Operation: Constant Clarity Grow Journal



This is the grow journal for Operation: Constant Clarity, a project aimed at the generation of an RSO product with an 18:1 CBD:THC ratio. More can be read about it here. This page is going to be the literal grow journal or diary for the project....newest entries on top.
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THIS IS IT! THIS IS THE FINAL ENTRY!
OPERATION: CONSTANT CLARITY IS NOW COMPLETE,
THE MEDICATION HAS BEEN CREATED AND STORED.

24 March 2020:
Wow. So much has happened and what a wild ride this has been. However as of today, Operation: Constant Clarity is completed:
* I grew 20:1 CBD:THC strain resulting in nearly a pound of the high CBD plant material.

* Further, since I used the trellis technique on these there is no trim or small buds in the RSO material; its all top shelf cola stuff, COVERED with trichs.

* Today I created several kinds of RSO medicine, some straight 20:1, some with about 1/10 gram of high THC RSO and the rest straight THC such as you would find in the store.


* Finally, I processed it into pill form for reliable dosage and longer term storage.



Well, that's it! We hit the finish line! Still have a lot of work to do to finish processing the rest of the RSO (have a ton of plant material left, doing small batches on purppose for now, many reasons).

This got delayed ALOT due to the crazy shit going on with the Corona virus. Well being locked down, what else is a body to do but make his own RSO?

I will report results of testing soon! Here is a short video we made of the process today to finish things off:


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7 February 2020:
Here are some links to posted updates for this project. The articles got posted to the main article thread and I am too bone or brain weary to repost everything so....here are links to the most recent updates, the harvest has begun!

Midnight Special
Harvest Day One
Harvest Therapy



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31 January: Lots has been going on, my health has kept me from updating this as much as I could like to BUT as of today, the first part of the harvest of this project has begun with the taking of the trellised White Widow:

I detailed the rest of the mini-harvest here but the upshot is I just saw more evidence that the trellis trick works and will be part of my grow routing from now on....

This plant resulted in four racks of solid buds, these will be added to the THC pile. As this harvest proceeds I will keep two caches of flower, one of THC and other being high CBD. Still gotta work out the math on the RSO but for now the schedule looks like:
1. In about a week I will take the rest of the indica plants in that tent; its mostly Tahoe Cure with maybe a GG#4 in there.
2. When I do the above, since the these plants were not trellised I will gradual harvest them: I take the top third of all the plants on one day, remove the remaining canopy to expose buds below, then wait a week for the rest to fatten, then I take them.
3. At the point this tent is finished, the other tent SHOULD be about 3 weeks to harvest. In that time I mean to reset this tent (clean, etc), then create and add two more trellis rigs, one to each short-end and other to the long side.
4. I will start a dozen GG#4 seeds in that tent and while they are germinating I will reset 6 Hempy buckets and get them ready for action.
5. Before tent #2 is ready for harvest, tent #1 will have the next dozen going, 2-3 in each pot. The ones that act like they are going someplace get immediately positioned under a trellis and pinned up/down for life.
6. By now I can start harvesting the second tent. Since most of that tent is trellised already when harvest time comes I or a team can take the whole tent in one go, no need to gradual anything.
7. While this is drying I reset the second tent and move the remaining six to over. Like the first tent, the big ones get pinned down and the smaller ones get the middle of the room.
8. RSO! More on that as the date approaches; I have serious math to do (somehow) before then....

peace
jeff




30 November 2019: Been a while update. The situation was that the crop was becoming unstable and I wasn't able to sort out what was causing what. My dementia makes deductive reasoning almost painful now. So all my limited brain could come up with was to take a handful of GG#4 seeds I have, germinate them and stick some in each of the pots not hosting a CBD plant. The point was to prove the environment with some known good stock. As it turned out, the GGs I planted not only did well, they did better in a month than the other stuff has after three.  So I had to make some kind of decision. No problem with the THC based stock, thats handled with the GG plants if nothing else. The 20:1 CBD plants though, only one is worth a shit, though its a tad thin and would not produce much flower if bloomed right now. So I made a command decision and scarfed four cuttings off of the main CBD plant and prepped them for rooting as clones, started in my mini hydro rig. I also basically decapitated one other remaining CBD plant that never got beyond six inches, no branching. The top is now a cutting in the hydro and the remainder is still rooted in soilmix and I think I just saw new leaves....

