Green House Kush Test compared against Kaia Kush, each comparing Short Powder Feeding against Advanced Hydroponics Nutrients by Cannabissapean

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

( I had a feeling that something like this would occur.  ~40 minutes ago, when trying to submit my next post, the StrainHunters Server goes down, or at least my browsers are reporting that the server at www.strainhunters.com is no longer answering.  I'll keep trying to complete my reports.  Hopefully the server will hold together long enough for me to complete my journal.)

Here is a picture of the main cola of Kaia Kush #2 AH grown with Advanced Hydroponics.  Pretty purple colors, and the leaves are fully matured.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

And here is a picture of the main cola of Kaia Kush #1 PF fed with GreenHouse Powderfeeding (short).  Also pretty purple color, and sticky resin!

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

Here are pictures of the colas of GHK4AH (GreenHouse Kush #2 fed with Advanced Hydroponics).  This plant made 4 main colas.  It had grown so tall that early in flowering, I had to sharply bend the stalks downward to prevent them growing into the lights.  Because the overall canopy had grown so dense, I hadn't realized until the harvest that one of the colas of this plant had grown way over to the right of the tent and was crowding-out the GHK2AH and GHK1PF.  So here are the pictures of the 4 colas of GHK4AH:

This cola grew to the left toward the Cool White fluorescent.  It became so heavy that in the last days, during the flush, it broke and hung downward but continued to put on weight.

 

These two colas were more central to the plant.

 

The cola to the left of the yellow leaf is the cola that had grown far to the right after the supercropping to crowd the other plants.  (The cola to the right of the yellow leaf is the main cola of GHK2AH.)

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

This is a nice secondary cola from the Kaia Kush #2 AH that was crowding the GHK2AH.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

Although GHK2AH did make a couple nice colas, because of being crowded, some of the leaves and flowers in the inner area received less light, and that is evidenced by their light green color.  These inner areas still produced some nice flowers and resin.

One can see a secondary cola to the right that grew over to the fluorescent tube.  This tube is the UVB 2.0 lamp.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

I cut each plant just above the rockwool cubes, weighed each plant just like that, then hung them and measured their height, allowing any bent stems to hang freely on their own.  Here are the pictures and statistics so far.  These weights are the total plant, undried, untrimmed. 

The weight of the trimmed and dried final products and the smoke-reports must wait until a few days later.  But at least I have met the deadline for the contest.

This is KK2AH.  She measures 82cm tall and weighs 380g.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

This is GHK2AH.  She measures 77cm tall and weighs 277g.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

This is GHK4AH.  She measures 93cm tall, has four nice main colas, and she weighs 627g.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

Now that the front row of plants are out of the way, we can finally see the back row of powderfed plants in side-view. 

Side-view.  Sorry, if I had known that the focus was so bad, I would have taken a second picture.

 

Here are the labels for the powderfed plants (GHK3PF, KK1PF, GHK1PF).

 

These are side-views of the main cola of KK1PF.  This plant was the plant with the most resin of them all.  It seems to me that the Powderfeeding nutrients packed on more resin than the Advanced Hydroponics.  One could really feel the difference during trimming.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

Sorry, I was so excited about the size of the fan-leaves of the Kaia Kush #1 PF that I forgot to take a picture of the plant while hanging.

But KK1PF measured 82cm tall and weighed 566g.

Here are some pictures of the largest fan-leaves from KK1PF.  KK2AH had leaves also as large, but I had removed them about a week earlier because they had begun to deteriorate earlier.  The largest leaf is more than 35cm wide.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

Here is GHK1PF.  She measures 81cm tall and weighe 266g.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

And last but not least, here is GHK3PF.  She measures 82cm tall and weighs 350g.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

So, I have a nice pile of Cannabis to trim.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

But before I start trimming, I want to show you something that I had promised to show.  Remember that I had built these pots with lava rocks in the bottom, then small ton-balls, then the rockwool cubes, then more ton-balls.

The roots of the plant seem to love the lava rocks so much that there are very few roots that grow outside the pot, even though the holes are sufficiently large to allow them to grow outward.  This is good for hydroponics or aeroponics systems.  In the past, the roots had grown into the supply and drain hoses to clog them up, but ever since I have been using lava rocks, I no longer have that problem.

The plantless pots and ebb-N-flow tubs.

(Be back later.  I gotta make some coffee.)

Looking down inside the ebb-N-flow tub, we see that the plants did grow a few roots into the tubs area, but that is nothing compared to what they used to do.  The white tube with the wire mesh is the overflow drain.  The incoming port (from the feeding pump) is located underneath the middle pot.  The incoming port serves a dual-purpose in that, when the pump shuts off, the solution exits the tub and returns to the reservoir flowing in the reverse direction through the pump. 

