Pressuredleaf’s 2024 indoor grow blog

[PressuredLeaf]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been absent from this forum for a long time. I got too sucked into work and have been neglecting the hobbies that keep me motivated. Now that I have my priorities straightened I’m back!

The background on this indoor grow is:
I live in Arizona and wanted to grow outdoors in the ground. Initially I was worried the blazing hot summers and poor soil would be a problem. To my surprise all the tobacco I have grown does amazing. Even in the 122F summer. I actually neglected my garden for over a year and the tobacco has reseeded itself over and over with only natural rain (<8 in) and irrigation runnoff.

So, if tobacco grows well here why am I starting an indoor grow? Well, it comes down to the soil. The soil here is extremely high in free lime. To the point where we can have lime sheets or chunks in the soil that we call caliche. Since my garden also grows veggies, I wanted to see if I could correct the pH issues. When I prepared the garden plot I tilled in about 300lbs of sulfur pellets. I’m terms of pH drop per lb , sulfur is the best acid producer. But it takes time to work it’s magic. My soils test indicated I was actually pretty lucky. Outside of the pH issue my soil was only low on Zn, N, and K. I had no salinity issues which is extremely common here and very detrimental to quality burning tobacco. So, in my mind I was thinking “all I have to do is correct the pH and everything else will be easy!”.

After harvesting massive amounts of tobacco (for me), and cutting I ran into a huge problem. My tobacco is fire proof. At first I thought it was a harvest or curing issue, but even after building a highly controlled and automated curing chamber it was still fire proof. After reading a lot of old literature I ran into some very interesting info. Besides chloride, excess sulfate can be detrimental to tobacco combustion. Remember all the sulfur I added, and how it takes time to work? Well, sulfur is oxidized by bacteria through a series of steps to sulfate and in the process it released a bunch of protons that have the acidifying effect. So, while I was dropping the soil pH I was also loading the soil with sulfate.

So, now I have a beautiful patch of soil that grows veggies very well for me, but cannot grow good tobacco for cigars. This left me pretty bummed out. The good news is I have a pretty large grow tent and led light that I use for starting my peppers early. Now days these things are very affordable due to the boom in legal cannabis.

I don’t have an exact timeline of when things started, but here are my corojo plants. They are growing amazingly fast indoors and absolutely chugging water. I’m feeding using RO water supplemented with potassium magnesium and calcium nitrates. The soil itself is just recycled potting mix and has all the micros they need.

 

[PressuredLeaf]

I should also mention that my original intent was to plant little Dutch since it’s a smaller plant, whoops. Also, all the plants are in 3 gallon pots around 3/4 the way full. Larger pots would need less frequent watering but I didn’t have any, and I didn’t want to have to buy any soil.

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Man these things are growing quick, huge leaves too. I kinda wish I had planted little Dutch like I originally intended.

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Primed a few leaves today, some are just mud lugs (sans mud), but also quite a few nice sized leaves. Most are around 17inches in length and around 11 inches wide. Also a few of the plants are showing flower buds and have been topped accordingly. I’m curious to see how they will thicken compared to the outdoor plants I’ve done in the past. Some of the earlier mud lugs I pulled are paper thin when dried and quite elastic, they should make great wrappers. I know sun exposure is a big factor in leaf thickness. A unique thing to keep in mind when using a light source is the inverse square law. From a point source, like a grow light, the luminous flux decreases by the distance squared. Aka doubling the distance will quadruple the light intensity. So, the leaves at the top of my plant are getting absolutely blasted compared to the lower leaves. This doesn’t come into play when growing under the sun, because the sun is so far away, basically the light intensity is the same at the ground level as it is at the top of the plant (minus shading).

 

[deluxestogie]

doubling the distance will quadruple the light intensity.

Half the distance will quadruple the intensity. Or doubling the distance will quarter the intensity. Unless my brain is inverting the problem.