I decided since the THC plants were starting to get gnarly and the CBD stuff was now going to take a while to be ready to make RSO, I decided to bloom the most advanced THC stuff, turning that into RSO upon harvest and by the time that happens, hopefully I will have a small tribe of cloned CBD plants ready and if THAT happens, I will slam a SOG (Sea of Green) into the bloom tent and gen meds that way. At the end I should have enough material to complete the 18:1 RSO project...stay tuned. I made this video today showing the newly refurbished bloom tent with its first four residents, and my new 600w Mars Hydro LED grow light. This one is way different than anything from them in the past and anything I have owned. Super thin, super light, lets see how it handles heat, has no fans or other major electronics BUT it also covers a larger area than 600w LEDs in the past.....



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24 October 2019: Big update of sorts. Not in a great direction...the dementia and loss of motor control combined with periodic flushing of all local memory have forced me to down-scale my whole grow op. It was either that or cease growing entirely. Its not that the old system was bad or had flaws or even was too complicated to operate; in fact if everything ran smoothly I would never change anything. Its when something unexpected happens that my mental processes soil themselves on. And for all the good hydroponics is, it also brings a whole host of possible problems to the table as well. As long as you are a quick thinker and keep and eye on things like a hawk, its the best way to grow pot.

However I am at the stage where the fog is there more than not and my crops were suffering because I was having problems I had never had before and so had no memory to rely upon and fresh deductive reasoning is seriously broken. So after talking it over with my grow mentor, I opted for a simpler soil-ponics system called "Hempy Buckets.", the details here:
https://www.livingwithlewybodydementia.com/2019/10/hempy-buckets-safe-and-simple.html

That was a few days ago. I have been getting my ass kicked on this drug study and so checked out the girls closely today for the first time in a bit. The old plants are doing about as well as before, some have obvious new growth. However the overflow had the light going right into the trays which started doing the black sludge thing again. To rescue that I just took the four overflows and doubled up four buckets with like plants. I have employed the Thunderdome Theory before, two men enter, one man leaves. I reasoned that the existing plants are kinda stagnant-y and just not the best specimens all around. So I double them up with like plants and wait to see who over-powers who in each bucket. Once the performer in each pair makes herself known, I yank out the wimp and let the strong one have the pot for the rest of its life.

Then looking around I observed that four of the pots only had one plant in them so to keep the Thunderdome thing going, I decided to start 4 pairs of GG #4 seeds I have that I know are strong performers. My seed starter will ensure all 8 start and I can pick the strongest four to pair up with the remaining four plants.

What this will do (big picture) is make damned sure I have a solid enough crop to finish the 18:1 project which is SO important to me and maybe many others. I expect that within 4 days I will be ready to do the pair up transplanting and in a month I will know enough to thin out the herd, once again returning to a strong crop....
Dodgy stagnant plant with a White Widow seedling sharing the love...
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27 Sept. 2019: Excellent. It feels good to actually deduce a problem, find the correct solution and have it yield real results...today here is a fast snapshot of the state of things since fixing the pH a few days ago (and had to adjust the main tub today again)...waaaay better. When the pH is off, nutrient lock-out happens and stagnation is one symptom...



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25 Sept. 2019: Well OK. Things are going better, not as well as I am accustomed to but better and the key thing is now I know why things seemed to be stagnating, fighting for every inch of growth, and herein lies a lesson boys and girls: Don't trust your memory, particularly if you have dementia. I know that sounds obvious but here is how it played out:
2015: I test my water for months, never wanders from 7.0 at the tap. Since my nutrients have remained the same, adjusting pH then became a matter of adjusting it once or twice, noting it took one cap of pH Down per gallon of water to bring things to 5.8.

2016: Test again, same results so the pH Down amount remains the same.

