Fanta Sea Autopot

*This grow was started along with 2 Blueberry CBD plants and a ton of garden vegetables. I wasn't able to really give it full attention until now but so far it's had a pretty standard and uneventful life* 4/1 Day 1 4/21 Transplanted to larger pot 4/22 I topped just above the 4th node for now while I debate how crazy I go with training. I did want to mainline but it’s challenging right now to focus much on it with all the other plants around. 5/2 Everything going fine. There are fewer plants around now which will make it easier to focus on it more. Also transplanted to it’s final home, the 5 gallon fabric autopot. The medium used was 50% coco and 50% perlite. I did add 1 tsp/gal of gypsum into the mix too. 5/6 Tent was cleaned out and now all that’s left is the Fanta Sea and the 2 Blueberry CBD plants. I’ll give the Fanta a few more days at least until I hook it up to the autopot system. Adjusted the lights to a decent middle ground for both since they are at different heights, something around 325 – 400 PAR. 5/7 Moved the CBD plants outside so now I can focus just on this one. Readjusted light to 430 PAR / 27.9 DLI 5/9 I topped again on both new tops and adjusted the light to 460 PAR / 29.8 DLI

5/14 Started seeing some yellow tips. I readjusted the light to 440 PAR / 28.5 DLI. 5/15 Hooked up the netting and started weaving the branches in. 5/18 Awesome growth. Been using half strength nutes (1/8 tsp Jack’s per gallon) for a few waterings now and not seeing any deficiencies. Res EC is around 1250, ph about 5.7. 5/19 Did a good round of defoliation, cleaning up the very bottom and exposing a few good sites. Still seeing some yellow tips on some new growth. I can’t wait to get my new PAR meter in the mail because my current one has to be way off. I turned the intensity down a little bit again, this time to a supposed 380 PAR / 24.6 DLI.

5/20 I am starting to see some slight yellowing on the leaves. Very faint but no more half strength nutes I think. It was good to see that I can start off at half strength if I wanted though. And it’s loving the lower light intensity, leaves are perky and happy looking. 5/21 Did some work on getting the lollipop done and tried saving a clone. We’ll see how that goes. 5/22 My new Apogee MQ-610 arrived today. Sure enough I’m getting different readings compared to my last PAR meter. Without adjusting anything I now have a reading of 440 PAR / 28.5 DLI. My old meter reads around 400 PAR so obviously I was running into issues just relying on that. Did another round of defoliation and upped the light to 475 PAR / 30.8 DLI 5/23 Potential signs of light stress at that setting, brought it down to 460 PAR / 29.81 DLI. 5/24 Continued with defoliation and even topped the 2 highest nodes. At this point I think it’s almost time to flip to flower. I’ll give a few days for recovery first.

5/26 Switched the light schedule to 12/12 5/27 Got another trellis net set up, maintaining 460 PAR / 20 DLI 5/28 Continued with defoliation

6/4 I recently switched to a new calmag, but it didn’t mix with the rest of the water properly. I cleaned out the res and went back to the old calmag for now. Doesn’t look like any harm came of it fortunately. 6/5 I’ve been waiting for buds to appear but so far after 11 days of 12/12 still nothing. I did a big round of defoliation to clean it up a bit, and the second trellis net is now being used for more canopy management. Tent is pretty maxed out now. Latest light reading is 565 PAR / 24.4 DLI 6/8 Definitely switching to bud formation finally. I took this as my last chance for major defoliation and went through the whole plant, removing anything below the first trellis net, any thin branches that won’t hold weight, or any branches that have not yet reached the second net. This is hopefully the last time I do defoliation, save a stray leaf or two in mid flower. I noticed some burnt tips on the highest leaves, so I backed down the light a touch. Latest reading is 540 PAR / 23.3 DLI.

6/10 Everything looks great. We’re on autopilot now unless anything else pops up. 6/13 Last few days have seen heavy stretch. I suppose I vegged a week too long by looking at how it is now. I’ll gain a few more inches of light height tomorrow when my new exhaust system arrives (I accidentally broke the screen on the current one, thankfully it’s still functional for now). I ended up doing more general defoliation over the past 3 days due to the stretch but will hopefully be done shortly. 6/14 I installed the new 6 inch exhaust setup from AC Infinity to replace the 4 inch Spider farmer exhaust. Absolutely massive upgrade, and by installing the fan outside of the tent I was able to raise the light an additional 4 inches or so. This may end up being important as she’s still stretching and I’m almost out of usable height. New light reading is 590 PAR / 25.5 DLI

