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Need is the mother of invention as they say and being on a limited budget, in a very limited space in a rental unit which limits my options; my needs are very specific so my inventiveness has to be all the more creative. Some other things I didn’t mention in the initial post:
-most of the gear in the room is 10-20 years old (including a lot of the pots), even a good portion of the panda plastic has been reused from previous grows (some up to 3 times over the last 5 years) partly to reduce the cos
Need is the mother of invention as they say and being on a limited budget, in a very limited space in a rental unit which limits my options; my needs are very specific so my inventiveness has to be all the more creative. Some other things I didn’t mention in the initial post:
-most of the gear in the room is 10-20 years old (including a lot of the pots), even a good portion of the panda plastic has been reused from previous grows (some up to 3 times over the last 5 years) partly to reduce the cos
but mostly to reduce the environmental impact of single use plastics in growing. People always forget that “reuse” comes before “recycling” in the three R’s any 80’s kid had drilled into them.
-the Veg area is built around a window for additional lighting instead of blacking it out. Now that it’s legal there’s no need to hide it, especially when the price has become so devalued.
-I don’t keep “moms” per say, I take grow a half dozen varieties in rotation and take clone from the lower growth that needs to be pruned before flowering. My usual cycle is growing 3-4 crops in rotation on a 3 week cycle usually since I grow a lot of 9-12 week varieties; taking clones every 3 weeks (usually only take 8-12 days to root and then start vegging), harvesting a crop and moving clones to veg area, veg to the empty spot in the flower room.
-For IPM I spray the veg area and early flowering crop (first 2 weeks until flowers are visible) with a home made neem oil/potassium bicarbonate spray (KCHO3 is the short for of potassium bicarbonate which I often use for brevity) up until winter is well underway and there are no bugs outside to invade the grow. I also use mosquito dunks as a BTi source in my reservoir to prevent gnats or thrips from living in the soil.
-I reuse the soil, partly to reduce cost, partly to reduce the eco impact; plus I was comparing reusing a fortified soil (aka a living soil or no-till system but I don’t use those terms as I find them inaccurate and marketing heavy) vs a traditional hydro-organic low tech grow at my previous place where I had a 7 x 13ft flowering room and 6x6ft vertical veg room.
-I still have to finish the S.I.P.’s (I need 3 which I’ll compare to the earthbox I’ve been using for the last couple years and ideally find a much cheaper DiY version which works just as well). Currently there’s the one earthbox and two planters I’m simply bottom watering when I remember.
-the 3x4ft area’s for testing seeds/making my own currently has 6 Guatamalan x Honduras girls which I created a year ago. I’ll start a thread about them in the cultivation section though. Next up will be Stellar Collision F2’s I was gifted from Dman (one of the breeders) to make an F3 generation, make a back cross with the mom (pheno #5) kept from the F1’s I grew and fell in love with, reverse a clone of #5 and use the pollen to make a reverse back cross (i.e. use the female pollen to hit the girls in the F2 generation) as well as make an S1 generation. Suffice to say I’ll have lots of seeds to share after for anyone interested in testing them and who promises to post pics, good or bad, of the results.