Third times a charm….Tropicanna Poison

The difference in strength in fertigation really isn’t enough to where it’s going to have too much of a disadvantage on this plant - it’s still under the amount that a ‘heavy feed’ would be. So I’m just filling my sprayer up with solution from the tank and adding a little biosys. It’s planted in a small plastic pot with coco and perlite. I will adjust the quantity of water I give it to how it reacts pretty much. I always use a hand spray bottle at first as it stops me over watering because my hands will start hurting from pumping. The down side is sometimes they get clogged with biosys. It’s annoying it doesn’t dissolve, it jjust suspends in solution for a while. That’s why you cant add it to a tank. Well you can, but you just end up pouring it out as sludge lol To be honest, I don’t think I’m going to continue with this one - it’s just the speed. Iv done a couple photo grows and generally they are however much longer, you decide to veg for, than autos. I don’t think I am destined to grow this strain! Also can I ask why on an earth a grow company would put a bloody bright green light bulb inside the humidifier?! It’s so odd. Plus the thermostat numbers are red LED’s It’s just a pain in the ass - more so than with auto’s. Also, it’s my comfort zone and the THC % is getting there with auto’s now. I will always say auto’s are harder than photo’s but if you follow a few simple rules like plant in the final pot etc. I think I’m going to do two more mephisto seeds - double grape and the free one was SODK x Orange Super Haze! I am also going to do orange sherbet by FB. Two small auto pots and one large so I’ll have a look and see which is likely t0 get biggest and pop that one in the biggun’.

Sorry about the crap pics - the humidifier was going hard coz I’d just refilled it! It’s strange that I intended to do a tent full of mephisto auto’s but they just didn’t germ - and they were not very pleasant about it when I emailed them either. I think they thought I was trying to scam them or something but there was definitely some attitude in the email. At first I’m put it on the other side of the tent with less light and therefore would grow slower -nope! Just started stretching instead - mind you, it is more saliva leaning than anything else in there so it does make sense for it to be bigger. Oh yeh I fimmed it as well, I’m just going to keep topping it so that by the time the auto (if it makes it) has flowered, I can fill up the tent with the photo’s just vegging for ages, then I’ll swap so that the small tent is a veg tent. Try and make it less power intensive by changing the fan to one like the in-take.

So this one seems to be slightly more sativa than the diesel. It’s a lot easier to work with tbh, less compact before stretch. Iv topped, well, fimmed it twice - or is it thrice because I topped it and then topped each top. So 4 tops so far but I only just fimmed so we’ll see how It carry’s on growing. It’s looking good tbh - I don’t think I’ll have space for the second one I germed - I wish I could find out which is which pheno before flowering though to pick the red one!! Oh well we’ll see! I’m happy with how it’s going…

Doing well - biggest plant so far so the smaller one will be useful - I may have to clone it if I have to cut it back again before flower. It really all depends on the auto takes and how long the second tropicanna takes to ‘catch up’ as much as possible. I REALLY need to be able to run my lights for less time! The price of electricity is insane atm.

All has been fine, it’s just massive and I keep tying it down there are so many tops now. The actual AutoPot system is hooked up now so I don’t really have to do much other than keep the res topped up.

It’s going a little mental I must admit - still, it’s all good should end up with a monster of a plant tbh. It’ll make up for the lack of size on the frosted guava and the orange hill special. I don’t have much to say other than I made these plants = the OHSP (the ones put into Autopot, pots) a res and hooked them all a up together.

I did quite a bit of defoliation when I was tying the new tops down. This thing is an ABSOLUTE beast but where iv been LST’ing it down to the pot it’s growing outwards and then the tops will start growing upwards when I flip - a little bit like a scrog situation only the scrog net is attached to a single pot rather than the whole crop. It probably won’t be that long until I start it on 12/12 - mainly due to energy concerns and the fact that the auto is pretty much done. Iv also had to cut it back to 16h/ day of light. I had already cut it back to 17h and just decided to take off another hour. The plan really, is to keep lopping off hours until it’s at 12/12. Maybe an hour a week or so…I mean tbh, even if I can’t nurse the frosted guava back to health and to a size that will actually yield something, it CAN stay in veg growth for quite a while on 12/12 - some people actually grow all their plants straight from 12/12. Think it’s a Dutch table method or SOG, I guess. Edit day after: I went in this morning and realised that the tap was off for the 3 AutoPot plants so I’m surprised to have seen this one grow great - more than normal. It’s getting so big I’m considering chopping it back but then I’ll have to wait for even more tops. It needs a good defoliation for sure.