6/17 Buds are forming fast and furious now and the stretch has stopped. I’m happy with how it all looks so defoliation is over for the duration of the grow. The smells are starting to ramp up too. Opening the tent now gives off a subtle orange and vanilla smell. Only issue is that it’s been raining off and on now for the past week and my humidity levels in the tent are a little higher than I’d like. Not the end of the world though. 6/18 Upped the light a touch. The highest reading I can get is 670 PAR / 29 DLI, but some other bud sites at the top are only getting around 600 PAR. I suppose that’s a consequence of having my bar light that close to the canopy as the areas between the bars will have less light. I will just have to keep in mind to veg a little less next time. 6/21 Fan leaves are in an aggressive praying stance. I did start to see a few leaves with small yellow spots appearing. Before just assuming it’s the light I did some additional poking around and discovered my VPD was a bit too high. I broke out the humidifier so I can more easily maintain the correct RH and so far things look perfect and are now dialed in. I’ll leave the light as is for now since we’re still technically on the low side of things. 6/22 Looking in today I saw a few problem areas with leaves stacked up on top of each other. I decided to do one more round of defoliation, focusing on any leaves that are right up on other leaves or any leaves that were egregiously pushed onto the side of the tent. By the time I was done my forearms were sticky all over. Lots of additional frost on every bud site too. Everything is going nicely.

6/24 Everything looks great, so I’ll risk a little more light. At the highest point I can get a reading of 820 PAR / 35.4 DLI. The smell from some stem rubbing is amazing, with a little bit of each parent very apparent. There’s certainly some vanilla, some cookies, and hints of orange and gas all mixed together. It really is an amazing combo and I could not be more thrilled with how it’s all going so far. 6/26 I started noticing the very beginning of pH issues on a few leaves, just a few small little rust spots and brown edges. While the pH of the res was in range at 6.0, checking the autopot I found it much too high, around 6.5. It was time to clean out the res anyways so I unhooked it and cleaned it with soap and water. First batch of water I mixed up was pH’d to 5.8, then I emptied the autopot of enough water so it called for more. Mixing it in this way brought it down to 6.2 which is acceptable, but I’ll need to keep a close eye on it to make sure it doesn’t go any higher. If I keep my res at 5.8 for awhile it should slowly come down. I’ll have to revise my pH range in the res so this doesn’t happen again. I have been shooting for 5.8 to 6.1, trying to drift upwards then back downwards. The last few days I was at 6.0 so I was at the high end of my range and was preparing to go back downwards, but clearly this did not work as intended with the autopot. I’ll make a small adjustment to 5.6 to 5.9 for now and see how that goes in the future. 6/29 Day 90 from sprout, day 35 of flower. Everything has been smooth sailing, other than the brief pH issue. Reservoir is currently at 1310 EC and 5.8 pH, while the 2 autopots currently in use are 5.9 and 6.0 respectively. I think that confirms that 5.9 is the max I should allow the res to get up to. I’ll be swinging downwards in pH for now though before I climb back up. It’s been 5 days since my last light increase and I haven’t seen anything at all that says we’ve reached a limit so I did another increase. Max reading I can get at a top bud site which happens to be directly under a light bar is 940 PAR / 40.6 DLI. Most of the rest of the plant is significantly lower than that though so I don’t think that will cause any issues, but as I get closer to 1000 at those top sites I’ll need to careful.

7/1 Day 92 from sprout, day 37 of flower. Worth mentioning I started counting day 1 of flower from the day I switched the lights to 12/12. I guess some people count days of flower differently than that, but that’s mine. Buds have been packing on the frost over the past few days and slowly getting fatter. I know I won’t be getting any massive buds just because I topped multiple times and have a good amount of lower bud sites growing but that’s perfectly fine with me. Generally it looks like I’ll be getting golf ball sized buds all around. I also noticed I had 1 top bud site that was getting a lot more light than the others. Well I happen to be able to move that bar around away from that bud site in order to better disperse the light and even out the PAR map a bit. So I slid that over which allowed me to safely stay under 1000 PAR at that top while increasing my light up to 75%. This should result in more light for the lower parts while staying essentially the same up top. 7/5 Day 96 from sprout, day 41 of flower. I gave the light a small nudge past 75% yesterday and I haven’t seen any light stress yet. I’ll keep nudging it higher until I see something, but I gotta be near the limit. Most of my top sites are sitting around 900 PAR, but I have two sites that spike up to around 1050 PAR. I do have two CO2 bags resting on top of my light but it’s impossible to know how much that helps, if at all. Growth has been great though; buds remain frosty and are slowly getting bigger still. The top half of the buds will be of respectable size, no monsters but good solid bud. I’ll still have some larf way down in the lower half though, an unfortunate consequence of the insane stretch and being unsure how much to hack off in that scenario. I debated trimming them all off now but I’m thinking at this point in flower I should just leave her alone and grow. 7/6 It’s possible I found my upper limit on light intensity. I started to see some faint yellow areas appear on some leaves and there’s an increase of dry crispy leaf tips. So at least for this grow I think I’ve established that 75% power is the max I can do. For now I’ve backed off the lights to the last hash mark before 75%, which has most tops sitting at around 750 PAR and a few others at 850 PAR for a max DLI of 36.7. I’ll probably go back up to 75% next week.

