I have pretty much ceased my blog input for the past few years but I would now like to offer a suggestion to all those cannabis growers who are plagued with powdery mildew (PM) on their plants. This is a problem I have faced for several years and finally I have a solution to the powdery mildew disease that I would like to share with you. As you may know once this dreaded disease hits your grow room or garden it seldom ever goes away. If you are using clones from parent plants that have powdery mildew they will pass on the disease to the clones. Even if you get all new clones and disinfect the grow area just one spore can reinfect the whole garden. The key to solving this PM crisis is in prevention. Once your garden is infected with powdery mildew it is damn near impossible to get rid of it. The disease slows growth in your garden and spoils the taste of your weed. Not to mentio0n any possible heath effects. It can be hard to spot PM at first because the mildew can be mistaken for resin glands if you are not wise to it. Even under a magnifying glass it is easy to mistake the PM. The best you can hope for when you have an infection is to maintain your garden so the mildew does not get worse. You can get rid of some of the disease with treatment but enough will remain to spoil your harvest. To get rid of powdery mildew over time requires two separate treatments. One treatment is for growing plants that are in “veg” and a different treatment is required for plants that are in bud. For vegging plants you should use neem oil on a regular basis. Every week and sometimes twice a week. Even if there is no sign of powdery mildew visible you must spray your plants regularly with neem oil. Start by spraying a mild 1/2 strength mixture of neem oil on your upcoming clones. Spray both sides of the plant leaves, top and bottoms. Continue spraying the clones twice per week with about 30 mils of neem oil per two gallons of water after they are moved to the “veg” room. If you do this faithfully you will have no powdery mildew at all. All the while you must keep a vigilance for any signs of mildew and remain steadfast in your neem oil treatments even if you never see traces of PM. Its always there hiding in plain sight. Neem oil works for me better that baking soda, milk or any other commercial mildew treatments I have tried. With budding crops however you need a different solution. The problem with the neem oil is that it sticks inside the compacted buds and is hard to wash out. It also imparts a bad taste to the weed. Flowering weed will taste of the neem oil when harvested and will smell of neem oil in the bag. It may not harm you but it will ruin the exotic tastes and smells of sweet burning weed. Potassium bicarbonate will kill your powdery mildew from your bud flowers but will turn the delicate pistels brown. Same with commercial fungicides. To combat powdery mildew in flowering buds I use a milk spray. I mix the milk with two parts water and one part milk. Shake the mixture up and soak the tops and bottoms of the leaves and buds. Spray this mixture on your buds every ten days. It does not matter if you use whole milk or skim milk or 2% milk. It will all work. Every week or so rinse the milk from the plants with fresh water and a few days later spray a fresh milk solution on the garden. With this routine your buds will be healthy and disease free all through their growth. The milk must be applied under natural or synthetic light for the plant enzymes to work at killing powdery mildew. Neem oil on the other hand prevents both powdery mildew and pests like spider mites and white flies on vegging plants while the flowering plants benefit from the calcium milk provides to the cannabis plants. Always spray your plants early in the day so as to leave lots of time for the liquids to evaporate off. Try other treatments if you like. I know I did. I tried them all. But this treatment works for me and will no doubt work for you. Just before harvest I give my flowering cannabis plants a fresh water rinse to remove any milk flavor.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
A new/old and better way of growing marijuana
After a lifetime of growing cannabis I have tried hydroponics and soil and soilless growing techniques using organic and non organic fertilizers. I have tried bud boosters and soil amendments and most every growing aid I could find. I experimented with fabric grow bags, digital meters. I measured soil runoff. I balanced my water before adding it to my dirt, soil, compost and soilless grow mediums. I added fertilizers to my plants in various ways and amounts. All of that is over. Instead of all that activity I am now using “supersoil” which is PH balanced and contains all the nutrients needed to bring a plant to full term. I just add water and grow. No meters. No measuring. No flushing. The supersoil provides all the plant’s needs without any guesswork. My buds taste and smell sweeter. There is no bitterness in the buds. The yield is decent. The plants are lush and green even in the budding stage. The buds are compact and resinous. And the best part of all is anyone can do it. You do not have to be a scientist or chemist to grow with “supersoil”. You don’t have to worry about overfeeding your plants. The soil provides just the right amount of food your plants need. Don’t take my word for it. Try it. You will like the results.
