Canuk Couple First Grow

CptDong Hey all! First time grow here, we'll see what happens! So far they're shooting up and looking healthy, so no concerns yet. The Canuk Cookies plant is the one in the jiffy puck and the Auto Cheese is in the soil on its own. From all the reading I've done so far, it seems like keeping the nutes as low as possible while this young is probably best, so that's what I've done here. The jalapenos are being temporarily homed in the tent until I get a chance to plant them outside.

CptDong Well, this week things didn't quite go as expected. I received my set of liquid pH reagents this week and decided to check how accurate my litmus paper was. Turns out my water/nutes that I thought were ~6.8 turned out to have a pH >8.0. I checked how accurate the solutions were by testing pH of my tap water, as well as some vinegar and verified that they were appropriate pH. So now I know I can't trust my paper strips. So I slowly titrated enough pH Down into a full jug of the same Soil A/B solution as last week but with a pH of 6.3 and HEAVILY watered (flushed?) the plants with ~500mL each. Now that I've fixed that issue, I think things are looking up.

CptDong Looked back on my calendar and it turns out I started this run on a Tuesday, so I suppose that means week 3 has started. I gave them both 300mL of pH adjusted but otherwise plain water on Monday and today they felt like the proper weight and moisture for a clean transplant. Mission accomplished! Gave them a dilute dinner of Promix RootBooster, hopefully to ease the transplant.

CptDong At first I was worried that I wouldn't be able to tell the plants apart. I definitely don't have any worries with that anymore. Cookies is growing MUCH faster and keeps pulling my wire out of the dirt when I try to train her down and Auto Cheese is just taking her time but getting a lot more dense growth. Could this be due to indica vs sativa genetics? I'm starting to think I played myself by growing an auto and a photoperiod at the same time. The auto is going to be getting 12-12 when it could be using 20-4 to get chunky. Unless I let this cookies plant veg for 6-7 weeks and then try and contain it within the tent. Thoughts?

CptDong Well, it's been a quiet week here. Plants are still fairly healthy though I think I may have had a slight calcium deficiency on the Cheese. CC seems to be taking the LST fairly well and is finally branching out where I bent her over. I'm going to see if I can install my goofy 3bulb CFL fixture somewhere in the tent for some extra light. It would only add another 69W but the more the merrier at this point.

CptDong I realized that I have to end this grow by the end of August so I decided to flip these babies into flowering. I'm not sure if my current nute setup has the right amounts of P-K but I guess I'll see what happens. 12-12 light cycle is a go and I'm going to start throwing a dark sheet over it during the day to make sure cookies don't do anything silly. I also have a strange mutation on the cookies where the leaves are twisting laterally toward each other. I can't seem to diagnose this but the plant seems happy either way. Cheese is staying short but growing quickly now that I've added an extra 69W

CptDong The plants are growing like weeds! I got a new 450W (200real) LED light last weekend so I installed it Saturday as soon as I could. I've left it on the VEG setting because the plants started showing burn signs after only 12 hours of the full strength BLOOM setting. I've been gradually tucking and bending branches on Cookies every couple days to try and keep the plant from growing into the light too soon. I decided to try a LST experiment on the cheese by bending the top 2 inches over sideways. It had grown straight back upwards within 24 hours which I thought was amazing. Feeding schedule is starting to get stronger because I'm only watering once every 4 days and don't want them to get too hungry after the straight water feedings. EDIT: I was chopping some leaves off the bottom of the plant and I think I've found thrips. Jumpy little monsters hiding out on the bottoms of the leaf. I would take a picture but my phone camera quality resembles that of a crayon drawing. How should I approach these little shits?

CptDong I'm starting to get concerned with the auto cheese plant. It's growing much lankier and taller with narrower leaves and also seems to be developing some weird bulges at the node sites where I think I would expect flowers. Did I go full derp with an auto feminized seed and grow a male plant? Cookies is looking pretty healthy and this is why I'm concerned about the other plant, I don't want to compromise them both!

CptDong They're really kicking into flowering now. I'm still keeping the nutrients going strong but I think the last feed may have been too strong. That's a cause of downward pointing leaf tips, right? Cheese is smelling great and producing tons of long white hairs. She shot up like a stick over the weekend so I bent the top portion over to flatten the canopy out a bit. Cookies is trucking along like a trooper and smells almost minty. I defoliated a good chunk of the lower brush to improve air flow and maybe prevent bugs. I'm contemplating lowering the lights but both plants seem to be doing fine where they are and I don't want to wreck a good thing.

CptDong Not sure what's wrong with the ladies. I'm thinking it's a potassium deficiency because it got worse after I flushed them with pH'd water. More to come.

CptDong I had a feeling I was overthinking the grow and now the plants have decided to mutiny. From picture guides, it looks like I have a potassium deficiency, but giving them straight P-K flowering nutes and not improving, I'm not sure if that was the case. My thermometer/hygrometer died when the humidity hit 95%+ earlier in its life so I'm not certain on the temperature range inside the tent. I have a bad feeling that it's getting much hotter than I want it to be in there. I have checked the plants for signs of pests but don't see any obvious signs. My solution to this is to flush them each with 3 gallons of pH'd water only. I normally feed them 0.5 gallon each from the shared 1gallon mix jug. That's always plenty of water to soak the plants thoroughly and cause runoff so I only water them once every 4-5 days. Is flush and early harvest my only hope of salvaging this?

CptDong I think they're still alive? Everything I seem to do is wrong, so I gave them 12L of straight pH'd water and I'm going to let nature take care of the rest. I can't tell if the buds are going to fatten up at all or if I stunted them too badly. I'm checking the trichomes every few days with a little hand magnifier and I aim to chop as soon as I see ~50% amber. That's the goal anyway, for now they're all cloudy and clear.

CptDong Smoked the weed. Caught the sillies. What more could I want?

CptDong Grow started great, veg cycle was smooth sailing. The plant responded well to being handled and tied down at awkward angles like a champ. But then flowering happened. I know I caused the problem somehow, but I'm not sure how or where I went wrong. Could have been worse I suppose.