Naughty.Psychonaut

usually foxtailing happens cause of too much light, but not in terms of intensity, in terms of hour cycle. stray lights perhaps? outdoor cycle is just a mess these days anyway. growing out doors you kinda have to expect some funny stuff, because as we all know nature doesn't give a single shit what the textbook says. the seasons aren't what they used to be, plants think it's winter then we get a whole week of summer, this may cause them to do funny things like foxtailing or even hermie. very common for females in late flower to push nanners when their cycles get messed up or even just a little stray light.

Sorry, didn't even show, but this is what my monotubs look like. once fully colonised I place a plastic bag over the surface with minimal breathing on the sides to create a little micro climate / condition of high RH to trigger pinning, once I see pins I take that bag off and the mycelium starts to breathe like crazy pushing loads of fruits! big 5cm whole saw bits used to make 6 x holes near the top of the bin covered them with a small piece of HEPA cloth, but you can use a pantyhose or a old shirt anything that will keep dust and bugs out. with a single row of 8 - 10mm holes about 5cm off the bottom of the bin right around. in this case the layer of substrate I put down will be 5cm deep the whole tub through. as the mycelium breathes it will exhale CO2 (like us humans, they suck in oxygen and let out CO2, so they breathe like us rather than like plants... which I think is pretty cool) the CO2 will condense on the surface of the mucelium and start to fall / move out the row of holes made right above the surface, as the air gets pushed out it will naturally start to suck in through the big filtered holes. the filter holes also helps it from drying out too fast win win before I start fruiting, during colonisation when you need much much much less FAE, I cover the row of holes near the surface with this magical waterproof breathable stretchy plastic surgical tape you can buy at clicks or dischem this stuff!

Niiiice No stress man, the brown discoloration you see there is just a basic form of oxidisation the mycelium experiences as it dries out. The cake looks fully colonised but I think the reason it's drying out is because of the SFC... how constant is the 20°C + 90%RH? those are the right conditions to be aiming for, but if it fluctuates a lot it will hinder the growth of the mushroom. the temperatures and humidity has to stay relatively constant for pinning to start. I got some GT pins this morning hard to see how many there are, but they're all over, few bigger ones will be picked by tomorrow this little dude with his even littler bro to the left of him this dude fell over, but they still grow like this, gona make all kinds of funny shapes Anyway, looking at your SFC, I think the way you made it dries out the mycelium too quick resulting in the browning of the mycelium surface. if it's nice and fresh and there's enough RH the mycelium tends to stay fluffy and white. did you soak the cake for 24hrs before birthing her into the SFC? the "hydration" is quite important so the cake doesn't dry out too quick and another thing to retain moisture on the cake is the "dunk and roll" which I see you skipped. So basically what you do, when the cake is fully colonised you fill a big bowl with filtered water, RO / Distilled water works even better. soak the cake by placing a lid or another bowl ontop to ensure the cake is submerged. 24hrs later you bring over a bowl of dry vermiculite, clean out the bag not recycled vermiculite, then just roll the cake in the vermiculite. when you spray/mist the cake the vermiculite will suck up the moisture and release it slowly around the surface of the cake. I don't do cakes at all anymore, but here's an example I got on the internet for you the last point I wanted to make, I hot my SFC off google too, but it didn't make sense to me to use the same style chamber if I am in a lower over all RH area. Infact I actually had a SFC, but it gets used for storage again these days. I found what works better is much fewer holes and smaller ones. I moved over to monotubs, but these can be just as easily used to fruit some cakes. I can spray / mist the tub in the morning and it'll still have droplets of water on the side tonight when I get home. I still fan as often as I can though, fresh air is the golden key to growing mushrooms, so the more fresh air with fresh humidity you can introduce the better and then the more constant those conditions are the better for the mycelium. If everything's 100% in check and still no fruits, only thing it can be is genetics. Like I said long long long time ago on this thread, I got Liquid Cultures online, advertised as spore syringes, had to make a bunch of agar cultures with the LC to clean up the genetics, only after subsectioning like 30 to 50 agar plates I got a clean Psilocybe Cubensis genetic that was ready for growing. if you take a LC syringe and inject it straight into a substrate you most likely will only get a few mushrooms if any. what happens there is like planting 100 cannabis seeds in one pot. you will get a plant, you will get weed, but putting them all together like that isn't fair. you're not giving the genetic a fighting chance when you do that cause now theres 1000 plants competing with eachother. same with liquid culture, theres 1000s of culutures within that culture you got and they all competing with eachother. where as with agar plates it allows you a 2dimentional surface where the cultures can express themself and branch out in different ways and you select and sub section the strongest culture till you get a perfect clean "master culture" they usually just look perfectly round cause it's closer to one dominant genetic in stead of all out of shape because of many different growth types and genetic variations. sorry again for all the reading! I bet it will all be worth it though! Goodluck brother!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

why did you need to test the soil

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!

yoyo wingwing! let your thing swing!

