Wedding Cake Autoflower - Barney's Farm

Seedlings are 7 days old today, 11 days from planting the seeds. They're showing significant above ground growth over the past couple of days. Notes from week one: 1. I managed to over feed the seedlings just a bit but I think I'm on track now. I'm using a nutrient schedule from growweedeasy.com but neglected to heed their watering schedule which calls for nutrients only every other watering (I was feeding every watering). Used a new TDS meter two days ago to check runoff against input and saw that PPMs in the runoff was greater than what I was putting in. MJ2 shows a bit of leaf tip discoloration likely due to my mistake and she also looks to be a tiny bit stunted compared to her sister. 2. I was probably over watering as well due to my unfamiliarity with growing in coco coir (is it wet or not?) I need to pay more attention to runoff volume. 3. Still learning how to stabilize temperature and humidity in their right ranges using the various controls I have over lights and fans and such. Our winter weather has been erratic, including a 60 degree change in temperature over a 24 hour period last week! I'm trying to keep the temperature in the 75 range and the humidity around 60.

Seedlings are 14 days old today, 18 days from planting the seeds. Much above ground growth last week! Notes from week two: 1. MJ2 (the plant on the right) is clearly stunted compared to her sister but appears to be otherwise healthy now that I've corrected the nutrients. I'm not sure how it is that, while I prepared the mediums for both pots the same way and while I've been watering both plants with the same amounts of the same nutrient solution, MJ2 showed stress while MJ1 looks quite healthy. 2. Runoff is showing higher PPMs for MJ1 than MJ2 which is likely a remnant of my overfeeding? 3. Over the course of the week I bumped up nutrients to early veg rates (600) and bumped up the lights (20 DLI). 4. This being my virgin grow and having already messed up once I'm inclined to just let these two grow naturally with minimal training, probably limited to SCROG.

Plants are 21 days from sprout. Notes from week 3: 1. Over the course of the week I bumped the light up to 30 DLI, will be increasing this week. 2. Started some gentle bending with the trellis net in order to get some light down to the lower branches. 3. I'm still seeing significant differences between the plants in the runoff TDS. The PPM for MJ1 (now on the right) is consistently higher than the input (by around 100-150 PPM) while the PPM for MJ2 is consistently lower (by around 50) than the input. Still no clue as to why this is the case. Nevertheless, both plants look pretty healthy to me.

These plants are 28 days from sprout. Notes from week 4: 1. I abandoned the trellis net. These girls are growing out as short and bushy. Had I topped them, or if they were more leggy plants they might have been more suitable for SCROG but I guess I don't have the experience to see how the net was helping much and it just interfered with watering. I'm just going to let them grow at this point. 2. I did do some light lollipopping and am thinking I'll do some defoliation up top once I more clearly see the bud sites. 3. Might be my imagination but this morning I think I see a few whispy white pistils on the main stem colas. 4. The runoff TDS from MJ2 has stabilized. Runoff TDS PPM from both plants is now running just a bit higher than the input. Both plants look full and healthy and at just 1/3 of the way through the grow I'm beginning to wonder if it was wise to attempt to grow two of these in my little 2 x 2 grow tent.

Plants are 35 days from sprout. Notes from week 5: 1. This was the first week of flowering and both plants grew so much that I had to reinstall the trellis net in order to bend the main stems under it to keep them from getting too close to the light, which I've now moved to the very top of the grow tent. Hopefully I can manage to keep the canopy at this level for the rest of the grow. Currently, the net is positioned about 12 inches from the light. 2. I'm continuing to do some light lollipopping and defoliation. 3. I'm beginning to realize that attempting to grow two plants, even smaller strains like this one, in this small 2x2x4 tent is stretching it. I'll probably stick with one plant for my next grow depending on how these two turn out. If I had grown only one plant and topped it and used LST more effectively I'm thinking I could just as easily have filled out the space these two are taking up while maintaining a more level canopy. Live and learn.

Notes from week 6: 1. I'm concerned about running out of room in this tent and am planning to finish one of the plants outside the tent if they get much bigger and I need to do so. I should have stuck to one plant as recommended. Oh well, live and learn. 2. Still following the "fertigation" watering/nute technique at cocoforcannabis.com. I've tried both once a day and twice a day watering and twice a day is the way to go as the watering volume (shooting for around 20% runoff) is much more predictable. MJ1's runoff TDS is running a bit high from watering only once a day and not getting the proper runoff volume. Twice a day watering from here on out whenever possible. 3. Had to do some rearranging in the tent last week and carelessly managed to snap the tip off the main stem on MJ2. A late topping, I suppose. She hasn't seemed to mind too much.

