Been a while since updating, been fighting back the fungus gnats as best I could, but it was quite a battle. Shoutout to @Hempface86 here on grow diaries for offering some tips to deal with these pests, which helped massively! Once the soil was dried and actually beginning to crack, I used the sprayer with 1 part hydrogen peroxide to 3-4 parts water to fully saturate the top of the medium and kill these damned gnats. The sticky traps caught a lot of these buggers, I'd guess 15+gnats per trap and I ended up using six traps. I haven't even seen a single one flying around in a couple days so I think we got the infestation under control finally. I'm glad it looks like this has been resolved fairly early into flower; now the important part is to reintroduce microbes into the soil since the peroxide would have killed them for sure. I'm prepping some banana water this afternoon and will combine that with molasses and cal-mag to get some nutritional value back into the soil. In a few days, so during week 3 of flower, I'll be top-dressing these ladies for the final time before harvest. It's been one hell of a learning experience thus far and a great growing journey for my first photoperiods. We are nearly to the finish line, just have to stay on top of the few things they'll need over the next 5-ish weeks and we'll see what these already beautiful (and stinky) flowers can flourish into.
@Hempface86, Thank you! This is the worst I've had them yet as a newbie, hitting the leaves and soil with diluted hydrogen peroxide daily and will have sticky traps arriving today sometime. That should hopefully help me get a handle of it 😬