Cookies Gelato by RQS - Grow N' Smoke S9

This is the first week since germination. I consider this more of a Seedling stage rather than Vegetative. These ladies are still young and need to get rooted good before real growth starts. By next week though we should see some nice results. Everything looks good so far. Plant 4's leaves looked a little strange, different from the others. Upon researching this, it just happens for no reason sometimes. That's kind of a neat mutation. Of course I could be wrong and it could be a nutrient issue. I made some changes just in case. The first leaves were a little discolored maybe and slightly twisted. I think this may be due to me feeding too soon and supplying too much calmag? So I responded by lowering the feed from a 1/4tsp per gallon to half of that, an 1/8tsp per gallon. That's for the micro, grow, and bloom. For the Calmag I lowered that from 1/2tsp per gallon to 1/4tsp per gallon. Because I am using tap water, there is already some nutrients present such as calcium and magnesium, it tends to come out around 250ppm. Sometimes I can supplement too much then and apparently I need a new tds pen. Thanks for checking out the second week of Grow N' Smoke Season 9 - Cookies Gelato by RQS

Check out my grow series, From Seed To Smoke, on YouTube. https://youtu.be/THYTLQyGPVQ What an amazing week! These ladies have been growing tremendously! It's only 3 weeks today from when the seed packs were opened. Pretty incredible if you ask me. If you're curious, I kept the nutes at about 1/8 to 1/4 strength until transplant. That's when I upped nutes according to my chart.

I let the ladies recover from the transplant for about a week. Just kept them watered and kept it easy until it was time for a top and some LST. I have a schedule that I try to follow if everything goes smoothly and so far we are right on time. Stay tuned for next week!

This week was pretty crazy. The power went out for more than 24 hours and the ladies had to spend some time outside. Surprisingly they handled it very well. With the environment being vastly different I was really concerned. The temperatures outside were pretty low around 55°F and even lower at night in the upper 30s, also the light timing is different and it rained cold... What's worse is I let the ladies sit in their tent in darkness before hand for a few hours because I waited until the power came back and then it was night time. So essentially the ladies spent quite a bit of time in darkness. I don't think it was enough to initiate flowering but it is sure to cause some stress. Who knows, maybe it'll be a good thing. Not for one plant though, Plant 3's top split where I had the wire tie. Being so cold and the tie being too tight it made it extremely fragile. So we have a complete separation of the top. I reacted quickly and used super glue tape to create a sort of tight wrap. I braced it as best I could and will have to wait and see if it reconnects. If not then the worse case is it may act as just another topping but that is a lot of stress for one plant. I will have to pay extra attention looking out for pests. Outside exposure can always bring risk of pests. My environment is more clean and protected, outside is not. I do not like to use pesticides of any kind if I don't have to.

Easy week just maintaining the girls. Watering them every few days. I undid the ties because they were cutting into the stalks. I will be putting a trellis net up next week for more LST using a SCROG method. About a week or so after that I'll flip into flower. Thanks for checking out my diary!

I felt like the ladies were big enough for me to put up the trellis net. Getting the net up is easy, bending branches and weaving them through is the hard part. It's really not "hard" but it takes special care and unfortunately I broke a few branches as I was spreading them out and bringing the net lower. Although I've been doing this for a few years now, I still get pretty bad anxiety while I do this. I ended up taping the branches that broke or split and a couple of them I had to leave straight instead of laying through the net so that it could properly recover. Just a few days later the ladies are looking good! They are adjusting nicely and filling out the net perfectly! Next week I will do a lower defoliation and maybe flip into 12/12 light cycle (flowering). Of course I will continue to weave the branches throughout the trellis net to create a nice even canopy. Once flowering begins these ladies will stretch so this week and maybe a little of next will be the key time to set up the canopy how I want.

This was the final week of Vegetation. This coming week will be the official first week of Flowering. I usually consider 3 days as a transition period as the ladies get used to the new light schedule and adjust. I did not do a defoliation yet as I felt like I have the ladies spaced out pretty good and weaved into the net really well. There is a lot of light penetration to the lower growth but as these ladies stretch the lower areas below the net will become useless to the plant in wasted energy. I will slowly defoliate everything below the net in the coming weeks. I'm really excited about this season, I think I'm going to have a really good outcome!

