Grow Log Intermission – Are you financially motivated to grow?

Now, since we’ve ended the last grow which went over a course of 4 months (omfg my electric bill!!!) it’s time to move on to the next part. First I just wanted to say that if you’re interested in growing stuff hydroponically as a hobby and expect to break even financially, think don’t build your hopes up. Most of us understand that we are in it for the fun and learning experience of just growing plants, not to try to make money back that it costs us. Sure it’s nice to cover some costs, but if you expect to break even you’re heading down the “commercial” road.

The best way I can think of right now to break even is this… Grow good quality bell peppers. 90% you buy in stores are loaded with so much crap, because let’s face it. capsicum plants are like a gold mine for various pests. Thing is organic bell peppers ARE expensive. We’re talking over a dollar for one or in here, the UK around 60-70p. So let’s say I was running 400w of HPS a month, on at 18/6. Let’s say it was around £35 a month with all the additional bits and pieces. It’s a lot of money here. In one month you can have harvested around 20-25 bell peppers quite easy I suppose, as 2 plants will grow easly under 400w. That’s a little more than half the cost of our electric bill for what it would cost us to be inferior peppers. Thing is, would you spend that much money a month on peppers? Probably not. Well, if you have family, sell them to your family at a discounted price. The ones you don’t eat. 50p or so instead of supermarket inferior versions 70p. Most people use bell peppers at least 2 of them a month. That’s a saving of £1 on your electric bill already. I guess the point is, you can still grow for fun and “Try” to cut the costs by growing things people will use, but do it among friends and family and you should be all good. £35 a month can turn out to be £18-20 a month which becomes a lot more affordable.

With chillies, you can grind your own powder and sell your powders on eBay, you won’t get tons of sales, but you might get 1 or 2 a month. Make it cheaper than supermarkets including delivery. At the end of the day any money back you make on your excess stuff, is good. While it may seem hard to ask your family to pay money for your veggies and fruit you grow, don’t be ashamed to ask, and let them know that in order to make this hobby a constant hobby and continue to grow good quality stuff, you need to make some of the money back. Most families will understand and if they actually need/use it, they are getting a good price and a better quality version so it’s a win/win situation for both you and family. Just don’t forget, if you try to force to make profit, you’re no longer growing as a hobby, and it’s no longer fun.

C. chinense (Peruvian White) – The End

The experiment came to an end 2 weeks ago prematurely before all pods were ripening. I had neglected the plant and only just discovered my pH meter was off again, probably because I was lazy and stored it dry.  Was reading 6.1 but in reality after testing the solution with a manual kit it turned out the pH was in fact 4.2. Ouch! Lol, no wonder for the first time ever I started getting pods dropping. Anyway I got a good 70 or so pods off the plant. They’re hot enough to use in food. I have no pics of the whole pods in the big bowl they were in, because I gave them straight to my Mum before taking pics, but I have some pics of them on the plant while cutting it down.

So that’s it, this concludes this plants grow log. How would I score this from 1 to 100? 1 being failure and 100 being success?

This scores 65 (semi success)

C. chinense (Peruvian White) – Day 140

Whoa, this grow has been going on for ages. Almost 5 months? Lol, well at least I’m keeping updated on the log unlike some people that just stop at 70 days and never update again. However, this will be the last entry concerning actual growth in general. This is the final “log” day. It stops here, but there will be one more post later on which will be harvest, then a new log will start with a different plant, maybe bell peppers next time.

Right, let’s get started. The yellowing just doesn’t go away, no matter what at the top. It can’t be environment as I am now giving them a pretty good and growth still comes through quite yellow. I believe that this plant is supposed to be kinda pale green anyway and that dark lush growth is actually a sign of too much nitrogen in this plants case, even medium green too.  One thing I seem to have learned this time around is that if you stress your chilli plant just enough, it will fruit, but if you overstress it then it will drop lots of flowers, and if you give no stress at all it will drop many flowers too. I don’t have any concrete info on this yet but it’s just an idea.

Anyway, I did a little test as well with the nutes. Since using the HPS I would have thought the increase in nutrients would come naturally. More light, more nutrients, etc. Thing is that when I gave them 1.0 EC, every single flower that “could” have set, dropped. Well more like 90%. 2 days later, I changed down to 0.6 EC and bam, lots of new pods setting.  Yeah I’m convinced, Chinenses DO not need a high EC or PPM, even the little prolific ones. I think, I could drop down to 0.4 and get hundreds of little pods setting but I am sure that Fe will be WAY too low then in the GH Micro, that it will just cause massive flower drop after that point. I think 0.5 is probably a good spot. I’m at 0.64 right now and 6 new pods set in 24 hours. Pretty good I reckon.

