Southern Growing

I'm a grower down on the South coast of England and I'm painfully aware of how bad the current situation concerning good quality bud has become. You can go in to any city, town or village around here and get a bit of bud without too much hassle if you know where to look. Some of you may be lucky and get a decent gear but pay the high price of £10 a gram, while others may end up with the run-of-the-mill crap that seems to be selling everywhere these days for around £20-25.

I'm a grower down on the South coast of England and I'm painfully aware of how bad the current situation concerning good quality bud has become. You can go in to any city, town or village around here and get a bit of bud without too much hassle if you know where to look. Some of you may be lucky and get a decent gear but pay the high price of £10 a gram, while others may end up with the run-of-the-mill crap that seems to be selling everywhere these days for around £20-25.

I, for one, can't be arsed to hunt around trying to find a decent bit of smoke that is going to cost me a small fortune. This is why I grow; not for the potential high value rewards that can be made in this business, but because I love a good bit of bud and I resent having to pay a king's ransom for it.

I have been growing for about seven years now and only recently have I decided that something needs to change, be it the (stupid) law or the dealers need to stand up and say NO to crap bud!

So this column is my contribution to help enlighten/educate like-minded people about how important it is to know what you are doing when producing a garden of beautiful cannabis plants. We can all stick a seed in a pot and let it grow, but as most people who are passionate about growing find out, this is barely even the tip of the peak you need to scale if you want truly awesome weed.

My aim over the coming issues is to help people to grow good bud easily
so that they no longer have to buy off a hoodie or some multi-tasking crack head!

I am going to start nice and easy with a grow report on the lovely Super Skunk from Nirvana seeds, which I have a particular fondness for, plus it is a strain that just seems to love me back! (You will know what I mean). I have been growing it for several years as I find it still cannot be beaten for quality or quantity when compared to your ‘standard' and even most ‘high grade' bud that you will buy off your next-door neighbour's teenage son's mate - you get the picture!

It gives me great pleasure to share this grow with you all as I have just moved grow rooms from a cramped space to somewhere my ladies can properly flourish! On top of that, I have ditched the “old faithful„ 2x 600w HPS lights, (although these will re-appear at some later date as they are such good lights), and have opted for a mixture of 300W LED Bloom lighting, 150W HPS with electronic ballasts and 250W CFL lights, to save a bit of energy consumption.

One thing I am keeping the same is the method of growing, since I have a strong preference for the Wilma 10 pot hydroponic drip system from Atami.

Lighting

In this issue I will start by covering the 150W HPS with electronic ballasts, two of which I purchased from a grow shop on the outskirts of town for £300! I know that this sounds a lot, and it is really, but using two of them is supposed to be the equivalent of a 600W. For this reason alone they have to be worth a go!

HPS is a great light to grow under, 2x 150W = 300W = less electricity consumption, and as a last point of interest, they run a lot cooler than a 600W and come with a mirrored diffuser for better spread of lumens over your leaf canopy. These will be used in the flowering period.

Medium

There are many different media on the market from countless reputable dealers that are great for all types of growing methods/applications. These come with or without added nutrients and other goodies such as trichoderma and worm castings. I have always used expanded clay pellets (LECCA), small rounded balls that come in bags of about 25ltrs. I find these cheap and easy to use as they retain little water compared to media such as coco. This is good for me as I like to leave my pumps on 24-hours a day to allow my plants access to as much feed water as they want.

Nutrients

Again, this is an area in which there is so much variety that it is hard to say which product/brand is the best/worst to use, and I guess the nutrients are only as good as you are at the end of the day!

I have used House and Garden nutrients for five years on my beloved super skunk plants and they seem to adore it, much more than the B.A.C Topflower I used to use. They (House and Garden) have a good range of products starting with root enzymes, veg and bloom pH adjusters, right through to bloom stimulators and flush-out solution.

The Wilma 10 pot hydro system is a re-circulating system, and House and Garden produce a great set of nutrients for this type of system called Aqua Flakes, one of the new range of feeds that are supposed to be ‘pH-perfect', meaning that there should be no fluctuations in your pH values once set to your desired level. In this system it is between 5.8 and 6.1.

The Grow

With the basic set up covered, it's time to get down to the bit that we all care most about: growing our lovely bud!

After my 20 clones had rooted and were split into two batches (10 for the 300W LED for another issue, and 10 for the 150W HPS for this issue), I set my 10 ladies into their new home for the next 2-3 weeks so that they could establish a healthy root system and bulk up a little bit more before they get moved to the bloom room later.

