OG Kush Auto by fastbuds in autopot

Things are going ok-ish. I have either fungus gnats or roots aphids. Honestly I can’t remember which one, I get really confused between them. I have put down sticky traps and made a few vinegar traps which have been working to a degree. Iv also been using essential oil sprays to try and make it less habitable. To be honest I am going to halt germinating more seeds, try to finish these ones. Definitely will finish all the ones that are full into flower and will try to finish the later ones I planted (the Afghans and smoothie) if they are well enough to do so. Once they have been harvested (the ones finishing in a week or two) I will re-assess and see if I can finish the afghans and smoothies. If they are well enough I will flower them, if not I won’t. Once it’s empty I will obviously take EVERYTHING out and spray and wipe with bleach. I plan to get rid of the soils/coco that is in there now and replace it with new coco. I don’t think re-using my old coco went very well and am pretty certain that is a huge contributing factor of why I have the bugs. I didn’t really think through the fact that if there were any roots leftover in the media they would go rotten and be excellent food for them! Doh! Oh well, it’s all good. Well it’s not but it will be! Lol On the plus side the girls are looking stupidly beautiful and the trichs are really growing beautifully now. I definitely think these are the Frostiest plants I have grown to date. It probably helps to have an appropriate amount of light in there this time! I would say to anyone umming and arring of whether to buy more light for their space That it’s definitely worth investing in. It took me a long time to build up my lights to a stage where I actually want them. I was thinking of the really early days of me growing. I was using CFL bulbs as I was scared that if I used a HID light the swat team would bust through my windows while abseiling down the outsid rod my building! Lol ok maybe not quite that bad but I was properly scared of being detected by a heat seeking helicopter! Luckily that really only applies when you are doing big whole room or whole floor of a house grows. Also I don’t really know where all that stands now we have LED light fixtures. I dunno but I do know LEDS were the answer to my worries! I remember when I went from a CFL bulb (200w) to the same wattage but in COB LEDS. I was absolutely AMAZED at the intensity of these little cheap lights. I literally bought the COB chips themselves and soldered them together with various heat sinks and stuff. It looked like proper bodge job BUT it did the trick. The autoflower I grew under a CFL literally didn’t produce any thrichomes at all. I turned it all into butter after smoking and it doing nothing. The butter also did nothing…I then harvested my second plants and was absolutely amazed that I grew like half an ounce of weed at home. Especially because the first plant I grew didn’t create thrichomes. I just assumed it was like trying to grow a coca plant at home where it will sort of grow but not create the right alkaloids. I love it but yer it’s just interesting to think back! I switched to the GHE flora nutes because the hydrosol kept separating and precipitating out of solution. Pretty sure it was the silicon I was adding but I didn’t really have time to wait and see if it corrected in the next batch because of the short flowering time of autos. Actually thinking about it even photos are on a stop watch one it starts flowering so yeh I just didn’t have time to wait and see due it being in flower. I do have more photos to add but they are still on my computer from my SLR and I havnt been on there yet. I been trying to find a way of focus stacking in post without having to spend money on photoshop. Yes I am a cheapskate! Update: iv figured out it is very hard to do focus stacking well with open source software. Pretty sure I’m gonna have to pay for photoshop which is annoying to me. I miss the days when EVERY piece of software was available to torrent! Iv just had to buy some VST drum software for my drum kit which I’m sure I’d have been able to pirate a few years ago! Oh well, I guess it’s swings and roundabouts because the software has also got WAAAAY better. Anyway I chucked up some more photos just ones I had taken on my phone. Will probably go back in later or tomorrow to do more close ups. I went in today and realised I had left the lights dimmed over night aswell which is annoying. I need to stop doing that but every time I open my tent I’m worried that it’s going to shine abnormally brightly through my curtains or blinds or something. I dunno, I get paranoid I guess. I have taken the bigger OG plant out of the AutoPot tray, rested a standard plant pot tray on top of the AutoPot tray and then put the plant on that. I started feeding it water only yesterday (a bit late if I am going to flush for a week bu ur n it’s all good) I tend to start flushing when the pistols are like 75% or so turned amber. It’s strain dependant obviously but to be honest I’m not sure I see the point in flushing anyway. No other agricultural crop does it. I don’t burn my bud, I vape it but I do smoke one joint of each variety I grow just to make sure it doesn’t black ash and go all nasty to actually smoke. I have never had a problem. I’m pretty convinced that flushing doesn’t actually do anything other than force the