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.

ooooooh man! if that was a woman I'd marry her just for the honeymoon!! I seriously need to start doing monocrops, man you did a great job here

This is the thing, when using rain water it's something specific to your situation. the vast majority of growers, especially new growers, get their water from the tap. with a small amount of those people using 3phase filters, if that. some people bubble their tap water. still not the same as rain water. If you wana make a point of how things work for you, you have to state the things that you do, that can literally flip the whole show on it's head. anyhow, have a blessed sunday!

well, there you go guys, to all the new growers, you don't need to buy probes, just let your plants stress then play guessing games and hope for the best personally I want to help others, not make them feel helpless cause they can't guess the right stuff. if you know for yourself it took time for you to learn how to spot these things, why not just cut the loss of time off by using tools? I'll respectfully stop giving advice as I can see there is no point. everyone should just have years of experience from day one. that makes more sense doesn't it. have a lekker sunday

@SkunkPharm that's pretty cool hope you don't run into the same issue as StonedTrooper in the future! when talking organics, ph it's much less of an issue than ppm, though both can still swing. if you keep using water with a ph of 1 or 10 (something way out) it's unlikely that any soil will maintain ph neutrality over long period of time. especially if you reusing soil. tap water here where I am comes out at 9 sometimes 10 and I have seen my living soil climb till about 8 ph and the plants did not like that. could've avoided it. it's a good thing that you have a couple years of growing behind you. good to know the products you use and what product does what and all that stuff.... but the best of all is having the probes on hand, because not everyone has years of growing behind them and they don't know all the science on day one and having the probes makes it much easier to understand than just "taking someones word for it". when studying this at universities the professor will give you probes to get accurate readings for the main purpose of "not having to take someones word for it" and to not play guessing games. hyrdo / organic. there's no harm in wanting to get the stuff right from day one instead of stressing a bunch of plants just to learn from that anyway. if a professor points to a plant and sais "that's what's going on in there, just take my word for it", I wouldn't go to that class anymore. I've seen quite a few cases on the forum similar to my learning experience where probes would've saved these peoples grows in a jiff. once they know what all the signs look like with no second guessing they can use the probes for their pools too! great device to have!

the idea that people say don't test ppm or ph when you grow organic is redundant. why would you "watch" and what would you "watch" for? you'll be looking for signs of things not being right. signs of stress in form of too much or too little PPM, right? or signs of stress from PH being out of whack..... sooooooo why would I wait to see signs on the plant if I can just test with a device that gives me the correct information with just a press of a button? and fix the problem before seeing the signs and before the plant has stressed at all? if you have a good, accurate device it will help you not waste so much time and school fees. first problem you run into you test and from there you golden. no guessing games. cause let's be honest, the sole fact that you said "which you learn by time" means you know no one will know the signs on day one. if you have a device you will.

yeah, I got the bluelabs toolbox long long ago finished the grow I was busy with at the time then moved over to organics most people will say that's stupid for a while I was bitter with having made the purchase, cause it wasn't cheap and hearing the majority of organic growers aks me why I would even need to test for PH or PPM, cause it's organic... right...? only to realise later on that they just showed me their level of understanding of the whole thing without thinking it through all the way, or they just haven't been doing it long enough to encounter all that can to wrong, in which case I am glad for them, but not everyone gets that lucky. Clearly there are going to be situations where even organic growers wana take the guessing out the game and test for both PH and PPM. it's just safer to have access to these tools. I have to advise against buying any kinda tech equipment and stuff that can "do everything in one" and rather go with tech equipment that's one thing made to do or test one specific thing. this will ensure better accuracy. This is just my but tech things that can do it all tend to be more gimmick-like and don't stand the test of time. In the long run it's cheaper to buy more expensive stuff

Update New batch moving into flower effortlessly, makes me think the fuckup with my previous batch was all due to the timing of topdressing. nothing else done differently and the fact that they moving into flower much much quicker than the previous batch tells me it's not environment related either. French Macaron Blueberry Hashplant Super Cheese Chernobyl Frosted Apricot have a lekker weekend all

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

Previous batch moved over to flower tent, was using the veg tent for some other stuff... got het cleaned out and ready for the next round 3 x Super Cheese, 1 x Frosted Apricot

without a doubt that is the best advice to give a new grower, don't overlook this! biggest mistake people make as new gardeners is thinking there will be only one product to do it all. if that was the case we would all be raving about this one product and when we have it we're successful gardeners and it's easy like that. if the world was made of cadbury. gardening is one of those crafts where you literally never stop learning no matter who you are you never stop changing and adapting to overcome different things. even the most clued up guys with years and years and years of growing behind them are all still constantly researching different and better ways to do these things and how to keep up with current changes and what not. that's why they stay in the game so long. change, adapt, overcome. avoid looking for and choosing one thing to carry you through it all, rather get the right mindset from the start and tell yourself you'll do research or run over to the forum here and ask for advice whenever a new situation presents itself. like they say, I can talk till I am blue in the face, that doesn't mean you'll be drifting around tight corners on day one. at least not without getting a few fender benders. so be prepared.

this indoor flower cycle kicked off kinda wack, I top dressed the soil with elemental blend right when I flipped them to 12/12, within a few days they showed a very positive reaction and started stretching and didn't wana stop untill very late. the BBHP took 13 week, the outdoor one was much quicker with only 9 weeks, but it was also a much smaller plant. the Sugarcane inside the tent only started making pistils during week 6 of 12/12, not sure if it was the elemental blend, still scratching my head on this one a bit. checked for light leaks and all that, everything is fine... only thing I could point out was how they just never stopped stretching, I think that was the nutrients

will be honest, she looks quite a bit better than the rest of the experience. she stank as a plant, had quite a sour under-ripe fruite smell with hidden notes of already processed hash but now that she's harvested the smell is very faint... I hope she just needs a to spend some time curing to reveal her true beauty