okay, here we find ourselves starting week 4 of the flowering stage and surprise there's not much out of the ordinary going on, i would usually do a heavy defoliation at this time, but the way they are trellised or staked, if you will, has pretty much trained the already ideal morphology of these plants into 3 "rings", the outer ring is where the major bowers reside and these are tucked all the way to the outside, the second ring it tucked once and houses the secondary growth from the major bowers and finally the sanctum sanctorum which constitutes the open middle and lower shoots from the major colas as well as vigorous stragglers from the maristem pushing into the light. of course the lower and middle growth is considerably behind the primary growth but accessing full light and filling in fairly well. i usually go wild with net trellises, super-cropping any "proud" shoots and laying them on the net and by the time i cut them down it looks like an amazing spider-man cover by mcfarlane and frankly i'm getting a little weary of it which is why im trying new low-maintenance training options...so far im pleased as usually id have filled a plastic shopping bag with fan leaves every week but still havent filled a single one yet and the lack of rough treatment has cut down on micro-deficiencies that develop during a plant's recovery from stressful heavy defoliation...every amputated growth of foliage leaves an open wound for the plant to redirect it's attention away from stacking flowers, allocating needed nutrients away from photosynthesis and moving around mobile nutrients unnecessarily. im one of those people who push the plants as far or further than they can go and always, always, ALWAYS eventually end up with tip-burnt leaves completely but the leaves are quite lush and lean towards shiny, instead of nipping the leaves off like a madman with a pathological fixation on removing leaves that cast shade on other lower leaves, this trellis allows me to "tuck" offensive inward-growing fans to the outer rings..enough about that. i'm cutting back nitrogen part of the masterblend and maintaining a masterblend feeding followed by a sensi calmagxtra feeding, i cut the masterblend to half nitrogen during the stretch which is coming to a stall as the colas start to set bud and even begin stacking. while these two phenotypes are mostly similar in the major categories (morphology, structure, vigor, stem scent, flower appearance/size) the second phenotype is roughly 6" shorter than the #1, has a thicker main stem and has started to blanket the baby golfball nuggets and surrounding sugar leaves with trichome production. only "issue" with the grow is i'm noticing a lot of humidity build up during the night cycle, my exhaust fan's seal keeps slipping and its just a matter of time before i build up a new seal with my aluminum tape repairs, aside from that some inlets would aid its moisture balance (currently i have an 8" inline exhausting directly into a carbon filter with pre-filter on the inside and even on the minimum cfm it creates a large negative vacuume and without a complimentary amount of input venting it's just sucking out the volume of atmospheric gases present and while off the tent slowly "inhales" through the few gaps i've missed.
thoughts: ive grown many plants with similar genetics, i feel like this cultivar will turn out like 99% of "kine" bud
, that is to say, og kush hit with the flavor of the month...good grower will make it dank, unskilled grower will come out with good mids...maybe im getting black-pilled on strains but i hope to god something shakes up this game soon...maybe it's time to detox and get my tolerance back to bubblegum-popping level
@Hempface86, same thing happened with "king's banner f2" from this same genetics company, and needless to say it was also straight fire herb, aside from the "gamma berries" ive tried from dark horse, they have all been top-shelf kind bud. cheers!
a final thought: from this run i can honestly say that yields were in line with those from previous scrog-type runs and resulted in less larf and more nugs, i feel, because they were just left alone to set bud early and start stacking without being weaved into a trellis net, i kept good airflow to the underskirts so my hand's off approach to defoliation of only removing visibly dead leaves had no adverse side effects. at the end of the day this marshydro sp-250 pulling 300 watts from the wall can only flower out 9-12 ounces regardless of training methods...i knew that light was the prime element in a grow but confirmation is always nice to have.