2017 summer greenhouse

Hi guys,

Time to get my summer grow log going. This is at a friend's house - my indoor grow isn't going to be set up for at least a month yet. I did the design and build out and fronted the startup, I'm overseeing the grow and teaching them along the way, the guy who owns the property is paying for the project and doing some labor, and his roommate is doing most of the day to day labor. We're splitting any results. The main goals for the project were to make something presentable, keep costs and labor down as much as possible, and meet the legal requirements for a "secured enclosed structure." The guy who owns the house is taking the bar in a couple weeks and has to be 100% legally compliant. No fudge room.

Got 8 plants. I'm dropping the strongest 6 in to a 11'x14' greenhouse. Three are from seed and I mixed up the labels so I don't know what is what. Five are from a local clone dealer. Kinda crappy strains but oh well. These plants are very young and small - I got started too late. The greenhouse was built to be able to handle six full sized plants if they're started on mother's day instead of about a month later. We'll see how it goes.

The greenhouse gets fair sun but has a small tree dead center a few feet behind it, so it gets some shade in the day. Not a bad thing - the summers here are hotter than I'm used to and I didn't want to spend on shade cloth. The green house is a metal pole structure wrapped in 6' chain link fence and covered with a double layer of 6 mil plastic. The greenhouse has an irrigation system set up on a hose and timer.

The soil mix we're using is organic and has been cooking for a couple months. Wish I'd cooked it longer but oh well. I was trying to stick to water only but his house's tap water is very basic so we're probably going to have to do some ph correction and add some epsom salts. I don't remember everything that's in the mix but I'm going to be adding a bag of spent coffee grounds today. The plants are getting transplanted into their 25 gal smart pots in about a week.

I'm finishing securing the envelope and walling off the front and back later today. Should be good to go very soon. It's been quite the project.

 

Envelope's up and zip-tied down, just picked up the tarp zippers to make the door and ventilation window. Plants are coming along by the day and should be good to go into their 25 gallon pots by early next week.

 

You can definitely tell which apartment on the block is mine this summer

 

Ended up keeping the last two plants for the greenhouse. Transplanting them and caulking in the irrigation system today. Those are the last two tasks for this project.

Got two more indoor grows lined up that I'm starting soon. One should be sometime in the next month, the other should be a little over a month out. I think I'm getting either a 24 or 36 plant card so I should be able to do some good strain hunting as soon as my personal one is in. Got a list a mile long of girls from unstabilized lines I've wanted to try but couldn't legally pop enough seeds to hunt through.

 

That lounge chair is key. I have one. I call it my moaning chair.

 

Damn straight, although we may have to take it out. These girls are vegging a lot longer in CO than they do in WA off the Canadian border. I may have to move all the shit out and put them in two rows of four just to keep them fitting in there by mid flower. We'll see. Gonna be a shame if we do have to get rid of the relaxing half of the greenhouse. It's nice to sit back and admire your hard work every so often.

Missed an update in there because I started a new job (can't wait to brag as soon as my contract allows), but here are the girls as of this afternoon! Got a set of pics from 7/29 as well but they're about halfway between the last set and this one. Not too interesting in veg.

The little guy on the far left is getting shaded out until 1 pm by a 50 foot cottonwood. Not much we can do about it. Expect that one to stay stubby. Luckily it's pretty much just that 3'x3' corner that's having that problem.

 

Hey stnky, a little more detail about tying down indicas please. I'm eyeballing a couple of big outside plants for that and one of them is indica dominant. I've done it a couple of times with sativas and had great results.

 

wrong thread but sure. If it has the absolute lack of side branching trait that indicas have, it's damned near impossible to convince them to branch out wide enough to not grow into each other. Well, not impossible, but you're going to spend a lot of time pruning and maybe double the veg time for the same space filled overall assuming everything goes well. Plus the stems on heavily indica doms seem to be more rigid than sativas - they stay stronger the way they want to go, break more easily if you try to make them do otherwise. Probably will take even longer than that to train a heavy indica to fill the same space as a heavy sativa. Doesn't matter if you light from different angles, fuck with light height to try and make them stretch, nothin. It can be done but it takes forever and its a huge pain in the ass. Gotta top em umpty bajillion times or keep them tied for at least a month and prune the inner growth obsessively either way. It's a lot of labor. That has been my experience anyway.

