Blueberry punch

[Hushpuppy]

Well I guess it's time I am finally gonna sit down here and do a grow journal. I have been growing this Blueberry punch that I got from "Next Generation Seeds". Bought them through Greenlifeseeds.com for $50 a 10pack. popped them several months ago and grew the first run. I popped 8 of 10 and had everything growing beautifully then my partner nearly killed all of them thinking they were all males:hitchair: I saved them and pulled the males but ran out of verticle space and had to do all kinds of brutal stuff to them Amazingly, they didn't hermie on me, even when !@#&*! thrips tried to take over my grow lab We ended up having to harvest early to get them before the bugs could kill em. They still proved to be some really nice smoke after all that:woohoo:

So now we start over We have 3 rooms, 2 are 3.5' x 3.5' x 6' "cabinets", while one room is 4.5' x 6.5' x 6'
Each "cabinet" room has one sealed, air cooled HID fixture powered by a 600w digital ballast, and both "cabinets are side-by-side so that the HID fixtures are connected together with a vortex fan to pull fresh air through them. Also hanging with the HID fixtures are 6 3'T5HO floro-lamps with 6500K bulbs. The walls are double insulated and painted flat white. There is a raised floor (in each cabinet) with an access door that allows my 12gal rezevoir to sit beneath my plants. As the pics show, I have multiple 10gal rubbermaid totes sitting on the raised floor with 1gal nursery pots set into the lids, but high enough to allow the roots of the plants to reach down into a shallow rez created in the totes by putting drain lines in the sides about 1 inch above the bottom. As yu can see, the drain lines run down into the 12gal rez through an opening in the raised floor. Then the water is pumped up through the middle of the floor to a dispersion head that feeds each planter with a constant flow. My grow medium is coco coir over hydroton which works so well.:hubba:
Now for a few pics:

 

[ozzydiodude]

IMO the T5 in your set up are a waste of electricity. With them being at the same height as the HID the "light power" from them is not getting to the plants. With the T5 you need them to be as close as possible for the plants to get the light right. IMO running the T5 vertically on the walls would be a better way to use them and you would get more "light power" to the plants.

But this is just my 1 cent sorry I'm broke and can't get of another cent right now

 

[Hushpuppy]

So now for the big room This room sits on the opposite side of the central work-room in which we have our clone table with a 4' T5HO fixture.
The bigger room is basically double the size of the 2 cabinets. We have 2 sealed, air-cooled HID fixtures hanging side-by-side with 4 4'T5HO 6500k and (4)2700k bulbs which are connected by homemade brackets to the 2 HID fixtures. The HID fixtures are powered by 2 Lumatek 600w digital ballasts, and like the cabinets, the HIDs are connected together with a vortex fan to pull air through them from the outside, back to the outside.
This room is also double insulated and has reflective mylar on walls and ceiling, but I believe I like the flat white better.
On our last grow, we had a custom made flood table on which our plants sat, but that cut some of our verticle space and became cumbersome to work with. Soo, we removed the table and built a raised floor that was just high enough to get our 12gal rezevoir beneath, much like the 2 cabinets. And this time we are using the 10gal rubbermade totes with the planters in the lids, as we found with our experiment on the last grow, the totes work sooo well. As with the cabinets this setup is also hydro, with a pump pushing nuted water up to a dispersion head and out to each planter to give constant water to the coco coir over hydroton. (we found that this method works soo well and is easy to manage)
Now for the picks: Yu will see that we already have our new clone girls set in this room. We had already taken cuttings to the cloner for the cabinets and then switched these girls over to flower b4 they can get any taller.

 

[Hushpuppy]

No prob Ozzy. The reason the T5s are set like that is for early veg, we only run the T5 and pull them down to the girls, then switch to the HID when the girls get bigger

 

[ozzydiodude]

IC that I'll bet works great then

 

[Hushpuppy]

Yeah, especially when ya pop in several youngins that don't like to be blasted too soon with the HID. so far I've been pleased with the way it has worked. I actually wanted to mount them on the walls initially but found it worked better to mount them to the HIDs so that they can be right over the kids and stay just a few inches away.

 

[izm.n.me]

So how much do you plan to yield on this grow? Very nice setup, I'm a soil typo guy tho.....I'm waiting for'm to show me the sex and clear my cab n let my ladies get all the light they can take ....do u top r supercrop?

