My First Grow

@Big_Eddie_Kane, Just checked your new photos and read all that, GREAT work man & that sucks your friend should stop spreading misinformation. That is one of the biggest issues and hurdles to overcome for new growers is all the bro science & people spreading myth and miss info. Those changes you made all sound very good. Heat and humidity play a very large role in growing, I suggest you check out vapor pressure deficit and how it relates to growing cannabis. Here is a great article on it and a chart to use, All growers should get used to reading a VPD chart daily and logging their numbers. https://cerescann.com/importance-of-measuring-vpd/ I find having a good few inches below my net pots works best early on you just want very minor spittle hitting the bottom of your cube from the popping bubbles. It will stimulate faster root growth which also could have attributed to your slightly slower growth. But that plant now looks very nice and very nice root structure underneath it. Your PH numbers are good, Your temperature gaps look nice and tight, All I could recommend is to get a good PAR meter and thermal laser temp gun to better read your plants and grow to their needs. This will also help rid you of the guesswork with your light distance. We use these pieces of equipment to dial in our optimal light to plant distance as well. Cannabis plants want all the PAR they can intake from the lights to then photosynthesize & store up energy for their night cycle when they do most of their growth. If we give them too much light, The plant will react in real-time by curling its leafs inward like a taco to remove surface area away from the light source to shut down photosynthesis. Managing this with a PAR meter and recording your numbers helps & using your thermal laser temp gun to make sure your plant top temps are not getting too high. In flower, our temperature control is vital to how our buds develop. If our rooms are too warm we get big airy buds with not very much resin & they are prone to foxtail bad. If our rooms are too cold we get super dense caked buds but lose out on size a lot. We want density + size that is where we get our weight from. Temps of 77-80 MAX for post week 2 of flower is good. We want to slowly walk that down as we near the last 2 weeks. Once our plants finish their vertical growth by weeks 4-6 of flower, We want to begin to open up our temperature gaps beyond 10 degrees less with lights off and a bit more each week until harvest. This will send extra energy from the plants into the budding process and resin production. We do this each week a bit more until harvest, As the genetic responses to this environmental stress have now changed from stretch To budding up and finishing off. When it comes to defoliation, We want to do that on a schedule and stick to it no matter how tempting it is to remove a leaf here or there, When we pluck plant matter off our plants they will release a scream if you will or pheromone however you want to look at it, This is all plants not just cannabis plants. When they do this the plant itself & all others in the area are alerted it is being damaged and shut down growth for 24hrs. When we defoliate do it all in 1 single session & remove all plant matter from the house.

@LegacyMarketFarm, first, thank you for the guidance! Much appreciated! Let me start by telling you that it took me a few weeks to dial my environment in. My friend who grows in a warm climate kept telling me temp and humidity didn’t really matter and everything that I read and saw on YouTube said it did. I live in a cold climate and the humidity over winter was like 21%. in the basement... and the winter here had my space cold. The first few sets of leaves were even deformed so I knew something was up. Picked up a heater, a humidifier and some purple foam insulation board and got it under control. The air stones are the wide round flat ones that suction to the bottom and the pump is the noisy metal vivosun model with a 6 way splitter and only 3 lines active, valves fully open. Wasn't really confident with the light distance recommendation because of the environmental stress so I moved it up and down a lot. Now that the leaves look healthy and it did grow quite a bit, I have the light at the recommended height and I've recently wrapped my buckets in reflective insulation which has the water temp between 68 and 72. The temp is usually 70s.. sometimes 79 which makes me nervous cause the humidity shoots up. The water level in the buckets my friend told me to keep filling it up to 1 inch in to the net pot. I posted the root ball with week 7s pics but things seem to be ok but it's my first time growing anything so I have nothing to go off of but pictures. I change the water every Sunday when I clean the space and do leaf maintenance and I notice they are drinking it up cause it's usually 3-4 inches lower after 4 days. I check ph the first 3 or 4 days to keep it 5.6-5.9 and by the 4th day it's usually stable til Sunday. My seedlings I do start on the heat mat in a prop tray til the leaves come out then I put them in the tent with everything else. I have some other plants in solo cups right now that are doing well at 18/6, 100% light. Again, this is my first grow so I'm definitely nervous to screw things up but I'm constantly listening to gardening podcast, audiobooks and awesome people like you that don't mind sharing information to get me in the right direction. The plant does look good to me though. No nute burn, it recovers fast after an aggressive defoliation with Recharge of course, and usually the next day looks like I did nothing which is so insane to me. The whole process is cool!