OS Mango Haze, Headbanger, Sour Jealousy

AvadaKedavra Tough week. There is nothing to do on the plants directly. But water distribution in medium, Far Red ratio and climate have been off. Headbanger is already fighting with limited water, while I suspected over-watering on Mango (was PPFD stress mostly). I am glad the plants didn't refuse anything else right off the bat, so I am content to keep going.

AvadaKedavra Week 3: Plants are doing pretty good, but I definitely stunted Headbanger. Still suspecting watering issues, I gave her a small dose of water. To my surprise, she started drooping almost immediately. I concluded over-watering and was dead-wrong. It took me days to force myself to flood her, expecting a disaster - but this time she picked back up right away. I must have given her too little while testing, the droop resulting from higher uptake than what was being fed. Mango showed a sign I never wanted to see again, after having had a terrible phosphor deficiency in an earlier run. Her petioles (violets) are asking for P, and P she got. Her leaf colors are a bit optimistic in these shots, she has that lockout-aura all the time still. I couldn't keep up with managing humidity very well, so Leaf-VPD was often at ~0.8. That alone will cost the plants some serious growing time.

AvadaKedavra While I am fighting VPD and lung room climate in the background and juggling values in their feeding chart, the plants are taking off. I have never seen such healthy plants in this stage myself, so I was facing a major problem. The leaves that I should have tucked the entire time got 100% uptime instead. Nodes actually started growing underneath the petiole from their roof fan leaves, and I didn't want to disturb the plants. I paniced to find the right time to start LST, and researched like a maniac. The result? Attempted 90° bend on all top colas. SJ snapped on the inside, but that was to be expected and the rupture turned out minor. Mango got her stem bent over way too far, just like Headbanger. All colas would have required me to tie them back down 2 times a day, but loud stress signals from SJ and Mango made me stop training and let her recover. In hindsight, leaf tucking would have solved these issues much better and I had to replace LST with HST to catch up. A day later, the scrog came down to help me sort the mess I made.

AvadaKedavra The plants are exploding. I constantly have to check their water levels, having to keep up with their demands surprised me and caused a lot of back and forth. I am running out of ideas on how to train the plants further, and am considering removing the scrog for a bit and tie them down for a cleaner structure. The way my tent is set up, I am running out of space to keep working on the plants 😬 Maintaining lower humidity levels has been a real struggle, as temperatures increase and ventilation removes the product of my dehumidifier. I am sweating to keep up, over- and under-watering here and there. Just measuring the top layer with an inadequate sensor comes with it's issues.. Every move I make reflects on the plants appearance, and struggling with climate is intense work for a home grow environment.

AvadaKedavra Hey everyone, Week 6 is in the bag and here are a few shots. Plants are enjoying a delicately balanced (manual labor) but stable VPD of 1.35 atm and are... dare I say it .. praying most of the time today! I re-did my entire VPD calculation for night time and every day I keep tweaking my setup, identifying problematic zones (easy fire-hazards when certain equipment interacts in auto mode!) around temp reduction without removing dried air. Single, 20° vent orientation changes apparently have massive effects on mixing my cool and hot airflow, and I am starting to think about placing a Undercanopy Light near the door + maybe vertically at a tent corner. See the controller shot for what happens when you leave the receiving water bucket without cover, as your dehumidifier literally blows dry air over the surface it spills into all night. (ignore VPD calcs, this is during night). I am still trying to figure out how much they drink, as environmental conditions determine their ability to uptake. I am placing soil covers with some distance after watering, to keep that upper zone moist but with enough O² access. I also managed to nearly rip off two node-1 colas, one on Mango and one on Headbanger. I have never seen plants that have issues carrying their own weight (although all of that stems from akward training) during early flower already. I used cushioned wire and also tape - because that heavy Mango cola was only supported by a towel I placed underneath it to grab my stuff. This cola now went straight up and I will not touch it as it is also secured into the net. Mango deemed my attempt at subdueing her main cola a bit unfair so she took off on this freshly fixed cola, literally while it was healing up, in a move I would expect to see from Apollo Haze. This screwed up my placement and I am since itching to take the net off again, rotate Mango 180° and fix her in. But I am certain, without help I would likely destroy more than I would gain. All in all - I am entering a happy tent every day with the girls praying at the low sunrise light. I need to keep contamination down and find a way to give them more lights. In the background I am trying to make sense of connecting terpene and cannabinoid profiles to the endocannabinoid regulatory layer, in order to smooth out functioning across something I learned is called the HPA-axis. Lots, and lots of learning with near zero background, but this will loop back on strain selection and terpene targeting, should this not overwhelm me with it's complexity. As I write this, I am smoking my first Alien vs Triangle result, somewhat optimized on monoterpene preservation while trying to avoid sesqueterpene production as much as possible. The result is really interesting, there is mild relaxation without sedation, completely functional daytime profile with increased immersivity; with a funky vibe / aura in the background that seems to dance around the fresh forest berry wash that could have been retained by freezing likely, that is now adding more and more overripe and floral linalool and heavier sequeterpene notes. the flavour is -intense-, I have never smelled cannabis that did not, in fact, smell like cannabis. That's all for this week, excited to see Week 7 unfold.

