ajcapetown

LOL Gareth... you clearly don't want any clones hey.. naaa it's cool I'll give them to somebody who is more polite LOL. I am kinda crazy and hairy though.. no jokes.. ok you are right!!

Hi Boys and Girls Time for an update although I must say it's not the most interesting one. I was at day 28 of flowering on Friday and snapped these pics. Buds are still going ok, they could be bigger but as mentioned before that little heat wave they experienced definitely affected them. Nonetheless I should pull some decent bud off of them. Some handled the heat way better and they are really starting to smell nice with a lot of frosting around the buds. The others that didn't cope well have formed buds but they are very hard.. almost like peas and they aren't getting sticky or smelly at all. I'm about half way so I'm hoping they improve. I noticed some slight yellowing on the plants so I have fed them with a half strength dose of bio grow and will give them a bit more tonight. I chose the bio grow over the bio bloom as it seems it is the nitrogen they are lacking. I have also had to prop them up with bamboo sticks.... not ideal as I had to slide the sticks in and probably did a bit of root damage. This is also due to the heat as they got too lanky and the stems just can't support them so they started tipping over. Next grow I'm actually just putting bamboo supports in the pots from the get go and if I need them they are there if not they can just stay there. At least then I won't damage any roots trying to do a quick fix later on. Temps in my grow room are waaayyy better at the moment, the cooler weather is mainly to thank for that, it's been sitting at about 26.5'C in there with lights on which is great for me. Pity I couldn't have kept them down from the start. Anyway chat again in a week! PS: I have got some seriously cool strains vegging at the moment and they are killing it, will be starting that grow log in the next 2 weeks and they will be put into flower as soon as this lot finishes up mid May.

Ya I'm also really keen to get hold of them. Saw their seeds on original sensible seed bank but I can't find a website for them. Ordering SA seeds through a european website seems crazy.. they travel all the way there then get sold and sent back to us here haha.

Nice one, should be good to watch!

WOW WOW WOW!! Super fat frosty buds, I love it. As for GarethL, just give him the roots, he'll smoke them! LOL

HAHA hey guys, ya I must admit my electrics are a mess at the moment. I'm actually going to do a post soon with the crap I had with my ballast and the extra wiring I had to do to get it right. Ended up doing all the re-wiring and extra wiring etc mid grow while the plants were in there and it's kinda just stayed like that. It irks me everyday though, grow should finish up around mid May at which point I'm going to get in there properly and fix it all up. As my light cycle is from 8pm - 8am it is also difficult cos I can't put the plants out in the sun if I want to do any work in there. Need to paint that wood white and I want to replace that mylar with white plastic as well to make it look cleaner. The shower taps.. you guys are right if it got knocked there could be crap.. never had a problem before as I have tightened them quite tight and they haven't been used in years but I should actually remove the tap handles and put a blocker on the shower head to be safe! Will probably do that as soon as I have the room empty.

Hey Guys Weekly update, buds are forming nicely.. hopefully the high temps didn't mess with them too much but time will tell. I'm going to go air cooled on the reflector as soon as money allows it, probably next month. I'm not entirely happy with temps, it is still hitting 30 degrees in there. I noticed some of my lower leaves are looking a little limp and yellowish, falling off with just a gentle tug so I fed them with a half strength solution of P-Force which I picked up from Jamie's Garden Shop. Never used it before but it's 100% organic. I'm probably going to give them another dose of AACT in the next week or 2. Not much else to report

Howdy Reaf Those pics would be great to see. I'm going to have to do a conversion, 6 inch hood into an 8 inch fan so looking forward to seeing how you did it.

Thanks for this Toby, the whole AACT thing I find really interesting and when I used Al Hassan's AACT my plants loved it, they started praying The whole idea of growing without nutes is my ultimate goal.

Glad to have you on here to share your knowledge. I have followed "reafs organic soil mix" in the past. Wasn't the Old Bootz mix yours too??

Welcome Van! I used to do exactly the same thing a good few years back, sit and wait for the oldies to go sleep so I could go smoke haha good times. All the best and don't get caught!!

Thanks gents, I think I am sold then. I'm quite limited on space, I've noticed an 8 inch cooled hood is about 85cm long and with my width being 1.2 with ducting I may battle to squeeze one in and keep the hood centered over my grow space. Any of you have more compact 8 inch hoods, In terms of air flow can I just suck air through the hood and out into the roof? Should create enough negative pressure to still pull fresh air in like it does now? I don't use a scrubber as I vent into the ceiling and the house only gets a slight smell in the last couple weeks of flower which doesn't bother anyone.

