First grow: Gorilla Cookies Auto

HappySl4ppy 3 plants, 7 days in since they broke the surface. Coco / perlite. Doesn't grow very fast, plant #3 barely seems to have grown over the last 48 hours. Giving 1/3 of the recommended seedling dose of calmag, a & b components of the fertilizer and root booster. Feeding water comes out at 6ph and 250ppm. 2x 120w LED lights at 60cm above surface, at 50% dimmed. (approx 10k LUX through phone app with paper diffuser) Challenge #1: Whenever humidifier runs out of water humidity drops from 85% to 35%, this has happened every 2nd day for at least a few hours. Challenge #2: I planted in 20L / 5 gal bags immediately because I didn't want to transplant during my first grow, I am pretty sure the watering aspect would have been easier to manage if I would have used cups for now instead. When I was testing an automatic watering system with I overwatered the coco (1l of water per plant in one go) and the coco has been moist for the last 48 hours and also in areas where there are no roots. Also it wasn't enough to produce any run-off so the plants are just sitting in the same moisture for 2 days now, not sure this is great. Challenge #3: chatGPT told me at day 7 it's okay to crank up the light from 10k to 20k LUX but the leaves started yellowing a slight bit so I dialed it back to 10k LUX which should be okay.

HappySl4ppy Over the course of the last week I gruadually: - Increased the nute dosage from 250ppm to 800ppm. - Increased light from 200 PAR to 400 PAR It seems that the plants have responded well, they've made some good progress. Main challenge is maintaining humidity of 50% or more, intake & exhaust fans (350m3 / h & 150 m3 /h) are running on 20% capacity otherwise humidity drops below 50% even with my humidifier on full throttle. This week I should have a proper drain to waste system in place because I still haven't watered any of these 5 gal pots to run-off.

HappySl4ppy Didn't expect the plants to start smelling as early as week 3 but I already needed to connect the carbon filter this week. Installed automatic run-off system with pump and have watered these big 20L pots to run-off for the first time. Fertilizing @1000 ppm and increased watering volume to 1L / plant / 24 hours. The temperature in the tent dropped by 5 degrees C after fully saturating the coco with (fertilizer) water. Before it was 30-31 degrees in the tent, now it remains at 25-26 during lights on which is a welcome development. Also humidity became much easier to maintain around 60%. Got rid of the 3rd plant that was lagging behind because I won't have space for 3 plants in the tent either way. Started doing LST on the 2 remaining plants on day 18, plant #1 I'm pretty satisfied about plant #2 I think I bent at the wrong angle and also halfway dismembered the thickest branch, now I can't really bend it at all without it tearing off the stem. Also have defoliated the leaves that were overshadowing nodes but this was a very confusing process at first and I wanted to keep as many leaves as possible. Besides that the plants are looking healthy and a lot of progress has been made this week.

HappySl4ppy First half of the week has been mostly spent on LST and repositioning the stakes, second half of the week I let the plants grow out. I do notice that my plants complexities are quite short & stocky compared to some other diaries, which makes the LST a bit more difficult since the branches are thicker and shorter. Not sure what the reason for this is, let's see how it will progress. I'm only removing leaves when they're overshadowing other nodes, but the plants are growing new leaves vigorously so I'm clipping at least a few leaves every day. I also performed one more intensive defoliation and removed leaves at the bottom of the plant that were overshadowed and also a bunch of overlapping leaves in the centre of the plant, however when I checked the next morning it was as if I didn't remove anything. New leaves took up the space almost instantly. For whatever reason I decided to increase PH of the new fertigation mixture to 6.5 and a few hours after fertigating I noticed clawing and drooping leaves on plant #2. Posted a question on here and the consensus was mixed between overwatering (since my coco never comes close to being dry between watering) and nitrogen toxicity. Plant #1 wasn't affected as much as plant #2, but plant #1 still had shiny almost blue leave tips with very slight burn. Watered the coco to 30-40% run off with 5.8 PH water with 750ppm (instead of the previous 1000) and wanted to let the coco dry out, at least so that the top layer would become dry and paused the watering / fertigation. 2 days later the coco was still appearing as moist as usual, however I did notice that growth of the plants seemed to slow down and there were no light green areas / new growth anymore. So I resumed with fertigating once per day 1L per plant and after the first watering the plants lit up with light green new growth again. By this point I also checked the nutrient schedule of the nute provider and saw they recommended a PH between 5.5 and 6 as well as a max PPM of 900. So I was overfeeding @ 1000ppm the whole week before, and then also cranked PH 0.5 higher than recommended which the plants did not like at all. Seems that the damage is somewhat limited but that's probably because I spotted the negative changes just a few hours after fertigation.

HappySl4ppy Going strong, had to increase watering to 2l per plant per day split into 2 waterings since 1l / plant didn't produce any runoff anymore. 1000ppm. Started adding half dose of bloom nutes. In week 5 I was worries about overwatering / nitrogen toxicity so I watered at half dose without runoff, when I flushed at the end of week 5 PPM was at 2500PPM 😬. Plants did not show signs of stress then. Defoliated a lot since leaves kept shading other nodes and budsites. Still a bit confused what to do about smaller shoots at the top of the canopy.