So Iv switched to 12/12 and a couple of weeks ago my back tent pole caved in two and the the started falling down. Luckily I had them co wooden slats I could cut and slide in but it’s ended up breaking the shitty plastic corner so I ordered a new 120cmx60cmx150cm. I didn’t REALLY have the money to buy it, so I’ll be in trouble but In 8 weeks time when I harvest at least two of the plants and save myself hundreds and hundreds of pounds it will make sense… Iv been in this situation before and it just takes a while to build up your stash to become self sufficient - at which point I shall tell my prescribing doctor I only need 10g or so. Or I’ll just get the 30%+ from the medical… either / or. When I start seeing pistols, I’ll start registering the week as a flowering week. The nutes are staying the same for a week and then will be changed to the next weeks nutes.

Pretty hard to tell what’s going on there. I think those were before I thinned her out a little. She’s going mental and stunk as soon as she started showing pre-flowers. All good after having flooded my grow room literally three times in a row. Finally figured out the issue…

As you can see, this plant is significantly ahead of the others - although the frosted guava is catching up slightly. It’s getting pretty tall and it’s only around 10cm from the light and because I accidentally bought a tent that’s 30cm shorter than the previous one, the light is as high as it will go without me directly using zip ties to tie it to the tent frame. That’s probably what I will do and maybe add the tsl-3000 along with it going all the way along and have the fc-e3000 in the middle of the tent. This plant is just slightly less tall than the tropicanna…it’s doing really well considering how long it’s been alive! Edit: so i got her out today and did some quite brutal thinning out. Most of the little nodes growing out of the underside of the branch - I will stress that not all the underside ones were cut, just those that I don’t feel would grow into anything useful. I figured the energy would be better elsewhere. My humidity is on the high side and so I thinned it out and am keeping it close to the fan just so that it has lots of air passing through. It’s still a beast, it just means that the buds that grow will be large ones. I find that when I spread a plant out like this one, I tend to get a lot of flower from it. It’s just got very bushy - when you fold a plant over it grows additional nodes from the first nodes that you have bent over. You therefore end up with loads of tops - too many in fact. That’s why thinning out was needed but honestly some of the branches and I would call them branches at this point were really thick… Iv just keeping the res full and keeping an eye on each plant. Tomorrow I am going to pull out the one that’s next to this plant - orange hill special by Dutch passion. Then by that point probably next week, I’ll do the guava. Ideally it’ll be the guava I’ll grow again properly anyway if I get a chance. It’s highly possible I won’t get that chance though…it’s super scary doing it in a rented property but the dickhead that was causing problems has been thrown out and proved to be a liar (not about me growing but if anyone was going to get me caught it would have been him to notice it in the first place.

Starting to -it a little weight on the calyxes now. I think this week, it should puff up quite a bit. Everything seems to be going ok so far - other than high electricity costs! Some of the photos wouldn’t upload so I’ll do it again another time….

