That's good to know about speicies diversity in my garden! That's also good to know about Trainwrecks... Too bad, cuz I find that one a nice strain to use later n the day... I just acquired some "Cannatonic" seeds. I'm looking forward to trying that after all the hype about it last year. I really like the high CBD strains, especially for day use. But I need a real heavy indica to be able to sleep, Sometimes on real high pain days, I like a nice hybrid or to blend strains. For anxiety & PTSD a good sativa (Jack Herer) I tried another couple of high CBD strains. One was "Dig Weed" and it's a realy nice Medicine: has a spicy kinda taste, and it's a hybrid sat/ind... VERY nice for late afternoons Good for nerve, tendon & muscle pains. The other high CBD strain I tried was "Z" something... I thought of it as "Z" for Zombie cuz it had a taste like raw meat gone off. I think it was more indica than the "Dig Weed"... it was good for pain & also for spasticiity. I likes my Kushes for sleeping and I'm looking forward (now that we had a court decision in Canada overturning Health CAnada's ban on allowing licensed medical Cannabis users from making "concentrates" or "edibles" from raw plant cannabis, I am looking foward to doing some hash making with trim. I think that will be helpful in my severe & chronic insomnia. (Sorry SisterMaryElephant, I do go on, but I read you conversing with another poster about high CBD strains..)
Yeah, as a pain based patient I look for higher CBD too but I found that the ones that are also low THC aren't as effective for me so now I look for both high THC and high CBD and regulate dosage depending on needs. Unless I'm running a breeding program, I stick to one or two strains max so I try to find strains that work day or night.
I've thought about switching to edibles but I'd literally have to grow 3-4 times more to make that switch. Not to mention I'd have to learn enough recipes and techniques to have variety. Not that I couldn't, it'd be a lot more work though. I guess I could start a collective and get different members to contribute different talents; that would allow people to specialize while adding diversity and shared labor. *shrug*
Disclaimer: I still use HID and I'm NOT an LED expert. All of my LED knowledge is from other parties or research so I can't say from first hand experience one way or another. I also run a medical grow consulting business in SoCal.
I don't know about medibles... Simplest way would be to dry fry (5 -7 minutes, stirring constantly) in a pan til the color changes & little wisps just start to come off it...
Then you've made it accessible for your digestive system... Then you can, put it in gel caps (you can buy at the drug store), sprinkle over rice, cereal or add to smoothies, and you can melt some chocolate, grind the cooked cannabis real fine & mix into the melted chocolate, pour into molds (I use icecube trays), put in freezer to harden, & you have a real YUMMY way to take your Medicine when ya can't be rolled a fattie or igniting your vaporizer...
I like to save all the leaf matter, stems & trip & either make Ganja Tea with it (simmer gently in a pot full of hot water for a while (1/2hr, I like to add raw cacao to that (has fats that meke great carrier for the cannabinoids) bits to it, then add some milk, or coconut milk (needs to be fatty so if you use nut, oat or hemp milk be sure to add the coconut milk too) for the last few minutes to hot up the milk & sip slowly... This too is a real nice soothing way to Medicate...
Or if you wanna go the "brownie" route, you can also use your trim & fans to make budder or oil (I like using olive oil to make a cannabis infused oil for external application with a hot water bottle when joints hurt bad.
It doesn't give me a steady supply, but I like being able to use mulitlpe delivery systems to try to combat the whole "building up a tolerance" thng...
I also find differences in how the medicine affects me with different delivery systems and even with the vaporizer at different temperatures!
There is so much to be studied on how this amasing Medicine works...It's Incredible!
Oh! BTW! I can still make good reports on the progress of my crops in a comparative way, even though my Medicne crop went balls up on me... (Made me a mess of Ganja tea though).
I've been noticing that the garden plants that I stuck in the gorw tent, are doing very noticabley better than the ones on my balcony. Looks like a third to a half again as big outdoors as they are in that tent under the Solar Storm!
Maybe it's not surprising, given what the conditions are like outside (see previous post), but I think it's kinda funny how the inside ones are bigger, not just taller, but with bigger leavees, and the plants were all the same size when planted.
Oh, and of course I'm still workng on Medicine... Got about 6 of 12 seeds popped under some T5 for the time being...
Trainwreak fem & a coupla seedlings growin' up... funny genetics or somethin on them seedlings... They're first set of adult leaves are kinda twisty... I hope that's the last time too.. We'll see.