 

[Hushpuppy]

I am honestly not sure how much this grow will yeild as this is only the second run of this BlueberryPunch. The first produced just under a pound but it was soo wacked from problems that we encountered.
This grow we are going to do more of an SOG by starting out with more plants flipped at lower height. We actually do a variety of tricks to see what will work best for the given situation. We normally top them and do a bit of lower trimming to create bushes, but this time we only fimmed them to create 4-6 main colas that we are gonna let grow out without any interference. I did have to do some supercropping method on one of the plants as it is quite a bit ahead of the others.
We actually got a late start on the girls pictured and they are bigger than we wanted to flip them at, that's because we had to wait to take cuttings b4 flipping. In a couple of weeks we will set the clones that we took, and we will do a more dense SOG in the 2 cabinets. We'll see how it goes, and I'll keep ya posted n pic'ed

 

[Hushpuppy]

I didn't think I was ever gonna get to update the grow as I kept forgetting to take my camera to the growlab. but here they are, between 5-6weeks into flower for the big girls and man can yu smell the blueberries cooking If all goes well to the end we should have some poundage of top shelf bud Also have the new girls in their respective rooms-a-growin. Just switched these girls to flower this weekend. They are about 4-5 weeks from cutting. Also the pic of the kiddies snuggled up in the tote are the new comers to the party. These are "White Russian" from Serious Seeds. Had 10 seeds and all of'em popped and are growing as good as can be. Those will have to me matured and culled of males. If I had the room for it I would cross the Russians with the Blueberry Punch and see what kind of "Russian punch" I would get, but my partner doesn't want to do that. Now for the pics:

 

[powerplanter]

Great!! Now I want a blueberry nug...I mean muffin. LOL

 

[happydaze]

Nice clean grow space. Sweet lookin goilz ya got there. l8trs.


-Happydaze

 

[Sol]

Great work, i love the simplicity of the plumbing. How can you go wrong!? I would love to try this.

 

[Hushpuppy]

I have talked to a few folk that want an effecient way to dry and cure their buds. I looked around on the internet and found some seriously expensive cabinets for drying herbs. I actually use one of my smaller grow rooms for drying as it works out that I have a couple weeks lag time between grows where one of the flowering rooms is open. I am able to hang my bud on strings and/or lay them on screens made for the purpose. But I have also thought about making a cabinet that could be a free standing and self contained unit. If a person is handy with the tools, one could easily build a cabinet with some air holes in the bottom and a small exaust fan at the top, with hangers and/or screens in the middle. OR if you don't want to have to build the whole thing you could buy a second hand "wardrobe" and modify it.
The first pic is obviously a wardrobe that could be modified by cutting some small holes in the bottom and then placing another false floor with holes over that to eliminate light but allow air flow. A small hole can be cut in the top to allow a small fan to remove the moist air from within the cabinet

The first pic is the wardrobe but the other 2 pics are actually growroom design options for a room with the listed dimensions. The designs do not account for doors, windows, or ventilation. The blue lines represent 1 linear foot. The lines separating each room represent possible constructed walls or curtains meant for dividing the space and stopping light penetration to each area, and would obviously take up some space from the existing space. But since I don't yet know the materials to be used, I only represented it with a single line. Also not shown would be the ventilation for venting the HID lights as I am not sure of the locations of the external vents. The fixtures drawn represent "cooltubes" with reflector wings, and are labeled HPS. The fixtures in the veg room could either be T5fixtures or MH in cooltubes, as I noted on the drawing.

 

[Hushpuppy]

Here are some more pics of drying cabinets. The one with 420 on it is from 420magazine online that someone homemade. you can see it has the multiple screens, and is made with the fan and filter setup, and probably uses a humidity and/or temperature controller for turning on the fan. Nice setup
The other pic is a homemade vegetable dryer from southeast Asia. not sure what the metal slide is for.

 

[Hushpuppy]

Ok so here's the update on the second Blueberry punch grow. We are at 6 weeks of flower and have a few more to go. The buds in the Blueberry room are plumping up nicely.

I hate that we lost a few plants in this room because there were quite a few more buds in the process. We made a mistake of letting the plants get too tall(again) and then my partner messed up and didn't check on the plants regularly.