*UPDATE* 4/23/23 (Went ahead and did some weaving to fill out the net better for Scrog) 4/22/23 - I thought this week was going decent until just yesterday I noticed some yellowing on the leaf tips and some curling, especially on Plant 3 in the back left corner. Not sure what that's about because I don't think I'm feeding too high and my ph is always 5.7-5.9, I water about every other day. I lowered my nutes this week once already. So yesterday I diluted 11g of my previous mixture with 5g of just plain water. Ph to 5.86 and gave a good watering until I used all 16 gallons. I also did some cleaning up around the bottom underneath the net. It was a good time to get in there and get rid of some unnecessary stuff. A fun fact I discovered by trial is putting the smaller branches that I removed in a plastic container and then placing them in the fridge. You can then keep them in there for at least 8 weeks (in my case they lasted that long) and they will still sprout when you are ready to get them going. I simplely had put them in there and forgot about them, 8 weeks later I clipped the ends at an angle and placed them in a bottle of water. Shortly after they began to sprout roots! It was pretty cool if you ask me. Anyways, I'm going to water the plants with a 1/4 strength of my usual nutrient amount next watering and then gradually up it from there.

What a wonderful recovery from last week! I was worried but I was right about the nutrient burn. Long story short, I used less nutrients this week and the ladies are responding well. The leaves that are damaged will be like that forever so eventually I will do a defoliation. But for now they are doing well.

Little bit of a late update, phone broke… pulled dead yellowing leaves off and some others damaged leaves. Humidity has been getting on the higher side so I want to add a couple more fans and defoliate for better air flow. Slowly upping the nutrients as the plants are wanting more now. They look pretty good to me and I expect them to bud up nicely. Threw in some liquid koolbloom because I think they needed a little boost in potassium.

Super easy week, just watering the ladies when they need it. Still concerned about the humidity so I’m going to start using my dehumidifier outside of the tent. I’ll monitor the humidity each day and set my humidifier on a schedule based upon the data collected. Soon I’ll be adding in another layer of netting to help support the branches and space them out more for better airflow and a more “sea of green” look. I usually vegetate for longer but I wanted to see if I could shorten my grow times and produce about the same results. Time will tell!

Started the week off on the wrong foot… my PH Pen messed up and I watered the plants with around 5.4 ph which is way too low. I try to stay around 5.7-5.9 but unfortunately I made a mistake. The ladies are showing signs of nutrient deficiency but I followed up with a watering with the proper PH. I hope to see better results by the end of the weekend.

A few more weeks until Harvest. I’m thinking I’m gonna yield less than 2 lbs this time but that’s okay. I just started the next set of seeds, Triple G

*Edit* Did a slight defoliation to let light hit more lower buds and get some better airflow. Added 2 pics at the end afterwards. I have some pretty gnarly colors going on here lately… On Plant #2 the canopy leaves are so dark purple that they are almost black! To me this doesn’t seem like a good sign although the odd thing is that the under growth is still a nice lush green. A few weeks ago I turned on my 3rd light in the middle, this may be the main issue so I turned it back off and will just stick with the 2 bloom plus bp2500s. But I also feel like the buds are lacking at this stage which may be due to stress. Honestly this has been a pretty tough several weeks for me. At some point I burnt these ladies with too much nutes and ever since then has been a battle trying to correct it even after a flushing with a micro dose of nutrients because I never straight flush until the end. Anyways, Even before that I had broken some branches and tops that I didn’t intend to back before flowering which was okay but also requires extra time to heal/adjust and it’s added stress which I should have vegged for longer then. Good news is there is no signs of pests and we are just about a week away. The breeder data sheet suggests 8-9 weeks. I will begin looking at trichomes for the nice cloudy/amber or full on amber color and I will start flushing this week. I may let them go 10 weeks just to see if they may ripen up anymore. Sometimes an extra week can add some extra weight and some may even cut the top mature buds off so that the lower growth can get more light.

This is officially the end of the 8th week which means I’m about a week from Harvest! The Royal Queen Seeds data sheet suggests 8-9 weeks of flowering. Starting Monday and for the remainder of the week I will begin flushing these ladies with just 5.8 PH plain tap water. It may take a little more than a week but we will get there. I was worried these past few weeks about how these would turn out but the panic has wore off and I am now confident the harvest will be good.

It’s time to harvest these ladies, it’s been 9 full weeks of flowering. I decided to start with the main tops and slowly work my way down throughout the week. That should give the lower buds some time to ripen up and by next weekend they will all be hanging and drying. Thanks for checking out Season 9 of Grow N’ Smoke. I’ll post a harvest update once I’m done cutting everything down. Stay tuned and check out Grow N’ Smoke Season 10 - Triple G - from Royal Queen Seeds

I am very happy with the results of the harvest. I slowly harvested about 2 plants per day through last week. I did it like that so that I could have time to trim a few while the others continued to dry. This helps during harvest so that I’m not slammed with 2lbs that need trimmed on one certain day. I will spend this week trimming a little each day until I am done by next weekend. This was a fairly easy strain to grow even with the few complications that I had towards the end. We overcame and seen it through to the end! I will post the final dried weight when I’m done trimming everything. Thanks for the love and support!