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Wow! It's another hot one here in Babylon Central. Got the a/c on & while it's about 28 in the sitting room, it's a nice 25 (celsius) in the grow tent. Getting kind of full in there! Got LOTS of flowers on the Cuke & bean plants. Got Zucchs on the way. Meanwhile the same species outdoors have not yet flowered.
Got a new cohort of seedlings soakin' up the good vibrations! Got my big girl ready to go to flower at a bit over 12 inches tall... She started showing fall colors for a bit...after my trouble with heat & water. Seems to be greening up again, but I'm a bit concerned that this girl too will go hermie on me..
So I got about 4 of a couple different strains & hope that we can have a nice stress free childhood & grow up to be some nice Ganja Goddesses for what ails me...
I'm also thinking of cobbling together a rack for along the wall that would hold some of them wee ones on an angle, to the light to make more room on the floor for all my little green friends!
Such a pleasure to see what the plants can do under good light!
I always grow from seed so I always get some males. I always save the best looking one (moved to a different location) and use it to pollinate a single female so that I always get seeds for the future. I don't know if this would work for you. I noticed that a male that has not open it's pollen sacks placed in vegetative light continues to bloom (albeit slowly).
Apologies for abscence, but I been having adventures, both with the medical bureacracy and with my indoor & outdoor garden.
Got beans from both indoor & outdoor plants, performed about the same, so I'll keep the beans outdoors from now on. Been getting tomatos from the indoor plant like anything, bu their still green outside. Tomatoes LOVE those lights. Cucumbers in both places had flowers & started fruiting. The indoor plant had more flowers & foliage and was doing better than outdoors, until disaster struck. Zucchinis are slightly more productive indoors. Medicine I've been keeping about 18 inches from plants (veggies are a bit further and are on the walls of the space) from the light with good growth, thick & bushy, even when it begun to stretch out with the light on a "Bloom" cycle she still stayed nice & dense. Had nice shape & color, until disaster struck I figured I was gonna get quite big, beautiful & bountiful.
Then disaster struck. Actually, I've been having disaster after disaster! My first crop went hermie on me big time! Then I had an emergency water shut off that left me with nothing to water my plants with for 2 days in a heat wave. Then the A/c broke down & it got to 40 degrees celsius (over human body temp!). then, cuz I opened up the grow tent & ran fans pulling air through the whole place to try to drop the temps... That's how I think I got ... what looks like spider mites. Also may be some powdery miltew too. They wrecked almost everything in there within 2 days, except the tomato plants, which are still producing fruits.
So I hacked most of the foliage off my Medicine plants... Anything with web, wee brown spots or that sticky stuff on em, leaves not much left 2 weeks into flower, but maybe It'll pull through (only to go hermie lke the first crop!)
So far I'm zero meds for 2 crops now!
But I gotta say, that one thing that has NOT let me down, not once, is the SolarStorm! When the a/c for the room works, with just the filter fan, 10 inch oscilating fan & the screened hatch on the side open, I get a constant 23 degrees celcius (room temp or a nice June day)
So, I'm taking EVERYTHING outa the tent & scouring it down good with bleach, water & elbow greas, then I'll spray it down with alcohol, & I got a tray of clones rooting right now to move on in & maybe, just maybe, it'll be 3 times lucky (crosses fingers).
Is there ANYTHING that one can use to treat powdery mildew & spider mites that won't damage the quality of the Medicine or render my veggies inedible?
You could have bought bottled distilled water for the plants or used the water out of the back of the toilet tank...in an emergency.
You really shouldn't have chopped up your plants 2 weeks in flower, you may have done more damage than the mites. Mites can be treated with neem oil, it's organic even I think. Mites, molds and even odors can also be treated with ozone but it causes some damage to plants and an ozone generator can be expensive too. If you're not sure that it's powdery mildew, try foliar spraying with just plain water just before or right when the lights come on. Sometimes people see a residue from evaporation on leaves and think it's mildew when it's not so...be sure.
Good luck!
Disclaimer: I still use HID and I'm NOT an LED expert. All of my LED knowledge is from other parties or research so I can't say from first hand experience one way or another. I also run a medical grow consulting business in SoCal.
Wow! It's been a while. I have had some more adventures... - Industrial accident took out 5 power poles in my area, resulting in a 6 hour power failure that blew one of the panels on my light!...And the hallway lights in the building! But the good thing is that no one was killed (powerline fell on a city bus full of passengers... And no one was hurt...)
But, I am pleased and proud to report that I still managed to finally get a crop to maturity!!!