Seven weeks from sprout. Notes from week 7: Decided to abandon the 2x2x4 tent for a larger setup. The girls were just getting too large, both vertically and horizontally. I could have removed one from the tent and continued, but it's too cold outside still and I don't have a good location in the house to position it for enough direct sunlight. So I decided to upgrade to a larger 2x4x6 tent. An upgraded light should arrive today. I'm sure I would have been fine in the smaller tent if I had only heeded the recommendation to grow only one plant and had I been more aggressive with early LST. Oh well. The plants have plenty of room to spread out now and other that doing some additional defoliation and maybe spreading out some of the limbs to allow more light to the lower bud sites I'll probably just let these plants do their thing from here on out. On the bright side this has been a fun, though costly, learning experience.

Eight weeks since sprout. Notes from week 8: I'm looking for some theories as to why these two plants are looking so different. Some of it, maybe all of it, is my doing, but I'd like to understand why if more experienced growers have theories. Here's their history. The pics were taken yesterday, at the end of week 8 (week 4 of flower). I treated these plants exactly the same up until the larger one started needing more water (week 3). But I still feed them both the exact nutrient mix. One of the plants showed signs of water stress early in veg. I flushed both (yep, my nute mix was too strong) and the stressed plant recovered, though stunted. Her sister didn't miss a beat. At the end of week six I clumsily topped the same, stressed plant while pulling it out of tent. Again she recovered, but now it gets weird. After that topping, the smaller, stressed plant moved into flower overdrive. Today she's showing dark, fat sugar leaves with lots of trichomes and she seems to be a bit further into flower than her much larger sister with lighter and thinner sugar leaves. My theory is that she's tired of my abuse and decided that she'd best get to flowering and quick. But these plants look so different that I wonder how much was my doing and how much could have possibly been genetics?

Notes from week 9: I'm still amazed at how different these two plants of supposedly the same strain are turning out. MJ1 is 10 inches taller than MJ2 and the buds are very different. MJ2 has fat buds and fat sugar leaves. MJ1's buds look like they're not going to progress past popcorn size and the sugar leaves are much thinner. The demands of the fertigation watering technique - watering at least twice a day and measuring the runoff TDS and making adjustments based on that - has me thinking that I'm gonna try soil in my next grow.

Plants are ten weeks old from sprout. Notes for week 10: I'm ramping down the nutrient solution this week per the GH schedule. Keeping an eye now on the trichome development. MJ2 buds appear to be a bit ahead of her sister but both plants are still showing mostly clear trichomes. The watering needs of the two plants have stabilized. MJ1 now takes 26 ounces per feeding while MJ2 takes 18 (to achieve around a 20% runoff with watering twice daily).

Plants are 11 weeks from sprout. Notes from week 11: Lowered nutrient levels this week per schedule. Buds are finally filling out on MJ1. Trichomes on buds on both plants turning from clear to cloudy, but no amber yet. Starting the flush today with anticipated harvest in 7 days.

Notes from week 12 Chopped the two plants yesterday on day 84. Trimmed most of the fan leaves and now have the plants hanging to dry in my 2x4. The humidity is low here right now so I'm supplementing with a humidifier to try to slow the drying process. So many lessons were learned during this grow... Re the fertigation protocol I used through this grow: My next grow is going to be in a soil prepared myself and unless it's a complete disaster it's unlikely I'll go with the fertigation protocol again, mainly because it's so time consuming to both prepare the nutrient mix and then to water, twice daily, checking the runoff TDS each time. Also, I'm not sold on the science behind the protocol itself. I religiously checked and recorded the runoff PPM each watering and made adjustments when necessary based on the readings. I flushed the plants for the last week, with two waterings of 80 PPM tap water daily and the runoff PPM never dropped below 400 (?) If the water being input is actually replacing the water in the media then I don't get at all why the runoff PPM remained so high after 14 tap water inputs. The plants did seem to respond to the lack of nutrients with yellow leaves. Also, I know now not to be greedy and attempt to grow more plants than the grow space allows. I started this grow with the idea I'd be able to grow two plants in a 2x2 but had to abandon that plan and move them into a 2x4 as they grew larger. Looking forward to my next grow when I can use training techniques to spread the plants out for increased yield. I won't know the actual yield of this grow until after drying of course, but just eyeballing the hanging plants I think I'll be pleased. These two plants of the same strain were so very different! More experienced growers say that's almost surely due to genetics but I'm not so sure that some mistakes I made during the grow didn't influence the results. Really excited to see what I ended up with after drying and curing! Update: Dry weight over 6.5 oz from the two plants.