Jay
Weed Tastes
I am reading a lot of forums lately concerning the flavors or lack thereof in today’s weed. The advice offered in forum suggestions range from curing your weed longer, to changing smoking utensils, swapping rolling papers, timing the harvest differently or adding molasses or terpenes to the plants before harvest. Some suggestions make sense like pruning for bud growth and some are bizarre like choking your plants with wire binding or withholding their food and water. But there is not any one reason to blame for today’s weed all tasting the same. Instead there are several. I remember Thai smoke as wispy and sweet and smooth. Vietnamese weed knocked my socks off with a spicy flavor of incense and a high that had me clutching my armchair to prevent me from taking off. Santa Marta gold was a unique flavor of exotic spices with a thunderous high that seemed to last hours. All of those weed types were uniquely different from each other. What was not different were the flavors from the same landrace strains grown or crossbred indoors. I call it Basement weed. Some of it tastes good. Much of it is bland. Afghani Indica and Hindu Kush are possibly the best suited plants to grow indoors. They are very sturdy and have a delicious hash flavor. Most of today’s indoor plants are crossbreeds with Indica and Kush plants that add bulk to wispy Sativa buds with exotic sativa landrace names like Acapulco Gold, or African Durban Poison or Swazi Redbeard. In their original state these land race marijuana strains taste out of this world, but today’s seed sellers have often crossed Sativas with Indicas to produce a decent yield in bud weight. Pure sativa buds grown indoors yield less than half the weight of sativas grown outdoors. Indoor Sativas yield less and take almost twice as long to reach maturity as Indica plants. For seed sellers it makers perfect business sense to provide a profitable weed strain to the retail market. For this reason, hybrid weed strains prevail throughout the commercial cannabis seed markets. But for every gain there is often a loss and, in this case,, it is flavor. Basement weed as I like to call it is often very much all the same in flavor. Basement weed is often quite earthy and moist because of the enclosed basement growing chamber. Instead of wafting in the breeze like outdoor weed basement weed has to suffice with a 4-inch vent fan and a twelve inch exercise fan to remove moisture from the plants. The resulting musk and fungus often deteriorates the marijuana flavors and terpenes so that the different plant varieties end up smelling similar. Another element affecting the taste of today’s indoor weed crops are variances in soil composition. The original landrace Jamaican weeds are usually grown in red volcanic soil. African weed is grown in dry earth that is rich in natural nutrients. Colombian and Mexican soil have their own special qualities that contribute to the taste of the cannabis plants. Basement weed is usually grown in Pro Mix or rock wool cubes which add nothing to the flavor of the cannabis plants. Natural fertilizers make for better tasting weed but many professional weed growers prefer the ease of commercial fertilizers. Commercial fertilizers often leave a bitter aftertaste in the marijuana buds that overwhelms the natural weed flavors. There is one other reason that today’s weed strains have lost their flavor. It is painfully easy to advertise a certain seed strain and substitute another. So that you think you are ordering one flavor and end up with a different flavor. By the time you realize you have been duped months may have passed. It used to be that when you purchased marijuana the name had meaning. Like Panama Red. Or Mexican Michoacán. Or Cambodian. Today’s weed is whatever you want to name it. OG Kush. Boy Scout cookies. It could be any weed from anywhere. And that is why today’s weed all tastes the same.
