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Soaked in tap water for 24h, then kept in moist paper towel in a dark place for another 24-28h. By then the seedling had a ~3cm long taproot.
No pictures taken.
A type of LST (at least as far as I'm concerned :D) was applied in the shape of a breeze fan, which softly but relentlessly pushed the gentle seedling back and forth. Applied with intervals for plant rest.
LED was set to PPFD around 350 µmol/m²/s using an extrapolating calculator based on provided factory light calibration, resulting in 35cm distance and 30% power setting.
Soil moisture kept at 40–60% usually 45–55%.
Began feeding 1/4 nutrient solution from day 5.
- The plant looks very healthy and eager as far as I can tell!
- Switched to 1/2 nutrient solution in the middle of the 2nd week.
- Solution pH confirmed at 6.5 👌🏽
- Increased PPFD to 550 µmol/m²/s in the middle of the 2nd week, gradually upping by +50 µmol/m²/s per day, closely monitoring plant response. Aiming at 650-700 for now.
- Extended light cycle from 18/6 to 20/4 in the beginning of the week, following plant's good response to light and current nutrient solution.
- Breeze fan adjusted not to overstress the gentle young trunk with huge leaves (relative to trunk thickness).
- Have not started Kinbaku yet, continuing to flex and strengthen the main trunk using the breeze fan.
Will be trying to find comfortable upper limits for PPFD and nutrients.
Fimed the lady at the beginning of 3rd week, she looked super healthy to me at 13 cm tall with 4 distinct nodes.
Will see how good of a job I did :)
PPFD is around 850 currently.
Began LST bending and guiding in the second half of the week. Aiming for multiple colas evenly distributed through a ScrOG net.
Transitioned to 3/3/3 ml/l nutrient dose two days after fiming.
By the end of the week she was about 20 cm tall.
Any feedback and / or suggestions on improving my FIMing technique 🎋 are welcome! Beginning of week 3.
For the next week (FIM recovery) should I keep adding Micro (2-0-0)? I’ve seen suggestions to ease off on Nitrogen for a week, but the bottles say always use all three parts
Hello tang1e,
The FIM looks great!
No, don't change the amount of nutrients. Your plant is healthy so you are giving the right amount. The FIM does not change anything about the nutrients intake from your plant.
Happy Growing Buddy! 💚
Switched to full nutrient dosage at the beginning of the week. The plant seems happy and has grown a lot of young branches from nodes all over.
Top leaves are curling up slightly. Currently adjusting PPFD by reducing LED power and adjusting lamp distance. Hoping to find a sweet spot where she takes as much light as she can without being stressed.
Actively training established branches, aiming for even radial distribution of nodes and, eventually, tops, through the ScrOG net, which she is now touching.
Clipped two FIM-damaged fan leaves (not sure if this was a good move or not).
Added some CO2.
Tucking, tucking and more tucking — as if I'm Bliss Tucker 😼🙌
First grow. Looking at FIM results I'm super confused!
It looks like if I had waited for the next segment to emerge and topped it (pics), I would get the same 4 branches (potential colas) AND 4 fan leaves which I have lost now due to FIM?
Did FIM benefit here at all vs Topping?
Excellent question! Short answer: Stoner science 😋
Long answer:
You could just train the plant and expose the side branches to get same results + the extra leaves like you mentioned.
The same goes for topping, where you can just train the plant, expose the side-suckers to the light (normally they get shaded by the main top, while forcing the top growth downwards.
By limiting light exposure to the main top-growth and force it downwards you let more light hit the suckers, who will start growing and develop to 2x new tops, while the original top grows horisontally and develops 2 new suckers and the process goes on until you have enough colas and switch to 12/12 light.
Example: growdiaries.com/diaries/191839-barney-039-s-farm-dos-si-dos-33-grow-journal-by-malumprohibitum/week/1105741
Hope it helps! 👍😉 --Good luck!
She's a very bushy plant! At about 25cm high (20 under the screen), she's already occupying about 50% of net area.
I'll try to add a photo of the stem later. It's quite tight and leafy there right now.
Added 4 x 12W strips with blue and red LEDs, currently running at 28W total. Purpose: transmit light energy to "undergrowth" and scrog-tucked fans.
Spotted first tiny stigmas on some sites at day 30. Yay!
