Gorilla Cookies Auto

renbuds 11/22-Off to a quick start. 11/27-Leaves are a little droopy. I upped the nutes with Grow A & B after a couple of days. Might be a little stutter because of that. 11/27-Did a little mini-flush with RO water. 11/28-Mini-flush seemed to help a bit with the color and droopiness. Looks like she is getting back on track. 11/29-Watered w nutes. Decent first week. Leaves are green but not quite as fully formed as I like. Let's see how she does next week.

renbuds 11/30-As we enter week 2 of veg I'm looking to see if she is healthy enough to top or Fim after 14 days. 12/2-Watered with slightly more nutes today. Foliar spray w Cal Mag. 12/4-She's shaping up nice and healthy. Started first bit of LST by bending the main stem over a bit. Cal Mag foliar is working nicely to get a bit deeper green color. 12/5-Upped the nutes again. 12/6-Solid week of growth. Plant was looking healthy so I decided to FIM between 4th and 5th nodes. Hopefully she will recover nicely and we can have some more solid growth before she starts flowering.

renbuds 12/7-FIM area looks good. Plant showed no adverse signs from the cut. Growing nicely. 12/8-Watered today. Still no adverse effects from FIM. In fact, it looks like it spurred faster growth. 12/9-Area at the FIM cut is recovering nicely and starting to grow out. 12/11-Watered to runoff with increased nute load. Turned on the Autopots. Enabled PH automation w AC Infinity peristaltic pumps to keep PH between 5.6 and 6.2 range. Increased VPD target to 1.1 . Pulled the plant back a bit to get more light on the under branches. Lights set at 100% blue and 50% Red spectrum. 12/13-Great first 3 weeks. She's healthy and green. She handled the HST without any hiccups. She is drinking from the autopot now. The PH automation is working to keep PH between 5.6 and 6.0 . I started tucking the big leaves under some of the emerging branches. Next week I'll start some LST in earnest.

renbuds 12/14-Trimmed 4 large fan leaves and started LST. It's interesting to see how much different the plant looks after trimming just 4 leaves. I expect that she will recover quickly. I really like how easy it is to move the pots around on the Tray2Grow. It's very helpful to spread the light around by rotating the container. I think it helps as I try to manipulate the plant to get a wider canopy. 12/16-More LST bending branches. Starting to get wider. My humidifier is having issues and I'm having a difficult time keeping VPD in the right pocket. I think its my sign to moved up to the larger capacity (3X) humidifier which will save me some work refilling a couple of times a day. 12/17-Trimmed away a couple more big fan leaves. She's starting to shape up nicely as we approach pre-flowering phase. 12/20-Solid week of growth. Still no signs of preflower. Up to 8 inches tall. Tied down some branches and the canopy is starting to get some width and space between nodes. I like where we are at after first 4 weeks.

renbuds 12/21-Did one last defoliation before flowering starts to get rid of lower material and hopefully boost growth at the top. It always feels like I've destroyed the plant when I do this. So far the plant usually grows back quickly and I'm hoping that will be the case this time as well. 12/23-Up to 10 inches now. Still no signs of preflower. 12/26-First hints of preflower. Added 4 gallons of light bloom mix to the reservoir to the 4-5 gallons with veg nutes already in the reservoir. Raised the Ph to 6.0 and EC is 1.23 now. I'm hoping that mixing the 2 will make for an easy transition as really the only thing new in the mix is the Bud Ignitor. 12/27-No adverse effects visible from change in nute mix. Plant is starting to stretch a bit. Up to 12 inches now. Branches are spread out nicely. I think she is setup well for the next couple of weeks.

renbuds 12/28-Looking for more growth and early pre-flower this week. 12/29-Up top 14 inches. LST is getting the canopy wider and flatter but the main cola is towering above. So far so good. I'm slowly but surely edging up the red spectrum on my lights. Up to 70% now and I'm wondering if that is not why the top cola seems to really be reaching for the sky. 12/30-Up to 15 inches 12/31-Did a little mini-flush. Emptied reservoir and filled with clean feed solution. I noticed that roots were growing out of the autopots which apparently not a big deal as long as it does not clog valve. I'm on a Tray2Grow so that is not happening. I'll keep an eye on it though. 1/1-Grew another inch to 17 inches. Canopy is flattening out nicely except for the main cola which looks like the Eiffel Tower. I'm slowly dialing up the red spectrum and lowering the blue spectrum on my LED light. 1/2-I may have committed a stupid move in an attempt to deal with what looked to be a ph problem with the plant. I've been using autopot Tray2 Grow system for my last few grows and while it certainly cut down on my workload the reality is that when I looked back at all my grows, the biggest yielders and most potent ones have all been using the traditional water to runoff mode. In those cases I monitored not just the reservoir but also the runoff to make sure they stayed in sync. Using the autopot means I never see the 'runoff' so when I saw some issues in a few leaves on my GC grow I thought I would do a little reset and flush the medium. Only to find that autopot recommends that growers never do that as their system is designed to 'push' the salts to the top of the plant. For growers that want to 'flush' the plants they recommend just running straight Ph balanced RO water from the reservoir for a couple of days. Well so much for doing my homework AFTER I 'fixed' things. Now I'll just wait to see if I killed or damaged the plant. 1/3-The plant is stretching nicely and is up to 19 inches. I've been slowly increasing red spectrum (87%) and reducing blue (78%) as we she enters flowering. I've also increased the nute load higher than I've done on my recent grows. Bud sites are starting to appear now. So far I've seen no adverse effects from my top down flush. I like where we are at the end of 6 weeks. Update-The top cola was stretching much higher and faster than the rest of the canopy. So I decided to try a technique I've seen used by some experienced growers called supercropping. I bent the top cola over gently until it bent the interior wall of the stem without breaking the skin. I'm using some soft garden wire to tie it down at approximately a 45 degree angle. I could probably go a bit more but I'm going to stop there for now. Hopefully this will help even out the spread of the canopy without damaging yield or quality.

