Bubba's Gift 2nd

She is still growing strong. As you can see from photos, she has grown to the edge of the bucket this week, which is great. Soon bucket will be completely shaded and nute temps will be a bit lower. Which will be great :) I also did some defoliation this week, basically just plucked suckers on bottom leaves and trimmed away first and second set of leaves since they were in complete shade. You can't see it on the photos, but underneath the big fan leaves she is quite naked. :) I _feel_ that taking leaves away spurred more vigorous growth, but it's just a feeling. So she has been sitting in the same nutes solution for two weeks now. First nutes (weeks 1, 2, 3) had benes in them, this batch was benes free. No weird brown colored water. As you can see from photos, the brown stuff from beginning of the grow did not leave any color on the roots. They are white and shiny, they are firm, they look very healthy. I decided to change nutes today, and I mixed a batch with benes added, pH'd it, let it sit to dissolve nutes and get constant pH, then it was time to open DWC bucket. Nutes solution in DWC bucket was (almost) clear. It had a bit of earthy smell, but no slime, weird color in weird smell. When I opened the bucked, I noticed some brown clumps on the bottom of the bucket. At first it scared the shit out of me, because I thought that slime is back at this early stage. But after close inspection the brown stuff just laid on the bottom, not clinging to anything (neither the bucket, tubing, airstone or roots). Again, this is just my feeling, but I think this indicates that my benes worked as advertised. I think the brown stuff was microorganisms, that couldn't survive in the nutes. Either part of my benes died off (no biggie, since I can add them at will), or some other microbes were killed off by my benes. I like the second option more, so I'm gonna go with benes killing brown slime and keeping my plant roots nice and healthy. So I decided to add benes to the fresh batch of nutes as well. Again it turned nutes brown (nasty looking weird brown), but since I _think_ it did more good than bad last time, I'm OK with sampling brown nutes for a week or two. I actually feel I'm in change of brown slime now, not just fire-fighting it where it pops up. You can also see on the photos that she got her first haircut! Yes, after 5th or 6th set of leaves I took the top of, and you can see four new branches growing where one used to be. These 4 will be allowed to grow vertically for a while, but after second topping SCROG net will keep all new growth on the same level.