First ever grow! Testing out my setup.

Started my first grow! Trying a Northern soul freebie I received to test things before I jump into the strains I actually want to grow. I have this little gal in with some herbs and veggies in a 4'x4'x6.5' tent with a 320w light dimmed to 270w. Planning on doing a manifold to play with topping and LST.

Week 2 went very smooth. Caught her praying to the light one day! Transplanted to a 5gal cloth pot the last day of the week. I'm amazed at how fast the growth is.

The transplant didn't even phase her one bit. Also started watering since the middle of this week to keep the coco saturated and the nutes strong. Saw a decent amount of growth the next day. I gotta say she exploded once I put her in her permanent home and bumped up the nutes a bit. these last couple days especially have been quite crazy with how bushy she has gotten. I'm also amazed by the incredibly short internodal spacing. She has 6 full nodes and is working on her 7th at only 5 inches tall. I will be stripping and topping her very soon. In the last few days photos, you can see some edge curling. That's due to the fact that we are currently in a heat wave and hit 100F 2 days in a row and my AC is struggling to keep up resulting in 83F most of those days with a peak of 86F. Got it all back down to 79F so she should recover soon.

07/02/2018: Very likely going to be topping tomorrow. I have 6 full nodes and a 7th coming in. Excited to start training her and experimenting with manifolding. 07/03/2018: Topped, stripped, and trained her this morning. She looks so sad now! It's wild that when you chop em up it still pulls water through where those branches were and it kinda just drips out for a bit. I wasn't expecting that having not grown anything prior to this experience. She wound up quite short after cutting her down to the 3rd node because the spacing was so tight. She was 5" before the topping and 1.5" after topping and training her down. 07/04/2018: Checked in the morning and she had perked right back up after being topped and tied down. 24 hours after the topping she has already started growing pretty quickly again. This little plant has gone above and beyond my expectations as far as rebounding after some trauma. I was expecting at least a full day of no growth but that wasn't her plan at all. 07/07/2018: Shes cruising right along with her growth. She's working on her 4th node currently which means her 2nd and final topping is right around the corner. After that She'll have 8 tops and 2-4 more weeks of veg before flipping to flower depending on how much she fills out. Trying to keep things as flat as possible currently to let her have the most verticle grow space she can have. 07/08/2018: Completed the final topping for the manifold shaping. I got rid of the 2nd set of nodes on each branch leaving nodes 1 and 3 resulting in 8 total tops. I have trained down the tops that I can so far and as she gets bigger will begin training down the tops of the 3rd nodes. Despite having a 6.5ft tall tent I'm still trying to keep her as short and flat as possible just to experiment and see how she comes out compared to a buddy who isn't training his as flat.

This week was mostly spent recovering from her final topping and stripping. On each main branch, I topped down to the 3rd node and stripped off the 2nd node, leaving nodes 1 and 3 to make up the 8 colas I was planning on having. Once topped and her branches were long enough I pulled em down to make her flat again and now I'm just letting her do her thing for a little while so the branches can develop more. I really shouldn't need to do any more training, but if the canopy winds up uneven I will be pulling branches down to make it all level. I also took some clones from the first topping I did and they all rooted in 7-9 days even without any rooting hormones. They look a little sad because they sucked some nutes from their fan leaves while they had no roots but since I planted them in the solo cups they have slowly been growing and looking more vibrant. I was quite pleased with her fast growth this week, especially the last couple days where she was having noticeable growth even after only 6 hours between me checking in. Still not 100% sure when I will start flowering, but I'm guessing another 1.5-2 weeks tops. I've also been very pleased with how well mega crop is feeding her and how easy it is to use. Not 100% sure Ill need it but they offer a PK booster for use during flowering as well. Only time will tell if my Northern Soul will be a PK hungry girl or not.

