1st Photosensitive with Northern Lights

Days 57-63. Thursday 09th Feb. to Wednesday 15th Feb., 2023(wk. 2 of bloom) This is actually the second week of the flowering cycle. I purchased these seeds as Autos & was waiting patiently for pistils to appear with an 18/6 hour light cycle. No chance! I thought that these may not be Autos when at about week 7 there were no pistils at all. I changed the light cycle to 12/12 & now I am starting too see the flowers & pistils. I ordered some Bloom nutrients to use because I was mixing my own with powders & thought this may have been the cause of the plant not starting to flower. This was wrong as it was the fact that they weren't Autos. Anyway I am using the commercial nutes anyway as it is simple. I use a DIY CO2 system with the simple guages, rubber tubes & 2 litre coke bottles. I generally try to get the bubbles coming out at 1 per second but have no clue as to what this reads as PPM so I have left that part blank. I am using 2ml per litre of water with my nutrients as this was what worked for me with Autoflowers. I might try with 4ml per litre next week as this is recommended by the nutrient manufacturer. I have 2 x 15 litre growing pots which are connected via their taps at the bottom. The plant is in one & I use the other to change the water & add nutrients etc. This is why I specify a pot size of 30 litres which is effectively the volume used. My first diary was started in June 2020 which means I have been at this for at least 3 years now. I am a painfully slow learner...getting there.

Days 64-70. Thursday 16th Feb. to Wednesday 22nd Feb., 2023(wk. 3 of bloom) Increased nutrients to 4ml per litre as I was used to doing Autoflowers which seem more delicate. 4ml is the recommended amount for non-auto strains(or photo-sensitive strains). I halved this when using Autoflowers. Watched a youtube video about Supercropping & was very impressed. I applied these techniques to my plant in the form of grasping the stems firmly with one hand, twisting it with the other until an audible snap is heard(is this the mainlining technique?). Also snapped the taller branches so that they bent sideways, see pic. number 7 - High Stress Training. These techniques seemed to be quite violent & damaging to the plant & I performed this fairly late(it is best to do during veg. cycle) but it still seems to have recovered & worked. Plant seemed too hot when I measured the temp of the main buds & leaves across the canopy. Changed light bulb from the 315w CMHto 250w HPS as the canopy leaves were getting to 34 degrees Celsius even after I had bent them so they were further from the light. Now they usually remain at or under 30 degrees Celsius. I ran it using the 315w digital ballast at 80% but was informed by guy on a hydroponic FAQ forum that I may shorten the lamp life or the ballast life. I then changed it back to the 250w magnetic ballast which was designed for the 250w HPS lamp I used. I can see very faint appearance of trichomes if you look closely around some of the flowers or zoom in close on one of the images. Hopefully they will start to appear prominently now. I noticed the plant begin to stretch a lot more than it had been. I think this is due to the HPS not having light in the Blue spectrum as much as the CMH. It was still stretching on Wednesday 22nd February or day 77. Decided to stop providing CO2 with my dodgy coke bottle setup as I watched a few videos & realised that unless I can monitor the amount of CO2 I am adding then there is no point as I could overdo it & ruin the plant. Will find a use for the 5 kilograms of Citric Acid I bought. Coffee machine descaler is one use👍.

Week 11, Days 71-77. Thursday 23rd Feb. to Wednesday 01st Mar. 2023(Week 4 of bloom) Plant seems to be finished stretching by Tuesday the 28th Feb or day 76. A lot more trichomes are appearing on the smaller leaves & flowers as can be seen in some of the pics. It gets too hot at times & I will put on the room air-con which seems to help getting the temperature of the canopy below 30 degrees Celsius. I may need a fan to blow constantly on the upper part or flowering part of the plant. Installed a mini fan to blow on the top of the plant as I can’t zip it shut anymore as the top foliage starts to burn. Hopefully this will give me the 1-2 degrees I need to keep it coasting along. See pic. Bought a green LED light bulb from Bunnings(local hardware) for $5.98 & have put it in my grow room so I can use it to check on the plant while it is getting its 12 hour nap. Apparently that is why plants appear so green as they reflect green light & don’t use it for anything. I was wrapped. This same $5.98 bulb on eBay costs $31….some people are just dicks I reckon. See pic. Started 14th Dec. 2022

Week 12, Days 78-84. Thursday 02nd Mar. to Wednesday 08th Mar. 2023(Week 5 of bloom) Plant seems to have reached its maximum height & will decrease a bit due to the weight of all that amazing bud. The HPS lamp is about 8” away from the canopy & a check of the temperature shows that it is between 25 & 32 degrees Celsius which is about as hot as it can be for a good yield. I try to maintain the temperature of the canopy leaf & flower at no more than 30 degrees Celsius. At times I have had to put on the A/C even if I don’t need it. It seems to help when the environment outside the tent is cool also.

Week 13, Days 85-91. Thursday 09th Mar. to Wednesday 15th Mar. 2023(Week 6 of bloom) The trichomes are really starting to show. I viewed them with a small hand held microscope & there are no amber trichomes as yet. Most of them seem milky. This may be the last week before harvest. Some white pistils can still be found though they seem rare & the trichomes seem close too.(see pic). Note: Whenever I top up the water level during week between changes I use half strength nutrients or 2ml per litre of Growlush Bloom A + B concentrate instead of the 4ml per litre for the water change. Found my 50-1000X Zoom USB Endoscope so I experimented to get a good idea of where the trichomes were at. I think a tripod might be useful if only a small one as it is super sensitive to movement & hard to get clear pics. See pics above. The trichomes seem immature still as there are no amber ones yet & they still seem a bit clear. (Started Wed. Dec. 14 2022 - Day 01)

Week 14- Thursday 16th Mar. to Wednesday 22nd Mar. 2023, days 92-98 overall. (wk 7 or days 43-49 of bloom cycle) Plant started to lean heavily with the weight of the flowers & it seemed that many more trichomes appeared. Still no amber trichomes but they seem mostly milky so I assume it will change soon. Seems to be drinking less also. Got the USB zoom microscope working with my android phone. The main issue is stability & subsequent clarity of the image. This is due to the extreme zooming or the macro capabilities of the scope. I noticed there was a ‘clip-on’ lens you can get for mobile phone cameras. The elns simply is clipped onto your mobile so that your mobile camera is forced to shoot a picture through this lens. This is great as it gives you the added functionality & quality that you can get with good android or apple phones now, you are simply using a new lens on a phone you are probably familiar with. I plan on getting one of these. I think plant is very close to harvest. I personally would have thought it was ready. The only thing stopping me is the fact that not one trichome has turned amber yet & I am planning to harvest at 10% amber trichomes. I also learnt in my research at youtube uni. that the longer stems on the trichomes are preferrable which makes sense as I would expect the longer stemmed ones to have larger balls on their heads. Also I found that there are several different types of trichomes. Some don't get the cloudy ball but end up in the shape of a sharks tooth(pointy end). See pic. 11. 😁All happy at this stage....nothing to do but wait & watch those buds fatten. Seed planted on the 14th December, 2022(Day 0).

The great thing about doing this plant is that I planted it expecting it to be an Auto but after about 6 or 7 weeks when it didn't seem to be starting to flower I tried changing the light cycle to 12/12 which I had not attempted in the 3 years or so that I have grown. It seemed to fix things as it began to bloom soon after. The photosensitive strains seem so much more robust. I found the auto strains to be so sensitive & fragile. I think I will be using photoperiod or photo-sensitive strains from now on. The yield seems excellent too, it just takes longer.