Blewitberry Auto

This is my first real grow, discounting a slightly successful attempt at White Widow in an Aerogarden. I almost threw that one out, but stuck what little there was in a ziploc to cure for a few months. Looked like trim room floor sweepings, but when smoked actually feels really nice for maybe a half hour. AC Infinity self-watering trays AC Infinity Cloudforge T3 Fox Farm Ocean Forest Great White Mycorrhyzae General Hydroponics Cal/Mag ILGM Flowertime (just a little at the end) Water: mostly distilled, with some supplemental filtered Austin tap water Germination: under wet paper towel in a ziploc Sprouted in plastic cup, transplanted to 5gal Soil prepared by adding a thin layer of soil, sprinkling with GrowDots, repeating, up to about 5" from the top of the bag. Made a large depression in soil and filled with unamended Ocean Forest and the seedling. This grow started off rocky, got much better, then kinda went off the rails (possibly, haven't harvested yet). First seed germinated great, transplanted with no problems, but suddenly stopped growing after a couple of days. Thus I learned about those little gnats buzzing around my soil bag. I fought them with diluted peroxide for a while, but gave up on that and ordered nematodes. Gnats solved, but the seedling was gone from just below the surface. Germinated the second of my three seeds, and all went well until flower, when the big fan leaves got very rusty very quickly. Seemed clearly to be Ca deficiency, so I added some CalMag and mycorrhyzae to help get it into the plant. There was some improvement, but I was still worried, so I added some filtered tap water. Our water is pretty alkaline from the tap, but it has plenty of minerals. I top-watered a liter of the filtered tap to raise the pH a little (no way to test the soil pH, and my Vivosun pH stick seems to be borked, so I didn't bother trying to make a tea to test) because I suspected that the combo of 7.0 distilled water plus the nutes might be dropping it too low for efficient ingestion. After this, the new sugar leaves coming in were looking good, and the spread of the rust seemed to stop. During this fear of losing all my leaves, I added the second light at about 50% power, shining up from the floor. I figured I'd squeeze what energy out of them I could before they fell off, and I watched Dr. Bugbee's talk with Scotty Grows saying that if you keep them cool, watered, and fed you can't really give them too much light, as long as they are not right up against the light where the IR will burn them, so I've left the second light in place. A couple of days ago, I started seeing rust on sugar leaves, so I gave it some more CalMag and filtered tap water. Crossing fingers. As of this writing, I think I'm at the end of week 8. The leaves are looking ragged, but the buds look pretty decent.