I quit testing because it seemed pointless: I wasn't changing anything in the equation and pH checks took time and brain-power I sometimes didn't have. Thus I just stuck with the one cap of pH Down per gallon rule....until now.

2019: Trying to get a project going and I have over a dozen plants all exhibiting stagnation. I tried ridiculous amounts of things, wasting lots of time and resources until I finally decided to check the pH. Well thats a problem too because see how long ago I checked it last? Everything in that grow room had been packed up and unpacked at least twice since then so finding pH meter was a cast-iron bitch...but in the end, find it I did and WTF? The nutrients in the water tested at fucking 7.8! What makes that even more mind-blowing to me is the fact that the nutes I use specifically adjust your pH so its in the good/grow zone and this has worked w/o fail for years. So I ignored all the important signs and kept fooling with things that didn't work or had nothing to do with the problem. Thats a bitch of dementia/brain-damage: deductive reasoning really takes a hit.

Anyhoo, the water in the mini-hydro was in the same state so I rebalanced the stuff directly, not normally a cool thing to do, adjusting pH with roots right there, I mean its battery acid after all but I figured anything else represented more danger so...got them all to 5.8 and as of today, the plants seem happy. I took another "glance shot" at the grow to show this, sorry for crappy video but its that kind of day....

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18 Sept 2019: Hey kids, I am back from the dead more or less. Had a really nasty bout of the flu that left me down for a while and illness like that, when you already have dementia, makes you very stupid. Nature of the beast.

In any event, the four in the tub are starting to get some growth on them, they all went through 60 kinds of shit before getting things straight and one of the things I did wrong, one my most important rules for when growing when disabled, I don't care how good you think you are, start twice as much plant material as you expect to harvest. Shit happens to everybody but dementia turns shit-happening into an almost religious experience. Well I didn't do that and tks to small mistakes and a smaller dog, half the crop and most of the project got killed. I have ONE CB Diesel left, the only one that really counts; everything else is just for adding a small amount of THC to the end product. Well, determined to make this last project a success, I started the remaining CB Diesels and White Widows I had purchased (5 each) and added a Gorilla Glue #4 seed I had to even things out. Popped them into my seed starter three days ago, I open it up this morning to find:

Hellzapoppin!

So I quickly washed out the 11-seat hydroponics unit I have for just such an occasion, filled it with water from the hose I have ran into the grow room, which was pretty stupid as the pressure on the hose was like a firehose and the hydro unit was the size of a shoe-box. Blasted it completely out of my hands, water showers everywhere. Eventually got it filled with water, added an airstone and airline, 11 1-inch netcups and then fitted the 11 best into fine-pored sponges I use as a medium.


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06 Sept 2019: Well leading up to today the three Tahoe Cures in back (nothing to do with the main project) were fading due to the heat and the four players in this project were all reacting well to the new environment and starting some serious vegetative growth. At long last. But then this morning I go in to check mostly the probably-dead ones in back, only to find this:
Somebody stopped by for a snack
Yep. Left the tent a little unzipped and apparently someone had the munchies in the night, not the first time its happened...so I rounded up the usual suspects to see which one had blood-shot eyes:
The Usual Suspects

Alas, guilt could not be established beyond a reasonable doubt (all that Law and Order is coming in handy) so I had to let them go but will keep them under surveillance and put them on watch lists. If I had any. Sooooo.....with the pooch truly and well-screwed now, and since the plants in back were fading due to the heat of the back wall, I moved the now-dead plants from the front and replaced them with the two best from the back, Homer and one other, so they would be away from the heat and be top-fed, something we all know makes them rock.

And so it is the OCC is now cut in half; the culprit got one White Widow and one of my precious 20:1 CBD Diesels....I shut off the lights/feed to the tub near the heat, got everyone situated up front and then covered everyone. Lets see what happens next...
The now-smaller occ project



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31 Aug 2019: Light block and top-feed update. This is just a dual update on some things I have been working on, one is the dreaded "black sludge" or "black algae" that has been kicking my ass for a while now; see last few entries. In any event, at the end of the last cleanup I hacked up some dollar-store transplant cloths to cover the tubs while exposing the leaves to the light. Also, I had meant to do a time-lapse camera capture of two same-strain plants, one in normal hydro and the other in hydro but with a top-feed rig to show the difference in growth. Due to the black sludge mucking things up for the time-lapse project, it was abandoned for now.

