoyable to smoke.
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Made some hash brownies:
I mixed together portions of most of the 160 pulls & took half of that to use, which gave me about 4.5 grams of material.
I decarbed that at around 240f for about 30 minutes in the oven directly on a Pyrex glass dish. It took most of the time to get to 240f, but it was there for about 5 minutes at the end. Forgot to take a pic but it didn’t burn, & smelled pretty good. The smell only lasted for a little while.
Then I melted 1/3 cup of butter in pots set up as a double boiler, & added the hash. I let the water slowly boil for about half an hour & whisked the butter every few minutes. I also would scrape the stuff from the sides back down into the mix, as well as added water to the pot & to the butter as needed. At the end I was a little short of the 1/3 cup, so I melted a pat of butter & added a little water to bring it up.
Wasn’t sure if I needed to strain it, so I strained it & the butter went into the brownies, & the remaining ball went onto two pieces of cinnamon toast, which I ate about 15 minutes ago. I looked at it with my scope & could see some trichome heads in there, but not sure if they are empty or what. I can say that I detected zero plant or hash flavor on the cinnamon toast, so my conclusion is that I don’t have to bother with straining, & just put it all into the brownies next time.
I only used about half of the 160 hash mixture:
The only 160 pull that I left alone was the one from the tall/left plant. It looks nicer & has more trichome material than the other 160 pulls.
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Quick report on the cannabutter. The cinnamon toast spread with the clump from the strained butter was worth making, although most of the THC did end up in the butter for the brownies. The toast was mildly effective, nothing crazy. The brownies are pretty strong. Also I forgot to mention that after I combined the pieces of 160 hash to get around 4.5 grams to work with, I ground that up as much as I could to get about 2.5 grams of powdery material which is what I decarbed in the oven & then put into the butter. The remaining 2 grams was tackier & balled up & didn’t want to grind easily, so I didn’t bake it & that is what is in the jar in the pic with the brownies. I also have 3 grams of ‘trim 160’, & a half gram of 160 from one of the other pulls, for a total of around 5.5 grams of ‘combo 160’ remaining to play with. So I could do a couple more pans of brownies, & they would probably be pretty good. The only other 160 pull I have is the one that looks a lot more hashy, so I’m going to try & smoke that one to see how it is.
Hung & test-fired the small lamp…
…& am currently filtering water for the next round…
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Nice pull on the hash. Sounds like you had a good experience 
looking forward to continued journey
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Thank you, I think I made the right call on making the hash vs. curing the buds, as well as using the pithier hash for the brownies, as they were really good & powerful.
Yesterdays bubble bubble project:
Removed algae-covered lava, cleaned the stalks:
Combed out the roots:
Trimmed & flushed the roots:
Installed plants into bucket (350ppm, 6.0pH, ‘Week4’ nute ratio plus a little cal-mag, superthrive, h2o2, & sm90) :
I’ll flip to 12/12 asap while trying to spot if they look like they will have similar growth characteristics or not, & I’ll probably try to remove one if not. I don’t have an exact plan for that, & I might just leave them if I can’t tell quickly enough & the roots/ screen/ etc. are too much of an issue by then.
Worked on setting the RH & temp. The four big dips are me opening the cab. The two smaller dips later on is the air temperature exhaust fan kicking in, & the top of the canopy should be seeing around 82f when it dumps.
Center screen Thermpro:
Right corner Thermpro, roughly same height as center of canopy:
I raised the light & set the channels to 50% veg & 25% bloom, which should be drawing about 100 watts. Meter is saying roughly 400 ppfd at the center, not including the small amounts of uva & far red from the bloom channel. I could get the same number by lowering the light & turning down the channel(s), but the cab gets a little chilly then. I could run the heaters, but it seems to make more sense to just create a few extra photons & get the heat from the driver. The heaters will still sometimes will pop on, usually when I have the door open for a bit & maybe after the exhaust fan kicks on. But the heaters are mostly there for lights-off when needed.
