Spring 2021

Started a White Widow Photo to grow as a mother for later since I have some room. I don't want to start another auto a week later than the others that made it. It might be nice to have only 4 autos at one time anyways. The CBD is doing better I think I over nuted and she had clawing as signs of Nitrogen od I have been just watering her every other day or so. I do not like the pot she is in but she was an early experiment and I started LST but noticed the nute issues so stopped thinking it was the training, then after she recovered a bit I topped her. She is my little experimental girl (hopefully, seeds are not fem). I want to experiment with training on the photos while this first batch of autos I want to grow naturaly. Then consecutive batches I want to try different training methods on each of the same strain/genetics to see what is best. I think next grow I may top, then I may LST and I want to test something I saw randomly on YouTube where a grower put a Styrofoam cup over the main cola in beginning flower for a day and the side colas pushed up to create a more even canopy. He called it a no stress training. My hypothesis for training vs not training with autos is that it seems any training will induce some stress which can lengthen the time to harvest. I have seen other grows where an 8 week strain takes 12+ and I wonder if it is b/c of the training, The first group is the control group, zero training just some fan leaf tucking and maybe some lollipop towards the end to clean up the underside for airflow. I will be recording the yield of each technique and the final quality as well. Personally I am looking for quality over quantity so I want to better understand if training is just increased yield at sacrifice of speed and quality or is the quality the same but sacrifices speed to harvest.

Starting the week strong let the 3 autos go a day without watering and they were happy and healthy the next morning. I have been putting yellow sticky traps everywhere to keep the gnats under control. The CDB is probably old enough to pull a clone from now. I would like to clone and then force flowering with her to ensure sex. I was able to get clonex and a couple of tray/dome combos from the local hydro shop. I need to get some rooting cubes. Last year when I tried cloning I went just water and never saw good root production. This year I want to learn more to be able to clone from my best pheno's when I get back into photo's again. I think it would be interesting if the CDB was male to collect pollen to cross with another photo later. I have been reading up on breeding and I think I need to learn a lot more before I really try something to have a better understanding of what I am trying to accomplish and how to get good results by breeding to get the desired traits. Right now I am not 100% sure what I would be looking for other than something like a good Indica with a CBD kick and eventually working in more CBN/CBG? I think before I get too crazy into that though I need to understand what a plant like that would be good for. I don't think a kitchen sink "throw all the good stuff into one plant and it must be good, right?" method is the best approach. I think having a better understanding on how everything interacts more to have a plan for the amounts I would need to achieve for each cannabinoid to have a good balance that would benefit someone medically. Also paring that with the right terpene profile at the same time. It seems like quite the undertaking to create strains that have a good high and good medical benefits for specific ailments. It may take a long long time to breed for something that specific. But I think the idea of having strains targeted for specific benefits would be great. I kind of seems like a pie in the sky idea of being able to some day go to some one that grows and get an 1/8th of Kancer Killah OG or Migraine Mellower Kush. I have gotten in a package of recharge and have applied a little to all the girls. Mixed it at 1/4 tsp for 1 ltr watering jug, gave them some just around the plant then gave some water. 06/06/21 This was a good week for the girls. I am watering every 2 1/2 days trying to get them up to 3 days. The Autos are growing great getting bushy and adding nodes pretty quickly. The White Widow seedling that popped up around Mar 28th is growing rapidly. She has been without a humidity dome for about half a week. She is almost as tall as the GSC which is a little squat and bushy girl. I gave the girls recharge twice this week. I am still not giving nutes as the soil should be good enough until preflower/flower stages. The first recharge was a lite watering then came back the next day and heavy water. The second recharge was a heavy watering. I waited till the girls showed signs of drooping before applying in the evening. Trying to learn and do better with the watering, I think at points I have both under and over watered the CBD. From the CBD plant I pulled a cutting from a side branch, since I had already topped her. I did a final cut diagonal through a node and then dipped in clonex and stuck in root cube. I have her on a 12/12 light cycle under the dome with a large florescent tube light hanging about 1/2 inch above it. I took a par reading and the florescent I have sucks, very low, I went to the local hardware and picked up some grow led T5 replacements, and they were blurples that read even lower on the scale. Those may be useful later but for now I went back to the white light tubes. I will need to research what tubes are best for keeping clones under. The CBD plant always looks like the leaves are a bit droopy and curling under at first I think I had nuted her too soon and over did it with the soil already being a little hot. I have not nuted since but she still looks like she is not doing the best. One if the things that could be part of it is that the seeds are from Sisters of The Valley and they came from an outdoor plant that was huge and got pollinated by another outdoor plant. It may not do the best indoors and maybe that's why she does not really look the greatest no matter what I do, even after a watering she perks a bit but not like the other girls. I am still working on maintaining the optimal VPD in the tents, the smaller tent actually seems easier to maintain temps and humidity level as it seems to oscillate less than the big tent. The temp gauge in the bigger tent always shows bigger swings, but usually when I check on it the temp is somewhere around 77 and the humidity is around 60% unless the humidifier runs out then it drops to 50% I think the min and max values seem to be outliers and having something that can record these readings regularly and see when they dip and for how long they are outside of optimal range would be ideal to learn more. I have removed the carbon filters from the tents themselves, there is a slight weed smell but nothing strong enough to let anyone know I am growing from outside the house. I noticed that after a couple days the 4" fan was having a hard time pulling air out of the small tent and the temps were getting up to 80+ that is when I pulled the filters and then the air flow improved. I think I will try to filter the air being sucked out of the room instead of filtering each tent. I am not worried about the room smelling, just the air venting to the outside of the hose smelling. I have found a c02 / temp / humidity sensor on adafruit that I want to get and try writing a program to log out the data in the tent to see what the levels are at all times and be able to learn more from the data, also an alarm would be nice as well. I have 2 soil water sensors as well I may try to hook into the system to monitor the soil moisture of the girls as the grow proceeds. I have given some thought to adding c02 to the tent but feel I should make sure my environment is dialed in first. I am thinking about adding a small evap cooler in the room that can run to cool temps and add humidity in the evening. I think it would be nice to simulate the cooling off in the evening that happens in nature, not too cool but enough that there is a temp drop the plants need to respond to. Another thing that I have an idea for is using the rj-45 jacks that the dimmers communicate over to try to control the lighting schedule. I think it would be cool if during the first and last hour of lights on/off I could raise/lower the light levels over that time period to simulate a sunrise/sunset. I know there have been studies showing it does not seem to make a huge difference as far as yield and growth but it may add to the complexity of the terp profile of the plant to simulate nature as close as possible. I really wish I could do an outdoor grow here. All though I know from growing other things outdoors in this region bugs are a pain in the ass here. But maybe an outdoor greenhouse would be good, with ventilation and air filtering. I am always jello of my co-workers outdoor grows with photos in SoCal. So much good breeze and so many sunny days that they grow massive trees there.

