Happy new year Bros and Brodettes!
Still haven't taken pics
But got myself a new good camera over christmas so good pics incoming finally
I flipped the (hopefully mostly girls) into flower on NYE. So 3 days going now.
Will take pics to document late veg this weekend and then come up with first flower shots in a week or two.
Couple notes:
My main flowering chamber only holds one G13xAfHz at the moment, the GA1 which was furthest developed from all, even though it was planted a full week later than the rest.
The GA1 is still among the frontrunners in the flowering chamber and definitely female.
The remaining G13xAfHz are either in my small flowering chamber (315w CMH) which is still running 18/6 light cycle as I want to veg the plants a bit longer in the 5 gal pots.
Basically I put the largest and most developed into 5 gals first and put them in the 630w CMH flower chamber and started flowering them after 2 weeks of veg in 5 gals. Everything that was a bit smaller still, went into the small flower chamber with 315w CMH and is still vegging, gonna get flipped in a week or two.
In the meantime the males/females in the big flower chamber will have shown their sex 100% (they were quite mature when I flipped them on NYE and I would say it looks like around 80% female or so, seems I was quite lucky again).
Anyway, once sex is shown, the males will be discarded (one of the potential males looks really good veg-wise though, might keep that one, a crumbled lime male) and "open slots" will be refilled with plants from the small flower chamber. The empty spots in the small flower chamber will then be refilled with potential females left over in the veg chamber (a few G13xAfHz among those still).
So this time around I am looking into something more of a perpetual setup, where I just naturally let things progress and skip the pre-sexing/pre-flowering stage to determine sex and just replace males with new female candidates as we go along. Let's see how that works out for me...
One thing that worries me a bit at the moment is that in 2 weeks, the 5 gal smartpots seem to be completely rooted through already ... When I let them dry out in between waterings and lifted the pots to defoliate and topdress some more soil before flipping to flower, I could see roots breaking out of the top layer of soil and the soil all around being rock solid (because I assume it is almost completely roots).
I am a bit worried that I should have flipped them directly after transplanting to the 5 gal pots... Hope there is enough soil left for them to flower without issues...
Also, because I kept them so low, kept topping and low stress training them, they look a lot bushier than in my past rounds but are also much closer to the soil... Meaning I am having trouble to water them below the leaf-line. Hope they will shoot up a bit more in the coming weeks so I can get below the foliage to water. Otherwise it's going to be tricky to water them without hitting leafs/buds ...
One big issue I ran into:
Cloning, yet again...
My DIY aero cloner works fine but is leaking... The water keeps getting pushed out the sides of the lid. At first I thought "ah, doesn't matter, just a few drops here and there, I have the pond liner on the ground, should take a lot of water to fill that up".
But alas, after about an hour, my floor was swimming in water and I had to shut it down...
The veg chamber is not 100% even and the water quickly accumulated in one corner, until it overflew and yeah, big mess (and a reminder why Hydroponics and automated watering scares me
)...
My hope is now that I can fix the aero cloner this week still (want to just lay a silicone "sausage" around the rim and press down the lid. Fortunately for me, the rim of the aero cloner box is not adhering/sticking to silicone. While the lid of the cloner box is of a rougher plastic and the silicone sticks.
So my hope is I can just spread a sausage of silicone on the rim, press down the lid and then it will adhere to the lid but not the rim of the box. Leaving me with a hopefully, tight closing lid that won't leak.
If that fails, I will just have to give the rockwool cubes a go before the plants are too far along in flower. AFAIK I can still clone without issues until about 2 weeks of flower, right?. Hope the cubes will work with just tap water ...
Anyway, like I said, GA1 just went into flower 3 days ago and the remaining GAs are still in veg, either in 5gal smart pots or in 1 gal pots.
And good pics are coming ....