 

In an earlier post, I spoke about a UFO (unidentified floating object).  I discovered that one of my airstones had disintegrated under one of the pots.  What I saw in the earlier photo was the end of the air-tube with the plastic connector minus the stone.

 

In the next post, I shall dissect one of the pots so you can get a good look at the roots.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

Dissecting one of the pots so you can see the roots.

Set the pot onto a tray.

 

Cover the top of the pot.

 

Turn it over.

 

Remove the bottom tray and we see only a few roots outside the pot.

 

Lift the pot off of the root-ball.

 

Close-up picture of the roots.

It was good to harvest today, because I can smell the beginning of root-rot.  Smells a little like a fish aquarium that needs to be cleaned.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

Now to begin removing the Ton-balls from the root-mass:

Rubbing the fingers back and forth, the ton-balls easily fall out of the roots into the tray.  It is better to do this while the roots are still wet and flexible.  If the roots are allowed to dry-out, they become brittle and break into millions of tiny pieces, making it even more difficult to separate them from the ton-balls when washing them.

(There it goes again.  The StrainHunters server went down again.  I can understand it, though.  I imagine that they are working hard to correct various bugs in the system, and they need to shut-down and restart from time to time.  I'm just glad that I started uploading my results as early as I did.)

As the process goes forward, the rockwool cube becomes visible.  From time to time, I dump the ton-balls into a second or third dish, because as you progress, the resulting collection of ton-balls become less and less clean.  It is better to be able to wash the ton-balls in separate batches rather than to mix all the impurities into the entire mass of ton-balls.  So, I collect the ton-balls into 3 or 4 different trays, each batch a little dirtier than the previous batch.

 

At some point, it becomes easier to turn the root-ball over again with the lavarocks to the bottom, and then with shears, easily cut the roots to separate the rockwool cube from the lavarocks layer.  You can see here that a few of the lavarocks are beginning to fall out of the bottom of the rootball.  Now the rockwool cube can be rubbed with the fingers over another tray to catch the next batch of ton-balls with a slightly increased amount of root-piece impurities.

 

Using the fingers, I gently pick small handfuls of the ton-balls off the top of the lavarock layer and deposit them into the next collection tray.  As they present themselves, I also pick out clumps of root material and discard them to the compost waste bin.  I continue this until it becomes apparent that it is more efficient to pick-out the individual lavarocks and deposit them into their own collection tray for later washing.

Yes, it is a lot of work, but it works for the plants.  (About a month ago, I bumped into an excellent deal on Lavarocks so I bought a bunch of it.  I now have about 110 kg of lavarock in the size of 1-5mm, and one bag of 40liters in the size of 8-16mm.  I plan to use just lavarocks without the Ton-balls sometime In the future to see how cannabis fares with pure lavarocks in ebb-N-flow.  I will not mix the two sizes so I can test to see if there is a difference in grow results between the two sizes.)

 

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

I spent a number of hours trimming each plant, being sure to keep them separate for later dry-weight measurements and smoke-reports.

I removed and discarded all the fan-leaves that were dead, discolored or otherwise undesireable.

Any fan-leaves that looked really healthy but didn't have trichomes, I saved them for use in salads and my protien shakes.

The trim from the flowers and fan-leaves removed from the flower areas that did have trichomes, I collected them into another tray for use in infusions, cannabutter, whatever.

The resulting buds (although not trimmed nearly so fine as I normally trim them) are now hanging to dry-out.  It would take much more time than I can afford to trim to perfection.  There is just so much to do, and I must do some other things today, as well as post these results.

Here are all 4 of the GreenHouse Kush plants hanging to dry-out. Yes, they are separated so that I can later generate separate dry-weights.

 

43 grams of sugar-leaf generated from the four GreenHouse Kush plants.

 

The clean leaves for salads and drinks weigh 252 grams.

[Cannabissapean]

14 April 2016                                                                                                  Harvest Day!

Those are the two Kaia Kush plants hanging to dry-out.  (I must add here, that the KaiaKush#1 grown with Powderfeeding (short) was much much much more sticky than the Kaia Kush grown using Advanced Hydroponics.  We must wait til the smoke-report to see if that makes any difference.)

 

The sugar-leaves from the Kaia Kush plants weigh 40 grams wet.

 

The undesireable leaves weigh 725 grams.  They are now ground-up and mixed into my composter for the worms.  The worms are giong to party hardy today.

So, there you have it. 

I shall now declare the official end to my Journal for the purpose of the Contest, but I shall continue posting the dry-weight results and the smoke report when the materials are ready.  I shall still be available from time to time to answer any questions you may have.  Also, as weather permits, I will resume the building of the greenhouse in my other journal found in the "Gear Reviews" Section of the forim.

Peace-Out, Strain Hunters!