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Decided yesterday to pull the screen - at least until I can determine if they are going to have similar growth traits & if one or both are staying:
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It’s been about a week since these went in:
Root growth progress:
I kept PPM low as the roots grew in, & I’ve only started to increase from around 350 to around 450 over the past couple days.
pH has been hanging out around 5.9 - 6.0.
I’ve been moving back the RH target 1% day by day, & they are starting to transpire about 8oz a day for now.
Slowly starting to roll into the throttles, but they’re picking up.
Temps still dip a little when ambient temps drop, but I’m not going to worry about it too much.
Thermpro directly above the one at “screen” level:
Thermpro at “screen” level:
Leaf temps have been running around 8f to 10f lower than air temps.
Leaf VPD Calculator
One issue is that my RO filter needs a new filter insert & was letting about 80% tds through. The inserts are no longer available & I was on my last one, so, time for a new setup. Old on the left, new on the right:
The new one comes with a press-fit hose to garden hose connection, not very convienent to attach to my sink faucet. After thinking for a while & checking, I realized that I was able to pirate the seal & locking collar from the old setup which had what luckily turned out to be a male ‘garden-hose’ thread. (It weeps a little bit where the new meets the old, but so do most of the new factory-installed press-connect fittings on the new filter, so I don’t feel too bad about my handywork.) This is great because without getting any other pita to find adapters or doing any other work, it allows me to continue to use the fitting on my sink that the locking collar attaches to, which runs & looks like a normal faucet outlet when the locking collar is detached. All of that came with the old filter. It was a decent filter for around 20 years, so I’m glad that I can keep some of it going:
The new filter works well, although I see myself deleting the carbon canister & housing, the automatic shutoff valve, & also the inline shutoff valve, & any unnecessary connections. I’ll leave the flow restrictor on the drain line. Made 10 gallons at 000 ppm in a few hours at 70 psi, after flushing the new carts for 45 minutes. Full res-change coming up tomorrow.
I hope to flip asap, & then to start watching the node spacing to see if I want to pull one or not…
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Moved some stuff around with green wire for some uniformity, 12/12 soon…
Started to see some regular activity from the anti-RH fan today, which is set to run at 3% over target:
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Flipping to 12/12 later tonight:
Roots today:
To prepare for 12/12 I turned up the bloom channel to 50% power (both channels now at 50% power), & lowered the lamp slightly to increase ppfd to around 530 at the center of the canopy. It’s a little more since there are some uv & far red diodes in the lamp that my meter does not read, but maybe add 10%. I also put a timer on the humidifier circuit to keep the humidifier off during lights-out. I also added 1f to the heater controller target, & it should end up somewhere around 68 to 72f during lights-out iirc from last run. I’ll probably raise it from there a little.
The anti-RH fan is drawing down the temps a little when ambient temps are cooler. Thermpro from the last 24 hours: The big bump in temp is from me making more brownies =D. Then it coasts down as ambient temps fell, & later this afternoon it was a little choppy & got more stable as ambient temps rose a bit. I could add more % to the ‘dehumidify target’ to slow the cycles down & gain temp due to that, but soon enough I’ll be turning up the light anyway. Leaf temps are sometimes a little chilly for now.
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It got cold last night & will be for the next few days before we start seeing some warmer days again, so I switched to the Photontek at 50% power to give me 40 more watts than the Kind at 50% power, to get a little more heat going in there. I could have turned up the Kind to 75%, but that would bump up the usage by 55 watts & I think I can get closer to where I want for now temp-wise with the 40 watt bump from the photontek, & still have more than enough light. Plus I’ll end up running the p’tek soon enough anyway. Also I increased ppfd to around 550 around the center on my meter. This lamp has a small amount of far red that my meter doesn’t see. It’s going to warm up soon during the days in a few days anyway, so I might see the cab heat up & start bouncing off of the high-temp fan instead of the anti-rh fan again anyway, but right now I don’t want to see cold leaves. Hopefully it’s not too much light.
