Gorilla Glue (Fastbuds)+ Quantum Boards

Day 42 - Plants are still recovering from the nutrient build-up catastrophe but are at least now showing signs of growth, and have stopped wilting. The next feed will be flowering nutrients: this is overdue but the whole flush disaster put off the nutrient change while I attempted to stabilise the pot environment. The plants are between 35cm and 57cm, with four of them being close to 48cm. Day 43 - Half way through day 42 light cycle I tried setting the grow room air system to recycling mode, by taking the ducting to the ceiling space off the Y joiner between the two tents. This allowed the carbon filtered air from the tents to flow back into the room and thusly back into the tents. Given winter is coming fast I wanted to see how the heat retention would be and what sort of humidity increase I could expect. I came back to a fairly warm, humd room at the start of Day 43 light cycle, and some very wilty unhappy plants. They perked up around 3 hours into the light cycle. It seems easy to assume it was the air quality change, the humidity did climb from around 65-70 to 80-85, but I don't have enough experience to know if its humidity or some lingering issue with the pot nutrient build up and final flush 4 days ago (as the wilt is identical to the wilting I got during the nutrient build-up). I am tempted to give the plants their well overdue flowering feed, but the pots are still pretty damp and feel quite heavy, like around 1/3 to 1/2 still full. They did get an almighty amount of water over 3 days during the flush (4 days ago), and my gut feeling is I should let them dry more before giving them more water and nutrients. As hard as it is, I'm going to hold back on feeding until them pots are drier. I will continue to battle on with this grow, although I must admit, part of me feels like just starting over. Luckily I have my second tent, so I am ok-ish to just keep-on keeping on with this grow and see where it goes. On the good side, I've managed since re-ducting back out to the roof space and tweaking the heater setup to get a constant 26c in both tents. The tent humidity is still around 70%, while the grow room humidity is around 60%. I have the extraction fan on full (198m3/hr), and the heater is shut-off as local ambient temp is around 19c so I don't need it turned on as the grow light produces sufficient heat to keep the tent air at 27c. I idly wonder if the high humidity from the recycling experiment temporarily stopped the plants transpiring, and that this caused the wilting, and now the 10% higher humidity in the tent is the result of them transpiring like mad to catch up. Here's hoping they suck that moisture out of the coco over the rest of the light cycle and get the pots dry enough to water, all without any further wilting. Crossing my fingers. I've just noticed while taking the photos that if I turn down the quantum boards to half power I get better photos that are showing a more true to life colour. DAY 44 - Well the plants were even more wilty today, looking really very unhappy. I guess my decision from day 43 was not the best choice. So as soon as the lights came on I proceeded with a 3/4 strength watering of the full gamut of flowering nutrient and additives. I watered through to a solid 30% run-off with 27c water. The plants are still wilting 8 hours into the daylight cycle. They must have got really dehydrated. I am so confused because the pots are not weighing as dry, and the top layer of coco is damp, so ithe plants don't feel dry. The 3/4 strength flowering nutrient feed I gave them today had a PH of 5.9 and a PPM of 1100. I watered each pot with approx 3.8 Litres of nutrient mix each, and I got about 1.1L in run-off per pot. The runoff had a PPM of 45-550 across all 8 plants. Because of the wilting, I've left them under 60% light intensity for the first half the light cycle. FOOTNOTE: To be brutally honest, I'm quite close to just chucking these plants are restarting the grow from scratch. I have more gorilla glue seeds about to arrive. I will give it another day or two, but fair warning, this diary may be concluded early. *sad face* Day 45 - The plants are looking better and seem to be recovering from the previous catastrophes. I'm feeling better. Day 46 - Wow the plants are looking way better, I'm seeing growth and a lovely deepening in their colour. I'm feeling really happy, and I think the plants have earned a reprieve from my earlier potential death sentence. I can't wait to see how they continue to grow now that their environment seems to be somewhat sorted out. I've started weighing a sample pot daily so I can measure the actual water consumption daily. When the plants wilted from dryness, they were weighing in at 5.2kg. After watering on Day 44 they went up to 7.7kg Today when I checked the pot weight it was at 6.2kg. Based on this I can see they are consuming around 0.7kg of water per day, so I will be watering them tomorrow and it looks like they are going to be on a 3 day watering cycle or less from here on out! It was very confusing because all the advice out there said don't water until the top inch of your coco gets dry but mine never did that. So I'm making the assumption the drying advice comes from HID environments which typically run hotter than LED environments. Day 47 - The plants did a big wilt over the day 46 night cycle again so I gave them another 75% strength feed today, but even as I did it I could tell they weren't dry enough to justify the wilt. The humidity is very high in my grow room, and it gets even higher (over 80%) during the night cycle, so I think maybe humidity could be the cause of this wilting (It's been so bad I've actually had "rain"on the sides of the tent and have been having to wipe down the inside tent walls so it doesn't run down and under the tent floor tray. So today I implemented a dehumidifier in the grow room. I set it to auto-operate for 50% humidity and over the next few hours it dropped the room humidity from 65% to 50% and kept it there. This saw the tent drop 75-80% humidity down to 65% which feels much more reasonable. The dehumidifier has also increased the ambient room temp which in turn increased the tent temp, which brought it to about my ideal range, so I don't have to use the oil fin heater at the moment, and possibly might not need it at all. I am extremely pleased with the effects of the dehumidifier and will be very interested to see if it eliminates the ongoing wilting. The watering today was 3000ml per plant, with an approx run-off of 500ml per plant. The PH of the solution was 6.2, and the PPM was 1050. The solution temp was 24c, and the run-off PPM was around 550-750 across the plants. I purchased a 30L brewers barrel which has a tap on it. It made mixing 27L of solution a relative breeze, and it was easy to mix in the nutrient and the open top allowed me to mix the solution by stirring, as well as easily check the PH/PPM. The tap on the bottom made filling the smaller watering container super-easy, and I highly recommend this as a great way to go for people needing to mix large amounts of nutrient solution and who can't find big enough containers to mix in. Look for beer brewing supply houses, they stock a range of large containers that are ideal for the job! Overall thought the plants seem to be deepening in colour and showing all the signs of a big turn-around in their fortunes. I am content at this stage with the state of the tent. I am looking forward to taking out the heater, and the big fan, and putting in the two clip-on pole fans I ordered, and having 100% floor space to dedicate to the plants. Also the IP cameras arrived, and I can now monitor the two tents from my phone, and this is really excellent as it alerted me to yesterdays wilting, and is a great way to check them at night I''m not sure if the IR leds in the camera will affect the growth but I don't think the autoflowers will mind (but I will do some research just in case). Day 48 - The plants are still wilting during the night cycle, some worse than others, but it seems to be lessening over the days since recovery actions were taken, and now that the dehumidifier is operational in the grow room and the two pole-grip fans are setup in the tent, I can't see any other environmental variables to optimise at this stage, as far as I can tell, I have now reached maximum optimisation of this tent, I literally can't think of anything else I could do to improve their situation, so from here on out I will just continue to feed on as best a wet/dry cycle as I can, and I guess we will see how the plants go till harvest! About the only configurable option I'll be tweaking ios the nutrient strength which is at 75% right now. I'll look to bump that to 100% on the next feed. My assumption about the wilting is that it is simply weakened plants not able to handle a full day of sun yet, and that it will continue to lessen as the grow proceeds barring any further screw-ups. About the only thing I may try if wilting persists is dropping an hour or two from the light cycle till they stop the wilt.