My Hydro Habanero's: DWC with DIY LED's

[Ictus]

ah I didn't google the doppler broadening. My imagination just ran wild and I was thinking some crazy time delay machine or something

I understand now, read about the doppler effect on lighting in a scientific american magazine on an airplane a few years ago (my education, haha). I remember something about redshift of the stars proving something important about the universe expanding.

 

[Ictus]

crap... I just pruned another one of the old leaves that wasn't fully recovering.... took a real close look... and I see 3-4 microscopic critters moving about with surprising speed!

Must be spider mites then, right???

I guess that would explain the symptoms. Mostly the new leaves are affected. It's showing more evenly now. Most of the new leaves on one plant are just kinda stunted, a little grey or tan starting at the base, and edges curling up, some of them are slightly shriveled. Overall plant health is ok. hopefully I caught it in time.


Guess I'll be treating these plants with Neem!

is there any possible threat from eating peppers from a plant thats infected or currently being treated with Neem?
One of the peppers looks ready to eat right now! A nice smooth oragnge all over. Maybe I'll eat it just before the neem treatment when I get the neem oil.

 

[queequeg152]

i dealt with some red mites with a product called abamectin e-pro. mites are resistant to many insecticides, i think i read somewhere that imidicloprid may even makes them breed faster. might want to get a positive ID on w/e it is before buying anything.

 

[Ictus]

Hmm, the product I bought is called Bon-Neem and it claims to be effective against mites. It's just neem oil and insecticidal soap. Definitely doesn't use the nicotine based on you mentioned (Imidacloprid).


Any tips on getting a positive ID? the moving flecks were so small they would just look like dots with my camera. But I will do my best when I get some fre time later. They looked slightly yellow or maybe orange.

 

[mrz1988]

Looks like a nice thread that I will have to read later, thanks for posting all of this Ictus. Your plants are growing REALLY dense! I wonder what causes that because I had a similar problem last winter growing indoors under LEDs. I think mine had something to do with low temperatures perhaps?? Let us know what happens with the mites, they can be pesky to find under the multicolored LEDs I noticed...

 

[Ictus]

Thanks, glad to know people appreciate the info.
Hmm ok, I will do some more detailed searching tonight.

Yes the extreme density is interesting and perhaps not ideal. I'm not sure where the peppers will fit

I've wondered about the lighting causing bushyness too. I know typical research says the blue lights discourage stretching while red light increases it.

I'll get some more pics tonight, but the sideways branches are actally getting pretty long. Maybe the plant is getting so much light during the day (in terms of avg intensity * hours) that it doesn't see the need to reach vertically? I've noticed the leaves up top are pretty small and thick, while the sideways leaves (outside the main intensity zone) have gotten much larger. So maybe it's a combination of the two.

I wonder what would happen if I took my lighting intensity back down to 500 or 600 PAR. That's probably closer to what most people get using larger reflectors and HPS or MH (they just get that intensity over a MUCH wider area).

 

[Ictus]

I think I'm going to stop rotating the plants every day now too. It's getting to be difficult to reach the base of the netpots anyways.

I think rotating them has definitely encouraged all the crazy sideways leaves and stuff.

 

[queequeg152]

i had spider mites bad on my hop plants, and i can tell you, the only thing i could see of them was the webbing, they themselves are almost invisible the the eye, i could just barely see little specs that i think was them... but i really dont know. i never saw one move quickly tho.

i also had red mites on my pepper plants, i actually got a photo of it with my usb microscope deal. red mites i could actually see as little dots.

but still, i never saw these things move hardly at all.

i have seen thrips move quickly tho, i tried for hours to photo one with my usb microscope to no avail. i think the immature thrips can be pretty damn small too.

 

[Ictus]

Frak those things look nasty!!

I got the well water report back for the house I'll be moving into next month. I got a few metals tested and also VOC tests just because there's a gas station within 1/2 mile. But all looks good. Water has mostly just Iron. Didn't ask for Calcium test since thats so easy to do myself. But I know the water has 40ppm using 0.5 conv, so 0.08 EC. Has almost .1ppm of Iron, I'm assuming most of the other 39.9ppm is calcium and magnesium, but I will test those myself when I can.