Also I moved a minute on the timer from light to dark. I’ll do that for the next four days until I get to 11h55m on 12h05m off, to maybe try & encourage onset of flowering. I’d like to go back to experimenting with the far red puck & flashing them at lights out for a longer period each night for a few nights, maybe like 1 second the second night, 2 seconds the third night, etc., for a week or so, but the puck seems too focused for my footprint & for how close I would have to hang it. So instead, adding a little darkness each night might help a little.
Not sure about what to keep yet, they might stretch similarly, but too early to tell. The one on the right has been more cranky in general so far.
‘Middle’ Thermpro from last 24 hours: The bottom of this sensor is around even with the tops of the tallest stalks. The heaters kept the box at around 72 to 73f after lights out, that should be good for now. Lights-on this morning & the Kind had some trouble getting this sensor over 76 or 77f. The leaves were in the mid to upper sixties. That seems freezing. Not surprising because It’s not uncommon for me to record things like a -8 to -10f leaf temp offset. I bumped the central heat & popped in there for an early check-in, & the box gained some heat but still was only getting to 78 or 79f. So I pulled the Kind & put the Photontek on, & it seemed to want to run between 79 to 81f for the 40 additional watts. All so far still with the anti-RH fan kicking in regularly. I unplugged the rh fan later temporarily to check & set the temperature fan sensor, since it got moved around & repositioned for the light change. It wanted to see it kick in when the air above the canopy hit around 85f. I saw that after a couple adjustments & plugged the rh fan back in, & the box settled to around 82f & climbed to 83f & 84f at the middle thermpro, with the anti-rh fan kicking on every 10 minutes or so for about a minute or so, before lights-out. I had also lowered RH target another 1%, & added 1% to the dehumidify circuit. I’ll see tomorrow how everything reacts after lights-out & back on again, & with the cold ambient temps again.
Nutes are still the ‘week4 grow’ factory veg ratio plus some calmag & I had a gallon of that left, so I pulled out 3/4 a gallon from the res & did a partial res-change to use it. Running around 425 - 450 ppm. Add-back from here out will be the ‘week1 bloom’ factory ratio, & it wants me to run that for the first two weeks after the flip, so the next res change will probably be in around a week & will get that ratio. I used to like to run the week4veg ratio for the first couple weeks after the flip, but once I started using calmag, I found that I can avoid that & just stick with the factory schedule if I use ample calmag.
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Still tough to say if they are stretching at the same rate. Possibly:
The one on the left seems to be growing better in general:
I’ll give them a couple more days, but I might end up pulling the one on the right in any case if it looks like it’s lagging. I can rotate the one on the left 90 degrees & train it across a little bit, & do six tops LST through a screen for whatever that will yield. There were four nodes on each top when I flipped.
‘Middle’ Thermpro: They are starting to stretch through this one, so I’ll probably move it up soon. The air temp sometimes bumps up & then will coast back down after I have the door open, happened both times today where it neared/reached 84f after closing it back up. Not a problem, not sure why exactly, but the panel heaters usually turn on when the door is open, so maybe that is why. They’ll put out heat for half an hour or more after clicking off. Leaf temps are running around 8f to 10f below air temps. I didn’t lower the RH target tonight for tomorrow, going to let it stay the same for a day before adjusting any further.
I moved the light up a couple clicks as not to hit the leaves with too much light as they stretch up. Moved another minute from light to dark on the timer.
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Been a week since the flip & they seem to be stretching at around the same rate, so I will try to keep them both:
Running around 575 to 600ppfd on my meter near the center. I’ll let it get up to 625 for this week & move the light up to maintain it for the week as they stretch.
Roots: Plants started chugging water two or three days ago, they are moving around 1/2 gallon a day total now. I did another partial res-change yesterday & I’ll give it a full res change tomorrow at the flowering ratio for this week. I’ve been goosing the PPMs up with the addbacks, running around 475 now after add-back, they’ll probably want a little more this week. I’ve been keeping the pH around 5.8 to 6.1, & adjusting as necessary. They like the new water filter, as long as it keeps filtering well. It’s faster than my old one which is also nice.
