Grape Ape

My outdoor crop is still a week or two from harvest but everything indoors has been harvested and is now curing... which means it's time to start over for a quick crop before winter. I picked up a couple pairs of clones at my local dispensary and away we go. I've been growing mostly sativa dominant stuff so I needed to increase my stock of indica - and some Grape Ape is here to fill the bill. ---------- I've never gotten clones in a sealed package before with a date but it seems to work out thusly from an age standpoint... the date on the sealed container was 7/25... the dispensary (Magnolia Wellness) lists a "drop date" of 8/17... and I purchased and transplanted these this afternoon 8/28. So I'm guessing that the clone was 3 weeks+ 2 days old when it was delivered in a sealed container... and it's been growing in that container for 11 days before I transplanted it...so tomorrow the clone will technically be 5 weeks old I assume after cutting. ---------- The only difference in plan between this crop and previous indoor grows is the skipping of the stage of using a 1 quart container, which is what I typically transplant clones into in order to better control the amount of moisture... and then I move them into either 3 gallon or 5 gallon containers depending on indoor or outdoor... so I'm skipping a step and the stress the plant sees with that extra transplant. I usually veg a bit longer than 4 weeks also but the plan is a straight 4 weeks here. No nutrients for at least a week. Lights at 40" for the first 24 hours to acclimate to the LEDs.

The plants are getting a good start into veg mode. These girls can't drink all the fluid in their containers that fast so I'm going to try some foliar feeding later this week. They only received ph balanced water for the first week. The heights measure in at 6.5" and 5". The shorter plant is actually a bit bushier. I'll probably top both plants sometime this week after some observation. -------- I topped both plants on Sunday September 9 using a technique I haven't specifically tried before. But it's easy... all you have to do is miss. 😁

Getting off to a good start vegging. Topped (Fimed actually) last week. Some of the older foliage looks a little squirelly, but the new growth is clearly tuned to the LEDS and looks lush. Very bushy plants all on their own. Probably won't top them again. Plant heights are 6.0" and 7.5".

These babies sure are bushy. The new growth at the top of each plant looks a little funky, almost deformed, but it grows out nicely. Can't even quite tell where I cut these little beasties without closer inspection which I did't have time for this morning in the fog. They seem to have an affinity for my LED lights. They look happy. 😁 One more week on veg lights and then we'll let them start to flower. Both plants are close to the same height, 10 and 10.5 inches.

These girls are quite bushy. Switched the lights over to a 12 hour cycle today (9/25). Heights of the girls are 14" and 13". These girls were FIMed once and seem to show some weird deformation at the tips of new growth, though it doesn't seem to last. I was giving all the tent girls some foliar feeding with a spray bottle and I'm curious if this might have led to the small spots I see.

Well it turns out those little white spots were a leading sign of spider mites. I loaned my loupe to my buddy and don't like trying to use my hand microscope directly on a plant so I did some minor surgery for inspection... and there's Nothing creepier than seeing little mites scurrying around on your babies. Pisses you off too. 😡 So we made a trip to the local hydro store and my friends there recommended Plant Therapy. https://www.lostcoastplanttherapy.com/ This stuff looks Way safer than some of the alternative products. In fact, it turns out Azamax from General Hydroponics (which this same local hydro store had sold me a year or so back) can no longer legally be sold so they removed the product. Exactly why Azamax is a problem he didn't say... but it is referenced heavily in a positive way in what is now my growers reference Bible which I've provided a picture of here somewhere. "Marijuana Horticulture Fundamentals" is so far beyond anything I had before it's humorous. I grew a couple 4 plant crops in my backyard about a decade ago and all I had was stuff written in the 1960s and 70s. I look back on those now and laugh - hippy sh*t. Now the serious children have taken over, and around here it's legal now. So screw you Mr. Sessions.

Wow... woke up after getting my butt kicked in a golf tournament yesterday to catch up on my diaries and the community love overfloweth while I was sleeping. I'm tickled, bigly. That and a little Durban Poison has got me off to a rocket start. On the plant health side, it looks like we're past the immediate pest crisis. New growth shows no signs of any spots and the plant looks overall healthier. Instructions were to apply Plant Therapy during the dark cycle 3 times 48 hours apart to kill different generations of bug as eggs hatch. This stuff is safe enough to be used well into the flowering stage, but these plants still have more than a month to go. Plant heights were 19.5 and 20" this week. I'm a day off (late) in diary timing of my current two diaries because of golf and rain interfering. We went thru a period of only water in the transition from veg to flower and now we're back on flowering nutes... but I traditionally only use about 50% of recommended levels out of habit.

Back on schedule for the start of the 4th week of flowering. Flowers starting to grow. Gave everybody a dose of Plant Therapy as a preventative measure on Monday October 22 during dark cycle.

Flowers are starting to look good and just starting to put on a little weight. Both this and my Sunset Sherbets seem to look a lot like the Cookies I grew awhile back. Lots of space with nothing going on between the nodes.

Only a couple more weeks to go on these babies. I think I'll be able to get by without staking anything here but we'll see how much weight the buds put on these last days. I've brought a space heater out to my grow shed to keep the temps up above 68 or so. Nightime temps are dipping into the high 40's outside now and my grow lights were the only thing keeping my girls warm (until now).

Getting close to the finish line here. Not much amber showing in the trichomes, but the buds are starting to look nice. Probably about a week or so behind the neighboring Sunset Sherbet which shows more amber now. I'll probably flush everybody sometime in the next week and then just monitor colors. The Grape Ape's don't need any staking as they seem to know which way is up.

Flushed the Grape Ape's on Monday morning November 12, only a couple days behind the tent mates. I really haven't done much in terms of pruning these girls, but at least they know which way is up. No real need of stakes to support the buds on these girls. It's time to start cutting back on water and getting ready to harvest.

I can tell it's time to harvest these girls because they seemed to have stopped drinking... and that's a sign. I gave them their last dose of water yesterday and I plan to harvest them in the next 48 hours or so. Probably Thanksgiving morning... celebrate some abundance.

Happy (American) Thanksgiving everybody! We're working on changing the management around here to get rid of the buffoon in charge. It's probably gonna be a rocky next few weeks when the indictments start flowing out... so fasten your seat belts and wish us some luck if you live outside the USA. ====================================== November 22 > It really turned out to be a coincidence harvesting my last plants for the year on Thanksgiving. I could wait until early afternoon and temperatures to warm up into the low 60s to cut the girls down and wash them as they were just waiting in the dark after an extended final dark cycle. Turned out to be a perfect task to slip in between other cooking chores. Yakking with my siblings on the phone while chopping up and washing the plant and catching up with the family. All done after a couple hours. It will probably take 2 to 3 days to dry and then I can trim them for curing (and update the diary with a dry weight). ====================================== November 27 >> All done for the year. Because I had nothing else growing in the shed and I could turn off the grow lights (albeit LED), and I could keep the temperature in the shed under 70 degrees F and dry this batch of herb slower than others. All the trimming was done on the 4th and 5th day after harvest/wash. Initial dry level of the buds appears to be about 55% so we'll be using Boveda packs as usual for curing for a couple months... though I'm sure to be nipping into this batch by Xmas. Weights come in as 53.5 grams of buds, 33 grams of trim, and 0.8 grams of kief. This was for two plants. In retrospect I clearly could have used 5 gallon containers here instead of 3 gallon. My fear of plants growing too tall inside my tent is probably based on growing sativa's. In this case I had another 12" I could have raised my lights.