Hey Reaf! Good to see you on here. The space is 1.2 x 1.0 It is an open reflector yes, I've been thinking of going air cooled, do you have any experience on air cooled and does it help much? I installed the 8 inch extractor yesterday and it's pulling way more air through but temps didn't drop as much as I'd hoped. The room does feel cooler though just being in there and I can actually feel the airflow. That is scary that the signs are not always visible.

Hey All Update time. I went ahead and treated my plants with actively aerated compost tea and the slight burn I was getting stopped immediately and I haven't had a problem since. I then removed the few affected leaves and things are looking really healthy. I have unfortunately run into another problem though... what seems to be heat stress. My temps have been hitting 32 degrees in there and I think it is just slightly too hot. The good news is it only affected 2 of the plants, the remaining 10 are doing just fine. It was of course the exodus cheese that got hit first, I'll never grow this shit again. To combat the problem I raised the lights quite a bit and yesterday I bought an 8 inch extractor which is probably way overkill for my grow room but I wasn't messing around, I want that hot air outta there. I'm starting to think it was heat that caused all the crap with my last grow, I just never realised it soon enough. I'm going to install the bigger extractor tonight and suck the shit out of that room haha! I have also cleared out the bottom of the canopy over the space of a few days to try get some better airflow under there. Apart from that not much else to report, got some awesome buds forming. I've put the 2 damaged plants outside which is sad but they were just taking up space and not performing. Here's a pic of all the healthy plants taken 1 week since my last update and then I included a few pics of the heat stressed plants which have now been abandoned. Cheers! AJ

Hey guys I finally received my new cannabis encyclopedia today after pre-ordering in October. was such a pleasant surprise coming home to it today. I'm quite a big fan of Jorge and enjoy his books etc. Just by paging through it this evening I can see this is by far his best work yet. Set me back just over R500 on Amazon.

Such a great looking strain, their stems look so thick and strong. You have a great growing area there, are you on a farm or small holding Totemic?

Thanks Guys!

One more thing, forgot I had these photo's I didn't add. After some of your suggestions I went ahead and cleaned out the bottom. You can't see it from the front but here's some pics that I took from behind, I took quite a bit off. Unfortunately it was too little too late I think because it was days later and the first seeds showed up. I am probably going to make hash with the majority of the heavily seeded buds. Cheers!

Yo everybody! Haven't done an update in a while on my outdoor.. to be quite honest I have lost a bit of interest in them because... wait for it... they are Fu%$#ing SEEDED I noticed it a couple weeks back and overtime I see it I get upset. Things were going perfectly and then seeds started showing up. I initially thought that they had possibly been pollinated by a male in the area but after a crazy amount of frenzied searching I found 2 tiny pockets of pollen sacks on one of the plants. I was devastated.. a hermie destroyed my entire crop!! They were so tiny and I can't believe a couple of pollen sacks did all that damage. Anyway as you can see the buds are still massive and they smell great but I have no time for cannabis with seeds and I just feel so demoralised. I've been watering them everyday, tied up the big buds but apart from that haven't been paying them too much attention as it just pisses me off. Next year I will be starting strictly from clone so that I can hopefully avoid this happening again. I'm also going to look into some sort of netting/cover to try protect them from any male pollen that could possibly be floating around. As for the sunflowers... those are fake haha, I put them up to add to my "camo" tactics lol! Here's some pics.

I've got a friend who is also on this forum. He's going to attempt a late outdoor grow on a semi covered patio with minimal supplemental down lighting to stop them from flowering too soon. Cannabis can handle our winter temps but Agree with Totemic on it being too wet. If you can keep them dry and help with a bit of light to add to the daylight hours I think it could work. I've seen it in commercial grow tunnels with a big CFL hanging above each plant. Think I saw it on The King of Cannabis documentary on YouTube. Not really practical for most people but if you have a nice private place or big plot it's possible

Hi Stretchy. Welcome, nothing better than smoking your own homegrown. Lots cheaper in the long run too!

