First attempt: DWC, 6 plants, 3 strains, 400W.

This is one of the plants as it's suffering in the high-Ph pot of soil.

This is them shortly after I put them into DWC. Note the yellow leaves on the far left one (the one that was threatening to shoot itself), they have all fallen off and it began a new solid growth about a week ago.

Here are the Aerogarden pics:

In that last picture, you can see a small new plant coming out. This is one of the ones I planted in a pod that never germinated. It's younger than the rest. We'll call this one "Flippy". The one on the middle here somehow lost its first stem, and immediately spawned two stems. It's been solidly growing like that since. We'll call this one "Siamese". The plant on the far left is the oldest and bushiest, we'll call it "Alpha", it's the one that went into the WG. The remaining plant we'll call "Whatever". This may sound insulting but I expect that it will have a sense of humour when it grows up and it will have to understand.

And here's all the recent stuff, all taken today:



The waterfarm with Alpha is on the near left. By the far wall is the big bin with Whatever, Flippy, and Siamese. Their roots are two pictures down. All looking good. I call it Flippy because it's been flipping its leaves on occasion, I'm guessing it's because of the surface being reflective. It hasn't done it today because there are more shadows now due to heavier foliage, so it will probably stop flipping.

The WF roots:

And here are the post-soil sativas. They might be a crossbreed but they definitely have the narrowest leaves here, so that's what I'll call them for now.


Well, that's all the information I can think of for now, I will post updates with pictures every few days. Any suggestions so far?

Oh, so actually I do have some questions. As evident, I have a plant that has a couple dozen branches, and a plant with only a few working leaves. Realistically, can I get these Sativas to produce anything at all if I start flowering in a few days? Or should I start flowering, leave the sativas in there, but abstain from flowering nutrients until they look ready? Holding off from flowering is problematic because of how big those other plants are growing.

Well, turns out there is an awesome hydro store near me less than half an hour away. I got the Ph 7.0 calibrating solution and have started keeping my plants at !+5.65-6. It's interesting to note that the Ph levels of my custom DWC boxes were more around 6, while the plant in the WF was around 7. I had to drop it down and I began giving it and the other big plants some PureBlend Bloom. I'm gradually shifting the hours towards flowering, right now. I just set it for 14/10, in fact, and will shift to 12/12 tomorrow. Pictures:

The three plants in the back. Flippy is still flipping its leaves despite having grown above the rest. I just take the flipped leaf by the stem and twist it back gently, and it stays. Ph 5.65, around 600 ppm right now.

A picture of everything. I moved the sativas to the left.

I changed the water in the reservoir for the sativas. Some gooey stuff was accumulating, but not too bad, considering there was still soil left in the net pots. Gave them a fresh mix of PureBlend Grow, Aquashield, Cal-Mag, totaling ppm was around 450 and I finished with 5.56 ph.

Someone must tell me what is wrong with this plant. Is it too wrinkly? Should I stick another bubbler to the bottom of the waterfarm or something? I'm going to go browse the forums for other WF grows I guess and see what I'm missing. But if anyone has any advice to give, it's appreciated.

The weakest Sativa has sprung crazy roots today, I just don't feel like taking a picture at the moment. The leaves it had grown in the DWC till now are dying for some reason, but at the top is a fresh new thickening green stem and fresh foliage, so I don't know. The other Sativa plant also has some old leaves it's discarding, but over 95% of it is green. I added half a teaspoon of PBGrow. Set the timer to 12/12, so as of the next cycle, they will be officially in flowering. The WF plant is still wrinkly but moisture seems to have returned to the big curling leaves, the stems aren't tilting weakly anymore and it looks healthier to me. I will probably flush its reservoir tomorrow night.

I'm actually not sure if these are even all that sativ-y anymore. They do have a different growing structure than the other plants still, but the thickness of the leaves is becoming more ambiguous with the other plants.


Managed to get a good shot of the WF without the HPS. Notice how the plant looks all wrinkly. This was yesterday. I drilled a hole and added a 4" airstone to the bottom of the WF, and another bubbler went into the three-plant container. They're getting air from two different pumps now.


The roots in the big container with three plants. The second picture is zoomed in on Flippy (left) and Siamese.

These are the roots from the Sativa-like plants. I'll still keep calling them Sativas for the remainder of this journal to simplify things for myself (since no one else seems to want to post at the weird times that I post).

A shot of everything. This is after the wrinkly plant had already spent several hours of day, 12 hours of night, and 8 more hours of light with the added bubbler at the bottom of the WF. I think the bottom leaves are looking different and the curved sunleaves on the plant aren't as dry anymore. Things are all looking good, I just have to clean the big reservoir sometime soon.

Oh, I added an 80CFM fan at the bottom of the closet, it's actually blowing into a custom filter I made by modifying a kitchen fan replacement filters (I also made a big one for the 250CFM). They all cost me less than $50 and I no longer smell the fresh weed smell when walking in, so they're doing the job for now. I also snipped the very top off of Flippy as it's getting way too high. Comments welcome.

