No Idea - Say Cheese!

Donated a couple of Cheese cuttings just as I flipped my Northern Lights into flower, I was a bit stuck with what to do with them so, after a week in the tent, they went into the garden for 10 weeks! We'll pick up the story soon....

So, week 2 to week 10, right? I'll explain so here's the condensed version of the back story for this grow. I was given two Cheese clones. You can see them in my week 2 entry. I vegged them for a few days in my small tent until it was time to flip my Northern Lights grow into flower. My Northern Lights diary is here: https://growdiaries.com/diaries/104320-grow-journal-by-stug69 The Cheese then went into my garden for about 8 weeks and I left them to get on with it. I wasn't overly bothered by them being brutally honest and they only got one pot transfer, into 2L pots, and were fed mostly water alone with the occasional BioBizz Grow. Following the harvest of my Northern Lights, I cleaned down the tent and brought the Cheese in and following a bit of quarantine, flipped them into flower. And now we pick up the grow properly. Week 10, Just brought in from my garden. I had now transferred them into 10L final pots and have used White Shark on the frankly MASSIVELY root-bound mess that I had neglected for a few weeks. I trimmed back brutally, removing so much foliage from them, because now they were almost 4ft tall mother plants and not easy to handle, tightly grown and not-very-cared-about clones. I really went to town on them, in order to get some airflow around them now they were in the tent. I flipped them a few days after this so, onto week 12 - flowering!

Week 12 - first week of flower. I missed week 11 (grow) intentionally as nothing much happened until about day 9 of being in the tent. Split Grow with FishMix, added calmag (holistically - small amount just to keep them from early deficiency) and added TopMax and Bloom at 2ml/L. The flowering stretch has seen 30mm growth in two days. I was starting to get concerned about head space as my TS1000 was already as high on the ratchets as it could be although I had another 100mm if I Jerry-rigged the mounts further. Still, she took 7 days to show early flower and at one point I was thinking about chopping but literally a day later we had good signs so, off to week 12. Pictures added showing growth. Look how brutal the lollipopping was. I really had to, these plants were HUGE and had to be culled hugely to get both in the tent and ready for flowering at a sensible size that didn't crowd later. I fully appreciate that this is sub-par and far from ideal however, you do what you have to do and what you think will benefit the plants throughout their flowering phase. I wanted to give them space. The canopy is 450mm - 500mm deep which is pretty deep - the pictures make it look like it has less depth than it is but for reference the tent is about 1850mm high. Light penetration was at the front of my mind, as was airflow so I bought a Honeywell Turbofan to replace the oscillating fan I had at lower level with my previous runs which all had been a much more reasonable 900mm high or so.

Week 13 - 2nd week of proper flowering. Not much to add apart from at the end of this week and the beginning of the next saw me carry out more defoliation at low level - I was acutely aware that down here and without any supplemental lighting, I was going no-where and wasting energy from the plant. I defoliated again, during the next week. Upped the Bloom and Top Max and added White Shark to the nute mix this time. And then I found aphids.

I've skipped to a day or two over 2 weeks since my last update. I'm today at beginning of week 16. The aphid issue was unexpected and a cause for more action and less chat and diary entries I guess. So, week 16, almost the end of week 5 of flowering. I still get the very occasional small juvenile aphid and the cause of it, originally a single blackfly, is gone. I have had a few gnats too but they're OK, just a nuisance. A word to the grower who like me, is a noob: always change your clothing before you tend to your girls, just as general good practice but especially if - like me - you have been in your garden. There is EVERY reason to believe that you will carry something unwanted into your tent. I read about it before it happened to me. I ignored the advice and paid for it. What did the aphids cost me. Well, initially and for the 1st week of finding them, I went through the plants daily, culling browth where infestation was high, removing leaves where less so, and spraying the remainder with a mix of isopropyl alcohol and water (40/60). I sprayed above my turbo fan and this carried the mist to the underside of the leaves. It was quick enough not to get evaporation of the alcohol. It worked for me, I brought down numbers by 90% on day one and I am fighting 1% daily. I is 99% better than it was but as I mentioned, I get the occasional beast. I was lucky. I was extremely lucky and caught it early-ish. Moving on, nutes are up to max, White Shark has been added to the feed water every 3rd feed whilst the misting and spraying has been going on, likely only serving to make me feel better I guess, and CalMag added once a week in small amounts. Never having grown from clones, and having removed 75% of the plants' growth due to conditions, lighting and ventilation and aphids, I am pleased with the development of the buds I have left! In fact, look at pic 1 - the SIZE of those trichs, right? There are no main colas, there are just lots of smaller buds developing at similar rates and starting to fill out nicely. I am going to hope to 80g dried but oh my, how much different the yield would and could have been with the (almost) perfect grow I could have made it. I'll update again in about 7 days,and thanks for reading!!

Not much to report really. I like simple weeks! Learning clones is a different beast to learning to grow from seed. I feel my usual attention to pattern of growth at this stage is compromised by the sheer randomness of the plant when it comes to the flowering. I have made this hard for myself though due to the amount of time in forced veg due to the tent not being available to flip them earlier so, flowering 115cm monster cropped gals is totally different to my LSD and topping/cropping/defoliation of plants I've had from seed isn't it. If you look at my earlier diaries, or specifically the Northern Lights, my last, most recent grow, you can see what I mean, as those were short, stocky and controlled. The Cheese on the other hand is spindly, tall and hard to move around in the net space to get best advantage of lighting. I guess it's just frustrating but as ever, I am learning and loving it and will take a LOT from this if I run clones again which is a definite as I took a couple cuttings, one from each these. The clones are in the garden and due to the lighting here now, have started flowering, so I have no choice but at least this time, or next time even, they will be a manageable height as they're only 22cm high. Pics taken this morning. Thanks for reading.

This was something else, clones given to me, raised in my garden then flowered in my tent under a TS1000. I culled 50% of the plants due to a severe aphid infestation but got in under control and still pulled almost 85g per plant, cured weight; 2 plants netted 165g. In the last pic, that's one of the harvested plants that I am holding. I used 50% of the harvest for bubble hash using only the buds, and along with 30g of a Northern Lights run (it's also in my diaries) I netted 17.6g of awesome hash. Can't do this again, it was a one-off and the first time growing on from clones. The aphids were a new experience and totally my fault having brought them in from the garden straight to the tent for flowering. I used isopropyl alcohol with water (50/50 ratio) and sprayed above a tent floor mounted fan up into the canopy of the two plants and this eventually culled the aphids so, with extreme lollipopping and culling (as I say, 50% of the plant got composted) I didn't give in and got some good, clean, pest free buds at the end. Thanks for reading and please do check out my other diaries.