1st Grow - Mexican Airlines/Six Shooter

A lot has happened! Mexican Airlines is beautifully taking off, much further in advance with much fatter and bigger main colas than the Six Shooters. Fast Buds anyway says you can keep the Six Shooter going for 2 extra weeks, so I am planning to run it for 11 instead of 9 weeks and the Mexican Airlines I am planning to run it for an extra week depending on its trichome development. This decision came in mostly because I decided to use Advanced Nutrients Overdrive on them, which supposedly keeps the plants going stronger and still at full power without losing bud development performance during its late stages of life. Yeah I said a lot has happened, so this previously mentioned decision wasn't the only one. 1 SS and 1 MA were transplanted to 15l pots, which I made Hempy Pots out of them. Moslty because I wanted to see what was up with this system that many people praise and also cause I was tired of hand watering so many plants so often. This was just a test though, to really help me saving some precious time. I would rather use this time to do some studying, training on them or just sit there and admire them than to be filling up buckets of water and mixing nutrients. So the real help came in the form of Autopots, so let's also see what those are about. Yeah you might have noticed I transplanted them in mid-flowering, much worse than that, 2/3 weeks away from harvest in the case of the Mexican Airlines. But hey, me and as well you reading this diary, would never know what would have happened if it wasn't for this little experiment going on here. They actually looked pretty bad when I transplanted them into the Autopots, but this was mostly because they had been dry for 2 days so it would be easier for me to remove those plastic bags and transplant them without fearing of the medium with the roots crumbling and becoming a disaster. Those bags are actually horrible, since when the medium goes a little dryer it shrinks and when you water your plants the next time water will be falling down the sides instead of being absorbed from the top. Because of this, what happened is that my roots were actually mostly concentrated at the bottom of the bags, really a lot of them (no pictures unfortunately). I believe this happened because I never really removed the run off water as I knew not much water was being absorbed from the top. Also all the water sitting on the tray in which the bag with plant was would be absorbed by it in a few minutes. By this I conclude most of the water was being fed to the plants from the bottom, pretty much like a Autopot system. Actually in one of them there were a lot of roots already outside the bag. There was no root damage at all during transplanting, not that I saw at least, because when I went to fit it into the Autopot pots I noticed the plants' base with the medium were way larger than the pots, so I had to really squeeze it in there, like a fat lady trying to fit into tight jeans. With this in mind I realized it could have happened a lot of stress in there and since I had already migrated everything to an Autopot system anyway, I decided to switch to synthetic nutrients and add a few more beneficial additives to help the plant cope on with the stress. The whole point on going with Autopots, as mentioned earlier, was to save me some time, but I found myself having to check the reservoir every day to re-mix the solution when I was still doing organics. This actually happened with the White Widows and Moby Dicks as they were the first to go into Autopots and were left in a different area to veg for longer. That organic Iguana Juice stuff was going smelly really quickly in the reservoir, in a period of 24/36 hours it was already all bubbly at the top, which tells me some degradation was going on and the PH was going up through the roofs. It went up to 8 once, and I believe it stayed in the range of 7.5 to 8 for at least 2 days. I contacted Advanced Nutrients support and the guy wrote me that the PH going up so much meant the plants were actually consuming a lot of the nutes. I didn't really go double check on this info, but I can tell you and you can see from the picture that they were looking amazingly healthy and growing a lot (took them 3 days to cover the thermometer at the back). At least for now I am not thinking to install a re-circulatory pump in there and I read people saying that doing air pumps in reservoirs with organic nutrients actually make the stuff go bad quicker, maybe too much oxygen in there. So based on all that and me not willing to wait longer to see if they would still be holding well on that really high PH made me decide to switch to synthetics. I am using several different products to give me a vast array of different micro-nutrients, but as well since they are Autoflowers I am giving half a dose of some of them, especially the base nutrient which is still from Advanced Nutrients but now their Connoisseur line, which is known to be some pretty hot stuff. By the way, there was some pictures of the White Widows and Moby Dicks in this album even though they will be in another diary. Now guess which ones are they... yeah, the best looking ones (of course the ones not flowering as well, duhhh!). Look at their color, it just screams healthy. The damaged leaves at the bottom are just scars of its turbulent past. What happened as well is that I changed the T5s for Apollo 6 LEDs, so I am still bugged now if all this growth, development and color improvement was due the lights or just a matter of time that took a while for them to stabilize after I corrected their PH issues. I think there is still more to that though as the Autoflowering ones (MA and SS) still didn't get to this appearance. So a whole LED grow is something to consider, especially cause I am still battling with heat as the temperatures are going from 25 to 29 celsius but I would like to have it always at 25 or lower during the flowering period. Another point would be electricity costs and peace of mind. I have running 2 ballats, 2 600W HPS, a inline fan, a regular standing fan, a humidifier and a portable air conditioner just so I can barely keep the temperature and humidity where I want, while at the area I am using for veg in which I have a LED panel is equipped only with a regular standing fan and a LED panel that needs no ballast and barely any heat control. Yeah, LEDS might seem to be a initial bigger investment but it's much worth it if where you are is really hard to control the environment, which will for sure decrease your yields or even have you wake up one day to a lost crop due a heat wave or some other kind of problem related to lightning and cooling that happened overnight... peace of mind comes first. P.S. Ever since I started using RO water (reverse osmosis) I started giving them Cal-Mag Plus as well by AN at 2ml/L. I use regular tap water with either some Iguana Juice Grow or with B52 at a very light concentration to germinate seeds though. In the last pictures they look very droopy. This was right after the transplant, some hours later they were already happily shooting up.