First Grow/Mini Grow/TangerineDreamAuto

🌱 It took me a week (after germination) to get parts of my tent and lights in place, so the seedling was in fact growing 7 days and was already 8cm when I planted it into soil. D4: 👉 Is the day 4 after planting it to soil. Added Alg-A-Mic to spray bottle and started randomly spraying the "leaves", looks much more vibrant even after 1st day of use. 💡 Hindsight: Realised 1-2 weeks afterwards that Biobizz recommends to spray the leaves only in dark times with alg-a-mic, do'h! Oh well. 🤫 D5: 👉 Got my setup finally ready! As this project is mainly about the teeny tiny small micro setup that I'm going for (from start to finish in Secret Jardin DP60) I feel the pictures of the actual setup are in place. 💡 I got to give it up to Secret Jardin, their tent + utilities is everything I wished for: ➕ 2 pieces of ducting flanges to cut a hole anywhere I want/need ➕ 1 piece of cable flange to cut a hole for the cable entry and make sure it's light tight ➕ 1 piece of light baffle for the incoming air hole to make sure no light escapes / comes in ➖ cosmorrow lighting kits (lights + adapters) didn't have the strings/wires included, so I had to make a lil customization, not too bad though obviously ✨ Excited to see how hard this thing is going to be 🤩 🌱 I chose Barney's Tangerine Dream Auto because of it's small height in specification 70-90cm (2.3-3ft). Hindsight sidenote: 💡 Should have maybe taken non-Auto, because the setup required more grow time before flowering phase. 🍼 I want my project to be almost entirely organic, so you'll be seeing mostly nothing but organic brands such as Biobizz and Plagron during my project. ENJOY 🤩

D7: 👉 Started 2nd week (in soil) with first dosages of Alga Grow and Startbooster, which should be good for the roots. I try to keep the dosages low for now. The soil was still moist from the watering I did 1 week ago so I figured this was my first chance to really water it + could't wait any longer to start with the nutrients. 👉 Also started with LST on D6 already, because any extra height with this one would be bad for my setup. I wanted to start LST early so the plant knows what's ahead of it, which is a lot of LST and eventually scrog 😁 💡 Hindsight: I think I started LST too early, because the plant was struggling for the next 3 weeks to progress. Could also be normal for this strain to start out slow, but my money is on the fact that there might have been too much stress early on. On the other hand the plant's stem kept on leaning the way it was set this week so it wasn't all bad. Just a bit too early though. D10: 👉 I got my thermometer and soon after realised on D9, that my setup was running too hot for the plant (32°C), got to cool it down to 27.5°C which is nice. D13: 👉 I've inserted other seedlings to the same propagator for outdoor flowers, temperature dropped at the same time to 26°C -ish. Also grew the distance to the LEDs to approx. from 10cm to 15cm. 💡 I try to keep the lighting close to the plant, 10-15cm. If the distance grows too much between LED's and canopy, the 'shoots' will grow too long for my setup.

D15: 👉 I saw 4th node coming in and topped my baby for the first time (and last time). I'm kind of worried about the slow growth of the plant but as long as it is going steady I guess I'm happy. No pictures for the day. 💡 Maybe I should amp up nutes? Slow growth might be due to the fact that I applied LST quite early on. 👃 Started noticing faint smell from the plant already. Noice! D17: 👉 I swapped the plant from it's first pot to it's final destination which is originally a 5 gallon (19 litre) pot. I'll just half it and make it 2.5 gallons. I was looking for a wide one so it would not hog up vertical space. 💧 Watered for 1,5 L. 😐 We'll see how this will go. Quite unsure at this moment.

D22: 👉 Still haven't watered since last weeks watering when I switched the pot. 👉 Decided to let it grow freely without forcing the LST this week so all parts of the plants leaves will get same amount of light. Will continue LSTing when she has more branches. 💡 We definitely have a slow beginning with this and I wish we'd have way more branches by now but she looks healthy so that's good. D26: 👉💧 Increased the amount of nutrients and started watering more frequently 0,4L every other day. Seems like there's a lot of shoots coming up. ✨ Looking good and it seems to be speeding up the grow process. Now that's what I like to see for sure 😎

