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CannaSanta swung by in June dropped a load of stuff along with a few selected phenos will be making mothers for future clones and what not, few strains I'm excited about, some just came with the batch, couldn't say no... not the everyday drop off Pineapple Chunk - Barneys Farm Cherry Pie - Unknown breeder CannaHealthGenetic#21 - CannaHealth Sunset Sherbet - Seed Junkies Peanut Butter Breath - Thug Pug Inzane in the Membrane - Ethos Genetics Zweet Inzanity - Ethos Genetics Grape Diamonds - Ethos Genetics Forbidos - Inhouse Genetics Garlic Sherbet - Inhouse Genetics Platinum Silk - Inhouse Genetics will be selecting from this batch for future monocrops once I start a new batch. will have to do seperate project for breeding, have to work through quite a few seeds and select which of the batch mentioned above gona be used before breeding starts.

I don't pH because I don't use much fertilizers, if any. Also using rainwater. My soil PH at the beginning of a run is always at a desirable 6,9 noting the higher nitrate levels for a decent start to veg. Having one fixed number for pH is not always correct, as the Ph in the rhizosphere generally changes throughout growth periods, ending in a more acidic ph. If ever I was forced into a corner and had to use tap water, I would use it without pH'ing it and just letting it sit for 24hour, because your will notice the pH drop to a suitable range without adding any chemicals, if you are fertilizing, you are on your own. I have my style of growing, and my soil is more than 3 years old, with consistent love and care it gets better by day.

Round the 100 day mark for the big lady and day 70 for the purple one.

never the less, a test is a test. no funny business as a intermediate grower I would rather give advice that I would have liked to recieve when I started out, because the advice that circulates a experienced growers conversation and a learners conversations is also two vastly different things. like I said, I was left scratching my head way more taking advice from people who advocate the "just know better" notion. infact it was infuriating listening to advice that doesn't help at all. then scoop water from the dam? I think there is more than that to it? have you tried a cannabis plant in pure double grow potting soil? I've lost many many plants to generic potting soils. the biggest problem there is inconsistency. one bag has 0.3 EC, the next bag has 9.7 EC..... I wouldn't plant anything in generic potting soil ever. different strokes hey what would help, IF you wanted to go that route, is to have tools to test the soil to see what you need to do to it to get it in the right range.

Hello @CreX time to come out from where ever you have been, okay thank you, see you soon

well say you're on a wine farm talking to one of the farmers it would be pointless to say "I am doing a monocrop here" and assuming he is talking about grapes only. in most cases it's variety/strain specefic. so when you hear a wine farmer standing on his wine farm saying those words, he means he is growing one specific kind of grape in that specific area of the farm, because grapes grow differently just like with cannabis you got the late crop and early crop and everything in between, some varieties need a bit more water than the others. some need more heat. some need the first sun of the day. some are more frost tolerant. some need more nutrients and all that fancy stuff, which means they all require slightly different conditions and so they end up moving one specific variety to the desired area, so when you really get into the whole farmer talk you'll see the talk within the talk there's probably better terminology, but in this case I was doing the same here with my little farm. a "mono-strain" crop

Can someone please explain to me how this term ended being used for growing out cut only cultivars/varietals ? isn't it already a monocrop if you are just growing cannabis ? - I've been hearing it a lot lately and its just so confusing because in agriculture it simply means growing one crop and only that crop on your land no ?

Just filled 100 10L pots with FF green bags.. had no issues with pH so far.. even I actually broke the 'biological' rule at the start. Stopped feeding the Silica... as is chemical. Run it without or till TopMax is back. I had 2 plants needing a flush.. they are fine and green again. Not sure what I do with the Silica now... should have used my head before I bought it. For any lockout the plant shows a different sign. What ever pH you have, the plant will show you that and you could diagnose your pH level with those signs.. without using a tool. For that you need to know the signs. When i started 35 years with my first plants, you had the bible (Cannabis Grow Encyclopedia) and that is it. You found more or less all in that huge book.. but searching, reading and pictures made things not over all easy. Next person you could ask are friends, if they also grew, otherwise.. nothing, no help. Today with the internet, if I run into a issue I can't answer, i study what is different and simply look on the internet. You are never the first running into a hemp grow issue.. and loads of people already made a post somewhere about exactly your issue. Finding it is not always easy.. but is out there, trust me. The sites like this also helped to pool some knowledge together, is why I say run a grow diary on your first grow. More then enough people in here to help with the common issues first timers run into. Reading a few of those diaries before you start prepares you rather well. Buy tools when you learned it and want to go deeper into understanding. But first time grower i would still advise, buy a bag of FF Premium Classic, and grow just in that soil with water.. what ever water. Pot up like you should if not an auto and learn growing a plant in the first place is not given to all out there. Winter just makes the outcome look less successful. For somebody to understand the importance of pH... this picture shows you what the plant can absorb in what ranges... and you see why stick to where you should stick

