Virgin Sour Widow Grow

This was an awesome experience and would not have been able to get to harvest without the support of the growdiaries community. This was my first grow ever and the focus was on learning the basics. Already seeing benefits in subsequent attempts. Because this was such a learning experience I'll focus on the mistakes I made and the lessons learnt. 1. Starting with a bad soil mix - Advice to other newbies: start with a professional mix that is proven in you local community 2. Not controlling Ph in early stages - Advice to other newbies: Get a digital ph meter and test the water (including after adding nutrients), and adjust accordingly - I use 3. Overwatering - It was really hard to find a recipe that works. Advice: Seedlings (up to 2weeks) should get low water (<30ml/per day), for larger plants (assuming fabric pots with aerated substrate, preferably proven mixes) wait until the medium dries (at least two knuckles - or wait until plant leaf and stems starts drooping) before watering again and then saturate the medium until there is a runoff (test the ph of the runoff as well) 4. Bad containers - High risk transplant (not recommended for autos) helped. Better to use fabric pots at the start and never transplant plant autos 5. Underestimating the light requirements - After I started supplementing 7hours direct , 5 hours shade sunlight with CFLs (500W for 28K lumens) at night I saw pretty big boost during veg - as result of these early mistakes early growth was stunted and my white widows died early. Fixing these gave me the foundation to get a decent harvest after taking the impact of early mistakes into account Important lessons learnt later: 1. Don't let pests get out of control. Powdery mold became an issue later in plant life cycle but I also had to deal with leaf miners, aphids and snails. In future Diatomaceous earth will be a standard inclusion with preventative Neem oil during veg and spot fixes to deal with specific issues that crop up quickly. Also be aware that puppy induced damping is a thing :) 2. Low stress training makes a huge impact. For this grow I held back on this because I needed to learn the basics first. As a result I found that lower buds were under developed and larfy (but will be using for cooking). Good training (and better light penetration) can help a lot with this 3. Boveda bags help regulate humidity during curing 4. Microscope was a luxury but one that I would never grow without again. 5. Hydrogen peroxide wash can help to eliminate light powdery mildew infections that reach buds - This is well worth watching: https://vimeo.com/275728566 (Jorge Cervantes demonstrates peroxide wash) - This had less of an impact on this grow, but after washing the buds of my other grow I'm sold 100%, after a wash the bud is sparkling and I've not detected any harmful impact. I started the grow in January (southern hemisphere) to test the idea that it will be possible to get do multiple harvests with auto flowers in period from first planting in September to finishing final grow in late May. The experiment was successful, but in future I will split my resources differently: A couple of photo period plants outside, then cycle through a couple of auto flower harvests in a grow tent with LED lights. The highlights: 1. I had no idea that the growing cannabis could be such a fascinating hobby (I started growing because I wanted better quality bud for a lower price, I'll keep at it because it's so damn interesting) 2. The amazing support I got from the grow diaries community. Special thanks to: - @bbird, your diary helped me formulate the basic idea of how to approach the problem - @DinafemSeeds, Mark your feedback, encouragement and inside knowledge helped so much when I simply had no idea what to expect - @Mrs_Larimar, thank with detailed, specific and actionable feedback to my questions. It's great to see a master at work :) - @Quexos, thanks so much for all the support, knowledge and encouragement. I've really enjoyed our conversations and your wisdom and quick turnaround on questions helped me so much! 3. Dinafem seeds are amazing! I've had 100% success rate with germination and the strong genetics helped the plants to survive everything that myself and the environment threw at them whilst producing sticky, tasty bud :) 3. Lighting up my first home grown joint!