Trials, Success, And Failures of a 1st

First grow, we are learning and setting up as we go. We will be making/altering/adjusting the grow space as the plants grow and as we figure things out. There are probably going to be a lot of mistakes and we are doing this a bit unconventional with our grow as we test stuff out.

Under a "300w" (135w actual draw) Meizhi LED light She's coming along well. Just giving a bit of root booster. Saw her grow a lot this week. We are trying to keep our blurple light low and centered on her as we know it's not the most efficient light but it's what we got right now.

Still under the same LED light (135 actual draw) Meizhi Taking the nuts easy don't want to over do it when she is this small. The growth has been amazing to see.

Big week for a little plant. She grew a lot and then we topped her. She grew up to 6" tall and then we took her down to the 3rd node and chopped her. This was very weird I've grown vegetables for years and have never done anything like this. We also decided to try and clone the top that we trimmed off. This is my first attempt at cloning ever.

She bounced back great from the topping. Everything I read about topping, mainling, and lst seems to be working great. The clone is looking bad. We should have trimmed the leaves and should have put her into a tray with a cover. Hopefully she'll pull through somehow.

Continuing with the LST and mainlining. We trimmed her good, we want her to grow the main branch out not the sub branches and we want that main stem/branches to fatten up. The little clone has perked up. She hasn't really grown anything new but she's not leaning over anymore so she just might make it..... in spite of our screwups.

Big week, we moved got a tent, replanted into the forever pot, and are testing out some automatic watering that we patched together so they can get watered while we are away this summer. The clone is doing better, it's perked up and is started to grow just a bit. Cloning really took a lot out of the little girl.

Clone has really started to grow now. Very encouraging that we can put her through that much crap and she is now flourishing. Tried some different light combinations,

Didn't really have a plan for the clone, just wanted to see if we could get a plant to clone. But now we kind of do, we are going to let her grow and take another clone of her. See if we can clone our clone. We are also thinking to let her go into flower with the big girl at the same time. See how she does. You might be wondering WTF am I doing with mainlining of my big SSH girl. The plan is to get her spread out on the main node as much as possible and let her go to 16 nodes total. Why? shits and giggles. We are just testing mainly. First ever grow, might as well give a few things a try.

Ok so the last update at week 9 was day 1 of week 9, We went away and this is now 12 days later, day 6 of week 10. Big test of systems..... The automatic watering worked'ish. There were some issues, in that everything got under watered... badly. The clone faired the worst as it has the small 1 gallon pot. The big girl faired ok as she had more moisture in the soil to draw from. There has been no Nut's that were given to the girls the whole time we were away. We just fed water with the automatic watering system. We are fighting with cooling and humidity, It's a problem we need to solve, but I don't think there is going to be a quick fix. We knew we would probably encounter issues like this on the first grow. This is why we have been taking a more relaxed approach to this grow. We aren't expecting massive yields, we view this crop as more of a testing/sacrifice crop in order to figure things out like automatic watering, cooling, humidity, lights, ventilation, tent, etc.

Next stage of topping, we split her to 4 nodes now. Did a bunch of defoliating and trying to force her to grow the nodes hard with all the nutes.

Coming along fine, working on getting some new better lights. Clone is doing well. Big girl is spreading out her new nodes. So far so good. Finally picked up a proper dehumidifier. We were using a portable air conditioner with a dehumidifier mode on it, but ti wasn'tdbng a great job and was soaking up a ton of electricity. We were always between 60-70%RH. The new dehumidifier can finally drop the humidity below 50%, it floats between 35-50%RH now.

