Devil Cream Auto DWC

This darling hasn't gotten her roots in the water yet but they ARE out of the netpot ... so I've prepared the water for her with a small dose of nutes. Have chosen to grow this one with Dakine 420 - I used it for my Wedding Cheesecake grow which was in soil but the buds on that grow were as hard as diamonds and I think it may have been because of the nutes. We'll see! WARNING: Don't pay attention to the amount of nutes I'm listing here... Dakine 420 is a dry nute line and measurements are in grams which GD doesn't allow for, sadly. Ready and waiting for the roots are 1.75g of Base and 1.75g of Grow in 3.5 gallons of water pH'd to 5.9... this gives an EC of 0.5 which MIGHT be a little too much for her but is easily remedied if it is. I've also decided this lady will be grown all by herself in my closet - I want to try to do some different work with the lower bud sites and just need her to be all by herself. Allons y! Давай! 01/10 - Roots (well, at least one root) hit the water.... I'm hoping the EC is not too much for this little one but if it is, I'll drop it down for her. Can't wait to start seeing her growth! 01/11 - She's looking good - good growth starting to happen and she's not reacting badly to the EC level. A bit on the dry side in the closet so I've just put another 5 gallon bucket of water in there, open top, with an air pump going - that's done the trick.. humidity is up in the 50s which is perfect. 01/12 - She's starting to drink quite a bit for her age which is interesting... and she's tolerating the EC nicely! I have high hopes for this little one!

01/14 - I'm going to keep this little one at the same EC for this week... Don't feel like I want to cram nutes down her throat even though she tolerated the high EC she started out with... with autos, less is always more and I don't want to unduly stress her out - just let her be and watch her growth! She's drinking a little bit, about 1L a day and her roots are looking magnificent - nice and white and spreading out. Very happy with her!! (Just a reminder, the measurements for the nutes is a little whacky - I'm guessing here because I measure my nutes by the gram and GD doesn't have any option for indicating that!) 01/15 - Good growth between yesterday and today. I've finally rigged up a humidifier for her and that will help, I'm sure... It's been awfully dry here for about a week now.. 01/16 - She's grown a lot overnight! Seeing this, I'm going to increase her EC a bit today - maybe by 0.1 ... it's time anyway.... 01/16 - Increased her EC yesterday to bring it up 0.2 ... it's now sitting happily at 0.7 and the only thing she's showing is a bit of a calcium deficiency so that's going into her bucket this morning.. Other than that, she's as happy as a clam, pH staying rock steady at 6.0. Rather excited to grow another purple strain! 01/18 - Boy is she a happy camper today! Lots of growth ... don't know yet if the Calimagic was really needed or not but it's not going to hurt her. Her leaves do show a bit of "early-leaf-wonkiness" which I just get a kick out of and that I know will disappear in time... but where I had seen some signs of early calcium deficiency will take a few days to figure out if that's been remedied.... Her pH is so stable as to be quite boring (HA!) and her EC has now increased to 0.8 with the calmag... and she's not complaining which is a good thing! Strangely, for her to accept an EC of 0.8 at her age is a bit incredible... My two other plants (the OGKush and Gorilla Glue in my "Next Up!" diary), which are both 3 weeks older, didn't react well to my attempt to raise THEIR EC to 0.8 last night... had to take them back down to 0.7 - so this little lady is showing stupendous strength... OR she likes HER nutes better than they like THEIR nutes... that's a puzzlement and I may have to do an experiment... I may have to get another 3 seeds (one of each although I have another Devil Cream) and switch nutes around... OG and GG would get the Dakine 420 while I'd put Devil Cream on the GH Flora series.. Oh... that definitely sounds like something I should do.. that would tell me which nute line was better to use! OK!!! That's in my future!! Super duper... 01/19 - She's just doing fabulously - continues to take the unprecedented EC with no back talk! I have no clue as to why but am thinking it just might be the composition of the nute line, Dakine 420, that I'm using... nothing else really explains it - she's an auto and autos don't like high ECs... But I'm not going to argue with this at all! 01/20 - This girl is going to be absolutely wonderful... she's starting to show me she's about to need more nutes so planning on doing this tomorrow to celebrate her 3rd week birthday... how does one make a birthday cake out of weed nutes? LOL! Plan to see if she can tolerate an EC of 1.0 - I'll bet she can!