renbuds 1/4-She seems to be showing no signs of adverse effect from supercropping, improper flush, and increased Ph and nute load. Signs of discoloration in the leaves appears to be gone now as well. Bud sites are developing nicely. I've also added the AC Infinity Ionbeam lights under the canopy to see if I can make sure ALL the bud sites are getting as much light and energy as possible. 1/8-While most of the plant seems healthy the discoloration in some of the leaves has returned. So I've dialed back the Ph and diluted the nutes to see if that helps. It's funny how plants are. I've got another plant in the tent, another Mango Smile which is getting all the same inputs and its leaves are green as green could be. Go figure. 1/10-Plant is looking healthy. Dialing back Ph and nutes seems to have helped with the discolored leaves. Trichomes are starting to appear on the leaves and buds are starting to really take shape. In spite of the supercrop I did a few days back the main cola is starting to reach for the sky again but the rest of the canopy is wide and getting good light from the main lights and the undercanopy lights.

renbuds 1/11-Looking to see some more bud development this week. I think the supercropping has stopped the vertical growth now at 19 inches. Canopy is looking good and lots of bud sites are getting full light from above and below. 1/13-Buds are really starting to stack and get denser. 1/15-Buds are getting fatter and denser by the day with more and more sticky trichomes. But, I've still got signs of the brown spots creeping into the leaves which has me a bit concerned. I'm thinking that based on what I've seen on some other high yield/high THC grows I've probably got another 4-5 weeks to go. So today I decided to do another 'mini-flush' but this time I'm doing a couple of watering cycles through the autopots from a different reservoir with RO water with some Cal-Mag at 6.2 Ph and 275 ppm to see if that helps stabilize things a bit. 1/17-End of 8 weeks and I think she is setup nicely for the last 4-5 weeks. I think the little mini flush cycles helped stabilize the plant leaves. No new brown spot growth. Buds continue to get more dense and sticky. All the key perameters (VPD, Ph, EC) are right on target thanks to the Infinity AI+ controller working with all the great ACI equipment I use. Now its time to sit back and just monitor the instruments.

renbuds 1/18-On to week 9. 1/24-Solid week of packing on density. She's not nearly as big as some of the other GC grows I've seen but the buds are getting fat and dense. It's going to be very interesting to see what her final weight will be. Based on some of the actual harvests posted here on Grow Diaries she's probably got another 3-4 weeks left to grow.

renbuds 1/25-Monitoring all the inputs with the help of the AC Infinity AI+ controller which makes everything so much easier it almost feels like cheating. Plant is stable and healthy going into week 10. Pistils are starting to change from white to amber. Good trichrome production. Increased my VPD target to 1.3 to 1.7. 1/29-On cruise control. 1/31-Everything is looking good. Buds are continuing to add weight and density. Even the buds on the bottom of the plant are rock hard, likely due to the Ionbeam lights under the canopy. It's looking now like we might be 7-10 days from harvest so I started dialing down the nutes a bit and added AN Overdrive which has lowered the EC and Ph slightly. Trichomes are mostly showing milky now w/ first signs of amber trichomes appearing.

renbuds 2/1-She's finishing fast now. Buds are super dense from top to bottom. Trichomes are getting a bit more amber now. Feels like we are getting close to harvest so I've decided to start watering with just RO water at 6.3 ph and some AN Flawless Finish to start the flush. 2/3-Top cola was getting more amber and I decided to chop it before it becomes too 'stony'. Hanging the cola in the Cannatrol Dry/Cure box. Normally I set the Cure function to 4 days. I think I'll harvest the rest of the plant at 77 days. So I'll see if I can slow the Dry cycle to 8 days so that the top cola won't dry quite as fast and give the other buds a chance to sync up.

renbuds 2/5-Rock solid buds like golf balls. Trimming the plant was as easy as cutting one well formed bud after another. Not one bit of "B" stuff. I've put it all in the Cannatrol Dry/Cure box for the next 8 days. Overall the plant was pretty easy to grow but if I'm being honest I'm a little disappointed with the final yield compared to many of the grows I've looked at here on GD. As much as I love all the work the Autopot saves me I've not had a single grow over 4 ounces since I started using it. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong but the timing is suspicious. I think on my next grow i'll do a side by side grow with one plant in the autopot and the other in the airpot with water to runoff instead of bottom up. All will be forgiven however it the quality of the smoke is there. 8 days and counting.