Today however I got to address both things. First the good news is while its only been 4 days since last cleanup, as of this morning both tubs are really clear and nice. Plus, as luck would have it the sludge mucked up the top-feed rigs for the second tub with Tahoe Cures and Homer in it...so I got my top-feed test results too...first the top-feed. I made a full grow video update but for the impatient, here are the results:

This just gives you the bottom line; for more info on this update I made a quickie video showing the growth plus how nice and clean the waters are...



So for now things are going OK, just takes time....one thing I would like to point out about the video though, recall I have stated elsewhere that my dementia has totally destroyed my sense of time...and so in the video when I say its been a week since the last time the tubs were scrubbed and cleaned, logs reveal it was just four days ago. Sigh. It seriously FELT like a week....
Peace
Jeff





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27 Aug 2019: Well the bottom problem seemed to be coming back...in spades. That plus now my four in this project seemingly got whacked with *something* which crisped some lower leaves, the dreaded "taco leaf" in cases. Using Occams razor, the only thing that can be causing the dreaded black sludge algae must be the lights hitting the water with nutrients. I have read this can be a problem but personal experience shows light is no guarantee of algae, at least not aggressive shit like this black sludge. I have had plants going in open/water their whole lives and were fine, no algae, nothing...which is why this didn't seem likely here and I have now gone thru three major scrubbings of all plants, roots, grow medium, tubs, feed lines, the whole shmear in bleach water and then flushed with all clean water...quite the process:
Beth working on the tubs and feed lines, plants rinsing in peroxide water baths
Enough is enough; if against all experience light is doing this to me, then for this project to succeed I must stop the light. So after getting everything clean, reinstalled and arranged, I took two dollar-store "transplant mats", cut some X-shaped holes in them and presto, Bobs your uncle, as they say.

3 Tahoe Cures peeking up in their new light-safe environment

Operation: Constant Clarity, safe once again. Had a bitch of a time keeping the top-feed lines straight...
So thats where we are today kids. They have grown some but not to where I expected them to be by now, so I would have taken (some) action in a day or so anyways if I had not seen the black sludge. If this doesn't work, I am hiring Godzilla; I saw what he could do with such things when I was 12...
Sigh...yes I paid real money to see this in a theater as an apparently brain-damaged child...


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16 Aug 2019: OK much has happened since the 11th posting:
* Had a strange oily black sludge appear in not one but two tubs at separate times. Eventually it got so bad I ended up having to take out every plant, gently wash and sterilize the roots with diluted peroxide and water and re-"planting" them in my To Go Cups. Next I had to take out the entire feed system, both tubs and the reservoir and scrubbed them with bleach water. Finally I re-assembled the system and used clean water to flush it overnight. The entire crop was in a single, disconnected tub with B1 water thru all this. Also ran the top-feeder pumps in a bucket of bleachwater which forced it thru all the feed tubes for 20 minutes, then clear water for ten. Finally this morning I removed all of the "flush" water, replaced the filter in the rez then mixed 12 more gallons of veg nutrients. I moved the project 18:1 plants back to their home, set up the top-feeder and we are off to the races:
Back 40: 3 Tahoe Cures

Project 18:1 plants in action once again

Homer

Finally, once everyone was together again and playing nice, I glanced at my mini-DWC unit that had been shut off for a while and saw where the rest of the abandoned seedlings had died, one was struggling its way back to health, all on its own. Like I said this was a discarded part of the project so it had no direct light, no air in the water, not alot of water in the water for that matter but there it was so I took that as an omen from the Grow Gods that I should rescue this one and give it a chance to show what it can do...so for today, let me introduce "Homer":
This is Homer who is surviving in spite of the odds


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11 August 2019: Had a slight break in the project due to week-long visitors from afar. Basically my step son came to visit his mom but bottom line is I didn't have the functional ability to do anything with it while keeping up with guests. I will do a better update in the morning; the house is once again quiet. Not directly part of this project but we had some hot days here this week and some insulation in the grow room came down at some point and the back end of the grow tent became an oven, taking out two of my four Tahoe Cures, while also doing something bizarre to my eyes to the rest of the tub: it turned it black and the top of the water had so much black stuff in it you could not see the bottom.