01/21 - Happy 3rd Birthday! Gave her a bucket and nute change today... ramped up the nutes to 5.25g of Dakine 420 Base and 5.25g of Dakine 420 Grow. Added in some H2O2 to help clean out the roots of the sediment left over from the old bucket... top watering seedlings brings down a lot of sediment into the bucket so this is the time I really want to give a complete change of "scenery" to the plant. Over the past week, I had increased her EC bringing it up to 0.8 which, really, is unheard of for an autoflower this age - but she kept telling me she was VERY hungry... I give credit to this nute line, I think it's the best one I've ever tried so far. I switched to it in mid-grow of a soil grow I did and the results were spectacular... Now that I've figured out how to adjust for a DWC grow with them, I'm really excited... and to see the plant tolerating such a high EC ... well... I've got great hopes! 01/22 - well, the little lady did NOT like the extra nutes.. at all!!! And the pH had swung WAY up this morning ... things were so bad, I'm not going to publish the pic I took of her this morning until she's recovered so as not to stress you out! I'm not worried about her - but you probably would be if you could see what she looked like... poor thing... adjustments have been made and she's already starting to come back ... will update again tomorrow, of COURSE! :-D 01/23 - She's not pulling out of it as fast as I'd hoped but then she REALLY took a hit. Poor little thing! She IS improving and she WILL be ok... I'm just going to have to stop thinking of her as SuperWoman... I doubt these leaves will ever look very good again - thankfully, they're early leaves and they'll soon be eclipsed by new, bigger and better leaves and at some point, I can just lop them off! :-D Eating some humble pie right about now! I rolled her EC back to 0.7 but she's acting just a little bit hungry this morning so I think I'll try to bring it back up to 0.8 - that's going to be an interesting exercise given that these nutes are dry and pretty potent .. going to try to put .75g of the base and the grow in to see how that does... we'll see... sigh.... Update: I gave a lot of thought about what I should do here and ended up doing a bucket change. Along with her general dismal appearance, she was showing signs of a nitrogen toxicity so what I decided was that I needed to change up the composition of what the EC was while I was adjusting it - and that's impossible to do with a bucket that's already got stuff in it. What she's got in her bucket now is 1.5tsp of RapidStart (hoping to boost those roots to help her out), 5g of the Base (NPK 3-13-26), 2g of the Grow (NPK 15-0-15) which may STILL be too much but... and 1/2 tsp of Calimagic. EC now sits at 0.8 which is what I wanted and the pH is 6.0. Just as I was finishing up the bucket change, her lights went out so this is good... I'll check on her again when she "wakes up" ... I won't SEE any change, I'm sure, but I'm hoping the EC and pH don't change... going to do a LOT of checking on her today! She's up from her nap and things are actually looking very good! I think I made exactly the right decision as far as her nutes are concerned.... Her leaves still look a bit like leather (very strange) and are still a little dryish but they're picking themselves up and going for the light which they weren't doing before and the clawing is starting to go away. Now feeling pretty confident in my abilities to diagnose her and make the right decisions... I'll check again just before I go to bed... and will be very anxious to take a look at her in the morning. 01/25 - She's still struggling a little bit but the growth has been at least SORT of satisfactory... I decided this morning that she still is having a tough time with as many nutes in her bucket but instead of a bucket change, simply replaced 1/2 gallon of her bucket with plain water - this brought her EC down to 0.7 - and I adjusted her pH which had been slowly rising AGAIN... so now it's sitting at 6.1. I also trimmed off the lowest leaves which were just sad to look at and were being swallowed up by the pebbles I'm adding to the netpot - so they were of no use anyway.

