Doctor's Choice - Black mamba #42

TyRun No actions, just chilling and looking how the weed growing ))

TyRun What happened with #5? It was not clear at all. About an hour before transplant I took photos and put all plants back into the box. Later, when we more or less decided which ones to keep, I came back and saw that only this one had dropped — it lost turgor and leaned over. On inspection nothing obvious was visible, so I transplanted it hoping for the best. But it only got worse. The chlorophyll in the leaves was fading day by day. On the third day I pulled one leaf — it came off. Pulled another — the stem snapped right above the cotyledons. That one hurts. It was the only plant with a clearly different leaf smell — pure blueberry/bilberry, exactly like Blueberry. Sad, but it is what it is. The roots were absolutely healthy — you can see it in the video. So what was that? I think it was some kind of fungal disease. Why did it happen? At the very start I messed up the humidifier automation — it was running at 100% humidity for about 3 hours at night. Then it happened again the next day for about 30 minutes, but I noticed it in time. That probably created a perfect environment for some pathogen. Anyway. From the remaining plants #1 #2 #3, I picked #3 as a replacement for #5 — it looked the most promising. #4 had a different structure — keeping it. #6 is just the fattest one — earned its place. Of course #1 and #2 were not thrown away, but not sure what to do with them yet. Maybe put them in small 1L bags and run them in a small box for flowering, but I promised myself not to do that again… so still thinking. Except for the issue with #5, all plants are doing well. They handled transplant with no stress or slowdown. I moved them into 5L pots, around 4L of coco in each. No watering yet. I pre-soaked the coco with the same nutrient mix as before, squeezed it to field capacity, and transplanted. Full root condition is shown in the video. You may notice some leaf twisting — that’s because this strain is not very tolerant. Where Trich Beast or Zangria were fine at VPD 0.7–0.9 (around 70–80% RH at 26°C), these girls clearly showed that it was too much humidity. At the beginning of week 3 I found that 65% RH is perfect for them (raised VPD from 0.9 to 1.2). Leaves quickly returned to horizontal position — turgor restored. Moving on. I feel like watering already — probably the coco is getting a bit stagnant without runoff — but holding for now. Upgraded the auto-watering system — now it works perfectly. Added an inlet filter, no more clogged drippers. Very satisfied. See you next week.

TyRun Looks like I fell into the classic coco trap — when it’s still too early to water to runoff. You either overwater, or the pH in the root zone keeps rising every day. The result is obvious: #4 and #6 got calcium and phosphorus lockout because I didn’t water to runoff right after transplant. They’re still recovering. #3, on the other hand, is doing great — you can tell by how perky she looks. She was transplanted later, so she got proper runoff earlier than the others. It literally took just 2–3 days without runoff to cause issues. Overall, these are just early-stage problems that won’t matter later. We’ll probably remove those big leaves anyway since they’ll be in the shade (or maybe not, if they’re still functional when side lighting kicks in — then the marks might stay 😄). Plants are already adapting to the watering routine, and root zone pH should stabilize soon. Feed (input): EC 1.5 / pH 5.4 (today tested 4.9 just for fun) Runoff: EC 1.1–1.2 / pH 6.4–6.7 Experimenting with VPD — was around 1.3–1.35 most of the week, now pushed to 1.5. Growth rate is decent, leaf color recovered to bright green, no stunting. Interesting note — plant #6 has a very unusual branch structure, never seen side branches attach like this. Doesn’t want to grow upward at all 😄

TyRun Plants at the end of week 4. #4 start to recover its vigour, #3 perfect growth, #6 slow vertical growth, side branches are suffocating. Little bonus - how different Ca lockout looks depending on the pH level. Got new drainage trays, from ‪@DrainMasterDE‬ thats awesome, big volume, convenient access. Many thx!

