thai @ 63 days, blue dream @ 37 days, and more update

the big thai plant is @ 9 weeks flowering, 63 days! i checked trichomes today and it's about 1/2 clear 1/2 cloudy, we're beginning the flush tomorrow, harvest in 3 weeks most likely




the most mature blue dream is @ only 37 days flowering, it's trichomes are getting amber already though! 1/4 amber, 1/4 clear, 1/2 cloudy, so i am going to begin flushing for 2 weeks tomorrow, no more nutrients in the water, probably harvest in 2 weeks at this rate



the myster-e plant is also @ 37 days flowering, it is 3/4 cloudy and 1/4 clear


here's the veg cabinet, everything in here that is large enough was defoliated 2 days ago


this is my thai mother, she's 59 days old, going to take 6 or so cuts off of her tomorrow


this is from seed a friend gave me, the best looking one out of the bunch, it is either og or bubba


i cut 2 real low buds as samples, these were not going to get much light and get big no matter how i trained it or what leaves i prune, a thai and a blue dream, using a magnifying glass balanced just right these should be dry in about 2 hours so i can have a sample


here is my

planttrackit v.0.3.a

here's a shot of my new and improved plant tracking excel spread sheet, all calculations occur in the black colored cells, this is very bare and just what i need to know, i feel it's a lot easier for me to view than v.0.2 ever was

thai @ 8 weeks, flower chamber getting crowded, more thai and blue dream clones - june 19 2010

thai is at 8 weeks flowering today, only 3~4 more to go! the 3rd generation thai clones were ready to be put into soil, so i had to make room in the veg chamber, 2 of the plants pulled from veg and put into the flowering chamber have only vegetated for 6 days! so i will have a mini thai and a mini blue dream coming my way in a couple/few months

i defoliated the thai a bit today, pulled off a few handfuls of crystally sticky leafage! here's the before picture


and here is the after shot


some bud shots of the thai





oaksterdam nurseries blue dream (17 days veg, 30 days into flowering)





a bud shot of the myster-e bag seed plant's top cola (30 days flowering)


here we have a thai in the front (clone, 6 days veg, 1 day in flowering), a myster-e plant clone (19 days in veg, 1 day in flowering), and in the back is blue dream (13 days veg, 7 days flowering), poking it's head in on the right you can see a lower bud from the big thai plant


this thai clone just got a haircut to allow light through, defoliation really works, keep trimming! she was vegged for 38 days in the tiny veg box i put together, comparing this to how big the first thai got under 250watt hps in just 31 days

wow what a difference the hid makes compared to the veg boxes crappy $34 cheapy ebay led panel, i need to put the cash down for something at least halfway decent like a sunshine systems glowpanel 45 or maybe a bloomboss 45, i don't like the ufo style ones, a square makes more sense as far as space planning, plus you can hang them vertically it seems! the ufo wouldn't be easy vertically, maybe there is a way to set it up that way in a stable manner but i don't know of one; my idea is to have a panel or 2 in the flower cabinet too! have them actually hanging off of the hid hood at a slight angle angling down (so light doesn't accidentally hit the underside of leaves), it would provide side lighting to supplement the 250watt hps but add minimal heat (if any)


i am keeping 1 thai in the veg chamber as a mother, she's going to be
ready for pulling 6 or so clones off of in about a week i think, i keep
her in the far corner furthest away from the cfl bulbs and mostly under
the low powered led as it stays nice and cool, for keeping a mother thai
plant it seems to do well as long as i keep training her low

the new clone all the way in the back is having a hard time, the 3 other clones i popped in yesterday seem to be doing well in their new home

thai and blue dream clones, thai flowering @ 7 weeks - june 12 2010

i took 2 sets of 2 clones today, blue dream, world of seeds wild thai, here they are in their new home for the next 5~7 days


they will stay in the main cabinet, with their grandmother the large flowering thai, i have brought in 2 plants from the vegetative cabinet into the flower cab as well, the blue dream and thai mothers of the newly cut clones


here are some closeup shots of the thai buds, we are at 7 weeks, 49 days, as of today








and here is our blue dream from oaksterdam nurseries, we are at 23 days into flowering for her


next up is the vegetating cabinet, the plant in the front is a cut from the mystery plant in flower, you can see sprouts to the right, they are either og or bubba, to the right of that are newly planted thai clones, their mother is to the far far right on and not really visible in this shot

smokefrogg's economical and small cloning solution

my cloning technique is really simple, here is a list of ingredients needed:
1 lime
ro water
16oz. plastic party/beer cups
plastic wrap if the cuttings are short, a clear plastic sandwich bag if the cuttings are taller
rubber band large enough to go around the top of the 16oz. cup
container large enough to put rockwool cubes in and have them completely covered with water
rockwool cubes
rooting hormone
steril razor blade