Not too much going on this week. Upped the nutes a bit now that the plant is getting larger and growing faster. Had to defoliate a couple times due to the rapid growth lately. Didn't strip some of the lower growth right away so a few of the tops from below the canopy made their way to the top. Gonna keep em and wind up with 12 tops instead of the 8 I planned on. The manifold looks great and I'm very happy with the results. From here on out training will just be making sure the canopy is level.

Not too much going on this week besides new growth. Clones are flourishing. Accidentally snapped a clones stem and taped her up. She seems to be doing okay now. Going to be flowering very soon.

Took some more clones and will be flipping to flower once those have rooted. Not too much else going on. Gave a pretty hefty haircut this week after letting things go and they got way too crowded. I love how clean and easy the manifold is. I'm just doing LST to the clones in there and they are much more of a pain to work with.

Im suprised how easy it has been growing these plants with megacrop. I just follow their feeding schedule and don't have to worry about anything else. They havent shown any signs of burn or deficiency the whole grow. I guess they are now considered mature plants as they have stopped growing 2 growth tips at each node. Speaking of nodes, Im sure at least the mainlined plant will have some crazy dense flower structure. The nodes on her are pretty much all an inch or less apart. Now I dont know of that will change in flowering with this being my first grow, but it will be interesting to see for sure. I was finally able to flip to flower on the 16th(Not actually part of this weeks update. Just wanted to write it down on here so I have a record of when I flipped since Im not posting another update for a week). Gave everything a nice haircut a day before flipping. Excited to see how things go through flowering!

Day 9 of flower at the end of this week. Plant has stretched a little but not as much as I had expected. Pistils are starting to form confirming the seed was indeed female. No signs of herming due to any stress. Im really hoping these girls stretch another 6"-12" at least.

Buds have started forming. The stretch has picked up a bit. They have grown about 6 inches since the flip to 12/12. The smell seems to have lessened a bit or atkeast changed to a bit of a sweeter less weed like smell. Started adding bud explosion from Greenleaf nutrients.

Had to flush things this week as I noticed run off ph was hittoung around 5.1. After flush runoff was at 5.9. Other than that everything has been going smoothly. Starting to get some trichromes developing on the sugar leaves. Hoping to get rid of my dill plant soon to have more space to spread out my plants.

Toned down the nutrients a bit this week as I was getting very slight signs of nutrient burn and my leaves are a pretty dark green color. Other than that things have been going smoothly. Got a new 27gal tote for a resovoir and a 350gph pump that im currently using for hand watering and will upgrade to a drip system next grow. Things have been bulking up a bit every day and the plants have officially stopped stretching. They are also extremely bushy and I had to pull so many leaves off the plants the first few weeks after 12/12 to keep airflow decent.

Things have been bulking up and getting a bit frostier this week. Raised the light up a bit and dimmed it a bit because the plants seemed to be dealing with a little heat stress.

This still going fairly smoothly. Anxiously awaiting harvest. Dropped bud explosion for now as it just seems to be burning the tips of my plants. Since I stopped using it the tip burn seems to have stopped or really slowed down. Loving the large reservoir and pump system for watering. Things take about half as long to water now!

Got a nice handheld microscope this week! It takes really nice pictures and works with my phone. Last picture in this weeks photos is from the scope. Clarity isnt the best due to a bit of a shaky hand, but when stablized it looks great. Im hoping I only have another week or 2 until harvest. It seems like theres some amber in there but still a bunch of clear as well.

Final week of flower. Trichromes are mostly cloudy with a few clear and a few amber. One of the plants started having a deficiency randomly, but being so close to harvest I let it slide. Excited to chop em down and see how much I got out of it. I definitely like the look and the easy management of the mainlined plant over everything else. The colas look the densest and heaviest. I will be chopping tomorrow.

This grow was a great first grow! This strain was super easy to grow coupled with using megacrop. The plants were also very resient to all the training I did. Topping didnt even slow em down. They also stayed very short and bushy even without training. My internodal space was generally an inch or so. I definitely recommend this strain to begginer growers as it was so easy to grow and got decent yields.