There will always be inconsistencies potting soils, Okay let me say craft cannabis soils but the person who is growing his first plant doesn't even know where to start, let alone test EC and PH and what is all means. I think just those 2 things are far over many peoples heads is what im saying. Its the grow stores fault, always insisting you need every nutrient on the shelf, the best thing any person could do when starting out, is just get some CRAFT cannabis soil and water the dam thing. Hone in on how the plant grows, how the colour of the plant changes as it grows, then figure out where the needs are developing, we all want to be ahead of the curb and have fast growing plants from the start, but this is always brings about the deficiencies caused by excess. A backlog of nutrients is always the problem. Its just like our social food culture, we are never needing when it come to food lol and that shit comes to bite us in the end, when we all but prematurely withering away, luckily nobody has to smoke us. I always try preach the same thing to any new grower, just water the plants. if they need something, they will show it, if not post some pics and we can recommend some food stuffs.

wait, let me stop with my opinion before I get called out for arguing again just let the experienced ouens talk and keep my bek shut, looks like I still got tons to learn aswell! cards are on the table, next move is up to OP

Because i'm not happy with just good, where your ppm test tells you how many total dissolved solids, I want to know how much of each nutrient is available from each of those solids.

Having the privilege or not, I decided after using tap water for sometime, more than a year and a half, that rain water would be better and from reading much literature, it is better, I slapped a small jojo under the pipe and zipp tied one of the 200micron filters ram filters so that the water doesn't have much debris. Plus I use blumats so I try to keep it clean, as this should come without mentioning. Things take time, mistake will always be made with new growers, getting everything right first time is almost impossible as we all know. My advice to a new grower and the way things work for me are the same thing, I always say what works for me, and also what involves the least amount of effort for me, as I like my growing the be the least labor intensive. But that doesn't mean people will listen, people want to take the long way around, that's fine, we all did it at some point in time. Then another thing we all know, is that there is more than 1 way to skin a cat. I'm only just learning that my way is not always the right way, even if the plants are happy, people can get happy plants with different methods.

lucky you guys with year round supply of rain water for all your plants! very few growers have that privilege would this be your advice to a new grower though? or are you just saying how things work for you? as this is clearly a thread started by a new grower wanting to learn how to do these things, cause no one ever mentioned use of rain water to our fellow newcomer till I mentioned tap water can be a problem, so all the while the standard was rain water? I must be living on Pluto! did you do this from the start and never had issues? from testing my own rain water just collecting over night it's not always 0 PPM, I sometimes get between 0.1 - 1.0 EC, cause the rain collects shit on its way down. it hits the roof, runs through gutters, comes out with stuff in it. Sometimes cleaner than other times. Do you do anything to make sure the rain water is clean or you just collect and use without a care? During my first few months on the forum I was left scratching my head way more than I was after I just used the right tools just once.... because humans can be wrong sometimes, just like me, I can be wrong that's why I still use my tools 🛠