For a better yield, should I aggressively (but gently) bend main leading branches and tuck all shading fans to expose young 'undergrowth' branches (circled) and bud sites to light, or, inversely, untuck fans and straighten leading branches to give more light energy to them?
surface area is the key. if you make more holes in the canopy and more light passes through the plant without hitting a leaf, it is a net-negative.
ATP, the primary product of photosynthesis, is highly mobile. Apical dominance dictates where it is used, and not dictated by where it was produced. It goes from the leaves into the phloem for use when not stored. where the light hits does not dictate where the sugars will be used.
there's other reasons to try to reduced proportion of larf and this or that, but in the end it mainly just reduces yield, which is fine if you have no use for larf. I don't do extracts so i try to lolipop the trash at bottom. i try to have a good understanding of how deep my plants produce good buds and stick within that range. Sounds counter-intuitive but try to stick to 2.5-3 colas per sq ft. you'll minimize larf and get awesome light penetration too without any effort while still have a solid canopy with no gaps as it fills out. If you want less trash buds, that's the best way to go.
Flowering technically started somewhere around Tuesday/Wednesday previous week.
Started conservative defoliation, mainly of nute-solution-burned, yellowing or otherwise unhealthy leaves. Also visually checked light penetration and leaf exposure. Most of the time there was strong correlation between me thinking that the leaf does not get enough light and it being yellow or drying upon close inspection.
The canopy fills almost the entire scrog net. 3-4 days to reach the very corners of the box, and it will be intercepting almost 100% of top-down light.
I don't think I want to cull her colas. There are probably too many for this size of tent (around 20? more? who knows — it looks like a fucking savanna tree now 😆). I've taken the risk with FIMming, and I definitely do not want to stress her any more. Popcorn? I'm fine. Medicine is medicine.
Did some light lollipopping.
28W total undergrowth blurples seem to be liked by the plant, so she turned a lot of level -1 and below leaves towards the side light. I tried to make a reasonable judgement of which leaves below the top canopy (below the scrog net) are not getting enough light and removed those, as well as any signs of new branch growth which sometimes started popping from some of level 1 - 3 nodes with already existing thick as fuck branches on that node.
Also clipped a few underexposed weak and thin bud branches. Decided to keep others still, want to see how they turn out. Plus, I don't mind popcorn buds. Medicine is medicine, and if it gets the job done well, I don't care if it's fluffy or not :)
Off to a good start this week!
Trying to feel for how much light she can take without stressing.
Day 50: The buds are starting to get sticky. The smell has intensified since last week.
I'm continuing to remove yellowing leaves, or those that are not getting significant light exposure.
Added Bud Factor X to the nutrient regimen.
Experimenting with additional bottom-up lighting. This gets inside temp even higher, and causes other cascading results (humidity etc), but manageable so far.
Moved the scrog net much lower, so now it pushes at branch base, if at all. Most of the plant is already formed into a uniform shape and stays like this even without the net. Since this is my first grow, I am learning as I go, and I did a couple of stupid things with canopy management early on, and probably disturbed the plant more that I would prefer to when fixing those mistakes and re-directing branches.
Continuing to trim yellowing fans, esp. those blocking circulation breeze flow. Continuing to trim young branches (lollipopping, essentially), because I definitely don't want new colas developing now. There are too many already, according to common wisdom.
Make suer to look at more than just the top colas. Ignore the trichomes on the leaves. I don't see much amber. Though i see a lot more 'plastic' than 'glass' (glassy being less ripe). I'd lean toward waiting longer but each to their own.
60d for an auto would be quite fast. Double check the lower bud sites.. if they aren't plump give it more time or consider cutting the tops off and letting the rest cook a bit longer.
She's very close to harvest.
Still waiting for an ordered magnifier to arrive, so difficult to tell for sure if trichs are cloudy enough already.
In the meantime, I will flush and prepare for drying.
Upd: Purchased Apexel 200x clip-on phone lens (with CPL), works exceptionally well! Positioned it over the 1x lens, no digital magnification applied.
If you have relatively steady hands and image stabilization in your phone, handheld trichome inspection is no problem at all. For hard to reach areas, take a video and review later.
With no prior growing experience, I started flushing a bit early (previous week) and kept monitoring pistils and trichomes, which still didn't seem milky enough compared to what I see in harvest timing guides online.
