Somango XXL in a Grow Box

Game plan I followed: - soaked seeds for up to 6 hours in lukewarm (but cooling) balanced distilled water - soaked Root Riot starter plugs in balanced distilled water for a few hours - squeezed out plugs until only moist and placed in tray which is sitting atop a layer of perlite in the lower tray - inserted seeds pointy end *up* (after reading a persuasive argument for doing so!) to a depth of ~1/2”; covered hole loosely with a piece of plug - placed tray on heatmat set to 75° under T5 - 2' light fixture (running 2 of 4 bulbs) kept inches above plugs. No dome. In Secret Jardin DP90 Propagation Tent kept at ~77° and ~45% RH - top fed plugs with plain balanced water only when becoming dry and only enough to remoisten - once seedlings cracked surface and stabilized, added 0.5 ml/L (2.0 ml/gal) of Rapid Start to water to promote lateral rooting - transplanted into net pots at end of Week 1 but keeping in tent until more root development. Then they move to the grow box (aka "The Producer"!)

Transplanted to Producer.

Day 14 from Sprout - Rez Change Overall, I'm content with the progress to date. The root pics above are at day 19 since I took the seeds out of the fridge! 13/14 have roots in the water; some are quite well developed. All look good. I peeked around in the one that (even still) has not dropped roots out of the basket, and found decent root formation coming out of the plug and into the growstones. Unfortunately, I probably damaged some of those new roots during my exploration. We'll see if it catches up. 10/14 look "normal" and are all coming along nicely. 2/14 have a noticeably distinct leaf shape ... much more "jagged" vs "rounded" ... reminds me of thistle! 2/14 have developed a "single top leaf" growing straight up from the mainstem. On Weird #1, there is a single new shoot emerging from the mainstem about 1" beneath the top leaf. On Weird #2, there are two new shoots emerging. Just waiting an seeing at this point 😎

Day 21 From Sprout - Rez Change Overall, very happy with the development over this past week. The ones that were already looking good at now looking great! The couple of “weirdos” (strange development of leaf/node placement) both have decent roots but are growing slowly. The couple that initially were throwing out more “jagged” leaves seemed to have settled in and are looking good now. Only 1 (back right corner) is iffy. Roots are slowwwwly dropping out of the basket but not yet in the water. Going to keep It around for now and see what happens. Continuing with Mantis @ the “always” rate of 5 ml/L. They’re loving it! Several of the “great ones” have 5-6 nodes developed, so I’ll top them back to the 3rd more and start training into a manifold since I’m going to give some of the others time to catch up. I’ll decide on training for them as we go.

Continuing to top/prune in different manners across the 14 plants. My first grow with this strain, so trying to learn what they will tolerate re recovery times. One plant (see pic) has its own thing going on! Node development is asymmetrical (like a clone) and each node has one HUGE fan and one smaller one. Not doing any training at this point (other than removing occasional fan leaves re light/air flow). I’m tempted to pull her from DWC and move her to coco and keep her in veg for a while. Might be an interesting mom!

Continued with training this week. As you can see in the pics, I've used a number of different training techniques/approaches/targets ranging from "growing to 6 nodes then topping back to 3" to "doing essentially no training other than minor/necessary pruning". I'm trying to get a feel for recovery time and outcome (to be evaluated later, obviously) since this is my first grow of SomangoXXL. That weirdo plant seems to have stabilized somewhat, and looks happy. But still weird. I'm excited to see what it will do next lol! I'm going back and forth re whether to put a screen over them. I plan to do minimal training over this coming week to see how they develop, although I'll continue to tweak to develop a semi-even canopy. Always very receptive to any feedback/suggestions from you folks! 😎

Another week of relatively aggressive training. I plan to leave them alone for the most part (eg I’ll still remove giant fans that restrict light/air) over the next week. Hopefully they gain a bit if height. Then I’ll strip them down, let them recover for a few days, and flip! I’ve added in 2 x 48” (54W) T5s to see how they respond 😎