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water gel / crystals


Maffro
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Heres the first wave of autos for this year and the water retaining / storing gels turned out to be the same shit ! so it recommends 2 teaspoons for each 20cm bucket ! so in the 1st pot is just soil, the second is soil and gels then the third is soil gels perlite and sand. When mixing i was thinking would a bottom half of perlite and sand be best for drainage and air retension ? or just mix it all up ? I had a forth plant which was nl x BB auto from godknows where - a freebie - so i put everything in the mix and an extra 2 teaspoons of gels ! The seedling looks a bit deformed so thats going in a bay window for an experiment of its own, no more lights for her and a litre of water a week and lets see what we get.

LR selectah

Basking

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When mixing i was thinking would a bottom half of perlite and sand be best for drainage and air retension ? or just mix it all up ?

I would mix it up , looking forward to seeing if this works as my outdoor season is only coming up to plant in October.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Right here what they look like

easy riders

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goodluckcard 001

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Right i cant see the pics at the moment but each plant has had 4 days without watering so today ive given them a litre of water each and ill post some more pics next Saturday so you can see how they get on. So they all have the same size pot, get the same light and get the same amount of water. Im going with a litre a week at the moment as im thinking that each outdoor spot will have 5 plants and i can carry 5 litres in my pack without looking too suspicious then i just refill after each spot at the river ( i really only can spare one day a week to do watering).

Any other suggestions as to how this experiment can be conducted please feel free to say !

As you can see one has started flowering already

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So heres todays little update, the plants have been 9 days without watering and still look fine - ive just given them a litre each with a tiney drop of baby bio, they have been in the window for a week as i cant put them under the light anymore due to space constrictions. They have stretched slightly over the weekend and theyre all flowering, the smallest one is the one with just soil - dont know if thats phenos or what but from what ive seen all of my outdoors this year will have some water gels for sure. Im using "Hozelock" water storing gels and they are cheap !

easy rider trio

E.R and money makers (Johnsons Tomato ones !)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sorry I did not see this post before now! I have tried the miricle grow version of the crystals for the last 2 outdoor grow seasons! I will not use them again! I used differant potting mix like happy frog and even coco, followed the instructions to the letter & also tried putting it directly in the bottom of 15 gal grow bag or directly in the ground! The results where the same, the crystals clump together and rise to the top of the growing medium! In the coco the roots would dry up 4 inches deep with a glob of wet crystals sitting on the top of dry growing medium! I hate to see anybody waste money, but if you must use very little!

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  • 2 weeks later...

well they are going better then i expected considering the amount of sun April brought us, gave them some bio bizzz bloom this week which they loved, they also stink so they all have to go out soon and the weather man said it should be ok after next Tuesday.

easy 1

this one seems a little more on the sativa side and is the soil and gel mix

easy 2

This one has the soil, sand, perlite and gels going on.

easy 3

This one is just soil and looks like its going to have a nice main cola - smells more than the other 2 too

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Cheers for stopping by Guys - They are semi window plants, today the sun is shining through the windows at 7am ! and it goes around the corner usually at 15.00 and after that they sometimes go next to the veg box thing ive got going on for some extra light, the 2 small ones still fit in but the big one doesnt.

Cant really tell if the soil mix makes much difference as ive never grown this strain before, will try the experiment again when i germinate the supercritautos as i can compare with last years and everyone elses on here. But now that they are drinking more we should see if the gels make a difference.

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hey i just say this topic and desided to post my exsperiance with these water saving crystals and outdoor growing. i live in toronto canada but when i was around 16 i started with a group of friends doing multiple outdoor crops all over ontario and southern qubec. my man places would be peterbrough and the boarder of qubec and ontario. in peterbrough me and my friends would usually spend that majority of our time as it is a short drive from my house and we had places to stay because 3 of my friends had cottages there.

in qubec it was a different story there was one cottage there that was used heavly by my friends family at tat it wasent a very plesent place to stay the cottage was just one room there was no running water no toilets ect... to make along story short we didnt wanna spend much time there but we knew from previous attempts at bring in big crops that peterborough was way more heavily populated so it was harder to find private space there and in this place in qubec we could do one large crop without the risk of having someone come across it.

so for the hole year before we started this crop we wanted to figure out a way we could do it where we only had to visit the crop 3 - 4 times max. the location of the crop was so far into the thick bush hauling soil wasent an option in peterborough we would do tons of little crops and we would just bring pro mix and tons of large grow bags at this location that wasent an option so we prepared we bought loads of different time release nutrients a couple massive 50 kg bags of perlite some stuff to adjust the ph of the soil etc.. and the main thing that made it possible loads of water saving crystals.