Sorry about all the fingers in the photo’s, I kind of have to just reach my hand in and press the side button without looking because my tent/room is so small! This plant is looking really nice now to be honest - she fucking stinks when you open the tent but is completely fine when it’s closed - the spider farmer filter and the smart Mars hydro 6” fan is doing it’s job nicely. I had to mount the light higher up on the actual tent frame because it was too close to the plants as my ceiling height dropped by 30cm - I be;I even the light is where it would be if I still had a 180cm tall tent instead of a 150cm - that was my bad, On the other hand It is a really nice quality tent tbh and I see no signs of light leaks or anything ;ike that. No plant stresses so far other than while in veg with the water and flooding etc. Looking good but I just want them to finish. The paranoia is intense due to the fact there is a leak somewhere in my bathroom which is right opposite my grow room. Honestly, the company workmen really don’t give a shit. In fact, when I first moved in and need a plumber to connect my dishwasher, he ended up doing it and I gave him some weed coz he said he’d just ran out. Also the pipes don’t go anywhere near the GR because the gas pipes that feed the radiator in my main living room (I live in a studio), are there. It should all be f(ne as long as I have ,y dehumidifier running the whole time to cover the sound of the fans in the grow room - ill turn off the internal fan for the plants because that’s the loudest one but I’ll leave the extraction fan going and just cover it with the sound of the dehumidifier that’s visible. It’s worked before, it’ll def work again. Also, tbh it almost ALWAYS smells of weed in here anyway….🙀 Edit: okay so it’s normal update day today but I’d already done the weekly update on Thursday because I was in there taking loads of photos anyway. It would be useful to have a hairnet for when I go in actually. I just noticed a hair on one of the cola’s. Maybe just do a water dunk before drying. Honestly, this plant won’t come on the same as it should do this week because I’m still using quite a lot of nitrogen as well as P and K because I’m trying to balance so many different plants. It would be so much easier if I were growing commercially because they’d all be EXACTLY the same! If this turns out to be a purple pheno - I may well take a cutting OR just leave some on to re-veg. We’ll see. If I could have kept the bright purple FastBuds plant I grew, i definitely would have to be honest. It’s annoying you can’t re-veg or take cuttings from auto’s - well you can, they just flower at the same time as the mother plant so it’s pointless. AAAANNYWAY - so I been looking at decent genetics now that I have a way fairly predictable way of germinating. The annoying thing is, if I’m going for some decent (high 20’s, low 30’s) that come from the states I’m looking at around for a pack of 5 - minimum. I’d be interested in looking at more of the original sensible seeds to see if they have any more high THC plants - I have at least 2,3 or maybe even 4 seeds left from the frosted guava so it’ll most likely be grown again…. Edit again: it’s crazy how quick the pistols have turned on this plant - only on the side branches also, which is a little opposite to what I remember but whatever. If I didn’t know better an inexperienced grower may think about chopping this plant down soon - it WILL be coming down FAIRLY soon. Next couple of weeks. Annoyingly because I was trying to balance the nutes between all the different plants this one got its PK boost a weeek late. The good thing is when that’s over it says to put both N,P and K in pretty equal amounts after this until flowering ends. I anticipate this plant being so much more ahead of the others that it wouldn’t surprise me if I get to harvest with this and still have a good few weeks left of, at least the orange hill special. It’s getting tall though! I’m surprised it’s still stretching tbh.

Okay so pk boost and as with everything else in this grow, it’s a week behind what it really should be, so I may have hit the tropicanna poison with a PK Boost too late, where as, for the orange hill special and frosted guava it’s probably a little early but hey ho - you gotta compromise with the Autopot system if you are growing multiple strains that are really quite different in terms of gene pool. Edit: okay so it’s 4 days later and it ALMOST looks like a different plant! Its colours are coming out now. As you can see, some of the side branches pistols are turning orange and there is even some colour turning up at the edges of the swollen calyxes. I don’t think I will get too much light penetration to be honest, due to the fact that it’s too crouded in there - it’s so easy to forget how big they get when you first veg them! (Particularly as it’s my first grow in months and first photo grow in years!) Next time I will just make sure I germ the seeds at the same time - although, it wasn’t really my fault, per sé. This is definitely the most advanced plant for sure…then the NYC diesel. Edit: so I noticed that my tall tower fan broke AGAIN and so I decided to buy a clip on I think it’s an 8” one that rotates - it’ll probably stop rotating after a while but the reviews say 18 months in after having bought the product, it still works fine, just doesn’t swivel. Tbh, it’s cheap enough to if it breaks then I can just replace it - it should def last longer than a tower fan that’s been flooded with 10-15l of water! Twice! So I can’t say I’m hugely shocked… For now, iv taken the fan that is a clip on that I was using for the extraction of my drying tent - it’s surprisingly powerful for such a small USB powered fan tbf!

