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Both plants sprouted after a couple of days. One plant immediately had some pretty fast growth and stretched towards the light. The other plant sprouted somewhat tall, but the leaves haven't emerged yet. This plant is likely going to be stunted and a slower growing plant, so depending on the growth over the next couple weeks, I may decide to cull this plant. Seeing that the leaves haven't gone out yet, but the seedling is somewhat tall, I assumed the par was too low. I don't have a par meter but I have the PPFD chart from Vivosun's website. Using the chart, I moved up to ~170 PPFD to encourage a bushier plant and to stop stretching. Humidity has been between 45-60% and temps have been between 70-78°F. Watering has been using a small cup to create an upside-down dome of moist water since I am using 5 gallon pots from the beginning. As the plants grow I will increase the amount of water used as well as the diameter of the dome's base until I am watering the entire pot.
This week was solid, had 1-2 days of LST to encourage a stronger main stem since I plan to mainline. VPD was one of my main focuses for the week. As a new grower I don't expect to have this perfect, but given the low humidity in the area I'm in (15-30% RH), my humidifier was working almost constantly. I am really happy with the continuous humidity adjustments that the humidifier enables. With temps in the tent hanging around 74°F and RH levels averaging 67 I'm maintaining a VPD level I am pretty happy with. While it isn't in the perfect early veg area of most VPD graphs, it is pretty close. The daytime VPD level is really good, but I struggle to keep humidity levels down during the night. I am starting to run lower settings on the humidifier during the night when I can, but I'd like to be at a point where I don't have to touch the humidifier levels day-to-day. It could be more consistent when there is more biomass in the environment, but we'll find out... Ph was also lowered due to my wonderful tap water's natural 9Ph. I also started to add a small amount of silica from Ventana while letting the plants eat the fox farms ocean forest they were planted in. Most importantly, I named the two plants. Marilyn (plant #1) is still the faster growing of the two with larger leaves. Janet (plant #2) is still doing well, she's just not growing as fast as her sister.
A ton of growth this week from Marilyn. Janet is growing good, but she's definitely got closer stacked nodes. I took a pretty hands-off approach this week. I turned up the fan so the ladies are dancing a little bit and kept an eye on the environment. Dialed in the over-night humidity problem after realizing that transpiration exists. For the next week I plan to keep my eye out for any deficiencies or general problems while scouting the nodes for mainlining sites. I think my light was too high as the leaves are curling a little, but I think that the problem will work itself out as the plant grows.
Training, Training, and even more training this week. Janet was simply topped with a bit of LST to encourage a better structure in the future. Marilyn was trained a lot more. She was topped and LST'd to create a manifold for the main-line. Once she recovered and grew a bit more she was topped yet again to create even more mains. She is now at 4 main colas. After each topping, both plants had foliage removed from below the main-cola "sites" to encourage more energy to be sent to each main. Some larger fan leaves were left on to allow the plant to still collect light.
I'm taking two different approaches with Janet and Marilyn. Marilyn is getting mainlined and topped frequently with heavy LST. Janet is getting much less HST, she's been topped once, but is mainly getting bent as a "safer" training method. I am still very new to growing, so I'm trying different methods to see what I like the best. This tent is a sort of testing project to see what I want to do with my larger tent. Furthermore, the height limitations require a lot of LST to prevent unwanted height gain. I want to encourage horizontal growth as much as possible before flipping to flower. I do plan to use a scrog net, but I would rather have that net support colas instead of being used to bend branches due to a lack of early horizontal growth. I am willing to spend more time in veg to achieve this. I'm currently planning on getting Marilyn to 8-16 mains before flipping to flower. Janet will use different training methods to follow Marilyn's growth.
As for environment, the light is being turned up slowly. This has increased the tent's average temperature and lowering humidity as a result. The VPD of the tent is not ideal, but is good enough for now. I understand chasing VPD is ideal, but I don't think yield will suffer significantly enough to warrant micromanaging the tent and risking volatility in environment. The tents are starting to have a plant stench, and the leaves do have a hint of a funky smell, but you really have to be looking to find it.
Dystx