@Darclinc hope all is well your side! As you can see even a seasoned grower change their situations and products they use over time and just introducing a new type of water or a different nutrient product you can have quite adverse effects, specially if you don't research the product properly. I have also seen situations where the product itself does not match what the lable sais, sometimes it's marketing, sometimes a batch flaw and in all these cases you can contact who ever you got the stuff from and take it from there, but without tools you would have to let the products to the damage first before you can call it. in my opinion that's a waste of time and resources. I don't wana burn my plants to have to learn, I would rather just learn and have healthy plants I have a PH probe and a PPM probe. I use them both. however I use my PPM probe much more than the PH probe. There is quite a strong stigma around the whole "Don't panic, it's organic" bullshit... I've heard it everywhere from vegans to agriculture and everywhere in between... The horticulture community love this, I have heard it plenty of times, infact I have heard it WAY TOO MUCH, how people will demote the use of PH and PPM probes in organics simply because of the fact that it's organic. Well, I have learned my lesson, was left standing scratching my head.... did the advice givers actually really wana help me? or did they wana make me feel inferior, because I don't understand the plant as well as they do? or maybe they just didn't really understand it themself? could be any of those, but trust me when I say this, I have learned way more from using the right tools than from listening to people. Back to PH / PPM.... even though all the talk here is about PH swings, it's much more likely to run into deficiencies or toxicities when working with living soil and slow release fertilizers that need to be broken down to become available for the plant, everything will be fine then one day you see heavy discolouration, what do you do? run to the forum and ask??? try to recall what you did last, did you feed it a lot, give clean water? and and and..... all this will cause more confusion and cost a lot of time and in the end more damage will have been done. what you should do, is get clean water with a PPM of 0 - 500 and a PH of 5.5 - 6.5 (very easy. most tap water and bottled water fall in this catagory, you can go to a local spar or pick n pay where you can fill up filtered water for cheap cheap and it will give you the PH and PPM of the water on the content list) run that water through your problematic soil very slowly to make sure you saturate all soil to get accurate reading, then you just dunk the PPM probe in the first bit of runoff you get. if it's too high you keep flushing till you in desired range and if it's too low you know you need to feed. there you go. no waiting for people to respond and hoping they get it right. More people have PH probes than PPM probes so it's easy to get someone to swing by and test PH every once a month or so. you really just need to test your tap water or whatever water you been using, because it'll take a while for water with a super high or super low PH to cause living soil to swing. Organic living soil balances PH by itself and in most cases if you're only slightly off you wont ever really run into any issues. only when you're way out for a period of time will it cause a swing. Sorry for all the reading so early in the day!

Howzit Mense, oooow I have a good feeling about the present, I think you all do. We are uniting to find a position of prosperity in the current cannabis culture, and it’s amAzeballs I might add. maybe the wool is over my eyes, but baaaa baaaa Alrighty, we have budrot, main bud on the sugar widow that was looking the best, so we chopped the kop and still fighting the good fight. Geez I don’t know how long it’s been, but maybe another week or so. I need to feed the other one again, I think I underfed the plant to be honest, anyway. then the Wilsonxlhead and Wilsonxslurri pictured below, man this slurri cross is a dam winner, the sweetest smells I have ever, so glad to be rerunning her, then the Lhead cross, is like superman weed, you’ll be doing lots of shit around the house (pictured first by that distinct sativa structure) then in order top to bottom crepes, lhxwilson, slurrixwilson, gg#4 (flower time!) All the best!

Based on my limited knowledge I''ve decided I'm going to most likely do the following: Get my water from the tap, filter it through the Brita's carbon filter (which we do daily anyway so I'll just get from there and leave it outside for a bit), and PH correct it to around 6.2 (if necessary) before giving it to the plants.

Update here, just finished off the Blueberry and Sugarcane outdoor ladies. I'm aware I posted photos of the Blueberry in another thread, but they belong on this thread and I know from my days of lurking these threads don't make no sense if you don't follow the conversations. so here they are, again, Sugarcane

Hey I only see this thread now! Ive been growing mushrooms for quite some time now, but nothing serious just normal small scale PF Tek style. Lions Mane, Kings, Blue oysters . Although PF tek is not quite the most efficient way to mushrooms, its a great an easy way to start off with. For what its worth, Noob to Noob, If you are going to take the PF tek route. Dont stuff around just get a steam pot. You can steralize using other methods but a steam pot and some consol jars makes it so much easier and almost fail proof. And start with oysters they are very resilient and grow fast. I use the same steam pot to decarb sugar leafs using the same method used to sterilize grow medium. Chuck the leafs or buds into a consol jar (AKA Mason Jar / Jam Jar) Instead of making a breather with stuffing just punch some holes and cover the lid with alu foil to keep the moisture out. I cook it for 90mins just like you would cook PF Tek.