TyRun As promised — I fixed everything, dialed it in 🙂 Plants are doing great now, growing fast and looking healthy. You often see people asking: “My runoff pH keeps dropping, what should I do?” I used to recommend increasing potassium, even though at that point it was just a theoretical assumption — I hadn’t actually tested it yet. Well… now I have. And it works. Situation: Input pH is stable around ~5.8, but runoff pH keeps dropping over time (in my case down to 5.2, even 4.7 on one plant). At the same time, EC is either dropping or at least not increasing. I tried light flushing — yes, it helps temporarily, but: Only short-term — next day pH drops again Adds unnecessary stress to the plant (basically suffocating the roots) Solution: Increase potassium. First, I boosted it by about +50%, then added another +30% on top of that. Example: I had ~2 ml per 10L → increased to 4 ml → after 2 days up to 5.5 ml of Canna Mono K. It took about 3 days to stabilize — runoff pH went back up to ~5.7–6.0. If you’re using base nutrients: Just get some Canna Mono K — it’s made exactly for situations like this. Yeah, I know I’m basically mixing my whole solution around it, even though Canna says you can’t build a complete feed with it alone — but in practice, it works for me. Also, side note — now 10L lasts me about 2 days. And that’s it for veg — switched to 12/12 on day 36.

TyRun The lamp finally arrived, installed it, and now I’m making the plants work. Total cost came to $ 314 including shipping and taxes — Kingbrite P55 320W. Ordered from Alibaba. At least I’m trying — the new lamp runs much cooler and can’t heat things up outdoors at all, so I’m pushing hard to hit my 30°C target to get CO₂ working at full efficiency. PPFD is no longer an issue, completely covered now. Temperature is the main battle, had to crank the light to 100%. The results are obvious — leaves are praying, so everything is running at the limit. Also added EOD-FR for 6 minutes after the main light turns off. The plants have started gaining size — #4 is in the lead, #3 isn’t stretching upward at all. Who would’ve thought at the start… should’ve set up a betting pool. Overall growth isn’t explosive, more steady and controlled. Switched the feed to flowering. Keeping nitrogen at 160 ppm for a bit longer, then dropping it to 100–120 ppm in week 3 of flower. Increased potassium to 160 ppm and phosphorus to 50 ppm. pH situation is a bit weird — plant #6 has 5.1 in the runoff and slightly elevated EC, while #3 and #4 are already at 7.1 and 7.3, but EC is lower than input and no issues — weird stuff. By the way, the supplemental lighting arrived today, going to install it. Got blue to try and reduce stretch after the flip, but looks like it won’t be needed this run. Also a new FR bar, 90 cm instead of two short ones, plus two white+red bars for undercanopy lighting to fight popcorn buds. Also custom-made from Alibaba.

TyRun Two weeks have passed since the flip. Plants haven’t started flowering yet, but they’ve already shown their sex. The height distribution turned out quite interesting, almost like it was planned. Weekly growth: #4 – 55 cm – getting pretty close to the light already #3 – 24 cm – perfect size for my box, exactly what I wanted #6 – 7 cm – solid progress compared to last week Overall everything is stable. I’m doing light defoliation, removing 2–3 leaves per day where they block light from growth tips. I’m not going for heavy defoliation — after reading and watching a lot, I’d rather keep the leaves. There’s also an opinion that around week 3 you shouldn’t remove too much anyway, and in general aggressive leaf stripping isn’t a great idea, partly because of mold risks. Why mold? Because external humidity isn’t as important as internal humidity inside the buds. The plant constantly releases moisture through transpiration all the way until harvest. If you remove most of the leaves, where does that moisture go? Exactly — into what’s left: buds and small inner leaves. That can create near 100% humidity inside dense flowers. You can drop RH in the room all you want, but inside the buds conditions for mold can still be ideal. Add a strong day/night temperature swing reaching the dew point, and it becomes a perfect environment for mold. So I’ll keep most of the leaves, just thinning enough to improve light penetration both from the top and bottom, without going overboard. Gradual defoliation also causes less stress compared to doing a heavy lollipop in one go. This isn’t a commercial farm with 1000 plants — we can afford to be precise and take off a few leaves every couple of days. Nothing more to report for now. Plants are still stretching — expecting the first “buttons” any day now.