01/28 - Well, it's been a rough week but she's coming around and certainly gaining in height although I'm not recording that particular statistic (because I don't much care!)... and I haven't been paying much attention to this diary since I've got a lot of stuff going on but I HAVE been paying attention to her! She's showing signs now of pre-flower but she's pretty small and I have no idea what is going to happen with her.... Having the most difficulty figuring these nutes out but I'm determined to see her through on them because I want to LEARN about them... so I'm kind of sacrificing her to the research gods.... I've got another couple of seeds of this strain and if I like the end product (because I WILL get a harvest from her), I will grow her again with other nutes to see how she performs with them... I'll try to do better at keeping up this diary.... as for the nutes she's got now, in her bucket she's got 2g Grow, 4g Base, 4g Bloom, 1tsp Calimagic, 1tsp RapidStart and 2tsp Terpinator.... 01/29 - she's not drinking much - EC going up, pH going up - going to increase the nutes in her today as both the EC & PH going up indicates she's leaching nutes into the bucket... so adding 1.25g each of Grow, Base and Bloom... we'll see what that does.... I've been comparing my grow to others who have grown this same strain from @SweetSeeds and I'm not worried about her any more... I think she's doing just fine! I've had to lop off some early leaves so she LOOKS smaller than others - but she's really not... and it's also interesting that all the other diaries had her in flower by Week 5 which this lady will match... and then the stretch will begin. Going to do some LST on her today, not much but some.... I'd been holding off trying to get her through all my trials and errors with the nutes but now it's becoming more important... so here I go! 01/30 - My addition of nutes yesterday did the trick! She's drinking nicely and both the EC and pH are nice and stable... She's responding well to the LST and I've done a little bit more this morning... I think things will be stable for a while (hells bells, if they can be stable for even 2 days, I'm going to rejoice!) 01/31 - Well what a day. I couldn't bring myself to update here this morning as everything was looking VERY grim... honestly, this girl is going to be the death of me! In a nutshell, I thought I had the EC and pH wonderfully stable - had been for days, plant looked wonderful when I went to bed last night, looked wonderful when I got up this morning... 4 hours later, it looked like something the cat dragged in from the gutter.... EC and pH were still stable but the plant was a goddamned mess... Know what I'd done wrong? I left the door of the closet open (which I normally do anyway because the cat likes to sit there by the plant and I don't worry about "light loss")... but it's been exceedingly DRY here for a while and it's gotten exceedingly COLD outside (the plant sits on an uninsulated wooden floor above an uninsulated dirt floor basement)... Enter my crash course in VPD thanks to the wonderful advice and observations and questions from my friend @Hashy. In short, the poor thing needed more humidity... Within a few hours of additional humidity (thanks to a couple of soaking wet towels in addition to the humidifier that's ALWAYS on in there, she was back up and smiling at me... I still don't know much about it, tbh, but I know there's a chart to follow for best practices in coordinating temps and humidity and that it really DOES seem to work! If you're interested, you can find it here: https://www.paramountseedfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/vpd-chart.pdf This is a different one from what @Hashy gave me in that it has both Celcius and Fahrenheit temps - much easier for we stupido's in the US - but the same information. Normally, I grow in a tent that's in my bedroom so temps and humidity stay relatively stable.... but this closet is a completely different environment and being aware of VPD is now of vital importance to me and has been a valuable lesson this dear little plant is very happy I have had to learn! (That being said, I STILL think she's got too much nitrogen in her bucket and may change it out tomorrow... bloody hell!) 02/02 - This girl is a pretty happy camper - but I hate saying that because it seems like every time I say that, I jinx it.... But she DOES seem happy... EC and pH are stable, her leaves are upbeat, her buds are growing... I still think she's going to be kind of small due to my trying to get a handle on these nutes - but I think I've finally figured them out and I've got the VPD business SORT of under my belt (although, with no equipment, it's all having to be done manually - increase/decrease heat/humidity) ... I'm still awfully please with everything.... sigh!