✨First off, wow. I was just out from the house for 5 days and my first reaction was WOW, it has sprouted so well. ✨ I think one of the best things of this hobby and growing process is when you don't see your plants for several days and when you do, it amazes you every time. Hopefully in a good way. D30: 👉 Looking more closely I see that the plant wasn't up for the upped dosage of nutes. 😿 I see nutrient burn on leaves and they are all curled down. 🌊 Gave it a good flush hoping it will regain balance. Will sligthly adjust the amount of nutes this week. 👉 I've adjusted this weeks nutrition information to the adjusted schedule. 💡 I don't know if flush is absolutely necessary, but I don't want to risk it. Decided to give it good 2-3 flushes on aone shower session. I know this will also equal as over watering, but I think it's less an issue than overdosage of nutes. This is what can happen if you decide to (slightly) give more nutes to the plant and then leave the house for 5 days. 🤦‍♂️ 💡🌻 Second thing I see is that okay, seems like this auto flower baby is starting to build buds. Wasn't hoping to see this either as I was planning to give the plant some LST/HST. Which I decided I will still do, because the space is tight, alright. I have no idea if I'm going to stress the plant too much now. But I have to do this one and will stop immediately if it seems to go to hell. ✍️ Note to self: "To hell with auto flowers." 😾 👉 Setup change: I used to only have my 2x20W LEDs, now added the other 2x20W for blooming phase transfer, in total 2x20W grow & 20x20W bloom. I will start the shift to bloom this ongoing week and switch to all 4x20W blooming lights with 12/12 change. 💡 Lots of changes coming in this week. Will it be too much for it to handle? We'll see! D31: 👉 Seems like it's handling the change well for now. I'm going to water it once the soil dries up a bit. I'm gonna make a shift from Alga Grow to Alga Bloom and gonna 50/50 them for the first transition week. Updated diary nutrients to match what I'm going to do. ✨🌿 Amount of shoots seems promising, about 8-9 of them. D32: 👉 This thing is looking better and better by the day. I'm getting super excited as I already thought that I've screwed up with this. 😻 👉 As this is the transition week, I'm doing a lot of micro managing of the environment and to the plant itself: ⚡️ I've tightened all of the strings for better control of the canopy of my baby ⚡️ I also shifted some of the big leafs of taller shoots under short shoot leafs in order to give them a proper amount of light as well ⚡️ I've organized the lighting to be in order of: Grow Bloom Grow Bloom (=4 strips of LEDS) 💡 I'm still worried about the tips of leaves as they are showing signs of over watering (because of flush) on top of the nute-burn. 💧 Even though of the signs of over watering, I will give a 0.5L of nutrition water so the grow process keeps on going and there will be no shortages to nutes distribution for the baby. This might be dumb tho. After this, I will wait out for it to fully dry. D34: 👉 Looking better and better, more lil beginnings of buds showing up and LSTing is going rather well. I've made minor changes to the strings every day for full control of the canopy and now even the most shortest shoots are leveling up to the tallest ones. Mission accomplished in my books. The bright green shoots and the amount of them is just 😻😻😻 ✨🌿 Amount of shoots seems promising, about 16 of them. 👉 I've made changes to lighting schedule, last night they had first ever 16/8 lighting, next night will be 14/10 and the night after that we going in 12/12 mode as first official week of flowering is starting (even though there are little bud hair here and there already 😋). 👉 Today I've added 3rd bloom-light making the order of lights G B B B. ❓ Why am I doing things so gradually? Well I just love to micro manage and I'm here to make sure the plant will not go into any shock because of sudden changes to environment. I know it wouldn't go, BUT.. I think I've shocked it enough with my inaccurate nutrition planning + over watering.

D36: 👉 Yesterday we got fully into 12/12 schedule with lights on all bloom 4x20W. Seems like it has finally dried out now. Will wait for tomorrow morning for watering. The temperature is not 28.7°C as in the picture, that's just me working the strings. 😅 👉 I've once again tightened the strings to be able to use all of the space horizontally. The plant is now 40cm in diameter. D38: ❌🥀 Crap. Been following the plant for couple of days because of the suspected over watering but now it seems that my case is most likely with nitrogen toxicity as the leaves are dark green and "clawy" (not ruling out over watering too, but..). I will cut out the transition nutrients of alga grow altogether and reduce amount of alg-a-mic as well for the time being. Will focus entirely on alga bloom. 🥦 Buds are coming together pretty nicely for now, I hope I see more progress and get over the N toxicity phase asap. Will post a question for additional opinions. 🌊 Asked a question, decided to flush. Will get a pH meter tomorrow to see if I need to adjust soil pH up. Thanks for the help people. 💚 D39: 👉🌊 Decided to flush with pH'd water again just to be sure. 💡 I rised the lights almost to the top of the grow box, now the lights are are approx. 30cm from the canopy. D41: 👉 I think most of my issues were caused by too hot environment like someone stated in their answer to my question. Answer was to just move the lights further away. I wonder if the damaged leafs will recover 🤔 🕸️ Started scrogging and I'm still waiting on when I can start water it with nutes. Maybe in a couple of days. 🥦 Broccoli is coming out nice. I like the amount of bud shoots. The smell is also nice. All is nice. 🌈

D44: 👉💧 Started the day with watering including nutes, but only 50% of the amount I would give if it wouldn't be the issues from the past week. I will increase the amount to normal amount in the later half of the week. 🥦 Plant is looking pretty much the same it has been for the past few days. Condition is okay/good. The amount of budsites is looking good to me.