To help them on they were placed under a bank of 4x5ft 35W fluorescent fittings, which give off little-to-no heat and allow the plants to grow right up to the lamps and absorb all that yummy light goodness.

Some people will think I'm a bit mad to use only bloom nutrients throughout my plants' life, but I have never found this has stunted or affected my growth/bloom at all.

The ladies started their cycle on a mild solution of feed water at around 1.0 EC for a week and then I started upping it at the start of week 2 and it finished at 1.4 by the end of week three of veg. Usually around this time my plants are around the 12-18-inch mark and are showing off a nice sturdy main stem and plenty of branching with deep green leaves wanting more light.

Flowering

The plants have had a great start and are all looking healthy and are uniform in growth, so now is the time to move them in to the all important flowering room. I love this room, it being where the magic happens. To see a load of cuttings come through and finish coated in resin and stinking to high heaven is just wondrous. Frankly, I could lose myself in there all day looking at the glistening flowers plumping up all around me.

As I'm using the Wilma 10 pot, moving the plants around is really quite easy as I can remove the drippers, pick the pot up and move it on to another 10-pot system inside the flowering room.

Once the plants have adapted to the new environment the feeding schedule begins again. We start with a 1.4 EC under a 150W HPS lamp with an electronic ballast for supposed better use of energy. The lights are slightly smaller than a 250W but are extremely bright and give off very little heat close to the lamp. The light is placed about 16-inches above the plants for the first four days to give the plants a chance to adapt to the sudden jump in light intensity, and then moved down to 10-inches from the canopy by day 10.

As with all HPS lighting, the plants picked up a bit of vigour and had a little growth spurt for a week or two, which pushed them to a height of around 60-80cm.

Feed was been upped to 1.6 EC now as the plants were starting to react to the change in photoperiod (light regime e.g. 12/12 or 18/6) and we are already seeing white pistils starting to emerge from each flower, growth looks impressive and well formed considering it is only getting light form a 150W!

Over the next two weeks the EC level is upped to around 1.8 and things are looking good for the super skunks under the 150W's. The buds are starting to form defined nuggets and all the plant is looking as healthy as she possibly could. This is when we crack out the House and Garden Shooting Powder, which is worth its weight in gold. This little treasure gives the plants a mighty phosphorous boost for three weeks (starting at week 5 of flowering, up to week 8, before flushing for a week for good measure at the end), and it has a massive effect on the size, smell and taste of your harvest. Every time I use this it amazes me. You can literally see the buds fatten up every time you are in the room. I've had Buds that have doubled in size after using this stuff and they always stay tight and dense.

By the start of Week 6 I am starting to feel a little bit anxious. I'm looking at my garden and instead of seeing the fat, luscious buds in front of me I'm used to seeing, I have smaller than usual buds that look a little bit airy and lacking something!

I checked my temperatures, which stay around 22-24 C constantly, the nutrient solution and the humidity and they all are perfectly acceptable. Could it be the lights? I know that I've only got a 150W over these, but if the hype was correct I should have my normal fat glistening buds by now. Instead I have four plants in the middle that are looking ok not brilliant, and six plants on the edges that just need more light than they are getting.

This is a pain as it means that the plants are not using the nutrient as efficiently as they could be because the lack of light intensity means photosynthesis happens at a much slower rate!

Unfortunately, come harvest time the buds hadn't swelled much more and the overall dried yield was only a fraction of what I've achieved with the same set up (excluding the lights). But judging by the ever-present stench of the super skunk, she didn't seem to care that she didn't get as much light as she wanted, as she still stank to high heaven. Plus the taste was just as good, so all was not lost.

OVERALL

These 150W lights are a good alternative to running a 250W but in no way compare to the mighty 600W. I would recommend using them for veg lights or as a flowering light for the first 3-4 weeks, then up the wattage to a minimum of 400W for the remaining time. Unfortunately they just don't deliver the goods to flower a decent crop of tight buds from start to finish.

Part 2 of this article which will cover 20 super skunks grown under a 300W LED bloom light, will be printed in two editions time. In the next issue I will be covering the mother/vegetation room. With tips and pics of propagation, vegetative stage and storage space within the grow room, along with some of the essentials that will be needed to make your grow go a little bit smoother.

Happy growing and smoking fellow stoners!