Cannabissapean

[Mykol76]

Nicw work ,good harvest ,some beautiful buds were formed, I imagine that the smell is pungent and intense ..
You notice the excellent root system, at what temperature is maintained, your roots and nutritive substances during the flowering period?

[Cannabissapean]

Thank you, Mykol.

I had received the Bluelab Truncheon EC-meter just before the last batch of nutrients, so there were no EC-values measured before that.  I used it only once to measure the EC of the nutrient solutions for that last batch.

After that last batch, I had entered the "Rush-to-Flush" phase, where I used only tap-water for the last week to flush-out the salts and nutrients.  The EC-meter showed that the tap-water started at ~0,5 - 0,7 EC and the pH started at 7,8 pH.  Of course the EC of the reservoir would rise and the pH would sink as the minerals collected there.  But, I did not record the run-off EC and pH values.

In the initial batches of nutrients, the pH was always adjusted downwards to around 5,8.  In the last couple of batches, I adjusted the pH to a bit higher values (~6,2-6,5).  These values were reported from time-to-time when the nutrients were mixed.

The temperature and humidity can be seen in the pictures of the thermometer/hygrometer that also appear from time-to-time.  The warehouse where the tents are is held very much constant.  During the Vegg phase I kept it between 24-26°C/45%rH in the room.  The temperatures in the tent would remain virtually the same, except during each feeding when the exhaust fan ceases.  Then, the temperature and humitity would rise significantly approaching 30°C/80%rH over each a 30-Minute period, and then returning again to normal temps and humidity.  I think that these fluctuations may have a beneficial affect in that they create a hostile environment for would-be pests.

My journal is not so much a journal of data-logging, but rather a general comparison between the two strains (GH Kush and Kaia Kush), and the comparison of the two nutrient schema (GHS Short Powderfeeding and Advanced Hydroponics) and their effects on the two strains.  My journal was also an exercise in sharing my growing techniques in Vegg and Flowering phases (Rockwool/drippers, Lavarocks/Tonballs/Ebb-N-Flow, Fluorescent-lighting, LED-lighting, and as they were received, sharing the various new Tools and Meters.

[Ghost Grower]

Nice show man, lots of details.

Good job !

[Cannabissapean]

Thank you, Ghost Grower.

"A nice show" is exactly what I wanted to achieve.

I know that I blab sometimes, but I had fun making this journal.  I hope you'all have enjoyed it as well.

And as many of you know, it takes dedication and a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone to crank out a journal.  My deepest respect to every one of the other contestants.

I just wish that I had better growing skills to produce the giant colas like Mykol76 and Jankahar, and better equipment, lighting, camera, etc. to produce better pictures.

And oh geez, I wish I had the talent of creativity and computer skills to produce something like "Gonzo's Great Adventure", one can see in another section of the forum.  That was to me legendary and comical.  LMAO    

Many thanks to Admin (and certainly many others unknown to me) for your continuing efforts to expand the business and to improve the forum and to correct the flaws in the improved forum.  We all appreciate that.  And thanks for the tipp on how to maneuver pictures during uploading and editting.  That enabled me to improve my presentation, by bringing my pictures and captions together.

Materials are now dried and weighed and again photographed.  They are sitting now in curing jars.  I'll post the pictures of the dried materials and their weights soon.

[Mykol76]

@Cannabissapean

Our work was really great, many photos many growth details and everything else .. Your plants have been in great form for most of the period ..
But the experience comes with the years, and grown in the hydroponics, it seems easy, but at the same time is very delicate, and it takes little to fuck the system or part of it.
If I can give you some advice, try to keep the roots around 18 ° / 20 °,, above 24 ° the roots die, if the roots die, the plant can not absorb more other substances and water, and then starts to die.
However then again, you did a great job with everything, I enjoyed following your diary, I hope to soon see new jobs.

 

[Cannabissapean]

Mykol,

Thank you for the nice words, and for the advice.  I had not known that the temperature of the feeding-solutions was so critical as that, but now that you mention it, I think, looking back, that there was indeed a noticeable difference in performance after I had moved the reservoirs out of the tent(where it was warmer) and had placed them directly on the floor (concrete in contact with the earth about 1 meter deeper than the surrounding ground-surface) where the floor temperature is fairly constant at 18° to 20°C.

It had been suggested by some others here, that I should install an aquarium heater to raise the temperature of the solutions, while others had suggested (like you), that the solutions should be kept cooler.  So, now you have given me an idea for a future Test Grow.  If invited to participate in another Test Grow for StrainHunters/GreenHouse, I may decide to run a test regarding temperature of feeding solution, all other factors being identical.    Hmmmmmmmm...

[Mykol76]

I do not know who  and what we advised you, but as the temperature increases the oxygen diminishes, is a matter of fact.
Obviously it depends on the circumstances, whether to use a heater for the water, or a water chiller, but in both cases, the goal is to keep the root tmp around 18 °.