Yo @Naughty.Psychonaut hope all is well brother! I need your input on my current situation please. My pf cake was fully colonized with no signs of contam this time round. Placed it in a sfc with soaked perlite in my room. Avg temp about 20celsius and rh avg 90% in chamber. Misting and fanning minimum 3-4 times/day. Its been 2 weeks and no sign on pinning and cake is turning light brown. Is it contam? Shot in advance brother

that's just the thing, nail on the head, you can agree ALL soils will have inconsistencies.... growing weed is not a black and white, said and done, type thing. there are millions if not billions of variables and this is the reason for the existance of those tools. when was the last time you bought a fresh bag of FF? I got my buddy I built the LED for in fresh FF, bought about 5 bags and they all 9.0 to 9.9 EC..... only realised it once his plants where toasted, cz how could you know before? did a run off test, got the answer, fixed it right away. with his noob mind telling him it was deficiency cz he hasn't used nutes yet..... this all conflicts with the whole notion of craft soil + water = success.... that's major bullshit. I can show you emails between me and Derek Van Zyl from Freedom Farms, it's not only generic soils that have inconsistencies. basically EVERY living soil is prone to inconsistencies literally because of the way it functions. you can't avoid it unless you move over to hydro. you also stated that some "honing in on the problem" would be needed............. why not use a probe and get it over with, rather than standing there scratching your head and running around like a mad hare asking 100 people and getting 50 different responses and then you have to cherry pick and all that while your plant gets toasted? I've had quite a few misdiagnosis' by experienced growers, even here on the forum, so I also don't trust that an experienced grower will know all visual keys right when they happen and much less so if I have to show someone and trust their word, cz they themself don't know what the soils read outs where before everything went wrong. now if you build your own soil, that's another story, but to tell a new grower he must start by building his own soil and trusting it fully with no testing, is like giving a 5 year old a racecar and expecting him to drift around the track and the car returning to you unscratched (I've noticed a lot of car related referances on the forum so I am tapping into those) basically, it's not gona happen. this conversation can go on and on and on and on and on and a lot of points will contradict themself, the object will stay the same. having a probe will guarentee a safer grow experience. no doubt about it. to the point you made of a new grower not knowing what to do with the information the probes give them, I have to ask what in dear Sally's big juicy butthole will make someone think that that same grower who doesn't know what to do with the probe information, will know what to do without the probes? I honestly don't get it? You're not saying a noob is so much of a noob that they skip all the noob stuff and jump right to being an experienced grower? how does that make more sense than just using a probe? This might be petty, only because I believe you guys not to be petty, but this point I just feel like there's reluctancy to agree with me even though a lot of things said falls under the values of my opinions. like you said you tested your soil with a more thorough test than the PPM test, but you advocate new growers shouldn't test? they should just run into problems and deal with it. I don't get it man. some people get their "clean water", for household and everyday use, from a borehole... usually with EC sitting pretty around 2.0 to 4.0 EC... and you never know what the water is rich in.... magnesium, calcium, iron all very common in boreholes around western cape with some areas higher in certain compounds and other higher in other compounds ..... meaning different things will happen. Mg can swing your PH easy peasy, causing lock out and showing signs of deficiency, but what's actually going on is a toxicity.... no way of knowing this without probes.

If a new grower wants to grow successfully first time round. They can buy any potting soil and talborn green and red topdresses. No tools, no happy clappy dances. Just a winning formulae.

why did you need to test the soil

Also don't PPM anything. I've done a soil test twice. My CEC is always just under max after reamends

Exactly. The way I see it, I have no experience of any kind, so in order to give my plants the best chances it makes sense to me to start with a good PH as opposed to being reactive and trying to remedy problems I don't know how to remedy or probably even identify, i.e. not understanding the signs before it's potentially too late. I'm reading up on what I can, and have decided I'd rather be proactive than reactive. I know it's not that simple, but it makes most sense to me as a novice grower. Worst case scenario I have a shiny new PH pen to also test my 90k liter pool water, yaaaay! D

basically to sum it all up sq1 -> having probes = safe sq 2 -> not having probes = less safe sq3 -> knowing someone with a probe that can help at a moments notice so you don't have to spend the money to get probes = a little safer but less reliable. once you got the visual keys it's still easy to misdiagnose, throwing you back at sq1.