Sulfate Hach 8051 <5 mg/L R 10/17/11 12:55
Total Phosphorus EPA 365.4 0.20 mg/L R 10/19/11 10:06
Lead EPA 200.8 <0.005 mg/L R 10/14/11 18:49
Iron EPA 200.8 0.093 mg/L R 10/14/11 18:49
Manganese EPA 200.8 <0.010 mg/L R 10/14/11 18:49
Arsenic EPA 200.8 <0.005 mg/L R 10/14/11 18:49
Cadmium EPA 200.8 <0.005 mg/L R 10/14/11 18:49
Total Coliforms;non-NCDENR SM 9223B ABSENT R 10/10/11 17:05
Nitrite EPA 353.2 <0.02 mg/L R 10/11/11 13:23
Nitrate EPA 353.2 0.14 mg/L as N R 10/11/11 13:23
VOCs by 524.2 524.2 R 0:00
1,2,4-Trichlorobenzene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Benzene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/l R 10/12/11 9:47
1,1,1-Trichloroethane 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Carbon tetrachloride 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
1,2-Dichloropropane 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Trichloroethene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
1,1,2-Trichloroethane 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Chlorobenzene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Xylenes (total) 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Toluene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Ethylbenzene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Styrene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Tetrachloroethene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
cis-1,2-Dichloroethene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Dichloromethane 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
o-Dichlorobenzene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
1,1-Dichloroethane 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
p-Dichlorobenzene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
Vinyl chloride 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
1,1-Dichloroethene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
trans-1,2-Dichloroethene 524.2 <0.0005 mg/L R 10/12/11 9:47
PRELIMINARY

 

[physicsman]

I've wondered about the lighting causing bushyness too. I know typical research says the blue lights discourage stretching while red light increases it.

Really, I thought it was the other way around? Where did you read about it? I just remember someone made an offhand remark about an LED study that showed the blueish light you get when the light is filtered by a canopy of covering foliage promotes branching of the underlying foliage. A kind of mechanism that encourages them to reach out further to get out of the shade of the overlying canopy.

 

[Ictus]

Well I am not 100% certain, but the sources I have read all said that blue light encourages leaf growth while red light helps stimulate flowering.

http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/webdoc1380

Red light (6000 to 7000 angstroms) mainly controls maturation, and flower and seed production; it is particularly important to flowering plants. Used alone, red light will make plants grow tall and spindly. Blue light (4000 to 5000 angstroms) chiefly controls leaf development; plants grown under blue light alone tend to be short and stocky, with thick stems, dark green leaves and few flowers. Ultraviolet rays are used only in small quantities and can easily damage plants.

I'm not exactly sure what kind of scientific authority the Gov of Alberta is TBH. I've done quite a bit of looking at growth pics (both veggie and some non food items), and stretching under hps and denser growth with MH are common themes; some even go as far as to use MH for growth then HPS for flowering.

But I do also remember reading about the effect you speak of, how plants lower in the forest tend to stretch more, and they get mostly ambient skylight which is very cool compared to sunlight. I suppose that could be from either the color or the intensity if you think about it.

So I guess I have to admit I don't know and would defer to you if you found a definitive source. I am curious for sure.

 

[Ictus]

One minor thing I'd like to point out:
The light at the bottom of the forest isn't blue because it was "filtered" by the canopy, it's blue because - in the absence of sunlight, all you get is the atmospheric scattering and a small bit of bounced lighting. The canopy does block the sky light too; in 3d graphics this is referred to as "Ambient Occlusion" (and it's a cheap trick to make crappy scenes look decent)

I know you probably already know that and were just being brief; only reason I share this seemingly meaningless detail is incase somebody didn't.

 

[Ictus]

Ok some new pics and new discoveries. You can see tons of sideways branching. The furthest/biggest leaves are only getting about 200-300 PAR since the spread on my tiny 60-80w fixture is small (it's using 40 and 60 deg optics).

Now before when I posted pics of what I thought looked 'bad' about new growth, it was subtle. It has since become more pronouced on all the relatively young on the right plant only.

Notice the brownness at the base, and limp curlyness:

Thankfully almost all the top growth is surviving now, but you can make out a distinct "brown" tint at all the bases of the small leaves, and a bit of the same saggyness from the previous picture:

I have two main theories on what the issue is.

The first would be whatever the heck THESE are!