As I type this, I have a 37 pods growing on my plant. It’s not loads, I know, but since I had only got 3-5 at a time earlier in the grow, I think that’s a huge step forward. Here’s some pics.

Sorry for the blur quality here. Anyway to the left is unripe, and to the right is ripe. More of a golden white.

Five pods growing quite near to each other, not bad! I’m happy.

 

3 pods growing on one node!! Success! This is a pretty good sign, at least to me, lol!

 

C. chinense (Peruvian White) – Day 128

Well I’m sorry for not updating in over a month. While the Tom experiment was terminated the Chilli experiment continues. One of the things I promised myself was that I will not give up until I figure out why I can’t seem to grow Chillies effectively. Last time I updated I was thrown off by the idea that feeding that little bit more had increased pod formation. Oh boy, was I wrong! It was subtle but took almost a month to realise that 1.1 – 1.3 EC is in fact, TOO much. Either that, or I’m doing it all wrong.

Here’s the discoveries I’ve made, and these are things that are the most important. Environment. Yes, I said it before, and I didn’t follow my own advice. Environment is KEY. You see, I still fell into the old “better light is better” trap again and again. While my CFLs were 2+ years old and had been used 24 hours a day, I finally took a look at how many watts were being used.

Got one of these. Mainly to measure the entire room and see everything I am using, as I live with family and want to pay the electric as use. I’m using the most electricity in the house because of my gaming rig on 24/7 and various growing equipment, including fans, etc.
Anyway the pic is measuring our fridge freezer which shows a horrible power factor (eww wasted energy), and the amps. Lower amps as we use 240v here in UK.

I measured the watts of one of my 125 6400k CFL lights and yeah, it was at 75 watts. No surprise though since it’s been used 2 years constantly sorta. Well I’d say 1 year 24/7 since I took a break for a while. The other lights, were okay. The 23 watters were reading as 20-22 watts which I think is good. I guess the smaller ones do hold their bang much longer and have a better overall lumen output. Uh, ya’know though, not to get caught in that lumen trap again though. Amount of lumens doesn’t = better plant growth, just remember that. This is why CFLs are underrated. People think “Shit, low lumens? Must not be able to grow anything!!”. Haha I just vegged an entire plant to 1ft tall busy under 25 watt CFL and very healthy. I urge anyone look ato keep track of their electricity per item to buy one of these little power meters. Ok, let’s move on…

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. . . Day 99 . . .

So back on subject about the plants… Okay, so what happened? For starters, I removed one, shown in this picture. There were 2 plants in there, one simply had to go since these plants are very bushy. I didn’t expect them to get so bushy and not grow so tall, so I figured 2′ would be plenty for 2 plants. Wrong again! 1 plant takes up around 2′ on its self horizontally and about 1.5′ vertically. That wasn’t the only reason though I removed one. The one I removed had lots of flowering but ZERO pods setting. Not sure why though..

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. . . Day 107 . . .

Here’s the single plant that was left as is. Of special note, root development increased since it has been on its own and the plant vegetation has started to bush out even more. While not the healthiest looking plant, I must admit, this is 100% my fault most likely for not giving it the environment it needs. Of special note that since the 125w cfl has probably been performing at around 77w in this pic, we hav roughly a total of 120w 6400k light at around 6500 lumens. So let’s see how many lumens we got going here really. This is just to demonstrate lumens don’t really mean shit, at least imho.

Grow Space
2 x 2 ft = 4
6500 / 4 = 1625 (lm/ft2)

Now let’s account for distance lost from light penetration on a CFL. That’s right, under 1000 lumens. So yeah how did I get 70% size pods that were VERY, VERY hot with just 1000 lumens, right?  Nah, lumens aren’t that important really, since we need to look at PAR and other things. The thing with MJ growers is they are banging on about lumens of HPS. Don’t get me wrong, HPS is still king for flowering/fruiting, but for vegging you’re better off sticking with CFLs. Just remember that CFLs DO produce heat, and if you do not ventilate the area properly or introduce carbon dioxide into the room/tent, they will suffer like mine have.  When I bought CFLs I thought I could get away with no ventilation, and yeah I was wrong. Don’t fall for this mistake. By all means, get CFLs for vegging, but do accept they produce a lot of heat that needs to be vented somehow.  I’m slowly beginning to understand what I should have known 2 years ago. Light is useless unless you get the environmental conditions right.

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. . . Transitional / Realisation Stage . . .