So this week has been much the same as last I guess, I’m just letting them do their thing for the most part now tbf. They ABSOLUTELY STINK now, I love it when I open my tent and it just stinks of skunk and yet any time I come home (my lung room backs onto my main corridor so if there WERE any smell it would carry out the front door. Nothing…occasionally I get scared because I come back and it slightly smells of weed but then I notice the door to the living room is open and that’s where I vape (with no windows open atm). I’m loving this plant and she is colouring up fairly nicely but I obviously got a green pheno. It makes me wonder if the one I killed (I had two germ’d because my rates were so low at the time). I’d definitely say this strain really wants to spring out that seed…but random for this stage of the grow but its vigour is quite amazing. What else can I say? Oh yeh, my internal fan ‘gave up the ghost’ and so I instinctively went and bought one of the MH clip on ones, only to realise I had an exact replacement in the next room! Oh well, it can’t hurt to have both tbf. I am SO looking forward to harvesting this beast to get it out of there and to give the rest of them some space - particularly the orange hill special - although tbf it’s shot out at least two, beastly , hairy cola’s and so it’s obviously all good - just not a fast version flowering plant. I’m actually quite surprised that they’ve literally managed to isolate the speed and vigour of an auto flower and put that speed into a photoperiod - with no other visible auto traits AT ALL. I was at least expecting to see some of them characteristic auto, 3 fingered leaves - it tends to be the smaller ones but I’m not seeing any of that at all. I wouldn’t know it had been crossed with an auto had I not been told - although I suppose the THC % kind of matches that of an auto. I’m hoping this Tropicanna poison F1 is a decent daytime smoke for me, I’m hoping the effects don’t leak too sativa for me as I find the effects of a classic indica way better medically but I guess we will see. Thats the only problem with growing and cannabis medicine, if only certain strains work for you medically then you are a bit more stuck for options but personally Iv never tried weed that isn’t medically beneficial - even the low THC and high CBD strains have helped somewhat as they distract me from opiates and are, of course much safer, hence the prescription! Anyway I also changed the res - well I just added to it but I added a slighter weaker solution - I’d been giving them all the ‘heavy feed’ doses and iv now cut back to the normal doses so that the other plants still can access everything they need but the Tropicanna can perceive it as a drop in nutrition. I will eventually disconnect it from the res and just give it water - iv not going to lie, that will be really annoying so I may have to come up with a better solution - maybe connect that one tray to a small res of its own. Mind you, I’m a little scared to mess with the tubing that carrys the water due to how many spills iv had this grow, leaking 5-10l of water over my floor. That REALLY helped the humidity as I’m sure you can imagine. Lucky they were in veg! Tbh, I better start germinating more seeds soon. I’ll probably buy some cloning bars so it takes up less electricity and also use one of them clip on fans like the last one for extraction. The inline ones that are quiet enough to run by my bed are too expensive and I wouldn’t use it enough to warrant the £££. The USB ones do the job great as it’s only a 60x60 tent and not even that as I had to get it into the tiny wardrobe hole. It’s just annoying they do break a lot from the cable bending around. I could probably do with having some tape to hand to stop things trailing around the gaff - I assume that’s why my fan broke - because it was sat in 5cm of water or so, two or three times! Oh iv also started running the AC when the lights are on to get it to around 50-60% RH. Without the dehumidifier it goes above 80 when lights are out! This is why I need as much ‘wind’ in there as possible…so it won’t hurt to have an 8” clip on fan as well as the tower fan. Edit: when I said AC I actually meant the dehumidifier and although it took the RH levels way down, it bought the temps right up. The 8” clip on fan didn’t work at all. Plugged it in out of the box - nothing. I spent the money on a rechargeable clip on fan (the type I used for extraction of the 50x60 tent.) so that I can use it for intake Because at the moment I’m having to keep all my hallway windows open and the blind up to get temps down to even around 26-27c with lights on. I’m thinking that I need a taller tent next time as it contributes to the heat. There has been a lot of heat in the grow the past couple days. I’m guessing that it is a cost of stuffing so much light into such a small space, combined with the poor ventilation setup that’s pointless to change now as it’s all coming down in a few weeks anyway! Iv been in there with my d-slr the past couple days so we will see what the shots are like - often they look great on the small camera screen but then are ever so slightly blurry when i look at them large on a pc. We’ll get there anyway - the thing is it’s REALLY hard to get to that back plant and so even I don’t really know what it’s like. It’ll be interesting to get her out or at least move her closer when I harvest the Tropicanna. In fact they should be harvested at the same time but the NYC d is further behind in that it has no trichs haha Edit again: I added those d-slr shots…oh and I disconnected the wrong plant yesterday! So I fixed that this morning! It’s just heing fed water now.

