Northern Lights Fem

The grow is now complete!! I took out the clippers yesterday and chopped her down! What a grow!! I am so impressed with how this plant performed. Overall definitely my most successful grow in terms of outcome meeting my expectations. Everything went exactly as planned and the results look very impressive. Now the hard part of drying and curing begins. It’s going to be a challenge to keep these fat buds from molding! Weight Update: after drying for 8 days and stems removed, the harvest weights in at 193 grams, 6.9 oz. I’m very happy with that. The organic plant is about 1 oz. The grow summary: vegged for 5 weeks and flowered for 69 days! Fed with General hydro nutes along the way, adjusting the feeding schedule as needed. I have to give a huge compliment to cocoforcannabis.com, as I followed the feeding schedule and methods that Dr. Coco has formulated (I can’t take any credit) and believe this was a big part of my success as his info seems to be spot on. I’ve posted a picture of his feeding schedule. The setup: The automatic watering system was a dream for the most part. Mixed 5 gallons of nutes every 5 - 7 days, dumped it in the bucked and the pump on a timer did its job. The pump would run be the run-off would drop down into a low profile, under bed storage bin. This worked really well, I scooped out any excess water as and when I needed. It also helped keep the humidity up towards the end. The pump started to struggle at the end because I never cleaned it, so this affected the flow at the very end, luckily it didn’t cause any harm to the plant. I flushed generously for 4 days hand watering until the run-off ppm was steadily 250 - 300, then didn’t give anything 3 days before the chop. The setup: the grow tent did what it needed to, the LED lights worked great (again), and my extraction fan and simple humidifier (fogger in a bucket of water with a fan) really helped keep the ideal conditions in the tent and could be adjusted with ease as the grow progressed. The medium: I have a new appreciation for coco/perlite mix. The difference in vegging time is undeniable that coco is very forgiving and much quicker than soil/peat mixes. I would love to figure out how to do organic nutes in coco on automatic watering cycle but that’s my next challenge. The experiment: I started this grow to compare growth in soil with organic nutes vs coco with regular nutes to compare outcome. In veg the coco was a much faster grower, leading to less training on the organic. The organic was significantly smaller than the reg. due to the fact I wanted to be as hands off as possible, with not mixing nutes every time I needed to water. This led to the organic performing way worse. It’s not a fair comparison in the end as the organic got much less attention than needed but same amount as regular. Conclusion: regular nutes work great and with auto system will perform well. Organic needs more attention to perform well with regular nute mixing and more monitoring on watering schedule. The plants: the Northern Light from Royal Queen Seeds performed beautifully. Very vigorous growth, quick flowering, not very demanding and easy to train. The smell was very light, which is what I needed after a few very skunky grows. There is definitely a nice floral smell to the plant but not the tell tale MJ/skunky smell. I didn’t notice how purple the leaves were until I chopped. I was always looking while the LED lights were on which hides the colour, so this was a cool surprise. The buds are so thick and heavy, tons of crystals and some neat purple showing in the bud. The initial trimming was very easy, it wasn’t too bushy so initial trim was a breeze. Had no issues with bud rot, everything went very smoothly, I did notice a few nanners here and there but nothing to be concerned about. Also saw some foxtails starting but in the end these just made the buds fatter!! After two days of hanging, wet weight is 689 grams, estimating trimmed dry yield around 4.5 oz! I could have flowered for another week to mature more. I saw a handful of Amber tricombs but this will spend a long time curing which will make up for it. Will 100% grow this strain again! By the looks of the buds, it’ll be a heavy yield so I might not need to grow again for quite a while (or I need more friends to share with)! Thank you for following along and reading this lengthy post. Cheers! The smoke: very easy smoke. The taste is musty and very kushy. Solid body buzz, nice and chill / relaxing feeling. Not much happening in my head that’s for sure! Great night time smoke