48 big crits

Broseidon

Active member
Big crits

Howdy Bro's and Brodettes,

went on hiatus and just got back and just put 48 CM seeds under ground.

3 didn't fit inside the propagators so they are gonna go without a dome, let's see how they will do.

Overall I kinda messed up already because I was still busy with this and that and didn't find time to plant the seeds for 4 days and they were a bit too far ahead. Planted them anyway, let's see how they will do.

Regarding germination, I tried something else this time:
Day 1 - 48 seeds into distilled water
Day 2 - all but 3 seeds had sunken down, a few had to be slightly tapped.
Day 3 - All 48 seeds had sunken by now and a few started to show the first signs of a tap root. I poured them all on a paper tissue which went into a plastic bag and into a cloiset
Day 4 - At the end of day 4, they were noticeably too long in the paper tissue. They had developed considerable roots and 90% had lost their "cap".

As I said, I had 100% germination this time around which I attribute to using nothing but MRN seeds and distilled water.
I will also, in the future, go 1 day into a glass of distilled water, followed by 2 days in paper tissue. I think they were just 1 day too long in the water glass.
Also: I will no longer pour them onto the paper tissue but gently place them individually. Ain't nobody got time to untangle all them roots and screech with fear every time they won't let loose easily.

Otherwise, quite pleased with this.

So future germination technique:
1 Day submerged in distilled water
2 Days in wet paper tissue (enclosed in plastic bag)

Like I said, gave me 100% germination rate.

Now I won't be able to flower all these babies but consider this my first serious selection round.

Critical Mass was the first strain gone from the ones I tried in the first two testing rounds and I had the most seeds of CM (which surprised me) followed by ASH. Since I had half the ASH seeds frozen (thought I wouldn't get around to popping them anytime soon), I went with the CM.

I will probably be able to flower 24 of them (so, half). But let us see where this journey leads.

Stay frosty friends

Broseidon out
 
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Hey greetings Broseidon!

Putting my chair here, i like to follow this and along the way maybe learn some things about selection as well.

The paper towel is what i also prefer, till now almost everything sprouted except for once with some old beans. they popped eventually with some water with H2O2 mixed in it, some trick i picked up somewhere online.




Good luck and wishes!
 
it worked out for you ... (this time)

here is the reason im against the glass water method

every seed has a built in fertilizer reservoir for the start, for the first 2 weeks how its often interpreted ...

anyways, i havent shown the proof, maybe i will one day ... when i get a few kilos of seeds ...

well, with this "drowning" you are leeching a part of the built in nutrients, thereby risking the pole position (compared to seeds that werent drowned)

there is a easy test: fill a glass half full with seeds (to be germinated) , fill it up with destilled water (EC=0,0) , when more than the half has sprouted inside the glass (and has sunken before) , go ahead and check the EC levels again, i bet they arent 0,0 anymore ...
(the reason for taking so much seeds, is simply to "guarantee" an amount that will activate the EC meter - a kind of "magnifying" glass with other words)

as you see this method is ok when you go coco or hydro (where you introduce nutes early on) - but it might be sub optimal on soil
 
@deran

I cant argue with that, actually it makes sense to me the way you explain it. I just saw it as a last resort otherwise the seeds where lost anyway.


Sorry also haven`t the kilo seed for testing :D

but interesting stuff!


Good day!
 
Broseidons back!! Yay!

Good to see you brother man.


I'll be watching, I bet you find a couple keepers out of such a seed pop.
Right on, dude. Right on.


Stay Hazed
Jake
 
I just won the spring cleaning critical mass, i be watching this to see what you get. Please talk extensively abut the phenos.
 
Howdy folks,

So it's official: 100% germination and 100% above ground

@deran
I used only wet paper towel method for the first two rounds and even though it looked like 100% germination the first round, I only got maybe 85-90% above ground from that round too. The second round I had all the issues with root-rot and the fungus gnats n all and it was a bit worse still.
This round a clean 100% and all are above ground and look healthy (even though I watered 15 with r/o water and the remaining 33 with roughly PHed [PH down for swimming pools, didn't even PH it actually, just squirted it in by feel] tap water @over 700 ppm. Still all good and the r/o water and shitty water ones don't even look different.

While what you say makes sense to me, I can't argue with the results either.
I will make sure to not let them sit in the glass longer than 24 hours next time around though.


Anyhow, the only issue I see atm is that they are all quite lanky/stretching.

I have not figured out how to make them short and stout from the get go yet. Every round, be it on the windowsill with light from outside and heat from the bottom from the radiator or under T8s on the cool metal shelf, they always stretch.

I have a heating cable I planned to run below a styrofoam mat and put that below the propagators under the T8s but if I am not mistaken, heat from the bottom leads to more, not less stretch?