We found that the roots in our system had worked into the drain system and clogged the totes for some of the plants. Needless to say, those plants drowned and had to be pulled. We did save 6 out of 9. A lesson learned that says don't think you can just let the girls take care of themselves.

The 2 smaller rooms are doing quite well. We were able to switch them to flower while only about 12" tall, so they are growing well and should produce well. I am still not satisfied with my inability to keep them from stretching after the flip. I wanted to create an SOG withing the 2 cabinets.

They appeared to be doing that quite well and with a 600w HPS above them, and in a 3.5'x3.5' room, we got about 90k lumens, but then they have stretched to an almost unruley height.

I wonder if I will do better with this strain to grow fewer in a given space and do some serious LST to open them up then allow them to stretch out.

I also got some White Russians that are chomping at the bit to get into a room of their own. I think they are at 4weeks veg and should be sexxing soon, then it'll be time to yank the boys and clone the girls.:hubba:

Working on a new flower room addition to the "lab". It will be 7'x12' when complete. This will be broken into 2 spaces for flowering at different schedules. If we can get it right, we will be able to have a serious harvest once a month, which should satisfy all the family kron-heads.

Here's the pics: first is right side of Blueberry room; second is right cabinet that was started 2wks after blueberry room; third is the left side cab which was started 1wk after right cab; last pic is the left side of the Blueberry room where the leaf-bud anomoly lives

 

[burner]

very nice hushpuppy, I see your using polyshield your your walls. I used that on my first grow and liked it...may implement it in my new flower room since I need to insulate it anyway. What's on the other side? Is the room studded out?

 

[Sol]

Very nice. So the last month or so is when to expect buds to fatten up? That is one helluva light you have there, nice. Did you build that or is it bought?

 

[powerplanter]

Really nice looking plants Hushpuppy. Does scrog make a big diff. on weight? Stay safe.

 

[The Hemp Goddess]

The first pic is the wardrobe but the other 2 pics are actually growroom design options for a room with the listed dimensions. The designs do not account for doors, windows, or ventilation. The blue lines represent 1 linear foot. The lines separating each room represent possible constructed walls or curtains meant for dividing the space and stopping light penetration to each area, and would obviously take up some space from the existing space. But since I don't yet know the materials to be used, I only represented it with a single line. Also not shown would be the ventilation for venting the HID lights as I am not sure of the locations of the external vents. The fixtures drawn represent "cooltubes" with reflector wings, and are labeled HPS. The fixtures in the veg room could either be T5fixtures or MH in cooltubes, as I noted on the drawing.

I have to say that IMO, neither of these growroom plans have nearly enough light for the vegging sections. For example you are talking about a vegging space of 39 sq ft in one option and 32.5 sq ft in the other. At best, 2 400W MH are going to cover 24 sq ft. The T5s are just a bit better as each 8 tube fixture is 40,000 lumens. However, I believe that it is asking a little much of an 8 bulb T5 to spread light over 20 sq ft. If you decide on T5s (which I think are preferable), I think that using 4 bulb fixtures and spreading them out a little would give you a lot better more even light spread.

I'm not sure I see any benefit to having 2 separate flowering spaces?

 

[Hushpuppy]

Hey guys; Yeah Burner, the walls are studded and insulated. It is a free standing building that I converted into my grow lab byseparating the single space 8'x18' into 4 rooms. The "big" room I call the Blueberry room as that is the first plants that I started growing in that room. It is 6'x8', but after putting insulation on the walls and building everything, it got a bit smaller. That reflective insulation board works pretty good.

The light system that I have is just some different brand vented hood reflectors(one from Sunleaves, several Lumenaire hoods. I modified the hoods to mount individual T5 bulb/fixtures so that I can have several T5 bulbs for early veg without having to change out or move the reflector hoods. It actually works quite well. I start with the T5s then turn on metal halide bulbs in the hoods. Then when I switch to flower, I change all my bulbs to flower bulbs and HPS bulbs.

Hey PP, the screens that I have over all of my plants are really there for supporting the growth of the plants as they get taller. Its not for ScrOG. I would like to do a scrog but I can't get my partner to wrap his brain around the concept or the process.