TyRun At this stage, I’m using the full lighting setup I have available: 730 nm far-red — 5 minutes at the end of the day. 450 nm blue — 4 hours during the peak light period, starting 4 hours after lights-on. It was originally meant to help control stretching, but it arrived too late, so now it will mostly be used to support terpene production. There are some studies around that. 40 W lower canopy light — no idea what the result will be, first time trying it. Main 320 W light with UVA. UVB — 1 minute every hour. You can tell the light is a bit too much. The leaf color on #4 looks slightly faded, especially where she got too close to the lamp. But it does not look critical yet, so I’m not backing off for now. #3 and #2 have some marks from UV burn. No big deal — they should adapt. I’ll try running UV every other day for now, since I still can’t control it remotely. I finally found a 20 L reservoir for a reasonable price — just a plastic barrel. I installed it, it fit into the old spot, but I didn’t notice one important thing: the water level in it ended up higher than the pots and drippers. The result? 1.5 liters of runoff, plus another liter on the tent floor. As they say: “Physics, you heartless bitch.” Other than that, everything is fine. Runoff is different for every plant, of course. The girls turned out very different — each one doing her own thing. One has 6.8 pH in runoff, another has 4.8, but visually they still look strong. They are growing every day and already starting to smell, again, each one differently. My favorite is #3. At first, she gives off this minty, floury smell — not exactly cookie or dough, but slightly sweet. Then, if you touch the trichomes with your nose, it feels like falling straight into a berry smoothie. Literally gives me goosebumps. But she is the only one like that. The others are more like sweet, earthy cookies, with a distant mint/eucalyptus note and some gas in the background. The first little frost of trichomes has started, and judging by that, the finish should be pretty snowy. Basically, I’ve now brought my whole arsenal into play. From here on, it should be calmer: just watering and watching the buds swell. As for the nutrient mix: potassium is around 150 ppm, phosphorus around 80 ppm. I reduced nitrogen as much as I could — now it’s around 100 ppm. Calcium was lowered to 100 ppm too, mainly to bring nitrogen down even further. Magnesium is around 80 ppm. Plus monosilicic acid and Hesi SuperVit.

TyRun Main news of the week: we’re saying goodbye to #6. She went straight to compost. Sounds dramatic, I know. But honestly, it’s pretty simple: she wasn’t growing, had no real buds, smelled like wet coco — literally the same coco she was sitting in — and on top of that, she decided to go hermie. Well… happens. If it had been a worthy plant, I’d probably bother picking the nanners off and trying to save her. But this one was clearly some kind of outcast from the start. Plus, I still hadn’t tossed #1 and #2, and suddenly a proper pot spot under the light opened up. So #6 got chopped, and the little ones were moved into one pot. They had been living in 0.3L cups this whole time anyway. What else, what else… At the beginning of the week, I sprayed chitosan for the second and final time. For the next three weeks, the only real stress they should get is UV. Well, maybe the main light too, to some degree. It feels like there might be too much light… but also maybe not. I don’t see any clear downside yet, so I’ll keep it at full power for now. That’s 320W main light + 40W under-canopy light + 20W blue during peak hours. Development is steady. Bud sites are swelling, leaf tips are slightly burnt, so we’re clearly riding the edge here. Vertical stretch has basically stopped — maybe just a couple more centimeters added. That means irrigation-wise I’m switching back to a more vegetative strategy: keeping the substrate as wet as possible, with a small dryback of around 15%. Of course, every plant drinks differently, so it’s easier said than done. In reality, one sits closer to 10%, another one closer to 25%. The feed is almost unchanged in terms of EC and pH: EC 1.33 / pH 5.8. But potassium and phosphorus are slowly going up. That’s it for now. The fun part is still ahead. For now, we sit, rub our little paws together, and watch the buds get fat.

TyRun Here is the grower-style English version: Well, here we are at the halfway point: 35 days of veg, 35 days of flower, and about 35 days left. Probably less, but it looks cleaner this way. So, what’s interesting this week? The main thing is the smell. They are starting to stink pretty nicely, so I’ve started using the ionizer. Everything except #3 smells more or less the same: mostly sweet chemicals, so I guess GG#4 is taking the lead there. Somewhere in the background you can catch some berries, but not right away. I don’t really know what Kush is supposed to smell like, but I had a chance to try DC Kush last year, and this smell reminds me of it a lot. Sweet, herbal, with that little bitter grapefruit-like edge. But the real star here is #3. Straight from the breeder’s description: blueberry pie. No, you don’t get it… Imagine one of those closed pies from cartoons. You move closer, and first you get that sweet baked smell. Then boom — blueberry filling explosion. And it keeps getting stronger and stronger until everything is covered in blueberries and there is no escape. Crazy stuff. I’ve been smelling this plant for a while now, and it still impresses me every time. Also, a new little gadget arrived: a 2-in-1 pH/EC meter with automatic temperature compensation, auto calibration, and most importantly, for lazy asses like me — dry storage. Rinse it in RO or distilled water, close it, put it away. AquaMaster P110Pro. A couple more goodies for the nutrient soup from APTUS also joined the party. I always had this feeling that something was missing from my salt-based mix, even in coco. So, meet: Topbooster — amino acids with a small amount of NPK. ENZYM+ — enzymes. I’m not going to write a love poem about them. If you want, you can look them up and read what they do. I liked their silicon product, so I decided to test these two as well, mainly to push flavor, smell, and cannabinoids as far as possible. Everything else is already covered. One more thing. I decided to refresh my crop steering knowledge a bit, because I had a couple of unclear moments. And honestly, there’s not much place to refresh it properly except with AI, so I used Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview. Turns out, I was doing some things wrong. Not everything, of course, but I definitely messed up the vegetative irrigation strategy. Drain should be happening gradually during the whole P2 phase — the irrigation shots that maintain substrate moisture during the day. Not all at once after the first big irrigation, like I was doing with a generative strategy. So basically, I was sending the plant a slightly wrong signal. Well, no big deal. The main thing is to catch it in time and correct it. Buds are swelling, stigmas are not dying off, so overall everything still looks fine.