This is where I finally began to put things into perspective and stop screwing around all the time. I figured I need to sit down and think about what was going wrong, and what was going right. I semi gave up on my plant for a while during this stage. It was not until the nutrient level dropped to certain point that I finally understood… LESS is MORE… Willard3 was right, I always rolled my eyes reading his posts when he said about his low EC values. “Yeah right!” I laughed. Now he should be laughing at me, since I’ve screwed up over and over on the same thing. My tests and how they reflected the plants/pod formation are below. These are not thorough tests just perceptive tests to changes in nutrient solution.

1.3 – 1.6 EC – 2 weeks
Only 3-4 pod formation. Huge, MEGA flower drop.

1.0 – 1.2 EC – 2 weeks
3-5 pod formation. Still huge flower drop.

0.5 – 0.8 EC – 2 weeks
This is where the magic is happening.  10-15 pod formation. Flower drop present, just a lot less.

Guys, unless you have great sunlight or 1000w HPS, it might be a good idea to see how lower EC reflects your plants. This would be, less nitrogen, more potassium, average phophorous and enough other nutrients to cover.

 

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. . . Days 120 – 128 . . .

If you’ve read this far through this blog entry, let me just say thanks for taking the time to read. Now that we’re on day 128, let’s talk a little about what happened since things changed around a little.

Switched to HPS at this stage due to flowering. I expect to see a lot of leaf drop since capsicums need a large spectrum to grow properly. By the way, I am getting a lot of leaf drop even before the HPS. This can’t be a good thing, as it happens at the top as well as the bottom. I know the HPS will probably make this worse, but let’s see.

Taken under HPS lighting again, this time using the “Tungsten” filter on my camera. Wow, how it manages to get rid of that bad CRI problem and actually show decent colours, I don’t know. Still, these chillies set BEFORE the HPS and under CFLs. Therefore, I am almost certain the nutrient solution is more important than the lighting. 3 chilli pods at one location seems pretty good to me.

This is pretty cool. 2 chillies growing at another location. That’s 5 at just 2 spots. There are many more spots like this. While it isn’t as prolific as it should be, this is a good sign we’re on the right track and a little step closer. That about concludes this blog entry. It took me a while to write this but I think after the long time of not posting anything, it is well deserved. Things are looking positive for now.  I forgot to mention that I did pick off 2 ripe ones, and 1 small chilli was enough to spice up my sisters meal quite a lot.

C. chinense (Peruvian White) – Day 88

Not much of an update here. The biggest pod is this one. Around 10 days old I think, can’t remember. Size is around an inch almost. Still getting a lot of yellowing of new growth on leaves, but not as bad as it was before. I also think I may have found a reason for pods not setting, and lots of drop. See, when I had a 100% fail grow before on these, I came to the conclusion after that I overferted, and so this time I’ve been going by a pretty standard 1.0 EC or so, even below.  A few days ago I was disappointed with the flower drop, so I upped the Micro and Mato that I’m trying again. 1.5 ml / litre of Micro and 2.5 ml / litre of Mato.

So far, I think (not sure yet), that I am possibly about to see a surge of new pod setting. So far in the last 2 weeks I’ve only had 3 set or so. Over the course of 2 days, I think about 4-5 are about to set. This is using a jump from 1.1 EC to 1.5 EC. If this works,  I want people to understand that following charts and guides online, over experimenting is not the best idea. Since these are small plants only 9 inches tall, quite bushy though, but still a Capsicum Chinense….technically everything I’ve read online suggest Chinense should be <- 1.1 IF they are small plants with bushy behavior. Guess it’s possible in my case, 1.1 is underfeeding. Wouldn’t have thought so with DWC though, but yeah…

Once again, if this works, I think it’s good proof that EVERY plant and system as well as environment cannot be replicated with a simple chart guideline. Everyones situation is different. If it doesn’t work, then ignore this, and let’s go back to the drawing board, lol!

C. chinense (Peruvian White) – Day 82

C. chinense (Peruvian White) – Day 79

Yay! Have my first chilli pod coming. Mind you tons of flower drop, and post-bloom drop, but this guy is going strong (I think!! LOL).

Also discovered light bleaching is possible with CFLs. Had both heat stress and bleaching. I just realised that 150w cfl + reflector right up close to a 1ft area on top of the plant bleaches them completely yellow/white, so the leaves are unusable when the chlorophyl is zapped right out of the leaf.

Yellowing has drastically decreasing since I moved the CFL from 5 inches to 9 inches, thank god!! Thought I had Iron deficiency the whole time. Be careful of having light too close :/