6/8 Started to see hairs on the Zkittles OG and the GSC but not the NL yet. All girls are looking green and healthy with the Zkittles and GSC looking very similar with fat leaves and squat structure. The NL has a little thinner leaf and a slightly taller but not by much. The Zkittles displayed an interesting leaf characteristic. It popped its single leafs, then tri leafs then 5 leafs then another node of 5 leafs before popping 7 leafs. I have not noticed that before on a plant. The other 2 seem to be normal with single, tri, 5 leaf and 7 leaf on each node. Waiting 3 full days for next water. 6/10 Noticing some spots with possibly lighter edges on leaves on the CBD seems like maybe cal-mag def Made light nute mix 1lt water, 1/4 tsp cal-mag, 1/2 tsp grow big, 1/4 of 1/4 tsp open sesame Gave a little around the stem base to all plants. This is the first time giving any nutes other than recharge to the auto's and the white widow fem. The autos appear to be doing fine with good green color and growth. The are squat bushy girls that are starting to develop some smell. The NL still has no signs of hairs yet but has a smell. The Zkittles and GSC hairs are quite visible now without having to get close to see them. This is why the nutes are light but mixed for a pre-flower stage. Last watering I tried the new watering can but that was an epic fail. The top of soil seem hydrophobic in a way and most of the water from the can ran off down the sides and into the fabric pot sides where it started dripping out to the floor. So I switched back to the pump sprayer, it seems that there needs to be a disturbance from the spray to get the soil to start to take in the water. I am not sure if I over watered due to this mess up, I am almost certain I did a little and will need to let the girls dryout a bit longer before next watering. 6/11 I added a top cover layer of sand to all the plants. I have been researching the fungus gnat issue and this seems to be a good solution without pesticides. I also ordered a pack of nemotodes but the same as the last time I ordered some, the box shows up warm and the icepack in the pack is no longer frozen or even cold. It gets too hot in transit and they do not survive. :( I had the same thing happen last year and I tried them anyways and did not see any results so assuming they were dead. I put this pack in the fridge and will try them anyways if the sand is not a 100% fix. I have other house plants that are having fungus gnat issues as well. Maybe some of them survived the hot UPS truck 🤷 When I applied the sand I noticed the gnats started flying around and did not seem too like what was going on. I put out fresh / flipped over the stickie traps and have not seen any new bugs on them. Seems like a good sign. Now the plants remind me of one of those zen sand garden things where you rake the sand around the rocks. Almost want to put a couple of rocks in and do that just for lols. 6/13 I have removed all sticky traps from area, the sand seems to be a success. 0 new signs of fungus gnats. :) The Zkittles OG and GSC are showing definite hairs and are in pre-flower / flower stage going into week 4. These girls also showed signs of needing water before the NL and white widow that are still in veg stage. I moved both girls together under their own light, brought the light a little closer for the flower stage and gave them a dose of week 4 FF nutes. I would like to work towards just doing dry amendments with something like Gia Green but for now I have invested in FF nute lineup and am going to use them up first. This is the first dose of nutes I have given any of these girls other than the recharge. The NL looks really good and healthy but for some reason is not showing any sign of pre-flower hairs. The NL is supposed to be an 8wk and the GSC is 9 week and the zkittles OG is an 11 week. So I have time but am a little concerned that this auto is not showing any signs going into week 4. The White Widow photo is growing tall fast and catching up to the GSC in height. Last time we grew WW it was a White Widow X Big Bud that had explosive growth in a hydro 5-gal bucket grow. Did 2 of them and by the time they hit flower they both took up one whole side of a 5x5 tent by themselves. Super bushy and fast growth. Maybe this one will be similar. I have not watered the WW and NL yet as they are not showing signs of needing water yet. The CBD is looking much better after the adjustments and recharge / cal mag from this week, she also did not show signs of needing water today.

