Indoor Iconoclastic plastic fantastic perpetual Shallow Water Culture

[The Iconoclast]

Close to four zips for the Blackberry Kush, I have a love hate relationship with this plant. Lemon Pie Auto is coming along nicely with my new experiment in not topping, the entire plant is still only 8 inches tall. I've been keeping the nutrient on the low side at about 800ppm, it's beginning to get crowded but all the bud sites are out in the open with all the large leaves on the outside.


Meanwhile I have begun my freebie bean grow (all from seedsman) with three in one pot. First up is Northern Lights in Blue, NY Diesel in Red and Banana Kush in Yellow. They all came up around day 5 and 6 slowly at first due I think to the cold weather. I thought Banana Kush was not going to sprout but here she is.

 

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You can see that the Banana Kush wasn't doing very well, I think it was just old seed, I planned on maybe just letting it grow as a single stem but it was obvious she had to come out. The roots looked healthy but she just had no vigour. Meanwhile NY Diesel, and Norther Lights are coming along well and looking very stocky. Topped at the 3rd node, they looked like a pair of cabbages for a while but after removing some leaves they are on their way. 26th tangle 27th defoliation 28th instant recovery

Lemon Pie is now nearing the end of week 8 and she is beginning to bud up. Her shape is looking very even, the jury is still out on this method of not topping. Next Lemon Pie will be topped so I'll see. Looks like another six weeks so this looks to be a 14 week plant.

 

[The Iconoclast]

Dropped three new seedsman freebies one of them, Lemon Auto, lacked the will to do anything more than germinate, the other two have gone on to be very vigorous if stocky, although the Northern Lights is too branchy for my taste, NYC Diesel looks good. I have installed a new Viparspectra 600 because of it's nice small square 10" shape to fit in the corner of my L shaped space. I now have the three spaced 5 weeks apart and the plan is to harvest once every five weeks

I think I have been using too much concentrated light for a long time, so I am raising my QB96's to about 20" See how that goes.

 

[The Iconoclast]

My original intention was to have a three stage perpetual, after realising that the final finishing time mucks things around and because I want to have everything sync on the same day, I have settle on 3 x 5 week periods. So I will compare this situation with exactly 5 weeks from today! At the moment they are 2.5wks 7.5wks and 12.5wks so whatever happens in the final 5 week block, I will always begin the next bean when the middle one hits 5 wks. Not that I'm expecting anyone to give a rat's, but there you go.

So here's a recovery shot on the big kahuna defoliation yesterday, and here the three girls after a recent reorganisation so I could spread the Lemon Pie out a bit.

I am going go begin making the reservoir last for 4 weeks, I'm in the third week on all three plants, although I do top up with concentrate to maintain ppm if they drop too much.

 

[The Iconoclast]

Big surprise on the Lemon Pie Auto, returned a shedload of top quality weed, there was only about an ounce and a half of that that was sort of larfy undergrowth but was still absolutely covered in dense trichomes such that I was getting a return of about .52 from 3.7g of weed that would be about 70% RH, which works well in the fat mac as the steam build up both keeps the oil cool and pushes it out under pressure. All the rest of the weed is just super sticky bud. not much trimming needed I ended up leaving a lot of the sugar leaves and longer leaves on that I would normally cut off because they were covered. Now the buds have a nice rustic outdoors look, but if you take a look through a loupe, it's just a sea of crusty trichomes. This produces not much more on average .65g rosin per 3.8g of bud.

I wasn't expecting more that about 8 zips, maybe 9 as I knew she would be heavy with child juicy bulbous trichomes, but over 13.2 zips was a genuine surprise, especially as this is my first non topped plant that was totally bent over. I'm gonna grow another one of these after the amnesia and top it to see the difference. However this has completely made me rethink the whole concept of topping, it does make a nice rounded even shape. Now I'm nervous that I won't be able to beat 13.2 by topping. However I can see that a plant has to be amenable to being bent over, she needs a bit of early flexibility, whereas, every plant can cope with a topping. IMO.

This is a very refined plant and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a medicinal strain due to the slightly sweet and spicy flavour, although she is strongly diesel to smell the buds, much like the Purple Gorilla, but unlike the PG, there's no overwhelming terpene profile, just a subtle lemon spice, she's only been cut a week ago so I'm expecting some more complexity. I could see the resin begin to run out of the fat mac just from being warm, that's how runny and full it is.