Ok so update on the clone that we haven't showed picture in a few weeks. The clone is doing well, we are mainlining her as well. She got split to 4 this week. When we topped the clone to 2 we took the top and tried making a 2nd clone, a clone of the clone using the top again. I don't have a picture of it but It's doing well. We put in under a plastic cover and did a better job with the cloning this time and she didn't get anywhere near as close to death as the 1st clone did. The big girl got mainlined to 8. We noticed so spots forming on some of the leaves so we decided to do a runoff test to get the PH (we don;t have a PPM/EC meter yet). We did a runoff test of the 1st clone (big clone) because she is only in a 1G pot and it's easier, the PH was way low. So we did a flush on her. We then did a run off test on the big girl and her PH was down in the low 4's, way way too low. So we did a big flush. I know, we fucked up with the PH and flushing, but again, it's a learning grow at this point. We also made a new DIY light using Samsung Q series 2' LED strips. We did it with a mix of 3000k and 3500k strips (10 total). The driver is adjustable from about 20w to 240w, we are keeping it at about 200w for now. There will be some more of these being built in the next couple weeks, this is the first attempt at a DIY light.

Big Girl is doing ok, she looks a bit strangely with the big T in the middle. But we are planning for the space needed when we turning those 8 nodes into the center and have to accommodate for those buds. Clone #1 is doing well, She's been replanted into a 5 gallon pot. But she's a bit smaller then the mother at this point, maybe it's because we moved the mother to a 16g pot earlier or maybe we just fed the mother better with nutes... Cone #2 is happy and doing well. We'll see how she goes, we are not going to top her, we are just going to repot her later and let her go into flower. I'm kind of liking this experiment, older mother and 2 clones that are much younger, we'll take them all to flower and see what the yield difference is. We build another light. This one is another Samsung Q-series (Also known as Quantum LED's) LED strips 10 @ 3000k and 10 at 3500k (20 strips total). Made this one so the 3000k and 3500k are each power adjustable and can be turned on and off Just running the 1 20 strip Q-series light right now. It's running at 400w total, so the big SSH girl is getting about 200w total.

Got a PPM/EC measurement stick now. Have some spots on the leafs and need some more information to understand if I'm underfeeding or getting salt buildup. All the girls are looking good. We are working hard on getting the 3rd light done (2nd small light) with the Samsung Q series strips. We want these lights done before we change over to flower.... and that means that as soon as they are done it'll be flower time.

Very happy with the height of the plants. We are ending our first week of lowering and the big girl is under 10" tall from the height of the soil. We were concerned about having enough height in the tent but the mainlining and LST really worked well to keep her low. Our getto DIY quantum lights using Samsung Q series are done. The SSH big girl will now get 400w to herself. Tent (4x4) is 800 total, 400 to SSH, and 400 gets shared between the big White cookies and the 2 SSH clones. We a runoff test and the EC was 3.2 and PH was 5.8. That's confusing because we have never fed her above 2.0EC and never below 6.2PH. But we also don't feed her until runoff. So I guess it must have built up over time. We gave her a good flush with water, we had to use tap water because we didn't have enough rain or dehumidifier water left. It's awesome to see the girls grow with less trimming. They look so good getting fluffily and full.

We've backed off the nutes after the run off test last week. We have a planned runoff test every week now to check. Figuring the nutes thing out and learning with our first grow. We built a raised drip pan rack a few weeks ago and it's making the runoff tests a lot easier to conduct. All the girls are starting to bush up and we are getting excited for flowering stage. Big Girl - We thinned some of the lower pre flowers, took most of them off, probably reduced the total number of flowers by more than half. We've let the primary 16 nodes go and 2-4 sub-flowers on each node stay, mostly depending on size and how much direct light they receive. Hoping this will result in bigger better buds in the end. Clone 1 we removed all the lower flowers, we are just letting the primary 8 flower. Clone 2 we removed most of the lower flowers, we left the primary flower and the largest 4 lower flowers.

Buds are starting to show/grow with nice white hairs. Clone 2 and the Big SSH girl have leaves that are turning yellow. Looks kind of like Nitrogen, but might be sulphur or Mag. So we kept a bit of Grow in the formula because it has more nitrogen and added KoolBloom and Diamond Nectar to try and round it out a bit more. On the last day of this week we also added a very weak solution (160ppm) of Epson Salt to boost the sulphur just a bit. 2L into big girl and 1L into clone 1, none for clone 2 as she's looking great. Hopefully we will see a bit more green in the next week. We trimmed some more buds off, but I think we are done with that now. Might just take any low popcorn ones after this and let all the others go to completion.