Either way, they look good and healthy but stretch and I would have really liked to have rooted through plastic cups for once before transplanting. Looks like that won't happen again, hmmmm


Off to the next point:
I can't even veg all 48 in one go. So my current plan is to select the 30 "best looking" and transplant them into 1 gallon pots for veg, the remaining 18 I would put into smaller (1 liter) pots and continue vegging under the T8s, cutting them back, training and also root-pruning to practice my "bonsification"-skills.

Then cut clones from the 30 in veg relatively soon and root those, then immediately send them into the flower chamber to determine sex.
Refill as necessary from the 18 remaining in training until I have 24 females. Keep a backup clone from each and flower them all out. I will also keep 1 male but I will simply select by looks/feel and of course smell and hope I get lucky. I had 3 excellent looking (some a little terpy/smelly) males in my first round where I popped 5 CM seeds. Am confident that this line offers very solid males.

When all is harvested I will likely just flower whatever females didn't get a spot in the first round and simply fill the rest by clones of females I liked in the first round (just from looks, smell, etc.).

After testing the finished product I will make my final selection and hopefully end up with my first keeper mum.
At this point I will try to "bonsify" the keeper mum and dad and keep them around in 1 liter pots under T8s and move on to the next strain.

I likely won't germ 48 seeds again. I think 30-35 is more in line with my facilities. But let us see how this round shapes up.

I have to warn you all though, I likely won't be uploading much in terms of pictures due to reasons.

Maybe some in flower, let's see.

Feedback, opinions, criticism, as always, welcome.

Stray frosty my friends

Broseidon out

/Edit
Forgot to mention (particularly since this was a topic here recently):
I also got a twofer. One seed sprouted 2 seedlings. Seems this is becoming more and more common?
 
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Hi Broseidon,

Totally understandable that you don't want to post photos of 40+ plants. Hypothetically, someone could get in a lot of trouble for that.

But- 4 of the best (or only, as far as evidence is concerned) would be okay, no?

At least show us the twins bro :D


Re: the phenomenon of "twins" it's getting to be more common, but I think that is just because average joes like you and me are now popping larger amounts of seeds, where historically only real-deal heavy hitters in the industry where popping that many. I hope you can follow my stoned ramblings... It's a numbers game basically. More seeds being popped in the open, more mentions of strange genetic occurrences.


Very happy to hear that your imaginary garden is starting off so well!


Stay Hazed,
Jake
 
Ya I thought about that as well.

Might just be the numbers game with the twins.

Could also be a change in the gene pool over time though.
 
Quick update (no pics again :( ):
Out of the 48 germed, through some errors on my side, about 43 made it through veg.
Due to space limitations, I was only able to top/clone 34 of them. The remaining 9 remained in veg, untopped.

Out of the 34, I got a whopping 21 females and 13 males. Awesome ratio! I believe the remaining 9 (still have to clone them and they got huge ...) also have more than 50% females by first glance.


Anyhow, on with the update:
I presexed by eye this time before transplanting into flowering pots. I thought this is a risky business or hard to see and easy to misdiagnose etc. etc. but I am now convinced that this is my future method of sexing before transplanting into flowering pots and flipping.
The female hairs were very, very, very clearly defined and noticeable, almost impossible to miss. I found the males much harder to "diagnose". I sometimes wasn't sure if it was a male indeed or a female that just wasn't there yet and needed more time.
But then I just looked at the obvious 10+ females I had already found by that time and decided it is very likely a male, since if it was female, it would be highly visible like the other 10+ examples.

I killed off all the males except for 1. It looked by far the best, it had 4 main colas (reacted great to the topping) and had a citrus/grapefruit/lime smell when rubbing the stem. I am quite excited about this one. There were only a few females who looked similarly stunning out of veg. Great node ratio, bushy, vigorous, looks like a stud. Will keep for the future.
None other male was even close to this one in terms of structure and vigor. There were 1 or 2 more that made more than 2 tops from the one topping but they were lanky, spindly, needed support to not fall over and had bad node ratios (not very bushy). The one I kept also grew the main 4 shoots (from the 1 topping) very close to the stem and only the shoots coming out of those 4 main ones brushed out. It really gave that nice "cup" or "chalice" form people keep talking about.
So yeah, excited about that male.

In terms of females, I ended up with 21 which puts me at near max capacity. If I put everything right next to each other (pots touching), I can fit 24.
So stuff is pretty tight. I was considering if I should eliminate some of the floppy phenos (a few have bad node spacing, huge spaces of just stem in between, are very floppy etc. just lanky and ugly) but then decided to give them a chance and see if the product surprises in the end.

There are a good handful, maybe up to 10 plants that look quite stunning and have me excited to see how they will turn out.