Hey Delta, sorry for the late response. In my opinion a difference between day and night temps are obviously better but I don't think it will make or break your grow if your variation between high and low isn't too much. You'll find as winter comes along it's easier to control as when your lights go off the temp variation changes a bit more. I actually put a heater in my grow room in winter to stop the temp from dropping too drastically. Anyway here's an update on my grow. Since I flipped last week Friday my plants have just exploded. They are growing amazingly in this living soil. I have noticed some very slight burn on a few of the leaves, it's not serious but it's there. It affected the Greenhouse Exodus Cheese plants the most. I don't know f it's just this pheno I'm working with of the Exo Cheese but it is so fussy, anything upsets them. Definitely not as hardy as the rest. I'm not sure if I'll be growing too much more of the Greenhouse seed Co stuff. I'm currently growing some little seedlings from seeds I got from barney's farm and Humboldt Seed Organisation and they are going crazy. I think the yanks (americans) are going to start taking over from Europe in terms of genetic quality and seed quality. Their cannabis cups etc are already way superior now that it's legal in many states. I'll do a grow log on them once this grow is done in 7 weeks. Back to my current girls, a friend feels it may be an overload of phosphorous as my soil has a lot bat guano in it. I am going to treat it with some actively aerated compost tea which should balance things out. I'm really not too concerned though because it's not causing any damage and won't effect the yield etc. The following pics were taken exactly 7 days after my last pic update... to give you an idea of the explosion haha. I'm over the moon, think this may be set to be one of my best grows ever. I'll continue taking pics every Friday evening. Still using plain water at ph6.2 Cheers for now!

YAHOOOOOO.... that TBH is making my mouth water!! Are you going to harvest at 8 weeks or watch the trichomes? you must be about 2 weeks off?

Hi everyone. Just a little update. I switched to flowering on Friday and everything is going well. I found a way to combat my heat issues, I switched my day & night around. During veg I had my lights off from 11am to 5pm as this is the hottest time of the day. On friday when switching to flowering I have set lights on to be from 8pm at night until 8am in the morning. As I am pulling in fresh air from outside I figured night time air is a lot colder. It has dropped my temps by about 4 degrees which is perfect. Since friday the highest temp recorded in my grow room was 30.5'C and the low was 24'C. Only down fall is that I have to wait until 8pm at night to go into the room so that I don't disturb the dark period. I gave them just a plain water feed on Friday at ph6.2. The living soil is working a treat! Here's some pics I took on Friday as I started the flowering cycle. Will update with more pics this Friday when it's been a full week since 12/12.

Hey Guys After a disastrous indoor grow that I harvested in this week I have been dying to start fresh. I have had these clones on the go for 2 months now, they started well then things got a bit shaky (they went bright yellow and new growth died so I cut them back. I'm still not sure why it actually happened) Have a look at the first pic and you will see what I mean. Unbelievably only 1 died, the rest all made it. Now they are doing well and have bounced back completely. The GHS exodus cheese came from a mother which I grew from seed. The training day and kaas came off other plants I adopted from a friend. They were first put into a 50/50 mix of coco/perlite and fed with a mild dose of Greenhouse powder but after my last failed grow I have decided to go back to organic. Organic just works better for me, plants seem less sensitive and I prefer the final product. They have been under LED but have now been moved under a 600 HPS. I'm battling a bit with temperature though, it's been hitting 34 degrees in there even with the 5 inch extractor on full. The plants don't seem bothered by the heat, think it's me that stresses more. I'm considering getting a bigger extractor but will see how it goes. Weather should start cooling down in the next couple weeks. I have been using a living soil mix from Jamie's Grow Shop and wow it works well. As soon as I put them in they started looking healthier and growth improved literally overnight. I don't have to use much in the way of nutes now and ph isn't as important, although I do still keep it around 6.2. I have also given them a mild dose of Bio Grow, although I don't think it's necessary but it didn't do any harm. I highly recommend this product. Today I potted up to 12 litre square pots which they will stay in for flowering. I again used the living soil mix from Jamie's Grow Shop. I sprinkled 5ml of mycorrhizal fungi (mycoroot) and a half handful of worm castings into the hole before putting them in. Then watered with plain water at ph6.2 I am going to flower 12 plants and will probably start in 5 days or so once they have settled into their new pots. I will have to start fairly soon though as space will be a problem. I'm not sure if I will use nutes while I flower, I may just watch them and see how it goes. With a living soil mix it won't really be necessary.