I made an ‘LST bar’ for each side & will install these tomorrow in place of the screen-mounts, in order to give me something to send training wires out to the stalks, so I can put some space between the tops. I think trying to lay a screen down now just for spacing/support might do more harm than good. I shouldn’t need to pull/move the tops apart very much. I’ll probably have to add more support later on.
‘Middle’ Thermpro over last week: Tired of losing heat during lights-on (still pretty cold this week), so I caved & set the plate heaters to run up during lights-on. I noticed that the cab got cool enough for them to be cycling at their ‘lights-off’ setting & not getting the cab above 78f with the lights on, so I could either set the heater controller with the built-in timer & a low set-point in order to not run during lights-on, or if I’m burning the power I might as well run the target up to where I want the air temps to be. So I did that, & they are still timed & set to run cooler during lights off. I set the target so that the air at canopy level should run at around 80 to 83 f during lights-on, somewhere around there.
I did that a little before 7pm on yesterdays Thermpro chart:
Todays Thermpro chart: Air temps much more steady. Leaf temps running around 10f below air temps during lights-on when I tested.
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Trained to the LST bars & full res-change yesterday:
Haircuts today:
Also spent some time today before & after the prune, comparing data from a Thermpro temporarily suspended over the center of the plant to the traces of the other two in their usual spots, to see if I could notice anything:
I hope these things continue to stretch similarly…
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Two weeks since flipping to 12/12, did a full res-change today, switching from last weeks nute-ratio to this weeks. I’ve been running PPMs fairly low but showed them 500 with the res-change. Plant on the right showing signs of cal-mag deficency so bumped that up a little as well. After drinking all day the PPMs were up to 520, so I cut it to 490 with some add-back tonight. pH has been running around 5.9 thru 6.2 with minimal adjustments.
Plant on the left started growing taller than the plant on the right, so I trained a couple tops shorter using clips. The one with three clips wasn’t bothered, the other one got beaten up a little & is still recovering. That top is still clamped a little, & running a higher leaf temp than the rest. The others will be ~ -10 leaf temp offset, it’s been hanging ~ -3 since it’s still having trouble transpiring. Starting to wonder if I’m going to regret having kept the plant on the right, but I’ll know more in a week once they’re nearly done stretching. In a couple days I’ll do some more trimming on some of the lowest stuff out by the corners, & maybe steer some tops around if needed. Trying to keep the strongest PPFD at below 700 for this week, been having to move the light higher around four clicks a day to move with the stretch.
Top Thermpro from the last 24h, & the last week:
Much better stability with the plate heaters until it warms up around here some more.
It’s been a little rainy over the week, so the anti-RH fan has been running a little more often, pulling the box temps down a little & ending up with a little higher RH than on days with lower ambient RH, but it’s still staying decently warm & pretty stable. Plus I’ve been in & out of the cab more than usual over the past few days, which puts the big ‘random’ dips in the charts. I don’t mind that it’s a couple degrees lower than it could be right now, mainly due to the recovering top. Hopefully I don’t cook it.
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I saw how you did it but I’m curious how you actually get such a flat top. Mine are under t-sopo journey. Eeyore and Lucy.
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My first suggestion would be to not do what I’m doing now, which is growing two plants from seed in one bucket. Really this cab does the best in terms of training ease with one bucket & one plant. With two plants & one bucket, I’d be better off with two matched clones instead of two plants from seed, since I would avoid the potential issue of two phenotypes growing to two different heights like what happened last grow. This grow the plant phenos are somewhat similar, but the one on the right has three tall tops & three short tops, probably due to the early lst training down to the edge of the bucket I did on the right one early-on. Also I had to put some bends in a couple stalks on the left plant since it was stretching a lot early, & I ended up damaging one of the tops a little bit. Funny because the right one was the overall a little taller than the left one initially when they went in the bucket. So for the future I plan to mostly work with one plant scrogs to try & get flat canopies that way.
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Sorry I was referring to the earlier grow where you used a plant clip and bent the main stem 90degrees to get that uniform growth. Did you slowly bend it until you could get the clip on or just bend it and set the clip? I’ve broken countless shoots just trying to tie them down.
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