Big girl and Clone 1 had/has yellow leaves, we think it's either a nitrogen deficiency or sulphur deficiency. We stopped using the "bloom" and switched back to the "grow" because it has more nitrogen in it. We are keeping the KoolBloom and Diamond Nector to make up the difference. After a couple feedings and 3 days to uptake we saw more green in the leaves. We will continue this for a little longer then probably switch back to the bloom mix. With the outside temps cooling off the grow room is a lot easier to keep at a constant temp. The buds are starting to really come in now, and the frosty coating is exciting to see for the first time ever.

Wow the tent is very very stinky, with the carbon filters and neg pressure it's nice and clean until we unzip the tent and then it smacks you in the face like a hobo skunk! She is still yellowish but more green has come back in, so we are now cutting back the grow and adding the bloom nutes back in. Although with the Diamond and the KoolBloom I don't think running the grow vs the bloom will have that significant of an effect on the plant. The added bit of nitrogen is what we needed and the grow helped give us that. The buds are fattening up. We switched to flowering 1/2 way though one of our grow weeks so our flowering weeks a 1/2 a week delayed. I marked the days of flower on these photo's. Looking around at other grows I think we are probably doing ok for bud development we have with the amount of days we are in flower.

The last couple weeks she hasn't been looking very good. We have been wondering if it's sulphur or nitrogen deficiency. We asked on here and got and answer that we were feeding too much. It just didn't jive with what we were seeing. So we decided look for some more answers. We moved 3 different temp and humidity sensors in the tent and figured out our VPD was off and our humidity off. We turned down the lights as a temporary solution and we changed our portable AC unit to a dual hose AC because the single hose AC was pulling hot air back through the tent vent. We've run the dual hose for a couple days and the VPD is better now and the airflow in the room/tent is working correctly. We also increase the nutes and that seems to help. Being in week 6 of flower we have dropped the Diamond Nectar and the grow as per the recommendation of GHE chart FYI we add CaliMagic because we using the dehumidifier water most of the time, and when we do use tap water its at 0.05EC from the tap so we need to add in the cal/mag that is missing.

Should she be renamed Pinhead???? Hell Raiser???? Shit went badly sideways!!!! Our cola's and buds are short, fat, and dense. The buds are super dense too. We have 4 fans in the tent and a major dehumidifier in the room but it's not been enough. The venting has been an issue with the old AC and the new AC has been popping the breaker because it shares a breaker with the lights and exhaust fans. This has resulted in the VPD being higher then we'd like and the occasional time the AC, lights, and ventilation turned off because of a popped breaker and the humidity went way up (75-85%). All together this has resulted in the very bad and dreaded bud rot. Went away for a 3 day weekend to visit friends and came back to a few buds that had yellow dry leaves and dry buds. I investigate further to find that it was bud rot. So triage started, if any bud showed signs of rot I took the entire cola. This was painful but I know that bud rot is not to be messed with. It took 2 days to go through and deal with the rot and trim the cola's to recover the ok buds. This is how it broke down in numbers; SSH ___ 54 cola's pre - 27 removal = 27 cola's remaining (50% removal) Clone 1 _ 8 Cola's pre - 1 removal = 7 cola's remaining (12.5% removal) Clone 2 _ 5 Cola's pre - 1 removal = 4 Cola's remaining (20% removal) Total 67 cola's pre - 29 removal = 38 cola's remaining (43.3% removed) Total wet trimmed weight = 997.3g (29 cola's = 34.4g per cola average wet) Saved wet trim weight = 558.3g (56% saved) ***because of the rot we trimmed really closely, trimmed all the buds off the cola, took all stems and most of the leaves off to make sure none of the rot was left. I suspect we will have a higher % dry weight because we took off so much of the stems, leaves, etc. Our biggest cola was 48.23g wet trimmed before we dissected it into the buds and tossed away the rot. We took apart all the cola's and were able to save a lot of the lower buds as the rot usually was only on the top 30-50% of the cola's. This is still young and the tricomes are clear. Not sure how nice it'll be but we are drying it and will find out in a week or two. There might be some more that need to be removed in the coming weeks, we just don't know yet. I molested all the cola's hard, looked at the base of all the buds as best I could and pulled anything with even a bit of identifiable rot. The ones not taken have been handled a lot and will for surely be degraded. I read about some people using skewers to separate the buds in dense cola's allowing more air into them, so I'm trying this method. It's desperation at its best as we are only a few weeks away from the finish line. There will be a push this weekend to get the new outlet wired in to allow the A/C it's own breaker so that we stop tripping the rooms breaker, I think the ventilation issues with the old A/C and the new A/C tripping the breaker is what pushed us into this bud rot. Most of our biggest/fattest cola's got taken, so with us having 56% of the cola's remaining I'd expect if we can get this to finish and harvest we will end up with under 40% of what the actual harvest would have been if we didn't lose our big cola's to rot that made it through ripening. But we still might lose more we just don't know yet. Amazing how a seemingly healthy plant can go completely sideways so quickly. Bad part is it happened, the good part is that we did catch it fairly early. Less then 50% cola's effected and out of the cola's effected we were able to save 56% of the bud weight. It's not ideal but it's a lesson and we will learn from it.

