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This is my second grow after coming back from a long hiatus. The first grow was purely for the sake of seeing what problems I would encounter, and this grow is my first attempt at being "dialed in." I use quotes there because I typically don't get too exact on every single measurement for the plant. I keep track of pH and I watch plants for signs of needing more food. The goal for the grow is to maximize results while still keeping the inputs very simple and minimal.
I am starting the diary for this single plant run on the day of planting the seedling into the net pot. This seed already had roots growing out of the bottom of the Root Riot cube for a couple days before transplant. From now, through the entire cycle, I will leave the drip ring running to encourage roots to reach out sideways into the net pot instead of only downward into the bucket. I do have an air stone in the bucket, but it is primarily for agitation. The dripping action of the ring should pick up enough dissolved oxygen to keep the solution saturated. Having the air stone in a corner of the bucket just does a good job of circulating so that when I put in something to make adjustments to solution, it stirs the reservoir for me and I don't have to pull out the plant to mix.
The bucket I'm using is called a Hydrobucket. It's a product made for DWC which is arguably very pricey for a single bucket. The reason I shelled out the money, is that the additional square area of reservoir allows me to get into the bucket without taking the lid off of the bucket and disturbing roots. During my first grow, I tried to run totally sterile with calcium hypochlorite in regular black 5 gallon buckets. That failed miserably. Every single week after nutrient change, I'd encounter root rot the next couple days after the change out. About halfway into the grow I switched to Hydroguard, and the roots improved drastically. I still ran into issues every time I changed out the water though. I noticed I never had issues when I just added water or solution back to the res, so I found these buckets and thought they would work perfect for allowing me to control the solution, and look at the roots, without having to pull the root ball totally out of the bucket. Water changes will be done by dropping a small sump into the the front square area.
This time around I'm starting Hydroguard from day one in hopes of simply never running into a root rot problem at all. I'm thinking that with the ring constantly dripping the beneficial bacteria over all the roots, they should be very happy in there.
There won't be much to add for the next few weeks other than pictures of progress. Since I won't have much to write until the plant is a bit bigger, I'll give a quick run down of the plan.
I'm going to be installing a screen to train the plant under once the plant has developed to a point I'm happy with. To prepare the plant for a screen, I will be mainlining and training for either 4 or 8 main branches. That decision will depend a bit on how big and branchy she has been up to the point of getting her to 4 mains. If she is lanky I'll for sure top for 8 main branches. If she stays short I will use 4 mains.
That's it for the first week! If I make any changes to anything I will note them in the weekly comments. If you're reading this diary, Thank you, and I hope your own growing goes well!
Going to go ahead and call this the start of vegetation. One week in the bucket with the drip ring has seen really fast growth compared to the last run where I just periodically watered until roots came out of the bottom. The plant itself is already making leaves but no roots have popped out of the net basket yet. I'm going to guess that's because the roots are growing into the LECA rather than straight down. We will see if that bears out to be true. I've had the light on 24 hours a day for this first week, and today I will set the timer to 18.
You can see the signs of a little burn at the very tips of the leaves. The first couple days with the very weak solution I noticed yellow tips but just left it alone. Now she seems to be growing enough to handle the solution.
I'll be leaving this solution in until the plant is a little bigger and looks hungry, at which point I'll change the solution out and increase the strength. That normally takes my seedlings about 3 weeks, however with as quick as she's going, it might happen before next weeks check in.
Update (3/15/22): I finally saw the first roots breaking out of the net basket. They are indeed coming out the sides rather than the bottom! I'm excited to see the difference this ends up making by the end of the grow in terms of health and yield.
Marking the start of week 2 of vegetation today. The past week has seen growth continuing to speed up every day. It's looking like I'll have enough nodes grow to do my first topping in preparation for the screen. The nutrients are the same as what was originally put in when the plant was a seedling, so we are at 2 weeks with the same starter nutes. After I finish making this post I'm going to go ahead and switch to a weak vegetative profile on the nutrients and give her a couple of days to react. I'm thinking sometime in around 3-4 days from now, she'll be ready for the first cut. If that cut comes before next week's update, I'll get a picture and edit this entry.