Bob
EDIT: closer = greater light intensity

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Half the distance will quadruple the intensity. Or doubling the distance will quarter the intensity. Unless my brain is inverting the problem.

Bob
EDIT: closer = greater light intensity

Yup, your right. Anytime there are solid numbers involved and not just concepts, take anything I say with a grain of salt.

 

[deluxestogie]

take anything I say with a grain of salt

How about the inverse square of a grain?

Bob

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Alright time for an update. All of the plants are topped, and I will allow the leaves to ripen as much as possible before harvesting. Normally, this can be problematic if you are growing out doors. As leaves ripen they get brittle and can easily get thrashed and torn by the elements. However, since I’m growing indoors I can let them go as long as I like. The first few leaves I harvested had a couple that aren’t curing properly. They are retaining some green, and are producing a weird maduro color from the left over chlorophyll. The first set of leaves were mostly harvested out of necessity, since the lowest leaves were crowding the pots and made it a pain to water effectively. Plus, I was accidentally cracking them while moving the watering wand around.

I took one of the smaller semi color cured leaves and tried a burn test. To my absolute delight, it burned extremely well. As soon as the leaf lit I would remove the flame and observe. The ember actually propagated a few cm into the leaf before going out. While this isn’t “proof” it certainly supports the idea that potassium fertilization really helps with combustability, at least potassium nitrate does.

Viso/ligero

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Alright, here are some of the leaves in the curing chamber. Normal humidity where I am this time of year is usually less than 20%. So I need a humidity controlled environment unless I want to get into the candela business. I use a small grow tent with an ultrasonic humidifier, a humidity controller (Amazon), and a small fan. I found the fan necessary since it keeps tiny water droplets from condensing on the leaf surfaces. I normally shoot for between 70-80% humidity when color curing. This is in the mold danger zone, but with the fan I’ve never had an issue. Plus, any lower and the leaves dry too quickly. Once color cured, I either dry them in ambient air, or raise the humidity to around 90% to hydrate them for kilning/fermenting. The 90% is also good for rehydrating delicately colored wrapper leaves from WLT. I don’t really care too much about wrapper spotting, but if you do high humidity can rehydrate the leaf without water spotting from a spray bottle.

Here is an example of the immature leaves that cured a weird color. In real life, they look less green and more maduro. I think the combo of the beautiful corojo brown + leftover chlorophyll gives this weird maduro color.




Edit: I also planted to piloto seeds today. That plant grew over 8ft for me outdoors, but always got way beat up before I had any nice leaf to work with. It was always so pretty, so I have to give growing it indoors a shot.

 

[deluxestogie]

I've had some upper leaf (I've forgotten the variety) color-cure brown on the upper surface, and a greenish brown on the lower surface. After kilning, they were a uniform, deep maduro to oscuro.

Bob

 

[PressuredLeaf]

I've had some upper leaf (I've forgotten the variety) color-cure brown on the upper surface, and a greenish brown on the lower surface. After kilning, they were a uniform, deep maduro to oscuro.

Bob

That’s good to know. Maybe it is a surface thing as you point out. In that photo you can see they look more brown from far away, but the up close leaf looks green in the photo. Under the natural light the leaves look more maduro than green. If these first leaves all end up on the green side I won’t be too upset. Most of them were volado or seco leaves that I accidentally broke or damaged during watering.

One thing I forgot to mention. These are growing under and LED grow light that puts out about 400w of led light. I also added a small fluorescent bulb that is designed to put out a lot of UVA and UVB to try and mimic the natural sunlight a bit more. The bulb only uses about 40w, but one needs to be careful since UVB is dangerous and invisible to the naked eye. It’s not a lot of uv flux for the area, but I turn it off if I’m going to be in the tent for more than a few minutes.

 

[PressuredLeaf]

The more carefully primed leaves are curing up nicely. Many are getting that beautiful corojo brown color. Plants in the tent are definitely showing signs of senescence, the leaves are getting alligatored near the top of the plant, and the lower leaves are yellowing fairly consistently.