Bud rot issues are continuing, I seem to take 1 or 2 every day. Keeping it warmer and drying in the tent now. With the cold nights it’s a little hard to find the balance of exhausting vs temp vs a huge electric bill. Really feel gutted by this, I want to just toss them in the garbage and start over but I know the smart thing is to continue and learn from the experience so I’m soldering on and trying to make the best of the situation. I’m cutting back the nutes, the plants don’t seem to be eating much anyways (run off is high) and we are nearing the end of the flowering so it should be time to scale back.

With the bud rot I have learnt that taking the top ½ of the bud cola is sufficient if we catch it early. The small sugar leaves on the buds becoming dry and crispy is a good indicator for rot. If I see anything suspicious I just lightly touch the tips of the sugar leaves and if they are crispy it’s almost always has rot at the center of the bud. You will see some ½ chopped cola’s on the plant, we left the bottom of ones we could now. The saddest part is Clone 2 lost about ½ of her main cola to rot. We left the bottom part hoping it’ll be ok and finish ripening. The rot has affected our largest cola’s the most. I removed a big cola about 10 days ago and tossed the top half and the bottom half was fine. I let it dry and then dry trimmed it. The remaining bud weight for that ½ of a cola was 7.4 grams of dry trimmed bud. It makes me sad, that cola total was easily over 12g dry and might have been 15g. I had a good 20 of those just on the big SSH girl before the rot set in….oh to ponder what could have been. New growth on the buds is coming in strong. I took a scope to the buds and it’s probably about 75% clear and 25% milky, so it’ll be a couple more weeks at least I think. Continuing with the light feeding of 0.9 EC, but the runoff is still higher so she’s not eating much. The leaves are looking worse every day but I’m told that’s normal at this point. Some of the leaves are now taco’ing so I’m turning the lights down a bit more, be around 350w rather than the 400w I have run until now. I did a mini-flush at the start of the week, just to make sure I wasn’t salt locked. The PH and PPM’s came back in a very good range so I think I’m fine. I guess I’ll continue on course for now, maybe get a set of pom-poms and do a cheer to try and encourage her to hang in there to the end. The first 2 cuts off of the plant due to rot have now finished drying. Wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it or if it’s even be any good. Smoking it’s not very nice and the high is very short lived. So I took 2 oz of it (because it’s a bit weak) and made a 1lb of butter….. or that was the thought. Usually I make my butter on the stove in a pot but this time I tried it in a slow cooker. Well it turns out the slow cooker was a bit too hot and I lost a lot of butter to boil off. Ended up with only 9 oz of butter in the end and not sure how must THC I lost in that. I have made some cookies with the butter now and I can honestly tell you WOW!!! These are the strongest cookies I’ve ever made. I usually go with 1 oz/lb of butter but because this stuff smoked weak I thought 2 oz/lb of butter would be correct. These cookies now hit hard and last a long time (5 hours). They give and very tingly body feeling with a “space” head effect. Very uplifting and really focuses you on a task with no couch lock at all, if anything it’s a bit energizing. Turns out to be one of, if not, the best batch of cookies I’ve ever made. Can’t wait to get some bud from the finished plant that is fully ripe and dried/cured.

