1st Grow: ILGM Northern Lights Autoflowe

I should be measuring pH to get into the habit of doing that. I added a very small amount of grow big to a gallon of water and watered them a bit with it in the morning once. Not sure why...just felt like they needed something. I am now letting the water dry up a lot more. That should help force the roots to grow out more and keep these weaklings from falling over after some water gets near them lol. They're fine though...doing well, growing, no weird colors or anything. All is good :)

This was late into week 2 and really might be week 3, but I'm bad with timing. The one that's refusing to grow straight is now able to do its own thing and I'm not going to try and force it lol. I started LST with all of them so we'll see how that goes. They're all doing pretty well, I believe. Nothing spectacular but they're growing every day and not dying so that's a W for me!

Not much on this week, really. Just kinda feeding and watering. I realized that the Tiger Bloom measurements on the bottle are in TABLEspoons and not TEAspoons so I will be upping them for week 4. They don't really need much water it seems like so I just split the 2gal sprayer I have between all 3 plants and I water them until I get a lot of runoff. It seems to be working fine!

I missed a week or so, but they are now flowering :) It is about week 6 right now so I'll be talking in past tense. I started doing some very heavy LST right before they were flowering and continued with it up until and beyond this point. They responded well and really aren't having any issues. I didn't defoliate much at all at this point because I wasn't sure if I needed to yet. No signs of any nutrient deficiency or other issues that I can tell yet either. I'm basically following the fox farms feeding schedule at this point but using slightly less than they tell you to as I only need my 5L sprayer to water all 3 of these plants, so when I add the recommended amounts to the 5L, the plants are only getting a third of it. I think it's working really well, too. I water using some technique I saw shared on a forum from a different forum from years ago but again, it seems to be working really well. I also get runoff in every pot splitting the 5L among all 3 which I'm cool with. I water every 3-4 days pH'd to 6.3-6.5. It's hot now, so everything is hot. I am trying to keep temps down in the room and tent and switched the light schedule to be off from 2pm-8pm. Outside of that, there's really nothing I can do

Ok NOW we're all caught up! I've done some heavy defoliation which I might end up regretting but I couldn't help myself. I kept readjusting the wires to continue to LST and would notice big ass leaves covering all the budding bud sites...what's a guy to do, ya know? Just let all the LED light go to waste on some foliage and have the light spectrum change as it passes through the leaf, signaling to the bud site that it should be more concerned with passing water and nutrients higher up the plant instead of growing into a big bud to be pollinated? Hell no. All of them continue to respond well to the LST. I don't know how much longer I need to continue doing it but I'm planning on stopping once the buds start to really expand into BUDS. No nutrient burns, no over or under watering. Everything is pHd and PPMd correctly. I'll be leaving for a vacation and be gone for 5 days next week so I'm still trying to figure out what to do...but really I'm thinking just a heavy watering with none/limited nutes and some strict LST and have em wait until I come back. All in all, I'd say they're doing pretty well and I'm happy about their growth! edit: OH and lots of leaf tucking, which is why an eagle eyed user here might see some leaves with holes, tears, brown spots etc. Do not fret, my friend. It is just me shoving those leaves behind :)

The tent has been the more stressful of the grows, so I spend more time thinking about it then I'd like to which makes me not want to journal it as much lol. I went on vacation, came back, and discovered a wickedly intense CalMag deficiency that was really hurting one but just starting to get worse on the other two. Adding calmag stopped the yellowing, but it will take me a while to figure out that I stopped measuring PPM...which made the other nutrients unavailable and caused other issues lol. Still, I'm impressed with their growth. They look good despite my newbie messups :)

This timeline is probably wrong as I lost track after the vacation, nutrient issue, other plants etc. but you can see they're all "recovered" as much as they can be! I suspect the one plant with more curling/yellowing/burning leaves is still having those issues because I defoilated far too much and too far into flower. I went a bit crazy after the calmag thing and got rid of all the yellowing/brown leaves and since that one had it the worst, that meant all the fan leaves basically lol. I also think she's a bit rootbound compared to the other two. The 5gal plant is fine af, and the other 3gal is basically chillin' but smaller. The burned girl (jesus christ smh) also doesn't smell as potent as the other two, almost like grass really...but none of them are CLOSE to the outdoor plant of the same strain. It's insane lol. Temperature is very hard to control in the room the tent is in, but I figured out a way that works for me to keep it always under 83. Humidity was skyrocketing after watering but I just open the "windows" to the tent and it stays around 65% for a day or two, then I empty out the water from the bins and it's back to 55-60%. (they don't sit in the water, they're on risers). Lots of people keep saying these recent Northern Lights Auto Flowers are taking much longer to finish, and I have to agree. The mini microscope is showing em all as clear and only slightly cloudy with a random amber head here and there. I even saw a new bud site underneath some of the flowers! I think they've got random spots of veg growth and stuff...the autos really are kinda weird lol.