I pH test everything

Pollination has commenced

Hello fellow fiends! Howzit! I'm super happy to find this forum on a casual night of browsing 420 events and finding a link to this site. Very keen to share my knowledge and experiences as well as learn from the local community. I've been smoking for a couple years now, and I'm by no means an expert. With how my life is right now, I have to find times to smoke where I can fully enjoy my experience, sometimes these times of calm are far and few in between, but when I do find the time to smoke or take an edible, it's always a great time. I've been to a couple 420 events like the Cannabis Expo out in Joburg, but some times it's hard watching people who just don't smoke get ripped off by vendors selling products for way more than their street value, I'm also a huge believer in moderation in terms of age. If your local supplier is selling to kids, find a different supplier. Smoking is an amazing activity, but I'm a staunch believer that children should not participate in cannabis what so ever, and seeing suppliers sell to anyone without discerning their age is incredibly disheartening. Now, there's a big reason this post is titled the "Edible Fiend Introduction", because that's me, the Edible Fiend. I started making edibles early on into my cannabis journey and I fell in love with them. At first, I created the standard edible recipe found online, and it was incredible. It was a delightful experience that got me glued for a long time, but the taste of the impure infusion and poor cannabis quality led me to wonder if there was any merit in the edibles. I tried a few from my supplier and found that they were much stronger than my edibles, but they tasted terrible, were expensive and often enough were just mountains of sugar with decarboxylated weed sprinkled in. I knew I could do better. Slowly, I began to refine my process with each iteration, changing temperatures and ratios with every iteration and noting the differences between batches. Using the same strain to control THC quantity etc... Through these trials, I have refined my process down to a relatively accurate science and I practice this science like an art. In the near future, I plan on creating an in depth post about my process and the modifications to the typical process I have made. As a teaser to end this post, attached is a photo of a recent batch of oil I created, the dark colour is a result of the material used being very fresh and not winterized for those in the know. The bottle is clearly labeled for obvious reasons, specifications on the batch: ~200g of sugar leaves & bud. 3 hour infusion. ~1.2ℓ of final oil. ~15-20g THC. Effectively 70-80mg per teaspoon. Egg for scale. lol. Can't wait to learn more from those with more knowledge than me, cheers!

Observe, the results of pressing hash collected from the trim of my most recent harvests. This is the first time I have ever had dab in my possession, and this shit looks fine as hell. Too bad I don't have a dab rig! Can anyone recommend a place to get myself setup?

Hey @Naughty.Psychonaut That's Bugsy, the additional outdoor element that I have to contend with. The pike of junk under the bush is my feeble attempt at keeping him away. He's made my purple punch it his home and one stop snack station. A few leaves for breakfast and it's time for a siesta.

Thanks man love the doggo! wait, is it a dog? looks kinda like it could be a bunny? or maybe a cat? yeah it's easy to get carried away with the indoor projects, everything is interesting! I wana try out every method of growing all the time and constantly have the urge to completely change things up, maybe add a hydro setup or something. I think I am much more addicted to growing and looking at the plants, looking at setups, looking at equipment for different grow styles and all that, than I am out here for smoking the actual weed I see you got a big bush over there! just a random bush or some proper genetics?

Shot bro! Nice harvest there! Ja still need to get the terminology right haha. But thanks for clearing that up. Ja its taking a long time to colonize but hooefully it's worth the wait. B&B were going to replace me with PF classic spores but informed me that the culture was sacrificed and they will substitute. Alacabenzi was probably the only non-contaminated spores available at that time, who knows. Will post updated soon

Howzit. In optimal conditions(moist but not soggy medium, high humidity eg. 80%+ and warm temps) you are looking at 3-5 days for the seed to break surface. Some will take longer. All dependant on strain, age of seeds etc. Patience is key