Continuing to have to take a couple cola’s or parts of cola’s every day or two. I’ve been feeding a low solution of 450-500 ppm (0.9-1.0 EC) for a week now and I have just started the flush, going to run the flush for a week and then pull the girls. The girls preformed amazing and made huge dense cola’s I could only dream of. Unfortunately the rot got in and it’s been taking the girls down ever since. I went into this grow telling myself to have reasonable expectations and that there would be mistakes and problems and I just needed to roll with them and learn. Lots of learning has been had, and as they say “experience is expensive”. I have been very surprised about how much growth the plants have had the last couple weeks. The culling of the cola's and shock to the plant I was worried would cause more issues but she seems to be pushing more into growth.

Bud Rot Bud Rot Bud Rot. Kept throwing out more and more cola’s buds all the way through flowering and drying. Cranked the temp up the last couple weeks to try and fight the bud rot, got some fox-tailing happening from the increased heat. The breakdown is like this. Early cut to remove bud rot – some colas had clean buds and I ended up keeping 3 oz (about 85g) Actual harvest day – Big SSH Girl – 887 g wet and 167 g dry SSH Clone 1 - 235 g wet and 47 g dry SSH Clone 2 – 140 g wet and 25 g dry Total harvest day – 1262 g wet and 239 g dry (8.5 oz) *we tossed a bunch as we jarred it due to mold Total Dry Weight = 324 g (11.5 oz) This was my first grow of MJ and my first time trying to grow inside and with bottled nutes. It’s been a lot of work making the room… setting it up, heating, cooling, lighting, humidity, and airflow. The SSH grew me some HUGE cola’s, however they got bud rot. Our biggest cola we weight wet (before throwing it away due to rot) was 80g. She grew big, fat, dense buds but we flew too close to the sun and the bud rot got us. Like everyone I had grand ideas how awesome this grow could be. But I tried to keep myself grounded and kept telling myself that I needed to be realistic for a first grow and that if I achieve 8 oz total from the tent (all the plants White Cookies and Super Silver Haze) it would be good successful for a first grow. I knew there would be mistakes, issues, and problems that I’d have to face as almost everyone does during their first grow. In the end I had to toss away over ½ the plant due to bud rot. All of the big large colas were affected, the smaller ones were the ones less affected and made it to the end. In the 4x4 tent I had 4 fan, three 8” oscillating and 1 static 6” fan. I had a 6” venting fan pulling from the top, A/C, heat at night, and a 70 pint dehumidifier. But one of the big problems was the grow room didn’t have enough power from the breaker panel and on the hot days the A/C would trip the circuit breaker. This would cause the heat and humidity to spike, the tent fans to turn off, and everything to go into the very bad extremes. This is most likely what started/caused the bud rot. Because it was a lack of power that was causing the issue it wasn’t a quick or easy fix. You can’t just put a larger breaker in because the wire run can’t handle the increased power, it’d burn down the room. Adding to the issue was that the breaker panel was full so adding another breaker wasn’t an easy option. A new breaker panel would need to be installed first and then new power lines run to the room. The project to upgrade the electrical capacity of the room ended up taking over a month. But that time was the critical flower month as power draw wasn't such an issue during vegging when we had smaller lights and better weather. I'm not going to lie, I felt very down and frustrated with this grow at points. It took a long time, I had many many issues, and the bud rot was like getting kicked in the gut over and over again as I had to continually throw away big fat colas every day or two. I was close to throwing in the towel several times on this grow but I persevered and have been rewarded in the end. DON"T GIVE UP!!! KEEP ON GROWING.... They say experience is expensive and they aren’t wrong. This first grow has been expensive in every way…. time, money, stress, frustration, yield, etc, etc…