Jack Herer Auto X Sonnenerde

Aircoholic The feminized seed called Jack is off to a very solid start. Germinating and presenting the seedling after 4 days is pretty good. Since, she's stretching pretty strong towards the light, which I did hang a little too high in the first 2-3 days. Not much to report here, she's just getting started.

Aircoholic Her first real leafs have a funny shape, all crinkled up - that might just be some reaction to the nutrient 'hot' soil, the next pair of leafs looks all good and healthy. Other than that, there's not much to report, she's doing its thing, lots of underground activities, looking all good. EDIT: On Day 16 after germination I decided to perform topping on her. Hope she recovers well!

Aircoholic She survived the high stress topping two days ago pretty well, the wound has healed, growth is taking a little pause and will surely start pushing out the side branches. She's looking lovely, gained a few centimeters of height, her leafs are surprisingly bright green, her stem looks sturdy. Looking forward to doing some LST'ing with her, once her branches are long enough for the clips.

Aircoholic She's cruising through recovery from topping and really getting up to speed now. She has some vigorous new grow and will soon be ready for some LSTing. Not much else to report, she appears healthy, vital and happy.

Aircoholic She's doing some wild jungle-style growth - super vital growth, rather difficult to control with some LST-Clips. This is, in my experience, rather typical for Fast Buds genetics and I know they advertise it proudly and a lot of growers like that, but I'm not so sure, I really like that. Anyway, she looks really healthy and well, and I'm hoping she starts stretching soon, because I hope the wild growth will sort itself out a bit then.

Aircoholic She responded really well to the LST-ing - the wild, vigorous growth from earlier has now turned into a little more appropriate and manageable growth. Her canopy turned very even and her shape is beautifully symmetrical. The last few days I wasn't home and left her to herself and of course things didn't stay on course. There was a heat wave with summer temps for a few days, the humidifier suddenly refused to work, causing the VPD to almost 1.5 kPa. In short, it was way too hot and way too dry for plants in Veg, which made her tensiometer go wild (696 mbar). After the humidifier works again, and I fed her 2L RO water, things have normalized again. Originally I thought about doing a second round of LST-ing, to open up her canopy a little more, but have now decided against that - her canopy looks beautiful right now, and I don't see her benefiting from a further opening. Also, I can see first tender bud sites forming at the nodes, so she's about to enter her flowering period and will start to stretch, in this phase more LST-ing would potentially stress the plant.

Aircoholic She is in full stretch and transition into flower. Apart from a few bottom leafs showing some signs of possible deficiencies, she's looking very healthy and lush. Because of her healthy grow rate, the few necrotic leafs don't seem like a big issue and are probably caused by slower nutrient availability in living soil opposed to external feedings. I'll keep an eye on it though, in case it starts spreading. Very cool is that she develops twin tops (spontaneous bifurcation) on both branches of the 2nd node. This is a 1st for me. I'll keep an eye on the bud development, and I am considering some kind of support to prevent the branches from snapping under the weight. But that's still some weeks ahead.

Aircoholic She's stretching and transitioning into flower beautifully. The two branches at the 2nd node have both split and develop twin tops - one of them split early, so the buds grew apart enough, but the other two were really close together, so I used two LST clips, to get them separated a little more. As a direct result, the two buds are a little lower than the rest of the canopy, but that's better than two buds not giving each other enough space for development. Even though she's still in stretch mode, I've slowly and carefully started a defoliation/lollipopping process. Since I don't want to stress the plant too much, I'm only removing a few of the lower leafs every couple of days, giving the plant enough time to recover. The lower branches, I decided, will have to wait until after the stretch - removing them would cause stress to the plant, but also some of them might grow further up and develop decent sized buds, and I don't want to remove those possibilities just yet.

Aircoholic She's reaching the end of the stretch phase, with a very nice height, that I can still handle with the low ceiling in the grow room. Her buds look beautiful, with the first trichomes showing up. She's starting to develop her signature aroma and looks pretty happy overall. However, there's a few clawing leafs, that were caused by the humidifier tank running out while I was gone for a few days. The relative humidity in the room dropped, pushing the VPD up, which caused the plants to transpire stronger, increasing the water update from the soil and thus drying that out quicker. The clawing leafs are basically artifacts from this dry phase - nothing I can or need to do about it, they're just the way they are now, but not causing any problems. Now that she's getting to the end of her stretch and fully settling into flower, I've started some Lollipopping and get rid of some larfy lower budsites, so she can focus her energy more up into the main buds - also it was super bushy in the lower 3rd, with a lot of leafs blocking any air circulation. And to support her even more producing buds and trichomes, I started to prepare some ACT that she'll receive in about 1,5 days.

Aircoholic She's doing wonderfully - I started some lollipopping in two stages and gave her some PK Booster ACT - as always in this stage, it's difficult to say if the ACT did help with the trichome production and bud development, or if she would've developed equally without, but since it's definitely not hurting her, I'll stick to the routine. Maybe another ACT towards the end of her life cycle, if I think that could have a positive effect. For now, I just water her, and let her do her thing.