we brought with us 100 clones of sweet purple and sativa spirit from paradise seeds. so we got there and we made massive area where we dug up and over turned the soil went through took out all the rock and chunks and added all of are ingrediants. when we ere adding the water saving crystals we decided that because of the fact that on the package it said the crystals where good for 3 months worth of watering how you prepair the crystals is you allow them to soak in water and the puff up and become like a gel that you mix into the soil.

we came up with the idea of following the spec's on the package with regard to amounts which i cant really remeber because this was quite a few years ago now so we soaked the crystals and mixed them in with the soil then we desided that if we then added the same amount of dry crystals to the soil to the soil that we added wet crystals we could get a few more months out of it and that the crystals would retain the rain water and puff up in the soil over time. we weren't really totall sure this was gonna work we were worried they would make the soil to moist. but we decided on pushing ahead with the water saving crystals because we worried about using a car battery and pump incase anything happened because we couldent visit the crop more then once a month.

but it worked very well i might add with the exception of a few plants that a cow had trampled( the reason we picked this spot was because it was on a big mountain at a high altitudeand most of the propertiy on the mountain was owned by family memebers of my friend the crop was placed on my friends uncles property who owned a cattle farm with hundreds or acres of private land) every plant yeiled nice soild bud the flavour was nice and it made that year super profitable because we had free'd up time to tend really well to our other crops. that year we only lost two small crops one to thieves and another ws assumed to be taken out by some bears as when we showed up to take them down the planters where ripped to shreds and there was bear tracks all over the place all the plants were scattered.

not only did having the crop in qubec help alot money wise making it possible for us to get a big return on our investment but the quality of the bud was substantually better the altituded make the sweet purple really change to soild purple as the sweet purple grown in peterborough was only slightly purple the stuff grown in qubec had no green exsept on the stems.

i wouldent suggest using them if you have the ablilty to tend to your garden whenever. but if you are a commercial grower and you are doing multiple crops they are amazing and really help take some of the stress off of having to maintain so many grows at once.

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The auto that had the gels and everything else has been out over the weekend and looks as good as the indoor ones at the moment, Heres the state of play today

ER

The other 2 are still in the window

er

er

ER and FD

er close up

I dont think the litre a week is enough for "big buds" so from now on im giving them a little more and im going to move up to full stregnth bio bizz bloom and see what that does !

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  • 2 weeks later...

Gave it 2 litres of water today so ill chop it next week, it only had one feed of bio bloom so not much flushing required ? the other 2 are ready now too but ill post those pics on the auto post

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yeah like tok said it seems the gel did it's work, they look healthy and surely not underwatered :)

AND they have some nice little buttons pushing to the top ;)

I hope the taste will be there too

Have a good end of grow

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Chopped and dried ! The tallest one is by far the best smelling, tasting and is the strongest hit ! yielded 11g dried but as the buds are fluffy that weight is alot in stalk. The other 2 both yielded 9g.

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Still having trouble with germinating, got one healthy bb auto and one deformed. Only one supercrit auto. 2 think diffs and one deformed TD. Think is was my compost so i splashed out on some jon ines seedling and cutting stuff - which resulted in 100% 7 out of 7 auto mazar germination.

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Good to hear that your mazar germinated well, sad to hear about the rest :(

And congrats for the harvest man, i'm sure they will be a nice smoke ;)

Have a good drying and curing

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  • 4 weeks later...

Just want to touch base on the water retaining crystals. There a few products out there to look out for .

So these crystals are in a solid form when out of package, then added to soil. So the soil mixture must be well mixed. As the water hits the crystal it swells, some swell to be the size of golf balls and some are more like a jelly and grow slightly bigger then original hard form. The Jelly type are better for your plant and soil. The ones that grow to be like golf balls aren`t so good. Can you imagine if the soil isn`t mixed well and there are 2-3 balls in a close range of each other. The roots will search for moisture and will find this huge source......But what if this source sucked up a good part of the nutes. It can cause heavy root damage. I had a friend that this happened to and he lost some plants due to disease. We looked in the soil and the roots were burnt from the crystals. So as far as I`m concerned the crystals are`nt going into my garden. I guess it would be good for guerrilla cash croppers, who don`t care for the end results. I do care for what I put in my lungs and food.

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Thanx for your input Pheno - there was some consideration to toxic un natural element of the products but in the end it was for convienience more than anything, with the 2 dwarf type plants i can compare the difference in the smokes as they are the same pheno and one had no gels added to her mix .

There was no difference in the hit, smell or taste - just the colour !

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just imagine if one of the crystals sucked up more nutes then another, the roots who would touch that crystal might have too much nutrients and could cause problems. Just my thoughts on crystals. I could see gorilla growers using them if they are just putting plants in the ground and leaving them till harvest. But for someone that can go water their crop then I would say no crystals.

I use a good soil mix that stays relatively most. Although I like to let them dry up before next watering, I find that this makes them stronger.

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