On the project-side I just checked the CBD and WW plants and they are all doing just dandy. Also two or so days ago I stuck a time-lapse camera up in there to monitor the growth of the WW plants. Its going thru a trial test now. Tomorrow should be about three days so I will check it about noon and if things look like they are doing what I want I will reset the camera and restart the recording, finally removing one of the feed lines...

Stay tuned...
J
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05 Aug 2019:
OK as of this morning the 2 CB Diesels and 2 White Widows had their second set of real leaves in the works so I decided it was time to transplant them to where they will be for the next long while, in To Go Cups and hydroton and finally into one of my JeffsPot Duo rigs. To give things an extra help in life, I quickly wired up another one of my top-feeder rigs with yardsticks and an aquarium pump sitting in the tub:
Closer pic of the drip feeders in action. Gawd I love inventing shit.

The two on the left are CB Diesel, 2 on the right are White Widows.

So as of now the project has moved to phase 3, Vegetation. Stages 1 and 2 were germination in the seed starter and subsequent enhancement of the germinated seed through use of a Deep Water Culture rig to encourage root growth.

These girls should have the time of their lives in here.

Now while I was setting this all up another idea for a quickie side-project came to mind. I have long believed that adding the top-feed to otherwise normal hydroponics really juices the yield and vitality of the plant. Now is a chance to prove it. I am in the process of rigging up a long-term camera in there with the idea of doing a time-lapse video of the growth with and without the top-feeder.

Oh yeah, had my 600w LED shit itself today; it was a cheapie thing from DH Gate, unknown brand so ordered another new 600w lamp exactly like the one thats been lighting the hydroponics stuff:




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02 August 2019:
Aside from everything else gong on this project, an idea for a new subproject has come to mind and I am working on making it a reality. Here is the deal:

I have long endorsed the idea that in addition to any other feed or grow method, you can really increase your yield and your general plant vitality by using a constant drip feed at the top of the plants just above the soil line. This results in the uppermost roots getting ample water and food. Under normal situations the plant must suck ALL nutrients and water up from the bottom. It sounds good on paper and I have always seen great results when I have done this before so now decided to put my money where my mouth is.

The less-interesting seeds in this project are a pair of White Widows. You have seen my current top-feed solution so what I want to do is, when I move these two White Widow plants into their tub, I will put the feed line into the top of one and leave the other to get food the old fashioned way. Finally I mean to take time-lapsed photography to record the process of both....

Since the seeds have just sprouted I figure I have maybe a little less than a week to get things ready but I have a spare old Android phone I can install time-lapse camera software on and a single memory card can capture everything from seedling to harvest-day.

It is my belief that the one with top-feed will show an immense improvement in growth and vitality.

More to come...
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25 July 2019: The seeds are well-germinated and are moved to the Deep Water Culture environment for further vegging and root-system building. All went well. The Seed Starter did its job beautifully and all four seeds were nicely germinated:


Four nicely-germinated seeds ready to go

I took each rooter plug and carefully peeled the peat away from the germinated seed, careful to never touch the root:
Ready to go!
Next I carefully place it inside one of the fine-pored sponges I use for deep water culture:

Germinated seed nestled in the sponge

And finally I just place the sponge in my 11-seat mini-DWC rig...
Four new citizens of the hydro rig: back two are CB Diesel and front two are White Widow.

So here they will stay until they have the second set of real leaves, at which time it will get transferred to my To Go Cup Thing (tm) where it will stay for the rest of its life...

J.

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22 July 2019:

This morning I started two CB Diesel (20:1 CBD:THC!) and two White Widow seeds in the seed starter:

So today represents the start of germination. The seeds should germinate in 24-48 hours, depending viability of the seed.


Aaaannnnnnddd we are off!

J.


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