What’s new with Jay
Regular followers of my site will notice a distinct absence of new articles over the past while at Jaycarterbrown.com. Over the past few years my cannabis grow tips have dwindled to almost nothing. Now that weed is legal where I live (Canada) everyone has been offering up grow tips on the internet and elsewhere. Many tips conflict with other grower’s tips and it is up to the reader/researcher to determine which is fact and which is fiction. I have already written my “grow tips” book titled GROWING MARIJUANA INDOORS, A FOOLPROOF GUIDE by Jay Carter Brown. Having written my book on marijuana cultivating tips I see no point in writing another. I could rewrite a fresh cannabis grow book and market it with a new different look. But that seems somewhat dishonest even though many authors do just that. They come up with a winning concept and repeat it over and over again. A genre some might call it. Although I have little new grow information I do occasionally share my results with different grow equipment such as LED lights which I am not ready to accept and cultivating supplies such as ventilated grow bags which I experimented with a while ago and then decided not to recommend them (see my grow tips column for more about grow bags). Besides my “Grow book” I have also written a short fiction action and adventure novel called OPERATION PAYBACK a police and drugs story much of which is located in Jamaica. It was fun to write about the “cool runnings” in Jamaica but much more difficult than writing my “how to” grow book. Conjuring up a good action story and then creating believable characters and realistic dialogue in Operation Payback proved more difficult than I ever could have imagined. I didn’t write just one novel when I wrote Operation Payback. I wrote about a dozen different stories if you count all the revisions and rewrites I had to make before it was ready for publishing. Writing a novel for some authors is easy. They sit down and write a fast story in one take. For me it was a much slower process and I don’t imagine I will want to repeat the exercise any time soon. So that precludes my writing another “grow book” or my writing another fiction novel. I wrote a third book called Smugglers Blues which has been the most successful of my three published books, selling over ten thousand copies in Canada the US and Britain. Smugglers Blues is an autobiography. It was perhaps the easiest of the three different book types I worked on. ( A how to “cannabis grow” book, a fiction novel and an autobiography). The hardest part of writing a bio book was remembering every detail of every episode while keeping a neutral and non judgemental position on all the characters. Adding in my personal comments and opinions was easy but not always wise. But that’s what an autobiography is isn’t it. Honest even when describing yourself behaving in less than perfect fashion. After the success of Smugglers Blues I thought I might repeat the formula but how do you do that with an autobiography. Once you have written an autobiography the story is told. I suppose I could retell the story, repackage it and re market it but that would not interest me and as I said earlier it seems somewhat dishonest. So why bother to keep writing short stories and giving out grow tips for free on my web site? Its a good question. One that has been plaguing me for several years now. But the fact is if another writing project comes my way I will happily take it on. Maybe in the future I will have a new book title to announce. Meanwhile keep an eye on my web site Jaycarterbrown.com “grow tips” for new info and articles that will be forthcoming until then.
What’s new ?
Autoflower cannabis plants are “what’s new” and will make home growing accessible to all pot lovers. No longer do you need to be a grow guru to produce some decent smoke for almost free. Autoflower pot plants do not require 12 hour light regimens like most cannabis plants do. This unique adaptation allows for pot plants to be treated like any other houseplant. Autoflower pot plants do not require 12 hour light regimens like most cannabis plants. An autoflower cannabis plant can be put on a window sill in May and by the end of August it will have flowered and will have provided a decent smokable product after a few days of drying. The plant does not care about hours of daylight. Nor does it care about other light levels such as house lights, television lights, computer screens etc. Most pot plants will not trigger into bud until they have 12 hours maximum of daylight/growing time. But autoflower pot plants will trigger into bud regardless of light levels. Just pop an autoflower seed in soil in April and it will sprout in May, grow vegetative leaf in June, start budding in July and finish with big juicy buds by the end of August. All without any help from you. Except for some TLC and a little fertilizer along the way. Order your autoflower seeds before spring and get a headstart on an outdoor cannabis garden, a balconey garden or even a few potted plants scattered indoors like any other houseplant.
Advanced tips for Growing Marijuana Indoors
Hi there and welcome to my latest blog about Growing Marijuana Indoors. Growing Marijuana is an ongoing learning experience for me and I am always increasing my data base of horticultural information. For a while everything with my grow room was cool and my pot production evenly matched my smoke habits. But I guess I began smoking more than usual because I soon found myself over-running my crop and smoking my weed faster than I could replace it with fresh grown bud. Before I knew it, I began harvesting my plants earlier and earlier to have some bud to smoke. By cutting my plants sooner than optimum I was reaping less and less bud per plant. This became a vicious cycle and I eventually found myself purchasing smoke to stop myself from cutting my plants down too young. Not only were the buds shrinking in size as I cut them early, but I was also using up my vegetating plants too quickly as I went for them ahead of time. My veg plants were shrinking in number and shrinking in size as well. This could not continue of course, and I decided to do something about it. First, I tried switching from plastic pots to grow bags. I had read the latest hype about using fabric grow bags instead of clay or plastic plant pots/containers for indoor grow rooms. The sales pitch was that the fabric grow bags allowed for greater root growth than plastic pots. I tried the grow bags and found a small increase in overall plant growth with the fabric pots. But cleaning the many roots that seeped through the fabric was time consuming and after a few crops the grow-bags became soiled and dirty looking. The grow bags also allowed more moisture into the room because while water does not seep through the mesh fabric of the grow bags, moisture does. I eventually returned to solid pots for the cleanliness and convenience. As I looked for other ways to increase my plant yield I changed out a 600-watt HPS for a 1000-watt HPS light system in my flowering chamber. That gave me two 1000-watt HPS bulbs in my bud room instead of only 1600 watts and the improvement in crop growth was immediately noticeable. Light strength is the gasoline that promotes speedy growth and lush vegetation in an indoor garden and more light is almost always better. I am currently running at about 60 watts of lighting per square foot of grow room floor. Because of the temperature build up from 2000 watts of light in a 6’ by 6’ grow space I moved to air-conditioning as well as vented hood lamps to deal with the heat. The air-conditioner cools the room but also dries out much of the moisture in the room resulting in about 45 per cent humidity and 70-degree growing temperatures in both winter and summer. Cannabis loving bugs don’t stand much of a chance in such a clinic-like environment and as an additional bonus my reading glasses no longer fog up when I enter my grow room. Along with air conditioning and brighter lighting I changed my feeding techniques by increasing the strength of my General Hydroponics plant formula from 1200 PPM to 1600-1800 PPM. I first tried the increase on a few plants in the vegetation chamber before deciding to continue with all my plants. Both the plants in my flowering chamber and the plants in my vegetation chamber have increased in size since I increased the strength of their feeding formula. I feed the plants every 2 to 3 weeks and water regularly between feedings. In another attempt to improve production I added a third step into my growing routine. I originally started gardening indoors with two grow chambers. One for flowering and one grow chamber/room for vegetating cuttings. As I transplanted a cutting from the grow room to the bud room I would take another cutting from the veg’ing plants to replace it. That allowed me 2 months for my cuttings to grow in the 18 hour per day vegetation room before they were transplanted into larger pots in the 12-hour flowering room. The vegetated plants then grew 2 months longer in the budding chamber before they were harvested of colas. Two months in the vegetation chamber and 2 months in the flowering chamber yielded four-foot plants at harvest time. I knew I could increase my yield if I could increase the overall plant size to between 5 feet and 6 feet tall at harvest. To achieve this, I added two small trays of cuttings to my veg room. Each tray held 12 small cuttings in 4 ounces of Pro Mix. The additional cuttings took no extra room in my growing chamber requiring only about 2 square feet of space. But when they were transplanted into larger pots a few weeks later the fully developed cuttings took off right away into full bore vegetation growth without the normal delay in rooting time. This meant my vegetation room was once again full of bushy plants ready for transplant to the bloom room. The additional rooting time of the cuttings in trays probably added at least two feet of growth to the plants at harvest time which added an easy 20% to 25% cent to my yield. My pot garden production now matches my demand and as a result I am no longer over-running my crop by smoking more bud than I can produce.
Rejoice fellow herb lovers as Canada legalizes cannabis this week on October 17,2018. It has been a long struggle. Too long. Lets hope that this new wave of marijuana tolerance washes away the injustices of the past. Happy toking everyone and check back with me in the future for additional pot growing tips.
Jay Carter Brown BLOG 2
Welcome to the Jay Carter Brown web site. Your questions and comments are invited on any subject particularly those that connect to Smuggler’s Blues and the author’s e-novel titled , Payback, Guns, Drugs and Poli-tricks and his gro-book titled How to Grow Marijuana indoors, A Foolproof Guide. To begin with this blog will answer a question posed by Jim Beam in Amazon.UK’s comments section on its web site about Smuggler’s Blues. Jim gave high praise to Smuggler’s Blues but since the cover states that it is “based” on a true story he questioned just how much of the book is true. To answer that question directly it’s all true. Names were changed and situations were skewed but Smuggler’s Blues is a real story about real people. There is no statute of limitations on capital crimes in Canada so it seemed prudent for the author not to include any facts that he might regret later. A careful reader will note that there are several references to time frames in Smuggler’s Blues but no actual dates. That is because two lawyers and a lot of common sense dictated a degree of vagueness in the story to protect the author and others from the crimes revealed in the SB story. The lessons learned in SB however are freely shared in the hope that others will in some way benefit from the author’s experience.