I just got to medicate with my own lovingly tended medicine.... Sweet!!! Burns with a white ash... Slow sweet transition to medicated state...Easy on the lungs. And it makes me feel all warm & happy all over to know that I grew this!
Because of all the "learning experiences" I had getting this crop to harvest, I did not get very much more than using my bizarro ghetto grow from salvage... However those buds were loose and airy... These wee sweeties were tight & firm and the harvest off the one plant that survived to harvest was 1 & 1/2, 1-liter (quart) sized mason jars of dried bud. Previous harvests were max one jar, but weighed much less...
I am feeling quite confident that I can run a self-sufficiant Medicine garden with this set up...
I ended up removing the vegetable plants because I've decided to keep my grow tent for strictly medicine.... I will grow the culinary herbs & veggies out in the sitting room & balcony. Though I am considering growing other medicinal herbs in the grow tent with my medicine. (Feverfew works well for some folks like me as a migraine preventative... St. Johnswort good for fever, depression in some folks & is a nice soothing cuppa before bed... etc, etc, )
So, while waitng for the Trainwreck to mature, I took the seedlings (different strains that I thought were helpful...LUV, Arthritis PM & Purple Sativa). 2 of each made it to healthy young foot high plants. I moved them into the bloom tent with my flowering Trainwreck.
I lucked out with the 3 pairs. I ended up with a male & female in the LUV & Arth PM. 2 females of the P.Sat.
So then I realised that I had not thought this through very well. Where the heck is my "LOVE SHACK" for the loving couples???
Duh!
Well, my Metis heritage taught me to be resourceful with meagre resources!!! [cue the fiddle music] I went to CANADIAN TIRE and picked up a box of clear garbage bags and some bamboo stakes. I watered with a drip hose so I didn't have to keep lifing the bags
I paired the "loving couples" off in a bit of carboard box, I put the bamboo on each corner & put the clear bags over the whole thing. These I returned to the grow tent & let those bebes get it on!
When I saw the guys had shot their wad in each case, I removed the males & put them out on the balcony. My cat LOVES cannabis leaves and will sit and wait outside while I tend the grow tent plants cuz she knows I will bring her out a few leaves to nibble.
I left the bags on the girls for a few days, then gave them a shower in the bathroom first thing in the AM & returned them once they'd dripped dry for a bit....
The day I harvested the Trainwreck, I moved 4 Trainwreck rootings in there with the 4 plants now well into flower.
I see bulging ovaries on the LUV & Arth PM... Flowering well under way in those & the P.Sat, though I can really see the difference in the growth rates between them and the Indica dominant LUV & Arth PM. The flowers of Sensimeila and fertilzed females look very different too...
Now the Trainwreck clones are getting well into flower. I've got another crop of rootings ready to go into bigger pots & will be ready by the time I harvest the LUV & Arth PM.
I'm feeling good that I've got a rhythm going that will keep me a steady supply of meds...
One thing I'm exploring now is this...
I used the UVB as recommended in the last 3 weeks of flowering for the Trainwreack, but now I've got things runnings so I harvest about once a month (Saves my crippled hands in the trimming...). But now I'm not gonna be able to run that UVB in this way....
Was reading an article on UVB somewhere that was saying to put it on a time & run it for an hour or so per day... So I'm thinkiong of trying that & see... Or maybe I should run a flower cycle without it to see how it affects the medicine (but with all them bells & whistles, it's hard to resist using them!)
The other thing is I'm a wee bit concerned about the blown panel of lights on the Solarstorm... I'm lucky it wasn't worse..
I suspect I shouldn't still be running it... But with 8 plants in flower in there I'm reluctant to shut it down....
I am already savng up for another one (and then another one... ). I'd love to eventually have 2 tents (veg/mother and Bloom) & use my old cupboard as the "LOVE SHACK"... and then have another Solarstorm for indoor veggies in my sittingroom!
Oh! BTW, the tomato plant produced like crazy in there & I expect that it would have kept me in a permanent supply of tomatos... about equivalent to the outdoor one on my balcony... That's pretty darned good!
Thanks for the update, glad it all worked out and you're happy. You might want to get a scale so you can get an accurate weight for comparisons in the future
Try running the uvb for a whole cycle too...
Contact George at CLW and see if he'll replace your SS.
Disclaimer: I still use HID and I'm NOT an LED expert. All of my LED knowledge is from other parties or research so I can't say from first hand experience one way or another. I also run a medical grow consulting business in SoCal.