Wedding Cheesecake Auto - Indoor / Soil

The development looks good, but I can not get the temperature significantly down. Cool packs / ice cubes in the grow tent help a bit, but not enough. I generate a little humidity with a spray bottle, but alas... Hopefully the heat wave will be over soon.

You can practically watch it grow now. Fertilizer is not necessary at this stage, as far as I know, but I got "Bio Hesi Grow" as a gift from the last hemp fair (a new fertilizer) and used 5ml of it (to 1L). I wonder if that's why the plant exploded? Either way, I'm happy. 😀

It's highly enjoyable to watch the little lady grow. The plant mainly grew horizontally and produced a great number of small leaves in its nodes. I'm sure this is not unusual, but still highly impressive to me when I open the closet every morning. I wanted to try my hand at low stress training and since the stem was getting stronger and stronger, I decided day 14 is the day I was going to start with it. I used soft plant wire from the dollar store (or rather Euro store, in my case). It's a pity the perfect symmetry is destroyed, though. Hopefully this will proof to be a good decision in the end. The lady started to smell deliciously now, even though not a single flower is in sight of course. It's a shame I have to keep the carbon filter running; I would not mind to smell this fragrance! Btw, I added more text and images to the first two weeks to make this diary a little more informative and entertaining. Take a look if you want.

In the last week, fungus gnats have appeared in the tent. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon with organic soil. The plant is now so strong that the little animals can no longer harm it - but who wants to be greeted by insects in their weed? So I took remedial action, on the one hand with sticky traps, on the other hand with nematodes. After only two days, the problem was solved. I am very pleased with the development of the plant. Its trunk is as thick as my little finger and healthy-looking branches are forming everywhere. As you can see, I have continued with the low stress training, however, this has come to an end today (day 21). In the coming week I will not be able to take care of the plant personally and I will not expect the diligent waterer to bend branches for me. Nevertheless, I think that even the current state already is an improvement from doing no lst. Since it is my first grow, I hesitated to try topping. Maybe I will do this with my next plant - lst looks easier afterwards, when you don't have to bend the main branch. I removed only two large fan leaves, the others I simply tucked away so they don't steal any light from the nodes / future buds.

The plant really grew in hight and just in time for week 5 first pistils started showing up. Yay! Also, the smell started to get more distinctive. There are so many nodes with the beginnings of flowers that I will have to trim some of them on the bottom. I'll do that as soon as I am back and upload some more pictures.

I switched to the bloom variant of the bio Hesi nutrition, but still only use 5ml per week. I mostly try to stick to nursing advise from Fast Buds, since I figure they have the most experience with the plants they breed. They wrote that extra nutrition won't be necessary when using organic soil, that's why I keep it to a minimum. (And to be completely honest here, I only have it because the Hesi people gave it away for free at the last cannabis fair in my city.) As a reminder to myself, those nutrients already lower the ph; I don't have to lower the ph of the water beforehand as I usually do. So far, this seems to work out marvelously. Every day the buds get a little bigger. The plant stretched out nicely and its stem now looks like a massive asparagus. :-D At the end of week 5, the stems of some of the fan leaves turned purple and I asked about it in the questions section. Thanks to @GrowingGrannie and @Anonymous2022, I was not too stressed about this development. The very next day, the purple color had already faded a bit and the leaves looked as healthy as before. I think the stress that turned the leave stems purple might have come from some late LST and defoliation, because it was more prominent in the twigs that fell victim to my try at LST.

Again, I was a little worried last week since some leaves at the bottom of the plant turned yellow-ish. I was told this is normal and so I just continued. However, in the evening the upper leaves begun to droop, too. I don't know if it's coincidence, but I think the bad things always happened after using nutrition. So I gave the plant plain water (or, how many here like to write, plane water ✈️) to see what happens. So far, things are going steady. I will try again with some nutrition in a few days.

The smell is still faint, but nice. The buds are approaching a size where it starts being fun to make macro pictures. I realized while browsing different diaries that the look of a bud or plant can be deceiving if there is no scale or everyday object next to it. That makes it difficult to use them as reference for my own grow. So I suggest: Lego for scale. I wonder why the plant itself stayed relatively small, though. I've seen very different sizes of this strain in other grower's diaries. Mine seems to be of the smaller range (54cm). However, all trichomes are clear and the pistils completely white, and I guess we still have about 3 weeks left till harvest. Maybe it will still grow a bit.

I somehow got 100 likes already on this site and am no longer a "newbie". I certainly still feel like one! Thank you all, though. 😊 Last week I worried again, because on day 54 I noticed some upper leaves tuned yellow / were dying. The leaves in the middle seemed fine. Again, it was very reassuring to hear your opinions on the matter. It turned out to be the normal progress. Thank your for easing my worries. Exactly on day 50 the first pistils changed color. I was getting a little nervous because soon I will be away for a week and my friend will be watering the plant. I'm afraid now I have to ask him to take a look at the trichomes under my microscope, too. But the changes proved to be slow, so I hope the plant waits for me and I can cut it myself. Trichomes are still mostly clear at this point.

My friend did very well with tending to the plant and even sent me some nice pictures, as you can see in this week's post. Since trichomes turned amber rapidly, he had the honor of chopping my first plant. He will be rewarded handsomely for his help once curing time is over. This strain is just finished and I already have about 20 other strains or ideas about what and how I want to grow. And much too little space! It's a pity. But for now, I am just looking forward to come home and see for myself how this one developed. I will add an update after the buds have dried.

I never figured out why the stems continued to turn purple, but in some sample pictures on the home page of Fast Buds I saw Wedding Cheesecake plants with purple stems, too, so it might be normal. I cut the soil in half to see how the roots developed, and I was fascinated to notice the whole thing was rather like cutting a cake. Millions of fine roots everywhere, so that none of the soil fell down when I put it out of its pot. I've never seen that before and I'm sure it's because of the air pot's unique form. I would like to use these pots for all my plants now. It's a pity they take quite a bit of space and don't fit on my windowsill. I learned a lot with this first plant and am eager to broaden my knowledge with the next - probably cherry cola auto, also from Fast Buds. Thank you for reading and see you there!