6/15 Topped the White Widow for the first time, did not save top for anything. Took cuttings on CBD to bring canopy level down and to introduce 4 main colas from top put them in clone dome after applying clonex Watered NL, WW and CBD with a deep recharge about 12 oz each. 6/18 Moved NL to it's own tent after not seeing flower hairs/calyx but finding what looks like could develop into bananas. I will be watching this closely as I am not wanting to breed anything this year especially from an auto that is supposed to be fem. After some thinking about growing autos so far and my experience with them I think I could achieve a similar effect by only letting photos veg for 3-4 weeks before flipping to flower. Of course we will see how the rest of the flower stage goes for the other girls in the tent. I wonder if being able to have a longer light cycle during flower stage means more flower growth vs having a 12/12 light cycle during flower. I have done some research of others growing NL auto seedsman seeds and there are many accounts of it going into the flower stage late but not herming or developing male flowers. Hopefully I am wrong and that is just new growth. The other girls look good, seeing good growth on the White Widow after the topping, the Zkittles OG is showing some clawing on some leaves. It may be sensitive to nitrogen. The GSC is not showing those signs. The nute mix I gave was a standard week 4 FoxFarm nute mix. Being further into flower maybe I should have mixed a week 5 mix or maybe I should drop the grow big out of the mix. I am not sure if the FF soil feeding schedule is for plain empty soil vs using the FF happy frog and FF ocean forest? My suspicion is that the ocean forest, which seems hotter than it used to be, has plenty of nitrogen in the mix and that I don't need to give grow big to them at all. I noticed the same clawing on the CBD right after I gave her the same week 4 mix. I am leaning more towards just good soil and dry amendments for the next cycle even though I have a ton of the FF nute line left. I want to be as organic as possible and I notice that only some of the FF nutes ore really organic. Not that ORMI is the golden rule I have seen things be ORMI that I would throw in the trash before putting in my garden. I like the idea of just starting them in soil that has plenty of nutes for them and only adding what they need in the most natural form. 6/19 NL is not under 12/12 light cycle to try to force flowering along w/ clones I think I am seeing more bananas pop up higher on the plant. Gave all the girls a good watering with recharge and some open sesame. The GSC and Zkittles are full on flower and looking good, gsc looking the best. The Zkittles looks a little scraggly like the NL but is flowering well. Smell is still not too strong, but then again I love the smell so I may not notice it. The flowering girls went 5 days w/out needing water. They maybe could have went a little longer but seemed to be droopy last night. The veg stage girls went 3 days. Trying to get the schedule down. I have gotten in some new sensors to develop a tent monitor system to track temp, rh, co2, lux, barometric pressure and altitude. I also got my hands on 4 more of the soil moisture sensors. I will be working on building a monitoring system that logs, tracks and graphs everything out. I need like 3 more rpi zeros to run all the moisture sensors like I want but I have enough now to build and run one which even that could be greatly helpful. I think the sand helps the pot retain more moisture that would be lost to evaporation from soil. I am not sure though so a monitor will help me better determine how moist the soil is and how long it takes to dry out. The other part of the system with the co2, temp, rh sensors will help me to log any dips and see when things get outside the envelope of acceptable ranges and also to calculate and track VPD of the tent which could lead to more automated controls down the line.

