Trials, Success, And Failures of a 1st

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.