3) Barney's / Wedding Cake Auto / Micro

Pretty much right around the time I took that picture you see of Day 9, I started noticing something strange about this girl. Usually you get 1st node - single finger, 2nd node- 3 finger, right? Well, this girl seemed to be missing 4 fingers on her second node. Was in denial for a couple stressful days. Then when they got kinda big around Day 11, I called on my GrowDiaries community (Questions) for help and got the emotional support I needed. Apparently, this was just nature throwing a curveball that others had seen and hit out of the park before. That calmed my nerves.. Big thanks to @Organoman and @Papa_T. She was moved into her final grow tent in the loft on Day 12 and light schedule was changed to 18/6 because the loft tent is in a warmer location, so 24 hour lighting wasn't necessary. Mild downward claw around Day 14. I think this was caused by leaving the humidifier in the tent on when the lights were out, which for some reason, makes humidity skyrocket. So I attached the humidifier to the timer so that it would also turn off when appropriate. Which means getting up early to turn on the humidifier when the lights come on, but my cat likes that because it means he also gets fed at his favorite time of day. And when my plants and cats are happy, I'm happy. 😂 Light schedule was changed to 20/4 on Day 14. LOW STRESS TRAINING BEGINS: My grows would be impossible without Low Stress Training. In fact, I do so much LST, can you really call it low-stress anymore? I have no choice but to use low-stress training to its maximum potential. Here's the math: 36 inch tall tent. Say you give 3 inches for the lamp and the cross bar holding it. Now you got 33 left. Say you want minimum 12 inches distance lamp-to-plant, now you got 21 inches. The pot and stand are 9 inches, now you got 12 inches MAX height that your plant can be. And since you don't have much room to yield vertically, in order to justify doing any of this, you have to maximize the horizontal space around the plant. You have no choice but to take every leaf and branch and say to it, "Excuse me, nope, you're going that way, dear." So step 1 of the abuse is starting this whole process when they are really young. Why so early? The trick to efficient growing, in my opinion, is giving your lamp a target to shoot at that is as big as possible as quickly as possible. Because this way, you get something called compounding growth. So LST is the remedy for both my yield and spatial concerns. The sooner you get going with it, the more likely you will have a really successful grow. I tried LST on Day 11 with an LST clip, but removed it a day later. The clip just was too big, and quite honestly, I don't think I'm going to use them for 1st LST anymore like I've been doing. The plant has to be just the right size for them to work, and the old fashioned way to do it works great as long she gives you enough leaf-stem to hold on to, know what I mean? So I reapplied LST the old-fashioned way on Day 13. She was bent down such that the single-leaf 1st node leaf was up in the air now, but her pair was under the plant. I removed that one. I like this configuration because it makes it easier for the branches you eventually get to go in a sort of N, S, E, W orientation (or if a clock, 12, 3, 6, 9 .. you get the point). Since the tent is a square prism, to maximize horizontal space opportunities, your longest branches should go into the corners of the square in a NSEW configuration to create the squar-ish shape you want/need the plant to have. Bend the seedling some other way, and wrangling the branches into a square shape becomes more difficult. Thanks for reading. Hope this was helpful somehow. Have a great grow day. Check out my YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtLdjlvS0mK9Pu3pkumUu-w