So this week was a combination of good growth and a disappointing stall. The day after I posted the last update I upped the nutrients (and swapped the water out) and everything looked good. A day after that I cut the top and bottoms to begin mainlining the structure of the plant. She began to rebound right away, already showing growth on the 2 branches left just hours after the cut. Sadly, just a day later I noticed some spots on the leaves and that growth just stopped. I looked into the bucket and noticed I had a bit of root rot starting to take hold. That was the disappointing part. I was hopping to avoid having any issues like that at all this run with the drip ring and using Hydroguard from day 1. she's rebounded from that and started growing again so everything is good as of today.
All in all the plant still made decent progress this week. I just hope I don't have to fight back root rot every week like the last cycle. I may go significantly longer between reservoir changes to see if that keeps the occurrence of rot at bay.
The story of how I went from 4 perfect mains to 3 is in the picture captions. I cut it down to 4 mains a couple days ago, trained them down with some wire and the next time I checked on them one of the branches had fallen off and was already wilted. Lesson learned is that I shouldn't try to do everything at once.
Since the symmetry is thrown off I won't worry too much about topping or training anymore. I'll let her bush a little then get her under a screen next week. I had wanted to train 2-4 main branches in each direction with the mainline, and flower with 2/3rds of the screen full, but now I think I will just fill the screen in veg. Still on the fence about that.
Nutrients are the same. Won't be changing that until I run into issues or the plant gets much thirstier, whichever comes first.
Did some LST to try any make up for the loss of the branch last week. She's bushed up pretty good!
I don't think I will be using the screen I built to train her SCROG style. I would need a few more weeks for fill it and it's looking like I'll need to start flower in the next week. I'll just have to wait for the next plant to use the screen. I need to have the plant finished and dried by the end of June and vegging it a few more weeks will push the timeline really tight.
Going to be switching the light cycle to 12/12 today.
I'm happy with how resilient this plant is. My issue with some root rot was a one time thing so far. It seems like if I make sure I'm keeping my water level within an inch of the bottom of the net pot I don't have any issues.
As you can see in one of the picture, I had an issue with a main stem split. The plant hasn't even reacted to that, so I am just headed forward with planned flowering.
I think for space reasons I should have flipped the light schedule last week, but that's water under the bridge. We'll see how big she gets starting the flower here.
Nutrients were increased to just a little less than GenHydro's recommended amounts, and she loved it. Blew up in a couple days time!
Not much change from last update to now. The plants have had a week of 12/12 and haven't done much but grow a bit vertically. I did a little bit of leaf plucking and tying down throughout the week but nothing really transformative. I kept feed at the same strength and she seems to be doing fine.
I MAY try to throw a screen over her to flatten her a bit more, but she's a week in on flowering and she does not look to be stretching much. Stretching could go all at once in these next two weeks though. We'll see. I'll try to get a feel for how well a screen would sit her flat, but some of these branch are so straight up that it may not work. We'll see around the 25th or 26th and maybe next weekend I'll have a screen to show.
There are no pistils showing yet. hopefully by next update I'll have a few.
Went ahead and put a screen in to help push it out sideways. Feeding hasn't changed and she looks good. you can see a pretty big difference between the left and right, with the right only getting 1 main arm and the left getting 2. If I hadn't have pulled that main branch off by mistake this screen would be a lot more even. Even still, I'm not upset with the result! Stuff in the middle is coming up from below to get some light and she's starting to show a lot of pistils. Eager to see her start stacking and filling in!
So Jisoo is at day 21 of 12/12. The stretching is almost nil at this point, and she has shifted to forming flowers. I took these two pictures before a light defoliation and a little tying down, but I did not do a whole lot of manipulation. As time goes I'll run my hands through the canopy to search for the wet spots between stacked leaves that I sometimes get because of humidity, and then I'll remove leaves accordingly. Other than that I will be just leaving the plant alone to do it's thing.
You can see a pretty big difference in the density on the lefts side of the screen versus the right. That's a result of losing one of the arms of the mainline. Even still, the plant has done a really good job filling out the footprint, and the lower branches that came up to fill in the middle are looking nice and healthy.
I'm already getting a bit excited for the end product. My last run I got plenty of bud to hold me over for a while, and so this time I was hoping to get something special in terms of quality. I was nervous about this strain because I've seen some diaries here that said their phenos had nearly no smell or flavor, but my experience so far is that the skunk side is really present here. I open my tent and the entire room is quickly filled with a very classic skunk smell. The little budlets have trichomes on them from the moment they emerge, and when I brush up against them while pulling a leaf or two, it leaves a very distinct lemon zest smell. I had thought my last White Widow run smelled like lemon, but Jisoo puts that to shame.