plant to start metabolising itself. It’s not like the plant sucks up the actual nutrients like nitrogen phosphorus and stuff and deposit it into the bud. It doesn’t work like that. Just like us, plants metabolise and break down their food. I dunno, I know a lot of people will scream at me but I just don’t see the point. Also when I talk of ‘flushing’ I’m referring to just switching to water only. I’m not referring to the same intensity flush you would do if you had nutrient lockout. I’m NOT hammering it with water to the point of shit loads of run off. Just enough to start runoff. I did notice the roots when I moved the pot onto of the AutoPot tray. They are craaaazy long and trailing like a tail out of the bottom holes of the pot. I have never had roots grow like that before. In actual fact, I am incredibly impressed with the AutoPot system. It’s not something that would scale up well, in terms of cost because they just don’t discount multiple units enough to make it cost effective. I’m surprised at this actually because it’s all just very expensive plastic. Also the performance of it is fantastic and it’s so low maintenance. I am surprised they make scaling it up so expensive because I think A LOT MORE commercial operations would use it then I believe. As I said, the performance is crazy good. It must be the AutoPot system. At first I wasn’t sure if it was that or the fact I actually planted into my final pot straight away stopping transplants but I did the same with the second batch that arnt in autopots and they are not as vigorous in terms of speed. I’m also very impressed that the autopots are so much better than hempy buckets or any other SIP’s I have used. It’s the exact same theory behind it - the wet, dry cycle but for some reason the autopots just do it so much better. I think it must be because the plants literally get water whenever they want it there and then. So they decide when to drink rather than me telling them when to drink (and eat I suppose). As I said before, I am slightly postponing germinating more seeds for my next photoperiod grow because I need to empty out the room and give it a deep clean, replace the grow media and make sure all the aphids or gnats are gone. It’s odd, there seems to be a lot of them in the soil and around the lower parts of the plants but there is definitely none in any of the buds I have photographed because obviously I zoom In to trichome scale so any bug would be HUUUGE on the camera sensor. I’m not saying they have had no effect, I’m pretty sure that’s why the two smaller plants went super yellow and a bit rusty. Pretty sure they have been stressed from bugs. I managed to get the yellow OG plant back to green but now the small blueberry one is yellow as F. OH WELL! That is the problem with the AutoPot system to be honest. Really annoying when you want to give different strains different quantities of feed. I think to solve this, next time I am going to mix a super soil concentrate into the grow media along with my ecothrive charge, worm castings (just a small amount). It’s also good for top dressing hungry plants so I can customise each pots feed shedule. It will be a bit of a change to do a water only grow and I KNOW full well that it is going to take some getting used to but it will make life a lot easier not having to mix in lots of nutrition into the water. I will obviously have to get used to organically growing with essentially dry ammendments as well as pre-digested dry ammendments in order to get going straight away. Anyway enough rambling. Tomorrow is the day I have in my diary to crop the OG plants. It has obviously been the amount of time they state on the pack of seeds - 90 days? Maybe? I dunno I’ll look…ok I just looked and it’s actually been 9 weeks. That is craaaazy quick! So 65 days. No wonder it seems to have gone so quick, it has been quick! The big one is definitely more ‘ripe’, for want of a better word, than the smaller one. I’m pretty sure where it’s been closer to the light it has finished quicker. I wanted to move the light closer to them but then it would have missed some of the taller cola's. does anyone know why they are called cola's? is it anything to do with thr shape of coke cans? or do other plants also grow cola's? iv grown my fair share of plants and havr never come accross another plant where people refer to the apical myrestem's as cola's. dunno, just a weird thought…but a thought none the less! something else which is interesting…i grew four plants initially. I added air-stones at the bottom of two of the four pots and i had two huuuge plants and two wee diddy plants. Annoyingly, i wish i could say that the two with the stones were the huge ones but no. It doesnt appear as if they really made that much of a difference. one of the big plants had an airstone and one didn't. HOWEVER, im not 100% i uses them properly because i literally just chucked the airdomes at the bottom, plugged them in and started chucking coco on top. It has been made apparent to me that i should have covered them in the clay balls i was going to put on top to stop algae growing (i ended up re-using the cotswald stone chips i used at the bottom of my hempy buckets). This time i am going to purchace some clay hydroten balls aswell as my coco so i can use them at the bottom as well as the top) There is ALWAYS shit to improve on - for example, i dont plan on getting bugs next time eithrr!