the procedure:
1) fill a container with ro water, add enough water so that rockwool cubes will be completely covered
2) slice the lime and squeeze half of it into the container with the water, i eyeball this and don't really have any true measurement, i am using small key limes, and only used half, although i am only taking 2 cuttings, the point of this is just to raise the acidity level, make sure to stir up the solution well
3) place rockwool cubes into the lime/water solution, let them sit there for a few minutes
4) get your rooting hormone out and sprinkle some out into the lid
5) now it's time to take cuttings, get the razor blade out and slice off the pieces you want to become clones, you may want to slice off some of the lower leaves on this cutting so the stem portion is a bit long
6) i like to slice diagonally on the bottom of the cutting, so the cutting's stem goes into a V shape, this exposes more of the inner portion of the stem allowing for greater surface area to root
7) roll the bottom of the cutting into the rooting hormone, get it all over the bottom and the sliced V shape part
8) take the rockwool cube out of the water and stab the cutting into it, get it a good 1/2" - 1" or more deep into the rockwool (i don't like using the premade hole in the rockwool, i feel the cutting is too loose in the hole, stabbing it in makes certain that rockwool is directly touching the cutting stem)
9) place the rockwool cube with the cutting into the 16oz. cup, i like to fit 2 side by side per cup as it keeps them elevated from the bottom about 1", with just 1 the rockwool sits on the bottom and can become far too damp
10) add a little bit of water into the cup, make sure that the water is not high enough to be touching the bottom of the rockwool, leave about 1/4" - 1/2" of air space between the bottom of the rockwool and the water
11) place the bag or saran wrap over the cup, use the rubber band to keep the bag on tightly
12) place this now self contained clone bio cup into your grow area, i like to keep direct light off of the clones, i have been placing mine in a flowering cabinet with a 12/12 light cycle and they have been doing great!
13) after about 5-7 days your clones should be good to go! they may look a bit wilted after a couple hours of leaving their high humidity bio cup, they will perk back up again after a day or 2. it is good to put them under a somewhat low intensity light during this time, i take mine out of the room with the hps, they sit under a small led panel and a couple of cfl bulbs instead

happy cloning!

why beercups? why such a small number of clones? here's some background:
i started using the plastic cup method after visiting several garden and hydro stores. all of the cloning stations that i saw were large, i just don't have much room to work with, and am only doing a small number of clones when i need them, so none of the existing commercial solutions really fit my particular needs. with 2 clones per cup, and each cup being it's own separate portable environment, it has worked out very well for the small level of growing that i am doing.

3rd gen thai clones, og or bubba seeds popping, defoliated thai @ 6 weeks - june 5 2010

there are 2 clones of the thai sitting in my vegetating box, one of them had enough growth for me to take some clones, hooray! these clones are the 3rd generation, their mom being a clone, and that mom coming from seed, spread the thai goodness!



here is the mother, one clone came from topping her, another came from the stub remaining on the lower left


here are the clones in their new home for the next 5-7 days


a patient had given me about 16 seeds the other day, he said, "these are feminized, they are from a medical grower, they are some og seeds, as well as some bubba", wow guy, thanks! 3 have popped so far, if i get 1 og and 1 bubba out of it i sure would be happy, although having either one of those strains i'd be happy about too, can't wait to see how these develop


here's the whole cabinet



lastly lets take a look at the main thai plant, defoliated quite a bit, she is bare but i swear those bud sites are bulking up, it is a slow process but it seems like defoliation really is helping, she has been flowering for 42 days, exactly 6 weeks so far, i am at the half way point in the flowering process for her, this strain of thai is supposed to be a 12 weeks strain

some fan leaf and tiny popcorn junk trimming - june 1 2010

i did quite a bit of pruning, getting rid of little popcorn tiny flower pieces that are too low to ever get a real chance to grow. i also thinned out quite a bit of fan leafery in order to allow more light to pass down and through the plant, i had done some reading and discovered several folks that were chopping most fan leaves off once the bud sites began to show their own leaf growth, the book i've been reading advises against this, i went ahead and gave it a try on one of the thai branches a few days back, today i noticed that the trimmed branche's bud sites were growing noticeably quicker than the other non trimmed branches, so i went ahead and applied the technique all over the thai, a little bit on the blue dream, and you can definitely see that i did this a few days back on the mystery plant too. in addition i am training the main cola of the thai again, it seems only 1 side of it gets a fair amount of light no matter how i rotate the thai plant, so we're training it down a bit to hopefully correct this issue



in the bottom left you can see 4 small pots of soil, they each have 1 bean in them, a fellow patient gave me seeds that he claims are feminized and either bubba or og, either one i'd be more than happy to create a little bit more room for



this was taken with flash turned on


to the right you can see one of the clones i took, it is a clone of the oaksterdam blue dream which is in the flower cabinet, she's reaching for the light and happy to be alive, so glad my cloning process worked out, i feel very confident in cloning now and will take my own thai clones in a couple days