Not much to report this week that was not already the case last week. I included a couple close up bud pics just to show the trichomes already on the plant. As you can see from the top down view, there is some room for me to defoliate and clean up a bit, but since I changed out the solution today I will give her a day or two before I start taking off leaves.
She's easily drinking a gallon of water a day now. I may have begin to do full solution changes sooner because around day 4 or 5 after a fresh batch, the pH begins dropping drastically between adjustments and I don't like the idea of the nutes falling out of range several times a week.
I'm still just following the recommended feeding for Flora trio simple recirculating schedule. I added Floralicious plus just because I needed to grab more of the bloom formula anyway and the guy offered it to me cheap and swore I'd love it. Probably can't hurt too much. ( Famous last words.)
The skunky smell she had before has turned into more of an overripe fruit smell. She still leaves greasy patches that smell of lemon rind on my fingers when I touch the buds. I'm trying to do that less and less but it's so hard to fight the urge!
This week is the same story as last week. Took some leaves off, kept the solution in the right pH range, and just let her go. Everything has been smooth with the exception of my blizzard fan mount breaking. The fan is now hanging from a ratchet hanger in the corner of the tent. I dropped the "gro" component from the feeding today. The feed is now just the Micro, Bloom, Floralicious, some Epsom salt, and Hydrogaurd.
The overripe fruit smell is overpowering my carbon filter a bit. I'm not to worried as it's not making the place smell skunky, but it's definitely noticeable when I walk by the fan outlet.
I'm very eager to see what these next 3 weeks or so bring!
Everything is on autopilot. Just checking and adjusting pH and then taking pics on Saturday for the updates :)
I got a usb scope this week to check trichomes with. I'm still early but I took a couple clippings just to try to scope. I have a bad habit of cutting early, so this should help me stay the course when I'm getting close. It also just makes for cool pictures!
Oh! As you can also see from the regular pics, she's starting to darken and go a little purple now.
Checked the trichomes on a couple clippings across the plant and still found mostly clear. No surprises there, breeder recommends between 9 and 10 weeks.
Nothing much else to report really. Just doing my daily duties and watching her slowly turn purple.
Had to cut off a couple buds because I noticed white mold starting :(
Good news is it seems I caught it on time. The rest of the plant looks clean. Humidity has been much lower now so I just need to make it these last two weeks. I might even cut it next week but I'll scope a couple piece to check before deciding.
Still feeding basically full strength, and she's still fading to yellow and purple :) Almost there!
She won't be a huge yielder, but I don't care. these buds smell like sour candy, I'm itching to get them dried and cured!
Took these pictures right before I cut her down. I never really saw any change from clear to cloudy on the trichomes. They were clear with a few ambers, then went to clear with a LOT of ambers. I took that as a sign she was done.
I will update harvest section when everything is dried. Things I can say about this strain right away though...
1. Amazing smell and resin production. This plant would be beautiful for processing the whole plant for the resin.
2. Leaf/Calyx ratio is not great. A lot of the weight here is going to be leaf even with decent trimming. The upside is a lot of that leaf is covered in resin. Further supports observation #1.
3. This plant is really resilient. She took a beating and still gave me some really nice smelling buds that I think will be a joy to smoke.
Harvest section coming in a couple weeks :)
Buds are still curing but I have been smoking them in the meanwhile and they definitely don't disappoint. I'm not a person who grows for weight beyond having enough to supply myself and share with some friends, so I won't be putting anything on the weight section. The end yield did give me 2 half gallon jars plus a quart jar of buds that are good for smoking, and then about a gallon zip lock back full of fresh frozen larfy buds (almost no leaf) to make dry ice hash with.
The Lemon smell and taste carried through nicely in the drying and so far through curing. It's definite got a sour diesel smell to it when you open the jar. Next time I grow this I won't do a scrog, I'll try to let it grow vertical with lots of light and opened up branches.
This strain would probably to best in either an outdoor grow with a great climate, or a large enough indoor grow to let her stretch up and pull the branch's apart to let light in to the lower buds. She doesn't make long spear buds, more like an abundance of grape-golf ball size nugs.
@chiefleaf55, Thanks! I've neglected to do a harvest tab but I should probably put one up just to put on bud pics. A lot of small but very sticky and lemony buds! high is nice too :)
Saltsarecleaner
