Watching the Northern Lights (First Grow, Automatic)

The seed came up from the soil on the 14th of April and refused to put its helmet down. I helped a little but damaged one of the little leafs. It was also time to move to a more closed envirenment because my new grow tent with the Spider Farmer SF 1000 just arrived.

After the initial small hiccups it seems that the plant is now thriving and accelerating in its growthrate. Time to lean back and let it do its thing (and of course dont forget to water her everytime the first inch of soil is dry).

As the plant kept growing faster and faster (and my tent space is pretty limited) I decided to try some LST. As she seems to show positive reaction I also started to defoliate a bit.

As she grew taller and taller every day, I felt the need to do some basic defoliation every now and then. Usually I adjusted the canopy using LST and then defoliated all leaves that grew over new nodes I wanted to keep. I did not cut any nodes as I want to Lollipop after the stretch. Speaking of the stretch it seems that she starts transitioning to flower on the last days of week 4

As I guessed she startet flowering as soon as we entered week 5. For now I keep doing the regular LST, defoliation and watering. I do not want to chance this system until around flowering week 3 where I want to Lollipop.

As she seems to have slowed down in stretching at the end of flowering week 2 I could not wait any longer and lollipopped the plant. I did not want to stress her out to much so I kept as many nodes as I could. It is my first grow and I still have to figure some things out. But for now I am really liking this so far.

Looking good so far. Went on vacation for 5 days and came back to some beautiful buds (last two pictures). Still some time to go but I doubt that I can withstand the temptation to harvest in the next 2-4 weeks (which would be a bit early).

The Plant seems to have stopped growing any further and even the buds have stopped growing any fatter. I think it is now time to just stand back and watch at the trichomes. I snipped a little test harvest at the start of the week because this bud was to close to the main cola and kind of interrupted any airflow there. I am a bit paranoid regarding the stories I was told about bud rot. But for now, everything seems alright 👌

It’s week 9 and I am thinking about harvesting. Trichomes look cloudy with a few amber ones starting to pop up. As I am going on vacation in two weeks and would love to get the plant dried up to this point I just took another tester bud to be 100% sure. Normally this strain takes about 11-13 weeks from seed to harvest and I know that I would be tremendously early but I prefer the lighter head high that harvesting just a little bit early can provide. Still not 100% sure though… You will see in the next update 😅

I decided to wait one more week and chop on the end of week 10. The Buds showed some nice frosty Trichomes and some clear signs of purpling. I had a pretty bad fungus gnat infestation at this point which got significantly worse during flushing. In the end I was giftet with nearly 50g of nice Buds which will be cured in Grove Bags for the next weeks. Overall a great first growing experience with little to no complications.