Wednesday, April 24, 2024
I grew a bunch of weed in 2023. Most of it was destroyed by mold. Here's the story.
The first order of business was consolidating my indoor grow setup.
I replaced a rat's nest of ad hoc LED bulbs and extension cords with two proper grow lights. The grow lights are a little underpowered at 60 watts each, but they will do. They will not start a fire.
The plan was two plants indoors, and two plants outdoors. The outdoor season doesn't begin until early May, so I started all of the plants early indoors.
That's two Durban Poison, for outdoors, and one each of Blackberry Kush and NYC Diesel for indoors. That's below the legal limit of three mature plants per person, because four is one modulo three.
Seedlings are slow to start but take off once the roots are established.
The Durban Poison plants were sisters, I assume, so it's interesting how different they were. Right from the beginning, one of the sisters showed a temperamental disposition and unusual growth patterns. Her leaves curled as if she didn't like the light.
Her sister didn't mind.
After a while, I potted up the indoor plants into their final containers.
Early on, my plants always show signs of stress. See how the leaves are pale and papery, with highlights of purple? Those are deficiencies that can be caused by so many things. Maybe it's too hot and dry in that space, or maybe I don't feed them enough early on. Or maybe it's too much water, or inadequately draining soil, or too small a container. Fussy, fussy plants.
They typically grow out of it. Then the problem becomes lack of vertical space. At first I tried nylon thread tied between two bamboo rods, with a wooden spatula as a spacer. It doesn't work.
Let's try chicken wire.
And stay down!
As it turns out, chicken wire is a terrible idea. The flowers fatten up in the spaces, so that come harvest time you have to surgically separate the sharp rust-prone metal from the delicate plant tissue growing around it. Reddit warned me, but I don't listen. Some of those guys are jerks anyway.
The rest of the season carried on without event, until about halfway into flower, disaster struck.
Do you see the problem? Well, that plant on the left is dead. I woke up one morning and it was dead. That's because it was hopelessly infested with mold. It was everywhere. Not so easy to spot, it turns out. It hides deep in the flowers, consuming the plant from the inside out.
I've never had problems with mold. What was different this time? In retrospect, there were four problems:
Fortunately, only some of the branches were contaminated. I gently removed the bad branches, and harvested the rest, keeping an eye on the flowers as they dried, lest botrytis rear its ugly head in my curing stash. The grow space will have to be nuked from orbit before I can use it again.
Due to the early harvest, the finished product is not the best. Still gets the job done, though. And no mold.
The roof planters overwintered with a couple of layers of cardboard over them. This was my attempt to kill the forest of catnip that had been growing there the year before.
Catnip doesn't die. The mint mafia does not forget.
Pull it out at the roots and use its shredded remains as mulch.
I got some companion plants started. Different herbs, flowers, and grasses. They all died.
If you start your cannabis early indoors, like I did, then you can't just plant them outside as soon as it warms up. The sun is much brighter than LEDs. Plants grown indoors lack the natural sunscreen needed to endure the big fireball in the sky. So, you bring the plants outdoors for a little bit each day until they're sufficiently bronzed. It's called "hardening off."
A coworker recommended shading the plants from the midday sun. Here's the first iteration:
After a few days of that, I planted them.
A professional grower advised me to shade the plants more, so I rigged up some privacy for them. I also paid a little too much for pretty flowers.
That's all well and good, but what happens when the plants grow taller than those posts that are holding up the shade cloth? I could get taller posts, but they're already more wobbly than I'd like.
Use your imagination. Maybe this will help:
Thus began my foray into improvised shelter design.
Of course the wind blew that to shreds in no time.
Let's try a tarp instead.
Too big! That ended up being a bucket for rainwater. When the wind blew, the tarp would flap and thunder. When it rained, the tarp would sag under the weight of water collecting in the center.
I got a smaller tarp, which was destroyed by a storm. The arrangement that ended up working best was a clear reinforced tarp that I bought on Amazon, until that too was destroyed by a storm.
He piled upon the [tarp]'s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
The outdoor plants went through some hard times. At first it was my doing:
That's an under-watered and underfed plant. The last time I tried to grow outdoors, the plants were over-watered, but this time I overcompensated.
They perked up after I dialed in the feeding, though, and for much of the season they were some happy looking plants.
They were even visited by a butterfly, and by hordes of the dreaded spotted lanternfly.
The lanternfly is a sap sucker, but the plants didn't seem bothered. I made a sport of shaking them off the plants and chasing them down with a sandal. They can jump very far.
Does anybody know what kind of bug this is? They were getting busy under one of the leaves. At first I left them alone for curiosity's sake, but after they started crawling around on the cannabis flowers I gave them the pinch.
I ended up overfeeding the plants, I think. At least one of them eventually showed signs of stress (surprisingly, it was the stronger sister who had trouble).
Here's my theory. I was feeding using Bruce Bugbee's lab recipe: 20-10-20 fertilizer diluted to 120 ppm nitrogen with every watering. What I forgot is that Dr. Bugbee practices "drain to waste," meaning that he effectively flushes out the growing medium every time. This ensures that fertilizer salts don't build up, which could "burn" the plant. I was not draining to waste, because I was concerned that would lead to waterlogged soil. For my setup, it would have been better to fertilize every other watering, maybe at a slightly higher concentration.
Anyway, the plants survived. Here they are under the clear tarp.
The second half of September was wet and punishing. The plants pulled through, a little worse for wear.
Then, there was a nasty storm that took the head clean off one of the plants.
What with all the rain and the body horror, I started watching the plants very closely. I found lots of mold.
Now, with outdoor plants, mold is not the death sentence that is can be indoors. Outdoors, water falls from the sky. Especially in September. It's a matter of vigilance keeping up with mold late in the season. These plants got to the point where I thought it best to start harvesting some of the larger branches early.
By the second week of October, I was ready to harvest the rest.
There was so much weed. These plants were small by outdoor standards, and I still ended up using every clean surface in my apartment to dry the branches.
Despite all this, there was not that much finished flower. The plants needed maybe another month to bulk up, and most of the product I did get was leafy and "larfy." I will be making edibles for generations, though.
The trim job was brutal.
I ended up with a few jars of passable flower, and two buckets of schwag.
That will suffice until harvest 2024.