GANJI'S GROW JOURNAL -- Day 194

The flowering plants have started really drooping-over badly this week. Staked and tied them up. Then flushed them until more than a gallon of warm water had flowed out the bottom. Added a quart of fertilizer to each one after flushing and rotated them under the lamp. They haven’t gotten any worse since, but there’s very little sign of improvement yet either. Planted five Sweet Tooth seeds directly into soil earlier this week and four have sprouted already. I’ll be planting more every so often since the Sweet Tooth clone-mother has died off. She just couldn’t recover from the radical pruning. Pulled it out and decided to redesign the cloning chamber. Re-hung the lights back to back on a hook in the middle of the ceiling to more evenly cover the area. Used the light meter to double check. Raised both lights up and used what I could find in the basement to raise the cloning tubs and smaller potted clones up as well and even out the garden profile.

This is an excellent alternative to constantly raising and lowering the lights in the cloning chamber. There’s not much overhead anyway and creating a more even garden profile will get the maximum amount of light to each plant. I also like the new configuration of the lights themselves. Putting them back to back in the center of the ceiling seems to have increased the coverage in the chamber. –MAX

Transplanted three of the clones that have taken off into medium sized containers and moved the three in large containers into the flowering room. Picked up some all purpose chemical fertilizer (10-10-10) this week, mixed a full teaspoon with a gallon of water, and fertilized the NL#9 clone mother. Also picked up some new party cups and some Perilite, and began a new experimental cloning technique. Using two cups, one slightly smaller than the other, to create a mini greenhouse. I fill the blue cups half full with Perilite saturated in a 10-10-10 fertilizer solution. Clip, trim, and dip the cutting as usual and plant it in the Perilite. Then I put a slightly larger clear plastic cup over the blue one to create the mini greenhouse. The technique seems to be working great so far. The first couple clones I took earlier this week are in excellent shape. The clear cups are covered on the inside with moisture which is being trapped within. I’m removing them once a week just long enough to air the clone out and they seem to be doing great. If it works, I’ll retool and make the switch over the next couple weeks. They’re much easier to care for as there’s no watering to do. It all remains trapped inside.

The clone mother will need to be fertilized every so often as it won’t get transplanted again. Ganji will also have to be careful to flush the container periodically as well to avoid a buildup of salts in the soil. The new cloning technique he has devised should work much better than just dropping the cuttings into soil. Perilite is highly absorbent but nowhere near as dense as soil. It should provide plenty of moisture to the fresh cutting while holding enough oxygen to promote fast healthy root formation. The addition of a clear plastic humidity dome virtually eliminates the possibility of the Perilite drying out, and saturating it with fertilizer solution should provide plenty of nutrients to get the clones started. --MAX