At the end of last week I felt like she's not ready yet since only about half of the pistils were brown/orange, the rest were still almost white. I decided to keep her flowering for at least one more week, and fed her a proper flowering solution once at the end of last week to boost cannabinoid production and growth a bit more, and then went back to flushing again.
Not sure if that move made any sense, I saw it as one more meal :)
Harvest time has come.
It is difficult to kill a plant I have been raising so lovingly and with a lot of care as a wonderful living being that she is (and we all are as One).
I even stayed up all night once to do a slow full 3x flush of the soil with emergency pH correction and buffering when I finally received the meters and looked at runoff values. It was almost like manually pumping a blood transfusion for a patient overnight.
The idea to grow indoors came as a lightning and almost by a random chance. It was, of course, a synchronicity of a high order, because that flash coincided precisely with a rare moment where I had a small window of time to collect seeds of my choice in person and transport them safely and very quickly. And get extremely helpful advice from a moderately experienced grower, who helped me avoid self-taught rookie mistakes and pick an almost perfect setup for my purposes. Many steps I have learned only when it was time to take them, and since there's only so much I can do in a day, I got to some procedures like instrumentally checking salt buildup and substrate pH pretty late. I did monitor her leaves from the get-go, so leaving aside a light nute / photon burn of the tips, I think it went pretty well. Definitely better than I would have imagined!
I wanted to do a small sitting meditation beside the plant before cutting her to dry. Wanted to thank the plant for this majestic experience and the healing power of gardening and caring for a plant on top of the medicinal values of cured buds and edibles we made along the way from trimmed fans. Those were unexpectedly strong and pleasantly smoooth. Wanted to tell her that I will miss her and remember her fondly, especially since she is my first full successful grow. The first time is always an unforgettable experience. Wanted to tell her that I do not want to kill her, and it was painful for me to FIM and shape her.
A sitting meditation turned into a dynamic meditation when I started removing light gear and feeding system and cleaning the grow space in preparation for drying.
Pretty quickly I noticed that I have a very real feeling of experiencing light- to medium-dose mushroom trip. I had vaped some 50/50 hybrid street bud half an hour earlier, but it was a very modest dose — shout out to TinyMight, you guys are amazing! — but no psychedelics. At that moment I felt that I don't need to say anything to the plant, because we are one and she had known my every feeling and intention from the start.
And then I realized that what I had considered to be a sombre event, is just a transformation for the plant, it's next manifestation. Having lived as a plant, she will now transform into happy and healing experiences of those who will enjoy her flowers.
This plant has supported me and helped me heal deep trauma and depression at least twice in my life over a period of a few months on each occasion. In between those healing periods it was just a get high and enjoy shit because why not kind of thing, and it didn't have any long lasting psychological effect at all, in stark contrast to classical psychedelics (LSD, shrooms, DMT etc). During those non-healing periods I didn't even have an urge to smoke all that often. I could easily not touch the stuff for a couple of months straight. My yearly consumption was in low single digit grams. Sometimes I felt that I did not enjoy the effect at all, it was slightly unpleasant even. Why would I want to blur my crisp perception to a gooey marshmallow state of cannabinoid high and scattered attention?
But when it is time to do some inner work — and you cannot miss this feeling if you strive to tune into your inner state — god, is it a POWERFUL plant!
I am very happy and humbled to be a conduit for this energy by caring for the plants and raising them.
I respect this plant very deeply.
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Split her into thee parts by leaving only a few nodes creating the outer layer of colas on each level and effectively "topping" her a couple of levels above (or below, technically, now that she's upside down) and this creating a new drying layer/level.
Tried wet trimming and I think I liked it. Will try to complete it in the next 1-2 days if I decide to go ahead with the idea.
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After drying for 7 days, I stabilized humidity at 60-62% for 4 hours and then chopped off buds (trimmed in batches during the first 3 days of drying), weighed and packed into glass jars for curing. Literally packed, because she yielded over 4 litres of dried trimmed bud (I think it was 4.5l) weighing 267g.
WOW. I did not expect that on my first run I will be able to grow so much potent medicine. A lot of it is fluffy, but can be easily pressed denser, if storage or appearance are a concern. In fact, I had to press the buds slightly to make it all fit in two 2-litre jars.
Thank you to everyone who helped me along the way and thank you for your warm wishes!
And thank you — the One reading this right now.
tangie