6/20 Moved the CDB to the smaller tent with 12/12 light schedule, she has good tops and is in week 8+ going to get her into flowering Still keeping an eye on NL as I am seeing progression with banana growth. Will chop when 100% sure. Making good progress with sensor development. I have a rpi3 running Nerves that is able to communicate with the sensor and get co2_ppm, temp_c and rh readings, I need to get it to lo these and possible pulish them on telemetry or pubsub. Also need to calculate VPD. 6/24 Deep Water / Nutes (week 6) on GSC and Zkittles, (week 4) on CBD and White Widow Did 1/2 lt each till got a little runoff from bottom of fabric pots, may have been underwatering them. Flowering girls are looking good. White widow is looking good as well 6/25 Deep Water / Nutes did wonders. I am learning as I work through this grow and I think I have been underwatering them in fear of overwatering. They each received 1/2 liter until they dripped out the bottom just slightly. Today they look so much better, like they should look. I need to get better at reading the signs and watering more as they grow. I am also still in work on the Nerves sensor setup, got the c02, temp, humidity, altitude, barometric pressure sensors reporting data, I need to get the lux sensor programmed in and then get it reporting to a FluxDB instance for long term storage. I also need to get the interface to be a bit better and have input for the leaf temperature offset. No sex on the CBD yet, I am hoping girl but after the NL popped bananas and I see how the cbd is looking similar in growth and leaves. I hope to sex her soon, if male then I can shut that whole tent down and start with something else. I am researching more organic methods of growing, I am realizing the not all the FF stuff is organic, I thought it was but there are some of them that do not seem much different from general hydro's stuff, grow big and big bloom especially. I would like to replace them with dry amendments to the soil that would be easier and more organic. Also learned about Saponin which gives the water a little bit of a soapy foam and it will make the peat (OF) less hydrophobic and ensure no dry pockets when watering. I will be getting some of this and using it every watering. The new fem photo Aurora Indica popped up this a.m. she is a sed form 2019 that I feel like I need to use before my stock gets old. I have gotten excited about the new stuff coming in but need to grow through the old stuff first. I hope she grows good. I did a 50/50 OF/HP from fox farms. I dug out a little seedling container worth and put organic seed starter that uses coco coir in the center were I germed the seed. I am hopping that may help with the issue I saw last time with the 2 seedlings I lost. Although I am not sure what that issue was exactly. I had a big fungus gnat problem and I did not have proper domes so it may be that instead of soil hottness. 🤷 I got a 3x4 tent in the other day with a sf1000 light and a 6in 200cfm fan. I am not sure which tent I will be using for what this season but eventually that should be the clone / mother tent I think. I need to dry in one of the tents as well, not sure if the 2X4 of the 3X3 section of the 3X4 would be better. For the autos they are pretty short so most likely the 2X4 which is shorter would be fine.

6/27 Got the rpi3 logger and dashboard setup It was in the tent yesterday evening but when the lights went out the LUX sensor crashed on invalid arithmetic errors most likely due to negative or bad values. There is a know issue with that sensor going negative under low light/no light. Then after that fix the I2C bus broke 🤷 and nothign on the I2C bus worked. Got it working this a.m. and back in the tent to log all the things. Gave the GSC, Zkittles and WW 0.5 liter of H20 from the dehumid. Trying to keep up better on watering. I have not yet started on the moisture sensors yet. The clone #1 looks a little sad but not dead, it could be transplant shock, maybe next week will be good. The CBD is not showing any pre-flower signs yet but looking perky and green. The Girls look good, not much smell just some when you get close. No visible trichomes yet on flowering buds.