 

[The Iconoclast]

Finally a bean from Seedsman that's not a freebie, they look fresher. Stuck her in the eazyplug on Monday and day zero was Friday so she slots right in. The next bean in 5 weeks time will be another Lemon Pie not topped. Fortunately the big haul on Lemon Pie takes the pressure off me a bit, which is good because my youngest plants at 5 weeks BigBud x Northern Lights, has me utterly perplexed, I genuinely do not know how to handle this one. So difficult a puzzle has she presented that I had to lift her out and take her into the light where I could see wtf is going on. To make matters worse, the Purple Haze that is in the pot with her is not really interested in asserting herself. But due to the elbow room I now have, I think I'll just let them do whatever they want, for a couple of weeks.

Same with the other two, NYC diesel, and Northern Lights. NL, is short and happy in her little corner of the world and NYC diesel is too rigid for me to bother with, so like the other two I'm just gonna let these two get on with it and see what happens. This is how a shedload of weed changes the whole equations. Mind you it looks like things could be getting a bit hectic in the cupboard in a few weeks time, because BigBud is flowering early.

And some shots of the root structure of Lemon Pie, in the pot and in the Shallow partof the SWC/

 

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I started off with another Lemon Pie, this time I pulled her over very early and decided to trim off shoots earlier rather than later I have ended up with a smaller plant, I definitely won't be getting the 13zips of the last one, hopefully looking like 5 or maybe more, hard to say, it's a heavy bud. She's only just past 10 weeks and I'll be chopping in a week, as opposed to nearly 14 weeks for the previous Lemon Pie.

 

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Started my 2nd Purple Gorilla three weeks ago, and as per the first one, she is growing at a phenomenal rate but more to the point easy to bend, so I haven't really tried to do anything yet. No need to defoliate as there's plenty of room in the leggy branches. The first Gorilla, I topped at the forth node with 4 pairs of branches. This one I topped at the 5th node and removed the first node branches, so still 4 sets of branches, but a slightly different effect. I thought this might stop the final pair from growing too fast and making it difficult for me.

I have also started another amnesia in a pot, I've had no success in dirt before. I just used an organic seedling mix and chucked a bit of tomato mix in the bottom. I was intending to plant her out but I think I'll see if I have better luck indoors.

 

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Bit of an update on how I'm using the new eazyplug sizes. First off my Blackberry Kush which was 6 days old has a look that I've seen once before, which I put down to old seeds but whatever it is I recognise that this is not going to be a good plant, many people will think this looks fine but I know what's coming. So I pulled her out and cleaned out the plughole and soaked the pyramid in some h2o2 overnight mainly because there was a bit of mould on the Pyramid but it also can't hurt, and this time I put the plug in the moment I knew the bean was going to germ. This is a freebie Banana Kush that I have never grown before, the first two leaves look weirdly chopped off but I don't mind that, and they have a nice reddish colour.

The eazyplug fits nice and tight into the Pyramid mini. But it's a little loose in the 2" block. Normally I would put the eazyplug straight into it's big hydro pot when it looks like this however my next big plant is going to be another Brooklyn Sunrise and as an experiment I am growing it in the 2" block with the idea that it will form many more root ends instead of diving deep into the clay balls. Not only that but after one week it's growing at the same rate that it would do in the big tub so this is not slowing it down even though roots keep poking out and dying. She's 6 days old and I'll let her continue like this for the time being, I mean why not.

Because the plug is not so tight in the block I did pack a bit of more crumbs in after the fact but I am wary of damaging the fine roots, so next time I do this I will set the eazyplug into the 2" block before I germinate and pack the hole properly so it's not loose. At the moment I'm going to probably go another week before planting in the tub she's sitting on.

These eazyplugs are wonderful to work with and I cannot understand why anyone would want to use the paper towel method when this is obviously a superior way to start off any bean for soil, hydro or coco, because you put the bean in dry and when she sprouts none of that delicate fuzz will get damaged plus there's a nice stable base to give her a good start.

 

[The Iconoclast]

Purple Gorilla is bulking up nicely although not with the stacked calyxes of my first PG.

Brooklyn Sunrise that began in a 2.5 inch easy plug cube has been bent over rather than topped.

Banana Kush in the mimi pyramid


Purple Haze is still surprising me in her tiny pyramid.

I have a new bean underway that I'm going to try and grow in a 2.5 inch eazyplug! Just for the hell of it.