I’m starting to think about chopping her down now tbh. I can’t see her miraculously putting on more weight now - I think it is what it is. Lots of tops that are pretty big and very dense but also lots of popcorn, I maybe should have lollipopped her a little more but you learn as you go don’t you. I think this will be a nice daytime smoke for me tbh. If I’d had more space to stretch her out I’d have got buds all the way down I think, it was just too tightly packed in after I topped it and tied it over. The tricks are nicely cloudy, although iv not seen any amber yet but tbh, my only way of checking is zooming in on macro photo’s so we’ll see. I definitely have some totally trichome covered plant - even if a lot of it ends up being used to make an oil or something. Maybe even distillate now I have a distillation apparatus - I could even try making it more potent…hmmm

The week was good - not sure I’d take acid when harvesting again although it just started kicking in once I’d finished so that was good. Honestly, I’m really happy with my harvest. There is a lot of it, and more to come in a few weeks time. I’m trying to delay people coming into my flat to sort the damp out but it’s getting to the point where it’s going to be tight! Oh well Update since drying and am into curing - for some reason the place where it asks you to put your dry weight has disappeared so I just put it in the wet weight. I got 60g off of her - not counting the popcorn buds or the trim that I’ll use in my lab to make shatter and then i will at least know how much extract is in my oil. As opposed to just simple putting it into a round bottom flask bit by bit using a small quantity of oil - dacarbing as I go and then use the same oil over and over again until it’s all been decarbed into like 50ml oil or something. I know which one would take longer and I also distilled my own 100% alcohol (which is pretty hard to do as it pulls 2% water out of the air) simply from water, a bag of white sugar and yeast. It took three distillations to get to 100% with the use of molecular seives at the end. It makes sense to actually make use of it - it’s also ethyl alcohol so even if there is trace left and I don’t have a vacuum kit yet - I need a vacuum pulling machine or an air pump for my lab anyway so pulling a vacuum inside a gauged pot seems like a good thing to have around. I know typically people would use short path distillation for this but I don’t have the end adapter for that so I could connect 3 flasks to collect into. I’m just going to winterize it I guess. Anyway - my flat stinks I should probably hang the buds in the tent to be fair… I mean I have a prescription and so it is ALLOWED to smell of cannabis but it’s that chlorophyll, plant smell I want to get rid of — mind you, I guess that’s the whole point of drying and curing but still…I have a gas inspection guy coming tomorrow so it is a little worrying as it obviously fucking wreaks of skunk in this room! Also the guy who was my cover and used to smoke joints and stink out the whole building has moved out now so I can’t use him as an excuse, I’ll just have to boil some coffee, bake some bread and maybe make a stink bomb? Haha I do have a lab after all! Iv never thought of playing around with aromatics tbh - apart from the aldehydes, I’m more than familiar with them! Anyway this is a weed growing place and not chemistry so I’ll shut up. I do intend to try the isomerisation of CBD into the THC we all know and love. Trouble is there are side products and it needs to be thoroughly rid of the solvents used - hence also another need for that vacuum chamber.