At first I thought maybe whitefly eggsacks and nymphs... but I'm not sure. You can clearly see what looks like a burst eggsac with some babies crawling out.

I checked tons of other leaves, nothing else visible. I chose this leaf because its one of the oldest "original" leaves that was from when I got the plant. Funny but almost ALL the old leaves are now gone either from natural causes or my trimming them off


Now back to my 2nd theory on the brown tint, since I don't think my pest problem (ugly as it may be) is advanced enough to be causing the browning.

I've noticed that at every single node on both plants, particularly the right one, have at least 3-4 flowers coming out really close together. Some places have 5 or more coming out of almost a single point.

Obviously, a plant this bushy won't be able to bring that many peppers to fruit without simply overcrowding itself.

Could the over abundance of flower production actually be stealing so much nutrients that they have trouble making it to the top?? I know it's a long shot idea, but maybe I should start pruning back the flowers, since none are dropping yet.

 

[Ictus]

Since I am moving into a new house next month and thinking of setting up a larger veggie grow area in the garage, I might not want to bring these plants into that garage unless I can be 100% certain the pests are gone. I'd like to start clean and use seed from now on (already got some varieties coming soon).

Due to the density of these plants, I think 100% eradication via spraying is unlikely. Spots would inevitably be missed or not saturated sufficiently.

So I might leave these here in my current house until it sells, and just think of them as an experiment. I still hope I can get some more peppers out of the plants before then.


So maybe I will really put this red/blue stretching thing to the test. I'll show you what I mean shortly.

 

[queequeg152]

wierd, ive never seen anything like that.

its not unusual to have 3 or 4 flowers on one node, they tend to fall off when the plants first flowering.

 

[Ictus]

Looks exactly like this image of a whitefly nymph I found:

Ah well, I'll be spraying them soon enough with Bon-Neem. Looks like it's mostly the right-side plant being affected.


Here's what I am going to try in terms of lighting.

So far my plants have little vertical stretch. In order to see whether it could be from an abundance of blue light, I am turning down the intensity of the Cool White and Blue XR-Es to about half what they were. I completely turned off the 6 Cool White XP-Gs since those are on a non dimmable driver. I am turning up the intensity of the Warm XM-Ls and Red+Far Red+Amber Rebels to full, which was barely any increase at all (guess they were near max already).

Here's the light intensity right now (pic has flash):

Here is after adjusting the brightness (still with flash):

And here is a picture of the plants and lights now, without flash. The whitebalance on the Camera is at 6700k, the same as the photos in my last few posts.

That's a tad exagerated, but the light is definitely warm now, and putting out about half the PAR.

Going to keep the lighting here for at least 2 weeks to see what happens This won't really prove weather blue or red light causes stretch though, I'd have to be able to provide equal intensity of only red light for the test to be really meaningful. But it will be interesting anyways.

 

[Ictus]

With my macro lens, I was easily able to spot the crawly critters tonight. Finding them was easy: just zero in on every instance of leave edge curl at the base of the leaf! Super careful observers can even spot them in one of the photos I already posted above.

This one I caught while it was moving pretty fast

They're tiny but visible to the naked eye. Are these thrips, or some kind of baby aphid? Seem too large and not quite like spider mites.

 

[queequeg152]

you got me, looks kinda sorta like thrip larva, but not really.

 

[Ictus]

Yea I'm not sure either.


Maybe I should do upside down total inversion into a neem solution instead of spraying? Funny my eyes have adjusted to the warm lighting and it barely seems warm now.

 

[Ictus]

Well last night I sprayed both plants heavily with a misting bottle and pure water. I covered the netpots and just sprayed all the leaves like crazy until lots of runoff.

Now today I haven't been able to see any of the moving critters with the naked eye, so maybe just water is enought to rinse a bunch off and reduce the numbers?


Anyways, I decided this one pepper probably wasn't going to get a whole lot more ripe, so I clipped it:

It's one of the smallest matured habs I've seen, around the size of a quarter.


Was definitely delicious and spicy!!! When I just ate the tip part I thought it wasn't so spicy. Then I plucked out the seeds (wanna germinate some), and ate a half of the remains with the white ribs. Holy hell was this one spicy little pepper!! My nose is still running and its been 15 minutes.

Nice resin buildup: