Boston, MA - Documenting my grow & interested in 'smart garden' tech

Glad I found this site and forum! I’m also a first time grower with an indoor setup in Boston, MA. Started 15 Black Cherry Cheesecake plants from seeds, 11 of which germinated and are now vegging out under LED lights. Next major milestone for me is going to be seeing when I can determine sex as this was from a mix-gendered seed pack.

I also decided I was going to blog/write and photograph the process and I got my website up before realizing there were lots of public grow journals available. Won’t spam the URL here in a forum but my personal grow site should be visible in my profile info. Last neat trick was using plot.ly to live stream sensor data (Temp & RH so far) from the grow closet.

Really glad I found this forum and am looking forward to learning from others!

Here are a few pics from the grow to date …

Germinating from seed …

More early seedling stage

Seedling setup was under a T5 lamp and over a heating mat before they went under LED …

Right before transplant into soil & smart pots …

Pre transplant:

First transplant!

Raspberry Pi 3 with the Grove sensor shield … just one of the ‘smart garden’ toys I’m playing with for environmental monitoring and real time data streaming …

11 plants in smart pots until I can discern male from female …

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Welcome aboard. There are a lot of MA people here, myself included. Good luck with the grow, I’ll be following your progress. I’m going to have to buy one of those Raspberry Pi 3 kits, good stuff.

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Looking good

Don’t tease us and then not put the link in your profile :slight_smile: At least I don’t see one…

Looking forward to following your grow. Is your plan to purge to 6? I played it safe and gave 4 away to hit the 6 mark.

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Sorry! I screwed up by making my username here the domain name for my grow diary website which violates the forum rules and my profile was edited by our hosts. I don’t want to run up against the anti-spam rules or upset the mods here so no more URL in the profile until I get a better sense of the basic rules here – certainly don’t want to come off as a shill or spammer as a newbie.

I mainly threw up a personal site because it’s somewhat straightforward to maintain pseudo personal privacy via a static-file website hosted via S3 and behind an AWS cloudfront distribution - plus I knew I was interested in streaming telemetry and data and I needed a base site for that. R=

My 11 plants are legal for MA because this is a 2-adult household so between the pair of us we can rock 12 plants total. However, the 11 growing now are unsexed so I’m planning/assuming that I may have to cull up to 70% of them once I can discern between male and female

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My dog is over 21 if you factor in dog years. I wonder if that counts?

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Are you in Boston? I’m in Andover.

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Super intrigued about the live stream data (temp,rh,ppm, and most importantly ph!

I will be following along as well. You sir have a very advanced smart garden setup. Two thumbs up. :+1::+1:

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@Matthew420
I have an 18 year old Jack Russell bruv, NOT counting dog years, in real years lol

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Nice long life so far! :slight_smile:

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Lol yea hey can hardly hear or see crap anymore lol he spends all day sleeping and sometimes gets too lazy to poop and pee outside…but I still love that old bastard! Lol

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Week 4 Pics (grow closet)

Week 4 Pics: Plant macro

Week 4 Pics: Plant macro

Week 4 Pics: The pots

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Day 30 pictures …

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wondering how your grow is coming along?

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Hi!

Thanks for reminding me I need to update the grow journal over at ILGM, i’ve concentrated posting updates and pictures over at my personal { URL removed } site which I can’t really link to off of the ILGM forums because it trips their spam filters.

The grow is going really well - so much so that I had to kill/cull 4 healthy female plants on Monday simply because my closet was bursting at the seams. I had 11 plants that made it past seed stage and was expecting 50% of them to be culled as males as I had used an unsexed seed pack. However so far there has only been ONE detectable male plant and I was totally unprepared to take 10 plants through flower and harvest phases. I either got really lucky or I ended up with a big feminized seedpack at a super low cost.

Latest pics are up at { url removed } except for some smartphone microscope-attachment pics I took today to examine the colas. I’ll get some text and picture updates over at ILGM shortly …

Feb 17 Update - Roughly 60 days in and 3 weeks into flower stage

Updates & Lessons Learned

  • Deciding to grow in soil w/ smart pots was a great idea. The watering schedule is perfect and I can business travel without worrying about the plants drying out. If I had tried hydro to start with I’d be stressed about ph and pumps etc. all working while I was very far away from home
  • The seeds I bought were supposedly unsexed so I started 12 plants, 11 of which grew just fine
  • However, 3 weeks into flower I had 11 plants and ONLY ONE DETECTABLE MALE PLANT :slight_smile:
  • Culling the male brought me down to 10 plants
  • 10 plants is too much for my space. Had to make the sad decision this weekend to kill off 4 healthy females to make room for the others

That is the main update, I’ll post some pictures down below.

The other main news is that we’ve (our private boston neighborhood gardening club) been using a Dake 10ton press to experiment with “rosin tech” on both flower and bubble hash. Amazing and fun but that is off topic for this grow journal …

Updates pictures below …

Here are some close-ups of the only obvious male plant I found, and it’s sad fate:



Here are recent pics of the “overflowing” small grow room and the aftermath of (sad!) having to cull some females:

And finally here are some close-ups of the colas via a $7 buck microscope attachment for a smartphone:

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Feb 25 Update - Roughly 70 days in and 4 weeks into flower stage

Updates & Lessons Learned

  • Space matters; had to cull one more healthy growing female in order to make room for the others
  • Now down to 5 remaining plants after germinating 10 females from 11 total seeds

Updated images:

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Your garden looks great, culling so many females must have been tough.

Harvest is just weeks away, so close…

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