Chocolate Skunk (A, B, C)

AkatsukiVirtue All three Choc Skunks are growing rapidly with no active signs of stress given the low temperature. I believe the consistency of the low temperature vs swings in values are preventing the plants from stressing. Example: If you live in a cold area for a long time and move to a warmer area, you are more susceptible to sickness vs the locals. Overall, I’m please with the results. My automated watering prototype is almost done! Currently have drip irrigation connected via a 5gal bucket reservoir with two pumps inside. One pump to deliver water to the plants and the other for recirculating the water in the reservoir. Note 1: I’m using Peat so the PH is recommended around 5.8 - 6.2. I was at 6.0 before adding silica, small mistake! I learned silica raises the PH. When I went to test PH again, it was 6.3. Note 2: I also learned not to use an air stone to aerate the water because that increases PH…crazy, but I’m always learning lol. I plan on recalibrating the after finishing the final touches on the reservoir so I can finally add my low doses of the other nutrients. I may consider using Powdered nutrients for any future grow if all works out.

AkatsukiVirtue Another week of things going well! I dialed in my automated watering system by sealing the port where the 1/2in tube connects with the output outlet with an FDA approved silicone gel. Wanted to get the FDA sealant since anything else would leak chemicals into the watering reservoir. Tested and no leaks detected! I also found out that there are these sweet quick connectors you can get from Amazon. The nice thing about this is that it makes my watering system modular. I can disconnect the tube feeding into the tent by pushing the quick connect tab and addressing the bucket without dealing with tedious connects and disconnects. All I need to do when I’m ready to reconnect the bucket, I just push the line from the bucket into the quick connector. Additionally, I started using .25 ml (25%) of compost tea along with .25ml (25%) of silica. I think I will need to up the dose next week to 50% strength for both. I will do a transfer to the 1 gal pot in 2 weeks!

AkatsukiVirtue Edit: Had to take out the BioForce from the water reservoir because it smelled foul caused a slime-like build up on the bucket floor and walls. Found out it was expired…oops. Anyways, the water reservoir should last weeks with all the other nutrients added and not go foul so here is to another attempt. I cleaned the bucket, applied my nutes and PH’d to 6.0. This week of vegetation has been a bit tough. The plants started yellowing which let me know it needs more nutrients. I took this as an opportunity to transfer the plants to a bigger container (1gal). In the process of doing this, I amended some dry Grow fertilizer with the soil before transplanting. I also amended my watering reservoir with more Silica and BioForce for helping the beneficial bacteria. I added CALMAG for the first time at low dose. I know the soil Grow amendments have it, but it seems these plants are nutrient hungry so I need to be a bit more aggressive with feeding. The PH of the reservoir dropped to 5.8, but after adding more water, it went up to 6.5. I feel pretty good about the plan. However, the plants are still recovering from the transplant so I need to give it a few days to bounce back and 1.5 weeks to see if the nutrients are being consumed. I also increased my light intensity from 46w to 76w. I have the potential to go up to 165w, but I am just gradually increasing as the plants grow. This strategy will also help with managing temperature in the tent. This 30w increase translated to a 2 degree F increase up to 72F. With winter coming, I should be able to increase the intensity while keeping temperatures lower due to outside weather.

AkatsukiVirtue Things are going great! This week I was focused on topping and defoliation. No changes in nutrient strength. My focus is on keeping the plants low so I can transfer them into my 2x4x5 tent later on for flowering. My next focus for the next couple of months is just continual training and defoliation. Hopefully it looks pretty by the time I’m ready for flower.

AkatsukiVirtue Nothing crazy has happened the past week. I am still aggressively training each plant to make for some dense branches and eventually buds. Initially, I think the plants were stressed out from all the sniping of leaves but they have been bouncing back very quickly with each snip, perhaps thanks to the silica? I suspect I will start flowering in about 3 weeks. During that time, I will grab myself clippings from one of each three. I don’t know what the buds will look like until I flower. At that point, I will decide which of the clones to keep. Or maybe I keep them all? Lol

AkatsukiVirtue These babies have been going through some stress! I’ve been defoliating pretty aggressively and keeping the height short for this plant. For most people they would think this plant was 3 weeks old, but I’m not concerned. I know it will explode when I take off the training wheels. As far as changes. Added more Grow Powdered nutrients PH’d the reservoir to 5.9. Out of these three, I CSK A is this most resilient due to how it bounce back. The reset are showing some brown edges.

AkatsukiVirtue Time for an update! The past 10 days have been rough while having slow growth. I believe the cause of this were different factors. 1. PH of reservoir was 5.9, which was not appropriate for my medium because peat moss is slightly acidic so my input PH needs to be higher to account for the dip in PH. After flushing with 6.5PH water, I tested the soil run off at 6.5PH. Most likely this caused some level of nutrient lockout. 2. Overtraining. I trimmed a lot of leaves off each plant in order to conduct an unorthodox approach to defoliation and topping. Shouldn’t have gone too crazy with the training, but I don’t really have a heavy time constraint to flower soon. 3. Deficiencies. All three CSK plants seem to be nutrient hungry and I fed CalMag and Compost tea at a lower dose, but I have increased it to full dose. 4. Overwatering. I got excited with my new automation that I did not realize I was suffocating the plants with my frequent watering. First I replaced the circulation tube for my bucket because that was deteriorating. Next, I watered the plant using a 1GPH emitter ran until run off to determine how long it took. I estimated it was 10mins. So now instead of running the watering system 2-3 times a week for 5 minutes, I do once a week for 10mins. In conclusion, my babies have bounce back stronger, no more defoliation for a while, and I am looking forward to the explosive growth for the next 2 weeks.

AkatsukiVirtue Okay people! I’m back with another update. This week has been crazy with work, but I found time to make a couple changes. First, I needed to refill the water in my reservoir, but prior to that I had to clean it out as there were residual nutrient sediments. After I got that out of the way, I looked at the plants and determined the deficiencies were mostly disappearing but the leaves still look light green for most. After I watered until run off, I tested the PH and PPM to get 6.6 and 940 respectively. My plan is to flower in 2 weeks so I decided to move them into their final pots to get acclimated for that duration before I transferred. While transferring, I added more grow nutrients proportional to the new pot. Additionally, I’ve decided to address the Nitrogen deficiency with foliage feeding using RAW Nitrogen. Ordered and it will arrive soon. The leaves are really starting to spread now I am no longer clipping them 😁😂. I can’t wait to see how these turn out. It’s crazy how low I’ve been able to keep them since they are sativa dominant, but I hope this pays out at the flowering stage 😅. Especially as my tent height isn’t forgiving. About that by the way….more to come 🤫