7/4 Got some updates to the sensor code. I can now deploy separate devices from the same codebase with config. The hard part is that the network settings should be dhcp, but could be static, thats just prone to issues. But the local dns record does not get picked up by InfluxDB for the scraper. So I need to set them manually by ip address and if that changes I need to update the scrapers. The flowering auto girls are doing well. I have gotten better with the watering by ensuring I give them 1/2 lt at a time. I am doing a nute, then a h20 w/ wetting agent, then a recharge session. Like every 2-3 days. No more than 3. They dry out too quick in the 5 gal fabric pots. Got some waxed paper going to try lining the sides with that on next grow in 5 gals. Taking some ideas from the living soil fabric pots. I think there is 3 weeks left on GSC. She is looking good and got a little dank on her, but not too much. I can see some trichs on the sugar leaves just starting to show. The Zkittles OG is not showing this yet. The CDB is showing pistil hairs. The White Widow is not showing signs of flower yet. 7/7 Not much to do today. Did water / Nutes yesterday. Light trimming of leaves blocking bud sites. Made a trellis for the CBD from bamboo and skewers. Trying this no stress cup training on the WW as the 2 main tops stretched super high maybe 4-6" and want the sides to catch up. I have seen one person try this and it was on for one day and the plant pushed the sides up to be more even with the tops. I know WW stretches alot but this one blasted up after recovering from topping. Overall I think I like the topping on photos, seems to do good with betting skinny plants bushy. It takes longer in veg though so another approach that I have heard talked about is treating photos like autos. 2 week veg then straight to flower. CBD is on week 10 or 11 I think and has been topped 3 times. I like the shape and the even canopy I am getting with topping but that veg time if she were not an experiment to play with I think I would prefer not to veg for so long. I will take the cup off the WW to see how she responded this evening. The auto girls are doing good. Just keeping up with watering. Some rust spots on lower leaves, I most likely pumped too much nutes in. I have an order from build a soil coming in. Going to try an experiment the next run. 15 gals X 3 1 build-a-soil, 1 happy frog, 1 ocean forest. I want to try these all with the same genetics to see differences with soils. I will try to do all three the build-a-soil way / living soil. The clones are doing ok, I have only seen one root on #2 an no more. I think the environment is not super great for them. Maybe too cool? The #1 clone is in a small pot with Ocean Forest. She is doing ok, I wish I had more sand for her but I am out. I do not think I will keep her around. I will keep working on taking clones on photos as I grow to just learn and get more consistent at it. Once I get lighting in the 4x3 with the clone compartment it may help. I need 2-3ft lights in there and another fan to exhaust air. Not top priority atm though.

7/11 GSC looking frosty and smelling good. Zkittles is behind but is a longer strain in flower so expected. CBD and WW getting hairs and in preflower finally. Aurora Indica is got 3's and 5's starting to pop 7's up, kinda short. Experimenting with cooled tent for drying, heard 60% @ 60f was ideal slow dry. Not sure how it's going to work.

7/18 Moved the Aurora Indica to flower tent today GSC is sooo close. Just waiting for a little more change. Zkittles getting frosty but is slower than GSC. CBD and WW looking good as they are popping hairs and growing flower.

7/25 Cut the GSC on 7/20 and hung her in the 3x3, she is small but mighty. Zkittles did not like the last nutes feeding, she is sensitive and now looking burnt and crispy. :( I will use dry amendments only next time for Zkittles OG. CBD is surprising me with her trichomes and smell. Reminds me of fruit loops. She is stacking buds and looking very nice. I may try some CBD crosses with these seeds in the future, the genetics seem good. The White Widow is starting to stack buds with tons of hairs and just the first signs of trichomes. The White Widow is also showing signs of yellowing leaves, not nute burn but looks more like fall colors / leaves dropping off. I think she may need more nutes then what I have been giving in bottled nutes. I dipped into my build-a-soil stash for the next grow and gave her a top dressing of BuildAFlower Top Dress kit. Also watered all flowering girls with H20/Rain/BuildABloom amendment 1/2 lt each Aurora Indica is squat with wide leaves, nice green color. I am wondering how she will stretch in flower now. She has been in the flower tent for one week now.