D50: 👉 Normalised the amount of nutes given with pHd water. 🥦 Buds are looking good n healthy. They are building up some weight, that's cool. Sugar leaves start to look delicious. 😋 🍂 Some of the lowest fan leaves are yellowing. Idk if it is just time related or due to the fact of multiple flushes. 💡 I'm quite happy with the size of this one, it has grown just the right amount without stretching out too long. My tent's height is only 60cm and the plant takes approximately 30cm leaving 25-30cm distance between canopy and the LEDs. D55: 🥦 Buds are swolling up a bit and they're looking healthy. 🍂 Lower leafs are yellowing and dropping off. I don't quite know what to do with them.

D57: 👉 Started the new week off with Plagron's Green Sensation. We'll see if it helps with the yellowing leafs a bit. D57: 🥦 Nuggets are looking nice and they are swollening by the day, but fan leaves still continue yellowing. Don't know what to do there tbh. It's not major, but still bothers me as I wasn't able to grow that many leaves during the veg phase.

D62: 👉 So I'm getting fed up with the deficiency situation and trying to balance things out with CalMag. Let's see how it goes. Buds development seems to also slow a bit down, so it's good to add CalMag into the mix. Fingers 🤞 🎪 Secret Jardin with the 10" inline fan is doing an excellent job, no smell issues what so ever even though the plant baby is super loud. 🔊 D66: No action points at this point, just waiting for the baby to swoll up, she looks delicious as hell 😛 Can't wait to have a taste. Also can't really see the difference of adding CalMag into the mix, but can't see it doing any harm either so all good I suppose. Have to wait for the effect. D70: 👉 I think we are about done with this batch, seems like the buds are not swollening anymore and I what I can see with my 8x loupe is that most of the trichromes have switched color. CalMag also seemed to do the trick as no more leaves are dropping the same way they dropped half a week ago.

D72: 🏁👉 Aaaaaaaaaaaaand that's all folks! What a beautiful journey this was. I learned a lot and really got excited for being a plant daddy. The plant turned out beautiful, but not what I originally hoped for. What now happens is a week long flush season and then the much anticipated chop o'clock. ❌ I made several mistakes looking back. Here are few that come into my mind at this point: - 🌱 Autoflower. I shouldn't have gone with autoflower to begin with, it wasn't easy to control it as I was trying to control my very limited space at the same time. Timing issues here and there. Tried to stretch the vegetation phase when it wasn't simply possible. - 🌡️ Heat. I misjudged the amount of heat that the LED strips produced. I went few weeks with the lights just being too low and damaged the leaves a bit. - 🌊 Overwatering. Thinking my issues were with nutrients and not the actual cause (heat), I flushed the soil couple of times causing unfortunate overwatering at the same time. - 😧 Stress. I caused un needed stress to the plant while I still had to LST/HST while in early flowering phase. I also transitioned from veg to flower by not just flipping the light switch from 16/8 to 12/12 overnight. Instead I did the transfer gradually. This probably caused slower transition for the plant as well. - 🍼 Nutrients. I should have reacted to the late flowering phase deficiency of Cal/Mag more quicker. I saw last week that the CalMag really had an effect and slowed down the yellowing of the leaves. - 💧 pH'd water. I should have done it from the beginning. But hey, you live and learn, right? Like mentioned, I learned a ton of new skills and I'm quite confident that my next grow will be much better. ⭐ What I was most proud of, was the space management, even with the heat issues. The heat issue could also have been managed if I'd just acted quicker. But I managed to get a decent yield with just 60x60x40 tent ❗❗❗ The thing was entirely unnoticeable by people who visited my home. If something, the inline fan could have been with slighty lower volume, but other than that: Just awesome 😎 I will definitely do this again after summer. D85: 👉 Last update before chop o'clock. The buds have swollen a bit still after the last update and "hairs" have switched color. 🌊 I've been flushing my baby for 2 weeks now, first with normal watering amounts with pH'd water for a week. During the first week I took a little teaser off the baby for a taster. I turned out to be just a little rough for the throat, so I figured second round of flush will definitely do it. 🌊 Flushed it properly with it being basically under the water tap (water not touching buds ofc), until runoff was almost clear. It's now been drying from that operation for 3 days. I assume it will be dry tomorrow and I'll leave it in the dark for about 24h before chop. So, 2 days and it's ✂️🌲-time! Can't wait! 😎

🎢 Growing this strain was a "ride". 🌲 It was perfect size wise, but autoflower was something I definitely shouldn't have gotten, but the photoperiodic one. Next time I know! 💪 The strain was super resistant to some of the heat-watering stress I was causing it to withstand. Of course that probably resulted in the final product. 👅 Can't wait to taste the final product after cure.