I also found a present surprise the other day. During the seedling stage, on of the seedlings looked odd. It had very dark wavy green leaves that looked nothing like the others. I figured it got a hot patch of soil and was showing n toxicity. This plant was at the back of the tent and hard to reach so I kind of forgot about. After topping, a side shoot made it out and I noticed very small yellow flowers! I think a rogue rustica seed made its way in there. I’ve never grown rustica or even ordered seeds, but always thought it was a cool plant. I decided to let this one go to seed in case I ever want to grow it again.

 

[johnny108]

A serendipitous find!

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Update today, I took a fair amount of the color cured tobacco out of the tent to ferment. I brought it to high case and allowed to air dry to a medium/high case. I then put it in an extra large “umai” dry aging bag, which is supposed to be gas permeable. The mud lugs that have been in there a few weeks are starting to release ammonia. For heating, I put it on the LED driver which is around 130F. I air the leaves out every couple of days and rehydrate as needed.

I also primed about 30 or so more leaves today mostly viso, I’d say.

 

[PressuredLeaf]

One interesting observation I wanted to mention about color curing. Some of my first leaves had a hard time color curing, even though the temp and humidity were tightly controlled in the curing tent. Initially, I had all the vents on the tent sealed shut to keep in the humidity as much as possible, and minimize the number of times I would have to refill the humidifier. Serendipitously, I was reading about tobacco curing and it mentioned good ventilation is needed, not just because of mold concerns but also for the green leaves.

When mature leaves are picked and hung to color cure they remain alive for a while. As they slowly die the cells consume starch and protein reserves for fuel and they respire, that is they use O2 and releases CO2. So, if they aren’t getting enough oxygen during the dying phase, they can’t use up all their energy reserves and the leaf doesn’t cure properly. I’m thinking that by sealing up the tent, there wasn’t sufficient oxygen and that contributed to some improperly cured leaves. I’ve since opened a vent at the top and bottom of my color curing tent. I’ll see how the next round goes! This isn’t a concern for growers who are curing in the open, but I have to do it this way in the desert.

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Alright,

I finished priming the rest of my plants. The leaves are currently yellowing in a big cardboard box. Interestingly, the very top leaves (corona or ligero?) seeds to show more obvious signs of maturity before the the mid/upper leaves. Maybe it’s due to the lighting intensity.

I’m other news the color cured hands have been moved after rehydration to the dry aging bag for fermenting. The bag is rolled up and placed on a hot plate set to 60c, this produces an internal temp around 125f. These leaves are fermenting very nicely, and the ammonia production is strong at this point.


A few days ago, I found a tattered first priming. I couldn’t help myself and rolled a teeny tiny cigarillo. It burned great! And it tasted quite nice too, very Caribbean cigar like and a little green. I’m amped for the nicer leaves to hurry up and ferment. A lot of these leaves are crazy thin, similar to the besuki wrapper from WLT, and extremely elastic. I think they will make great wrappers and binders as long as I don’t over ferment them.

 

[loui loui]

Beautiful grow, congratulations to the success!
Very nice pictures!
Thanks

 

[PressuredLeaf]

Beautiful grow, congratulations to the success!
Very nice pictures!
Thanks

Thank you!

Although outdoor growing is the way to go, this was a fun project.

 

[jamorro]

hey seems like you got some real good results. i am planning a indoor grow myself and found your thread. i saw in another thread that your tent was 36x36 did you find that the amount of plants was appropriate for the tent size or would you have gone with fewer plants if you were to do it again?

 

[deluxestogie]

Welcome to the forum, @jamorro. Feel free to introduce yourself in the Introduce Yourself forum. Read through the New Growers' FAQ, linked in the menu bar. You may wish to scan the topics in our Index of Key Forum Threads, also linked in the menu bar.

Bob