7/8 Day 99 from sprout, day 44 of flower. So I decided to get a new EC meter and compare it against my old cheap meter. The first one I got was an Apera EC meter and for the life of me I could not get that thing to read or calibrate properly. Numbers were all over the place. Returned that one and went for the Bluelab conductivity pen. Results were consistently lower with the Bluelab than with my old meter, as much as 100 to 200 (or .1- .2). This has opened up a whole can of worms for me, wondering if I’ve been underfeeding this whole time and now figuring out which pen to trust. Obviously I suppose I’ll side with the Bluelab over the cheapo, but I’ll need to rework my whole formula now to see what all the new numbers should look like. I did order some calibration fluid to not only recalibrate, but also to compare the two against the fluid. Moving on, there’s been an uptick in yellowing of the top leaves so yeah, pretty sure I maxed out my lights for this grow. I lowered the dimmer again to the hash between 50% and 75% (so I guess 62.5%? C’mon Mars Hydro, make hash marks that make sense). At the most directly under a light bar top bud site I get around 800 PAR. It’s a little depressing I can’t force more light but my main issue with previous grows was always light burn. I have to learn to accept keeping light levels lower than I would like because I went too hard when buying lights and they are obviously overpowered for my tent sizes. Hopefully this small change prevents anything from getting too bad and I’ll just have some yellow leaves up top. Big brain theory, totally speculative: I’m underfeeding slightly because my EC meter was off which has made the plant more light sensitive? I don’t know for sure, but between the EC debate and now the light burn it feels like I’ve lost control over the grow and am now just making stabs in the dark on what to do. 7/9 After a bit of an epiphany (thanks @FrontRowAG_BrianG ) I think the light was never the problem. I’m at the lowest part of my pH swing, I may have been underfeeding all nutes, and I’m in coco under an LED. It’s a calcium deficiency, likely caused by low pH. Symptoms all fit and it makes much more sense than light burn. So with that now figured out the light is back to 75% and I raised the res from 5.7 to 5.8. I’ll probably try to raise the pH to 5.9 later tomorrow because I don’t want to do too large of a change all at once. I’ve also adjusted my optimal pH range to 5.8 – 6.1. 7/10 Day 100 from sprout, day 46 of flower. pH in the res reads 5.9, and taking a reading from the autopot reads 6.1. It’s a tricky balance with adjusting the res so that the water that sits in the autopot stays in range, in fact that’s why I lowered my pH targets to begin with. I’m now leaning towards maintaining a narrower pH range for the res and then letting the water that sits in the autopot be the variable that changes. For instance, my other current grow is the Stoopid Fruits and the water sitting in that autopot reads 6.3. If it were to call for new water later today it would fill up with 5.9 pH water from the res and then slowly drift up to where it is now at 6.3. As it grows up and gets thirstier it will call for water more often and not drift as high. I’m now thinking keeping the res at 5.8 - 5.9 might be the best practice as this will allow for anything from 5.8 – 6.4 by the time it’s absorbed into the pot. As for EC issues, I got the calibration fluid in today. It confirmed the Bluelab was spot on while the cheap HM COM-80 was way, way off. I did calibrate the HM using the fluid, and even though it took it and now read the calibration fluid properly, testing the reservoir showed it to still be off. That went straight into the garbage. So now I know I have been underfeeding across the board for pretty much the life of this plant. In a weird way that has helped me understand that maybe I don’t need to go up to a full 1.3 EC as intended since I’ve probably been feeding at 1.0 or 1.1 EC this whole time. I will increase the silica to 2.5ml/gal and the calmag to either 4.5ml or 5ml/gal in order to take advantage of the extra EC headroom I have, and I’ll keep the Jack’s 20-10-20 roughly the same for a final EC of 1.2. 7/15 Day 105 from sprout, day 51 of flower. Marked increase in some fade all around, as well as some purple all around. Very cool.