02/04 - It's been a bit chilly around here... got up this morning and it had warmed up to -20F - thankfully, I don't have to contend with wind chills inside 'cause they are MUCH worse!) I had had to enlist the help of a small heater (whose electricity usage is outrageous but...) to get through the night, grabbed a small clothes rack and hung wet towels in behind this little one to help with the humidity. You see, this closet has an uninsulated wood floor and sits over an uninsulated dirt-floor basement that is, for all intents and purposes, open to the elements... normally, this is a good thing - especially when growing a purple strain since they like cooler temps and, growing DWC, the bucket also stays pretty cool (water temp is 59F) ... but this bit of chill that we're getting is kind of severe and I wasn't wanting the temps in the closet to get into the 40s with 10% humidity which probably would have happened without the heater and extra wet towels... And she was absolutely happy as a clam when I peeked in at her when I got up. She's telling me this morning that she's getting hungry... her EC went down while the pH stayed rock solid and she's drinking - not much but still drinking - so I will give her some additional nutes. Her bucket at the moment is comprised of: 4.7g each of Base and Bloom, 1tsp Calimagic, 1 tsp Rapid Start and 3tsp Terpinator. Going to add 0.75g each of Base and Bloom and 1.25g Shock & Awe (PK booster) - that ought to bring her EC back up to where I want it... AND give her the PK that she's needing more of right now.. I've given up on the LST - I just want to get her to a harvest, as meager as that might be with all she's had to contend with from me having to "learn" new nutes.... 02/05 - no sooner had I said "given up on LST," I went in and LST'd her! LOL! And she's responding magnificently... Her EC could be a little higher but right now I'm not going to fiddle around with success... she's looking lovely! 02/06 - The prospect of my having to keep a VERY expensive space heater going in order for her to be comfortable drove me to set up my old tent in my living room... Moved her into it yesterday along with the two seeds that are germinating... and she was MOST appreciative. I guess, until I can do some fairly decent renovations on that closet, it's not going to be a suitable grow site for winter grows here in Maine... ah well... 02/08 - She's extraordinarily happy in her tent with the little babies surrounding her (actually, there is only ONE baby right now but hope springs eternal for the other seed!). I doubt I'll take her back to the closet until at least March ... it continues to be fairly cold and she is responding well to the warmth in the tent... but I WILL take her back if for nothing else than to give the seedlings their own chance to shine AND to encourage her purples to come out and entrance me...

02/12 - I find trying to indicate the nutes here really rather impossible. I did a bucket change on this lady yesterday and mixed in about 4.6g of Base, 5.75g of Bloom and about 2.3g of Shock&Awe ... but it's impossible to figure out how to indicate that in terms of tsp or ml .... so pfffffffftttttttt.... I did add 1tsp of Calimagic and 6 tsp of Terpinator... and the EC sits at 1.1 which I'm happy with (as is she!). Still not getting colors from her but I'm thinking that's because it's just a little too warm and the difference in temps between day and night aren't drastic enough - Don't think I can actually do anything about that ... I might change up her day/night schedule so it's more in line with MINE which would mean the nighttime temps would drop more... but then there's the damned electric bill (our electric company has raised rates by 30%!) and currently I have her in her "night" when rates are most expensive. Ach! I'll think about that another time... not entirely sure colors are that important to me... LOL! 02/13 - No changes need to be made today - EC and pH are rock steady and she's looking very good. 02/14 - She just keeps chugging along, very happy!

The lady is doing well - but I'm disappointed in the lack of color... can't do much about the temps so she will be what she will be....

03/02 - Changed her nutes this past week... the Dakine420 simply had too much nitrogen in ALL of their products and she had turned a terribly DARK green with lots of orange spotting... got rid of it right quick! Put her on a flowering feed with General Hydroponics and she seems to be getting better. Still fattening up and has a ways to go yet as she's only 8.5 weeks from seed.

Tough grow and I doubt I'll grow it again but she was interesting. I don't think I'll grow this again - I'd only do that if my friends tell me it was the BEST weed they've ever tried...