For now, I left the light cycle at 18/6 to give them a few days to acclimate to the different light and room. I plan to flip them the latest 1 week later, as I risk letting them get too tall otherwise.

I expect they will about double in size during flower, as they have in the past for me.

One thing I am still considering and haven't decided yet is if I should flower the clones of the "males" I culled earlier.
Just to be sure and to have reaffirmation that my pre-sexing was correct.
I will probably do that, also just to see how a plant reacts when flowered in such a small container.

After flipping the current batch of 21 females, I will then sex the remaining 9 plants in veg and probably only top and clone the remaining females.
Will then fill up the remaining veg space with clones of the "best" females until I have 22 in veg.

I will then clone the ones I used to fill up the remaining veg space, again.

Once I harvested the current batch of 21, I will send the following 22 into flower. Only a hand full of which will be new, the rest would be on their second round in my environment.

At this point I will have a backup clone of every female (and the one male) in veg.
I will run most plants for the second time in flower and will have the harvested flowers of these plants drying/curing.
By the time the second round gets harvested, I will likely have determined my keeper(s) from this strain.

At that point I will also pop the next ~40 seeds of the next strain. Likely a combination of 2 strains next time and likely not Mr. Nice for once.
I am currently thinking peakseeds blueberry and ace's PCK or a variety of Karma gear (so I can determine for myself what the whole OG craze is about).

I will do the same spiel with the second round of seeds and move to the next strain (likely sativas, mrn mango haze/neville's haze and ace malawi/zamaldelica after).


Alright, that much for now, let's see how things develop, maybe I can upload a shot or two from flower. It looks really awesome to see all 3 chambers full and at capacity for the first time though. Very pleased :)

Stay frosty Bros and Brodettes,

Broseidon out
 
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I’m sure I’ve said it before but will say it again, I am very impressed with this variety. Not only with yield but was so surprised of the flavours. Tasty stuff that will be in the garden again for sure! Looking forward to what will come of your grow Bro!

Aloha
M
 
Hehe :)

I flipped them by the way.

I saw a few fungus gnats again. Maybe one or two...

Seems it wasn't the additional nutes nor the store bought soil that brought the gnats with them.

Must be either I bring them in through the house or from the worm castings or something. They are quite common around here...

Anyway, the plants also look healthy from the top but keep having these yellowing and crisping leaves from the bottom.
I would call it a nitrogen deficiency and have had success with watering them with a worm casting slurry during veg, to get them to perk back up and loose the yellowing new growth. It worked but I had to water them with the EWC slurry every other time. If I watered plain water twice in a row, yellowing would show back up.

As a consequence I changed my basic soil recipe going into flower and added 1 more part of earth worm castings and removed a part of peat moss for it.

The basic soil is now 3 part buckwheat hulls (instead of perlite), 3 part EWC, 4 part peat moss along with all the amendments.

I kept the plants under a 18/6 veg cycle in the flowering chamber to get used to the light and get over transplant shock and "settle in". They were there for another 1-2 weeks before I flipped them.

In that time I saw that increasing the EWC part of the basic soil mix alone did not fix the yellowing leaves from the bottom. The top parts of the plants all look great but the yellowing leaves seem to move upwards (mobile deficiency).

When I noticed that increasing the EWC part had not been enough, combined with the few fungus gnats I saw, I was ready to throw in the towel to be honest. Someone not far away just stopped growing after building a new place, due to time constraints. They used a full on hydro system and are selling off their equipment.
Originally I was just going to get some of their lights and stuff for cheap (LEDs and the like), just whatever I can use.
But I am now considering just buying it all from them and completely switching over to flood&drain hydro (probably with Coco coir).... Just so I don't have to deal with these friggin gnats anymore...

Aaaaaanyhow, I also did a lot of research on organic and no till growing in the meantime (I never stopped watching videos, reading, reading, reading etc.) and I am now convinced that my organic soil lacks a few key components:
1) I will brew my first malted barley aerated compost tea this week and water it in next week. I have high hopes for the effect this will have on the plants. I also got a big bag of alfalfa and corn seeds and will brew compost teas with all three as well as EWC in the future.

2) I will buy a kilo or so of clover seeds as a cover crop. The camomille/chrysanthems and the like I tried out last year did not cut it. I also just need way more seeds.

3) Worms. I need worms. I only ever added EWC and thought if any worms are in there, it's fine. If not, it's also fine.
After reading more about the soil food web, I am quite certain that most pots don't have any worms and the ones that do, do not have enough to sustain them.

4) I need straw on top of the soil to stop it from drying out constantly (although having the top 2-3 cm being dried out constantly is probably what is keeping the fungus gnats in check atm ...)

5) I am not entirely sure on this one but I believe I need some humic and/or fulvic acid. I read and heard that this is particularly necessary at the start of a no-till and later on is not necessary to be added anymore. But at the start it apparently is necessary.