7/16 Day 106 from sprout, day 52 of flower. Ethos states 60-63 days of flowering time and with the fade now in full swing that seems about right. I love the little hints of purple too. A trichome check reveals a little bit of everything: many clear, some cloudy, some amber. Sounds about right for around 10 days left. I’ll just leave everything alone until harvest now. 7/19 Day 109 from sprout, day 55 of flower. Everything is now a smorgasbord of green, yellow, purple and red. I have been plucking off the leaves that are curling up and getting crispy, just so they don’t start accumulating on everything. A trichome check up top shows some clear, some cloudy, and a little bit of amber. Checking a lower bud showed much more clear, a small amount of cloudy, and no amber that I can see. One concerning thing is that some pistil hairs up top are still white. Yeah, we all want big ass buds and more growth isn’t really bad, but after all this time I’m ready to chop her down and get to drying. I am hoping that over the next 7-10 days the pistils are all dark and all my trichomes turn cloudy, but maybe that’s too optimistic. I started a Mac N Jack that will eventually go into this 3x3 and I’m eager to get it in there. We’ll see how it goes.

7/22 Day 112 from sprout, day 58 of flower. Well, this was unexpected. I came home and found I have multiple branches falling over due to the weight of the buds. I got them all tied upright now, but I honestly thought I was harvesting shortly. Instead, they are still chugging along and packing on more mass. I removed a few more crispy leaves and at this point anytime I reach into the tent it’s impossible to not have my arm absolutely covered in resin. I suppose I can stop checking trichomes for now, it’s almost as if she hit a new growth spurt suddenly and clearly needs more time. This does throw a wrench into getting the Mac N Jack moved into the tent, but I’ve spent almost 4 months now growing this beauty; I can’t screw it all up now by harvesting too soon. 7/26 Day 116 from sprout, day 62 of flower. This is where Ethos says the Fanta Sea should be ready for harvest. As super pumped as I am to finally chop her down, if I’m honest with myself it’s just not there yet. Doing a trichome check says it’s getting closer, maybe around 50% clear, 50% cloudy, and a very small amount of stray amber here and there. So on we go. Leaves up top continue to fade and dry up, and as they get crispy I rip them off. Pretty sure I’ve heard Dr. Bugbee explain that in late flower it’s normal for the plant to pull extra phosphorous from the leaves, seeing as how we are pretty light on P using a 20-10-20 fertilizer. So I’ll keep letting her get her fade on while checking trichomes here and there and hopefully we’re close to the finish line soon. 7/28 Day 118 from sprout, day 64 of flower. Getting closer. I did a deeper dive into checking trichomes today, checking a few different top buds, a few different middle height buds, and a few way down below in larf territory. Up top was predominately milky, a small amount of clear, and a few ambers here and there. This progressed to more clear the further down I went. I’ll wait until Sunday before I check them again. I also did lower the light intensity just a hash mark under 75% to more simulate “fall”. Maybe silly, maybe not, but I’m trying it.

* I tried to do the harvest week, but for some reason we have to rate the strain before we can say we harvested. This makes no sense as I can't smoke it yet and do not want to preemptively give this strain a rating. I will do the harvest week when I have a proper ranking settled. * 7/29 Day 119 from sprout, day 65 of flower. Chop down day. After a deep dive into all the trichomes I could see, I found that the top buds looked pretty much done; almost all cloudy, a small amount of clear, and an increasing amount of amber. The middle height buds were majority cloudy with some clear, and the way bottom larf was about 50-50 cloudy and clear. With the time crunch I’m currently under and, if you average it all out at least, the trichomes being almost all there I decided to just harvest and call it. Absolutely a huge win for this strain is going to be the ease of getting it all trimmed up. Ethos advertises a high bract to leaf ratio and that it’s very easy to trim. After chopping it down into small sections of branches for drying I can confirm that this may be the easiest trim job I will ever have. Very happy with that. All the buds are in two AC Infinity drying racks in the 3x3 tent. Unfortunately it seems the best I can do with environment right now is 72 degrees F and 64% RH. The RH should drop in a day or 2 so I’m not too concerned with that, but unless I rig up some custom ducting from the AC I won’t be getting the temperature down any more.

This strain grew very well. In fact, my favorite thing with this strain is unrelated to the smoke. The buds were drop dead gorgeous with hints of purple throughout. Trimming was much easier with this compared to most other strains. The buds are rock hard, easily the most dense buds I've ever grown. She had a monstrous stretch, so much so that I got worried I was running out height in my tent, but it all worked out just right. All in all I'm SUPER happy with how this strain grows.