Jay Carter Brown – BLOG
How to Get Busted Growing Weed Indoors- a Foolproof Guide
This unlikely title is a tongue in cheek sequel to an earlier book I wrote titled How to Grow Marijuana Indoors, a Foolproof Guide. My original grow guide has a complete chapter on security but these days it takes some effort to get busted for illegally growing marijuana for personal use. Several American states have already legalized various forms of pot use for medical needs and for personal pleasure and the states that have not already legalized pot are moving steadily in that direction. That means there are no more dope sniffing police dogs patrolling neighborhoods looking for indoor grow-ops. No more infrared police scanners looking for grow-op heat signatures. No more police promotions for busting Ma and Pa operations. Canadian Police are of a similar mind to their American brethren and don’t spend nearly as much time as they used to on arresting personal use cannabis growers. In fact the police in Vancouver have accepted personal pot use to such a degree that there are now dozens of street front retailers that currently sell marijuana in the city. So if the police are not that interested in busting pot growers anymore why are people still getting busted for growing personal marijuana crops? Here are some sure fire tips on how to get yourself busted for growing your own personal marijuana crop indoors.
1) Sell some of your pot. Most marijuana production busts are the result of informer tips. I personally believe that some dealers on the street are given an unofficial license to sell drugs by the cops as long as they regularly rat on fellow drug dealers and producers. The message here is clear. Unless you want to get busted do not sell your personal product even if it does mean earning a few extra dollars here and there. Understand that customers are not always as loyal as you might hope they should be when they see you charging hundreds of dollars for pot that they believe cost you nothing.
2) Steal the Hydro. One of the quickest ways to get busted is to steal the hydro by bypassing the meter. Not only is this a very dangerous practice but most hydro companies have entire divisions dedicated to tracking down hydro theft. The irony is that many people steal the hydro thinking that it is safer than having a large hydro bill. Of course you should not have a high hydro bill for a personal grow set-up unless you are time-share growing for the entire neighborhood! Do not steal hydro (or anything else) unless you want to spend time behind bars.
3) Give guided tours of your grow room. It is hard to resist showing someone the miracle of indoor marijuana growth when you are successfully producing big juicy buds in some dark corner of your basement. But never tell anyone about your garden who does not need to know and remember that your garden may last several years or decades but over that length of time even the best friendships sometimes turn sour.
4) Throw your fresh cannabis scraps out with the garbage. That’s one way to alert the authorities to your activities. There are also many other ways to announce your illegal pot growing to the world. Burn fresh green cannabis litter in the fireplace when it’s not windy outside so the marijuana smoke hangs over the street like a fog. Or roll giant fatties and show off to strangers who might wonder where your endless supply of superb weed comes from. Common sense is often forgotten after months and years of running a secret indoor garden. People come to think they have a license and often fail to follow their normal security procedures. Unless you want to get popped don’t fall into that trap.
5) Talk to the hydroponics store staff about your crop. Growers sometimes spend a lot of time hanging around the hydroponics store, rapping with the staff. They buy lots of equipment and supplies and park their home registered vehicle in front of the hydro-store. They talk about the “herb” instead of referring to their crop as tomatoes. They think of the hydroponics staff as friends when they don’t really know those people at all. When growing pot indoors always remember the old adage that “loose lips sink ships”.
6) Give attitude. Making enemies is a great way to get in trouble while growing cannabis. You can also throw loud parties where your guests smoke copious amounts of pot in view of your neighbors and their kids. Remember to be curt with the mailman or other tradesmen who come to your house and make sure you don’t give them tips at Christmas time. Instead of littering your front yard with children’s toys and swing sets, put up some no trespassing signs and buy/rent a few pit bulls to patrol your fenced yard.
These are all excellent tips on how to get in trouble for growing weed indoors. But there are many more ways to bring heat on your operation. You could decide not to bother setting up a proper vent system for your garden so that the house and property reek of skunk. Or you might use your personal credit cards instead of cash at the hydroponics stores thereby leaving a trail to your door. Or you could smoke dope while tooling around in the car on a public street and with a little luck the cops will search your home as well as your car. It’s usually a piss off for most people to get busted but if you are growing your own pot and determined to look for trouble these are a few guaranteed ways to find it.