I still had the HPS on. As I was taking pictures, it went off. I took the opportunity to snap the following, alas not very organised:

I changed the reservoir on my three big plants. The Red Stem plant immediately fell over like a weakling. I think what happened was it was relying too much on the wall to lean all of its new growth against, and never got to stand up on its own. I turned the net pot around till the plant was able to lean on Flippy. Oh, I filled the new reservoir with flowering nutes only. Most of this week has been transitional as far as nute combos go, I don't have specifics. I can say I keep them around 400ppm and 5.6-6 Ph for now. And I'm not sure of the genders yet.

I was away for 36 hours, the plants looked quite different when I came back. There's definitely lots of flowering going on, but I'm confused about the genders. Will try to get good pictures later tonight maybe and see what we can do about identifying.

I would like to note that adding the extra air bubbles seems to have improved all plants and now all of the leaves look normal to me. I am kind of concerned about having a height problem. I might have to take the HPS out for like 30 mins sometime to mod the closet so that I can raise it. I'd prefer to avoid it, but I guess I could give it two more feet or so if I absolutely had to.

Well, had some hermies. The WF, the "sativa" ones. Actually, they could've been male. They definitely had pods. Basically, my oldest plants turned out to be bad. But we sliced them up and will make cannabutter, see how that goes. Here's what's left:

This actually makes it a lot easier for me to manage the grow. They're all in one DWC reservoir now, 600 ppm/5.6 ph were the last stats I took. I did have to raise my HPS light past my original design. I am thinking next grow I will have a screen.

All is looking good. Ph is 5.5, they survived the 600ppm just fine. We did spot hairs on all three plants, but I wasn't able to get a good shot. Here are some decent shots I got after I heard the HPS go off.

Plants look good.


Clones look good.

Bong looks good.

Life is good.

I newfangled a way to raise the light by several inches, as it was getting a bit too close (14 inches or so) to the tops of the plants. I raised it by about 7 inches. Here's a picture of the most developed bud.

The tallest plant still has the slowest developing buds compared to the other two. But it definitely has hairs.


And a good bud picture from one of the good plants (their bud sizes are roughly about the same). (They are the plants that are on the left in the above picture).

Not much new going on. All the plants are alive and well. The biggest one is finally beginning to show man random hairs but doesn't yet have the buds that the other two have. Here is a picture of one of those buds. I tried taking a bunch of pictures up close after the HPS came off, but this is the only one worth posting. I raised the lights some more today too, probably another two inches. I might end up needing to add a small fan to blow near the HPS light. Anyway, the bud:

This must be day 27 of flowering. The plant with the two stems is the most impressive one and I'm sad that I didn't clone it, but I will try reviving it after harvesting. The fast-growing plant has started blooming, while the smallest plant is mostly overshadowed by it. We'll probably take off some of the big plant's branches as time goes and they become somewhat usable. And now for the images:




That was the late blooming plant just now, with a zoom in on one of the produced buds. I really only began seeing proper hairs about a week or so ago. Here is a view of it from a side:

There you can see the buds from the shortest plant. Which is this:

And here is the best looking plant. First the stem, then the buds. This is the one that has two stems.

My Ph tester went out and it was 2-3 days before I got a new, much better one. When I came back I found the Ph had gone down to 4. I brought it to 5.6 this plant morning and overnight (their day) everything's looking good. I trimmed some yellow leaves down at the bottom. Pictures will be in the next message once I have them ready. I'm quite pleased with the way my first grow is going. \

Here are just a bunch of shots I took a few minutes before the HPS went off and a few after. Enjoy the pictures!



Yeah, two pictures of this bud. It has a twin, I swear, you just can't see it in the pictures. Well, you sort of can. You can see a couple leaves from it. Just look for leaves that seem to show the same pattern that are about 2ft to the right of that one.

These were taken on 11-12:

This is the last remaining plant shortly before harvest, around 11-28-ish.


I harvested and clipped on New Year's, took me over a day to deal with the large plant.

My first hydro grow is finally over and I have learned many things from it. The big plant overshadowed the other two plants and thus was able to yield 10X the amount of both of them combined. The big plant was Indica dominant and the other plants were more Sativa dominant. Indicas take longer to flower, hence that big plant was the last one remaining.

Of course, I did have those two clones, one of the big plant and one of the small plant. They are now half a week into flowering, and my AG has germinated two (of two) bagseeds. They are supposedly BB Kush but I've read about all the renaming and misnaming of strains. It was a good toke, nonetheless, so I'm happy about it. While I flower the two clones and build a better garden (I'm going to use two waterfarms, a WF controller reservoir, and any other custom containers I make myself out of buckets) I can continue to experiment with bagseeds a little more till I actually decide to start ordering.

Oh, gf and I smoked that entire plant in two weeks I guess.