AvadaKedavra Ahoi and welcome, this week I had to find my way around the results of Mango being caugth and tightened into the net. Light management became an issue: for the first time I saw how the high light intensity at Mango's sturdy 82cm side colas almost singed off pistils (with light, not heat). Those nodes decided to become the new main colas, after the central cola lost it's top canopy spot. The cola that almost broke off is still fixed in the center of the tent, and as a result, is getting light blasted at it. 😬 I build it a little personal Cloud directly over her central colas to achieve some spot PPFD scattering, which has helped me in the past. Image will be in next weeks update. SJ (69cm final height after training) and Headbanger (59cm final height after training) were, on top of that, -underlit-. I probably lost a good 6 days to underfeeding them with light, and after my adjustments they are still not quite where they would like to be. I used my undercanopy-lights to install a vertical light bar at the entrance, to help out Headbanger directly and provide some angled light into Mango's bushy structure. I used the other bar and installed that horizontally over SJ & Headbanger at an angle, so not much of it will hit Mango. I feel like ripping out my entire scrog-setup and structuring everything out anew, but yeah, damage and intense stress during peak flower production would probably result in a worse outcome for the 4 of us. Next time, I will have to plan my tent layout and light setup better, so I can account for these massive height differences without burning plants. For now, the tent seems at peace. Plants have finalized their structure, and the result of the missing light is unfortunately largely visible in thick, deep green leaves, ready to photosynthesize, but really just sitting there, praying oftentimes, in a resource vs energy uptake stale-mate. The tally count becomes high for Headbanger: Underwatering during veg, VPD issues during early nights + training stress already made her decide to flower fast. The relative low-light environment now reduced the total capability of the plant directly, as all other protocols provide nearly adequate baselines. But hey - what we know - we know. The nug is from 👽 Alien VS Triangle I mentioned last week, bottom canopy position, monoterpene focus plant (reduced capacity for sesqueterpene building) - I collect these low hanging fruits separately, when in need of something that hits right but also keeps me as active as a bee if needed. Downside? Need different strain for sedating properties, but those juicy main colas curing for ~9 weeks now will help with that just a little. To me it smells like a syrupy wash involving several forest berries, sometimes a redcurrant top-note releases as well. As it cured it definitely brought home it's underlying herbal body, gaining in complexity but still leaving the stage clear for the berry top-notes, that are converting more and more into their floral counterparts. I swear I detect sweet marmelade from the bag itself after this time, but that is not detectable in the nugs themselves. See ya next week!

AvadaKedavra Week 8 revealed which plants made it through just slightly bruised, and which plant nearly collapsed under all stress factors involved so far. I also went nose-first into a terpene state deep dive. ** SJ is sitting in the back enjoying the show and has clearly been the most resistant & content plant - that indica lineage showing through seems to help with that, I learned today. Headbanger is now content. After a racy start towards flowering from drought-stress during veg, she relaxed a lot and had just high osmotic pressure keeping her leaves up high. I feared salts accumulating, but it turns out she was slightly on the fuller side these last days and letting her dry back removed the pressure. Mango revealed to me why sativas (my closest to landrace so far) can have such a high learning curve. From seemingly prefering diluted drinks from seedling to early flower, she responded first when Calcium levels were not in line or Phoshporus was hard to access. I learned sativas depend a lot more on ideal transpiration conditions for nutrient management and that indica's can "take a hit" here more easily. I was planning for a leaner, larger plant and thought I prepared a decent structure - I got a side-branching powerhouse that demanded an even larger frame, such as not to create a botrytis-only biome underneath her canopy. Any greed displayed during lolipopping resulted in high-stress removal of lots of foliage & some doomed bud structures causing humidity pockets. Together with light stress and a weird, temporary heat-from-below situation, this already caused a lot of pistil browning, much more than I'd be happy to show at her younger age still. Trichomes will be browned in part as a result; and doing the unpleasant tally-count now will help differentiate from natural trichome-browning later, such as not to confuse harvest times. This accumulation of collateral damage is no joke - if you need to trigger hermaphroditism, grab a sativa and push her near the edge like I did, and perhaps add a cold-shock too - all female seeds will be yours, but no thanks to the weed. ** I went on an oilfactory exploration of all the plants this week, once for their bud-"aura" and once for trichome structures I ruptured somewhere farther down their colas. With a rather thick sesqueterpene smell present on all auras, I assumed I had lost a lot of monoterps already, but trichome rupture revealed that they are present, intact, and preserved so well they simply don't gas out as fast as the sesqueterps I am trying to avoid a bit more. Headbanger & SJ both had a warm, woody, slightly spicy and dry aura around them. Think wood-workshop near a desert oasis, as some air from the local spice market drifts by. Mango also had this, but faintly so and less spicy. Headbanger developed a clear peanut - peanut butter smell on top during week 8, which -really- surprised me. For the ruptured trichomes, SJ conjured a vibrant, hot jungle scene, that almost dipped my nose into some stagnant, biologically active, algea-covered puddle that is enjoying direct hot sunlight (this, in the most pleasant way imaginable). Headbanger burst out with intense menthol / eucalyptus sharps & bitters that settled into ... wet soil. Think of smelling cool, dark, dense garden soil after just having brushed your teeth. Together with the pleasant aura smell, this strain screams intense & unforgiving high to me. It scares me, and I am delighted to try this. With Mango I did not see it coming. Her ruptured trichs underneath that faint sandy wood smell revealed a warm tropical cocktail with fruits fading in an out around Mango, some ripe banana notes as well. I even refused to note down "Mango" at first, because I thought her name had me biased; but after confirming the myrcene - terpinolene interaction and smelling some pruned leaves, I just have to say it: IT SMELLS LIKE MANGO. Mango may tell a slightly less optimistic story after her last stress events, but from what I've learned about her so far, I'd be looking to grow her again & more to her liking anyway. *** Stay tuned for next week & learn from my mistakes :)