If you want to do it, go gradually. Bend them a bit and tie them down. Come back three days later, bend them a bit and tie them down. Tie the lower lateral branches down on the other side around the 2nd/3rd time you do it and pray they take - they don't seem to like to grow except straight over the main stem. Try to tie everything down to the same height after it adjusts and hit different points so you can come back and retie different parts of the plant each time. The method I use, for lack of a better term, makes the main stems of the plant look like a hand chair - a few laterals to fill out the empty space and more exaggerated dips on the side I leaned to to make the canopy even. Get ready to top the main cola a couple times while you wait for the low laterals to catch up. If you go really slowly and gradually you can do it with very little topping and pruning but it'll still take forever. Indicas like to be short, squat, and straight over their stem.

That's how I bush them out to cover a little under a 4'x4' each over maybe a 70 day veg with t5s hung relatively high indoors. Outdoors speed up that timeline if you want to use it but if you ask me just let them do what they do - tweaking the stems outdoors makes them weaker regardless of genetics. If you top early you're getting a really high chance of a stem split later in the crop. Similar with LST. I think you're better off supporting the branches with some kind of trellis. But expect a classic christmas tree shape and not a whole lot of stretch from indicas.

 

Also worth saying that I don't train in flowering if I can avoid it. The sweet spot to start training is between 18-36". The taller they are, the more careful you have to be about supporting the stem at different heights when you train so it doesn't snap while you're beating it. Too early and it stunts it hard, too late and the stem's too brittle/rigid. The sweet spot varies for each strain but IME sativas can take it taller. Just makes indicas worse for the method - training stunts the girl more the smaller you start it seems.

Hope that helped :S Kind of a long ramble.

 

These are two examples where I did that with indica-dom mothers a couple years ago. The plant on the left was way harder to manage than the one on the right (left when the picture was taken, right/second thumbnail). If the pictures help. It was Afghani x (Afghani x Super Skunk).

It took months to get it to side branch as much and as stably as it did and it took days of labor over the plant's 18-month life to keep it from growing into itself since every single shoot wanted to grow straight up. The sativa doms, on the other hand, had to be pruned to keep them from getting too wide - I was working hard to keep them at 1.5x the width of the indicas I was still trying to bush out when this pic was taken. One of them was literally 5' wide from six months on no matter what I did to it. The fucker ate up all my space - this grow room here is about 8'x16' of active canopy (not including storage and walkway). It was a pain in the ass.

 

We're in to flowering! I caulked in the irrigation system and moved the plants to their final positions in the tent. Should be on autofire for the rest of flowering.

 

Here are a couple from 8/17 - the cover on the greenhouse got ripped up by some high wind so we're redoing it today/tomorrow.

 

Update from 8/25 - been very busy and having all kinds of problems at the grow. The plants are fine but the people who live at the site are having disagreements.

 

Yep. DE and Azamax as preventive measures. The veggies in the same yard are having some pest problems. Looked like mostly aphids. Seems to be keeping them out.

 

From 9/8 - I started fertilizing with Floranova Bloom a couple weeks ago.

 

Finally got my card again I'd been waiting for it for months. This grow is now under my medical license.

 

Enclosure's getting ripped up again and there are some early signs of spider mites on one of the plants. The work never stops. But at least the girls are starting to look good and get heavy. Smells like heaven in there.

Looks like the thin, scraggly dingus of a plant in the back corner is going to get turned into hash if it doesn't start filling in soon. Been fidgeting with it all season but that corner of the greenhouse just doesn't get the right light. Shaded out by a huge tree. The plant behind it's a little behind schedule too but not as bad as the one in front.