I still need to find out if I need humic or fulvic acid and source it. Once I have done so, I only need to wait for the parts of my ACT brewer, build it and start the first ACT with malted barley, then move onwards.

Getting some worms is high on my list as a next step. My worm guy sez he can't sell me any this winter, in the spring again. Too cold, they don't multiply atm. ....



My hope is that the soil does offer the plants all they need or they wouldn't grow and look like they do (if you look at the top parts). But the soil likely needs some more support to create a thriving and living soil food web.
When I introduced the compost teas, worms and top mulching, I hope they will stop having the N deficiencies at the bottom/new growth and become so healthy the gnats won't even look at them.


If not, I will likely call it quits after this or the next round and completely rebuild the whole thing as a hydroponics system.

Would be a bummer though, because the first two harvests in organic soil were just divine terpene wise. Haven't had anything that smelled or tasted anywhere close since then. The effects were also way better.

I really hope I can keep it organic ...
 
Hi bro..good to hear things are coming along for you..
Just a few casual observations...buckwheat hulls and ricehulls used as an organic replacement for perlite are notorious for consuming nitrogen in soil and leading to deficiencies.
If you are going hydro to avoid fungus gnats I would go with rockwool as is can be reused almost indefinitely. Coco will give you the same issues with gnats..
Imo cover crops are a gimmick in small indoor setups...their usefulness is in building soils outside..indoors there are better ways..
If your soil wasn't balanced from the start you will always experience issues until you get it right...until then teas will most likely be a necessity for u...
Respect jj
 
I'm seconding what the good professor said about coco and fungus gnats. Mine seemed to show up with the coco, but they also could have come from firewood I keep in my basement. I may try diatomatious earth on the coco surface and enjoy knowing the little fuckers are getting torn to shreds. I'm also having drying, spotting, yellowing leaf issues that I haven't diagnosed yet.
 
Nothing compares to good organic soil, except its a giant pain in the ass and lots of bug issues amongst others.

Once I went coco, I never went back. Its just so much simpler and less issues with bugs ect. Yes you can get gnats and what not from bags of coco but they seem easier to handle in coco.

One of the best tips on growing I've ever got was its all in the preventative. Neeming twice a week up to 2 weeks flowering is a must in any grow not wanting an infestation. Also DE, its cheap and doesn't hurt the plants or you. Once and a while it doesn't hurt to go with something a little harsh like Dr doom spray especially this time of year when the mites come out.

But if you can perfect your soil, and you don't mind the extra work that comes with it, more power to ya!

Awesome thread BTW, been lurking awhile now. Going to popping a pack of the critical very shortly.
 
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Thing is, I have neemseed as part of my soil mix.

And the first grow and this one (the third) I had 0 issues during veg. They looked really great and there were no gnats either.

I think the gnats are always there but as long as the plants are healthy enough, they can't really emerge or multiply.

Once the plants get sick (starting late in veg when they get close to or rootbound), the gnats seem to appear.
If they manage to perk back up and stay healthy, they disappear again.

I don't know, it's weird but I have high hopes that they will be a thing of the past once I get worms in the pots.


@professor
I was never aware that buckwheat and/or rice hulls as perlite replacements are known for draining nitrogen from the soil.

This is invaluable information professor!!!
Because that, combined with the fact that I couldn't get bloodmeal but had to fall back to bloodmeal pellets (which dissolve/are processed in the soil food web much slower) could explain why my soil is still deficient in nitrogen.

You know it looked like N deficiency and the EWC slurry helped in veg but I was not sure at all if it was all from N deficiency. Coulda been some mag deficiency as well for example or just general nute lockout for certain nutes due to PH issues or whatnot.

That info kind of ties the whole picture together.

I might simply have to up my EWC and/or bloodmeal pellet amendment for the soil mix. Which should be fine for this grow as well because I can simply topdress that and water it in.


The whole cover crop thing:
I had my doubts after my innitial try failed but I believe once covered with straw/hay, it does add value to a pot. If for no other reason than simply for the top layer not "caking" over and becoming uninhabitable for roots. Like I said, it's pretty helpful right now to stave off the fungus gnats, kind of exactly what you would want for that, occuring naturally.
But long-term, that top layer has to be prevented from drying out so much/fast.
I also sourced certain types of clover that are supposed to particularly help nitrogen uptake for their company plants and only root through the top layer of soil.

Basically I am hoping that once I introduced worms, clover cover and straw/hay and gave them the good enzymes and stuff through the compost teas, that I can start to mulch as well with the leafs I strip off and have the worms eat that stuff up.

From what I understand I am at the low end spectrum for a no-till but veging in 1 gallon and flowering in 4 gallon should be alright for no till as well. At least that's what I heard..
 
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