TyRun Fungus gnats blew up, so I had to surround the whole place with traps. Looks like I’ve thinned the population out for now, but I’ll be picking those little bastards out of the buds later — they stick like they’re welded on ) Runoff pH is way too high, so I decided to bring it down by feeding with a lower pH solution. Temporarily running 5.2 instead of 5.8. What can I say… this grow keeps throwing more and more experience at me, barely keeping up with processing it all. The more you learn, the more opens up)) Hope this won’t go on forever and the perfect grow is somewhere around the corner ) The smell has started to shift — moving more and more into gas and chem territory. I’m getting more convinced that all these berry/fruity strains should be chopped around the end of week 6, day 42–45, but this time I’m gonna hold her for about 9 weeks and see what’s left. The color has really started turning purple now, with the top buds darkening first. From next week I’ll start bringing her into autumn mode — I think by harvest she’ll be almost fully purple.

TyRun Organic stuff in the irrigation system didn’t take long to become a problem. I had to disconnect the whole dripper manifold and flush it properly — even with hydrogen peroxide, because the lines went nasty. From now on, I’m adding enzymes separately by hand. A new pump arrived too: 40W, 2500 L/h. Things started working much better right away. The drippers are pushing way stronger now. Should’ve stopped being cheap from the start. Also grabbed a new camera, so I can finally keep an eye on the tent remotely again. I still couldn’t really get the pH down where I wanted it. Some leaves are getting burnt here and there. I’m keeping the input around 5.2, but honestly it doesn’t help much. Luckily, the buds don’t seem to care too much — they’re still stacking and getting denser. Spotted a couple of fresh green nanners on #3, the one in the middle. Plucked them off right away, and so far I haven’t found any more. We’re getting close to the finish now. Autumn is starting from the lower parts, so I cut nitrogen down to around 90 ppm. Did a light cleanup as well — removed some of the burnt fan leaves and opened things up a bit. I’ve already dimmed the light down to 160W, otherwise I just can’t keep the temperature under control. Summer heat has finally arrived, so I’m basically catching the last train of decent conditions. Looks like I’ll finish just in time. #3 already looks pretty much ready, only the lowers are still filling in a little. #4 is still throwing some new pistils, but not that actively anymore. #1 and #2 look like the youngest and most active ones, but I’m not really counting them — they’ve got their own little world going on. So yeah, that’s pretty much it. Around two more weeks and then chop time.

TyRun The final week is on… #4 and #3 are pretty much done on the tops — amber is starting to show, and most of the trichs are cloudy. The lowers could definitely use a bit more time, but I’m gonna chop them as they are. #1 and #2, on the other hand, don’t seem ready at all yet. After the transplant, it’s like they got a second life — still throwing fresh stigmas like crazy. But it is what it is. The smell has shifted into something more chemical. The blueberry has moved way into the background. Maybe curing will bring some of it back, but I’m starting to think I should’ve chopped earlier. Looks like #3 hit her blueberry terp peak around week 7.5 — insane blueberry pie terps. Honestly, she didn’t bulk up that much more after that, so she probably could’ve been chopped right then. If that smell ends up fading for good, that’s gonna hurt. As you may have noticed, she didn’t really try that hard to go black in the end — but hey, there were attempts :)