Growing

[Griffin (OP)]

Hey I thought this would be a good idea for a thread, to get some advice on growing pot or anything really. If anyone has any grow questions they can post them here I am inexperienced but I'm sure someone can answer if I don't know it. I am thinking about either growing or getting a job in the industry this summer even though I have heard mostly bad things about working in the weed biz. Does anyone work in a dispensary or growing for one? I love gardening so it seems like a fun interesting job to work in a big warehouse sized grow.

I have got a question about if there is anything you can do to get rid of Powdery Mildew? Here is the full back story if you want to read it. I was a few weeks away from finishing the best grow I had ever done, it was island sweet skunk, tangenesia, flo, and either durban poison or gold goat I don't remember. I got cuttings from a dispensary for free because my gf at the time was cool with their grower, I got about 50 clones out of the cuttings.

  I had to go to oklahoma for 5 days with my gf at the time, and so I gave it extra water, turned all the electronics on auto and checked them 1000x, and everything else to ensure that it'd be okay. I also opened up a window so that the smell wouldn't become to overwhelming because I was living in an apartment, which I am sure was against the lease.

When you walked into my apartment or to the door it smelled like tangerine starbursts and dank ass weed, it was so beautiful! When I left I opened the window up a bit because I figured with it open that there'd be a little more air flow so it wouldn't stink as bad. I didn't know if that was a good or bad idea at the time, because I figured the air wouldn't be as stagnant and would air out a bit slowly.

Well turns out that it was a horrible idea for multiple reasons, when I got back there was an awful moldy smell and white dust-like shit all over all of the plants. When we left it got really cold and raining, they were in flowering so the lights were off all night. and with the window open it made it extremely cold and humid at night. Turns out all of my plants had powdery mildew on them, it was disturbing, just a few weeks before they were done too.

The buds were covered in it, the leaves the soil every single thing, I researched a ton but the conclusion was there wasn't much I could do. The ideas ranged from using chemicals to remove the mildew, dipping the plants in water, to smoking it and hoping the flame would kill anything bad from it. I ended up trying them all with no luck.  They all tasted like mold and made my throat and inner ears itchy. I wasn't going to grow in the apartment again anyway but I heard that if you have pm in the area it is almost impossible to get rid of and will keep infecting the plants.

I was kind of traumatized by it, it was awful, I still go over what ifs in my head. What if I would of just turned the lights off and continued when I got back, or finished it then and let them start drying before I left, or not opening the window. It was sad because the weed looked and smelled amazing! It looked like all the professional grows in high times and like it was going to be on par with what you get in the better dispensaries. I lost the pictures I had of it too. Is there anything you can do about powdery mildew in this stage or earlier?

Do you guys use ladybugs for your grow to kill other bugs? Anyone have a favorite strain they like growing or smoking? My favorite to smoke is Banana Kush and in my very limited grow the tanganesia was the best because it smelled so sweet and sour just like star bursts.

[Daughter of Dionysus]

As you know or maybe don't
Me and hero 1 grow weed
For five patients.

We will be glad to answer any questions
By email of course

Mine is on my page

I don't know about hero's

Just email and ask away
Best thing.is your soil should be
Very loose
Needs air
Just keep it moist
No need to over water it
You will drown it.
Chemicals will burn them
Start making a compost pile

[Mimi]

My SO has worked for a very large (indoor) commercial grow operation for the past year. 

Griffin, you are correct - I have met several owners of these types of operations, and I wouldn't
trust any of them as far as I can throw them, including the one he works at.  Many are just a bunch of
get-rich-quick schemers.  A used-car salesman mentality, if you will


The pot end of it has been fine, quality plants, grown properly with no misrepresentation as far as whether
it is organic or not and that kind of thing,and all the required testing has been on the up and up.

It's the way the employees are treated that is the problem -- The owner is forever complaining about all of them,
constantly looking for reasons not to pay them, pitting them against each other,  cutting hours as punishment and fostering an all-over environment
filled with negativity.  I have never seen such an unprofessional work environment.

Many owners of these grow operations have no experience with pot other than smoking it.  They have to rely on the expertise
of their employees and that brings a multitude of problems, especially when those employees are treated well to begin
with.

It's the way the employees are treated that is the problem -- The owner is forever complaining about all of them,
constantly looking for reasons not to pay them, pitting them against each other,  cutting hours as punishment and fostering an all-over environment
filled with negativity.  I have never seen such an unprofessional work environment.

Many owners of these grow operations have no experience with pot other than smoking it.  They have to rely on the expertise
of their employees and that brings a multitude of problems, especially when those employees are treated well to begin
with.
----------------

As far as mildew goes, hands down the most effective treatment/preventative I've ever used is milk.  Yep, plain milk.
Dilute it 30% milk - 70% water and spray all the leaves, making sure you hit both sides. The lowest fat milk has been found to work the best, like
either !% or skim.....but unfortunately, once your plants are heavily infested with mildew, there isn't much you can do.

Many benefits to using milk as opposed to chemicals -- It is organic, cheap, convenient, and it provides some degree of foliar feeding.  It has been widely tested
and found to be equally, if not more effective than sulfur treatment.  There is a lot of information available online on the subject.
You can spray your plants once a day and the mildew will be gone almost immediately.

I spray all my plants prophylactically about every 3 days, especially in the spring and fall (which seems to be prime time for mildew where I live).

They tried the ladybug solution in two of the warehouses at the "farm", with limited sucess.  They were expensive (like $15 for a little mesh bag of them) and
after about a week they had mostly disappeared, followed by the return of whatever bugs they were trying to kill.  Personally, I use neem oil for bugs.

[MoeMentim]

I grew for personal enjoyment/supply for a couple years & have an old grow diary on another site if anyone wants to read a boring story: https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=143462

I still have the cabinet & also all the hardware for a 2x 600hps set-up that I never quite got up & going, everything is 800 miles away while I'm too rent-poor to go fetch it .  I could pull off the cabinet in my apartment without too much worry since I'm in CO & have a med card (basically a lease violation would be the biggest possible trouble I figure) but I really need a house.  What I want is to design & build a passive solar greenhouse with light deprevation / supplimental lighting to grow landrace equitorial sativas year round.  Somewhere in my stored shit I have a ziplock bag full of Thai stick seeds circa 1991.  Most are likely dead, but that shit was the real deal & some of 'em gotta pop.  Unless it takes another 25 years to do it...

[Daughter of Dionysus]

I had to start our soil today
Because we are growing
More than our
Pen will fit
This is how we are
Making our soil buckets
We're going to
Roll them outside and inside
At Sun up and Sun down
First one mostly pine needles and leaves
Second on compost
Third one decent soil
That can be found under
Your pine trees
After the needles are removed
Last one good store bought soil
With worm casings in it
All four are of equal parts
The pictures are in the other phone
So I will post them in a sec

It's taking like forever to up low these pics
Might be time to start looking at higher data speeds chipper
Email me and I will send them to you
Not gonna wait 30 mins to up load 4 pics