Girl Scoot Cookies as a beginner grower

LevureDeBiere_ams Hi Growers! Yesterday, Friday, July 24th, I transplanted the girls into 11L plastic pots. I gave them a light watering of 200 mL each, as I wanted them to have a quiet night to recover from the transplant stress. During the transplant, the smaller of the two plants seemed quite fragile at the base of its stem. I added a little more substrate around the base and gently firmed it down. Today, I pointed a fan at the plants to help strengthen their stems a bit. She already seems a little sturdier. Yesterday, right after the transplant, I kept the plants under perforated plastic bottles because I hadn't yet received my 6L Mars Hydro humidifier, which finally arrived today. I'm having trouble reaching the target VPD of 0.53 kPa at 27°C. That would require around 85% relative humidity, which I just can't achieve (and honestly, I think that's too high anyway). As soon as the temperature reaches 28°C, the exhaust fan kicks in and causes the humidity to drop significantly. At the moment, my VPD is sitting at 0.85 kPa. I plan to reduce the relative humidity by 5% each week during the vegetative stage. Today, I decided to start feeding them as outlined above: Power Roots at 1 mL/L and Terra Grow at 2.5 mL/L. Each plant received 300 mL of nutrient solution at EC 1.8. According to my Mars Hydro soil sensor, the substrate EC is currently 0.5. The girls are looking healthy and are growing a little more every day. My plan is to keep feeding them with the same nutrients throughout the entire vegetative stage, increasing Terra Grow to 5 mL/L at the end of the second week. As of today (Friday, July 24th), I'm officially considering this Day 1 of the fertilized vegetative stage. I plan to veg for 4 to 5 full weeks before switching them to flowering. When would you recommend starting LST, and at what point should I perform the topping? What is your advice about VPD? Happy to share this journey with you all. Let's grow! 🌱

LevureDeBiere_ams Hey Growers, This week has been absolutely incredible. I've included photos with the exact dates they were taken so you can clearly see their progress. Everything is going really well. They're growing amazingly fast. On the 31st, I was still half asleep and accidentally doubled the nutrient dosage. I had planned to give them only 400 mL of water, but for some reason I mixed nutrients for 800 mL instead. To avoid burning them, I immediately added another 400 mL of plain water to each pot. They handled it like absolute queens! I'm really starting to notice how much stronger and bigger they're getting every single day. It's honestly a joy to watch. This week, I'm planning to transplant them into their final 19L fabric pots and begin LST. I'll also top them once they've developed two more nodes. They're going to turn into incredible trees. No particular issues this week. I can't wait to see what comes next. I'm also planning to try cloning the main tops to see if I can grow two little lollipops. It costs nothing to give it a shot! I bought some cloning gel to give them the best possible start. I'm also going to try running one seed as a "no-veg" grow. I've seen this method all over YouTube, and from what I've read, the yield difference isn't that significant. Once again, I'm experimenting! Maybe I'll fail, but sometimes you have to go out and find the knowledge you're looking for. One thing is certain: if I never try anything, I'll never learn anything. And that's really the whole purpose of this grow box: to keep learning more and more about this incredible plant. An entire world of knowledge is opening up to me, and I can genuinely see the impact of my work every single day. It's incredibly rewarding. Thank you all for taking the time to read my journal. I hope you're as excited as I am about this fantastic week. Have a great week, everyone... Let's Grow! 🌱

LevureDeBiere_ams Hi Growers! This week has been full of questions. It started off in a very satisfying way, with the girls handling the amount of water and nutrients I had given them really well. They looked beautiful! Then, I decided to transplant them into fabric pots, which, from what I’ve understood from my reading, are much more breathable. I went with 30-liter pots. At that point, I decided to defoliate the largest lower fan leaves. By mistake, I cut off one of the branches on the plant on the right. Since I didn’t want to stress her too much, I stopped there. Yesterday, I topped both plants, and since they had handled their first defoliation well, I started LST and removed all the huge leaves that were creating too much shade. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how things are turning out. I kept the same nutrient dosage with a 3L watering. (I also put three more seeds into germination: White Widow, Pink Runtz, and OG Kush. It seems like the Pink Runtz doesn’t really want to get going. Everything comes from RQS, so I’m going to send them an email. Just like with the Girl Scout Cookies, the WW stayed in water for two days and produced about 1 mm of taproot, then nothing else happened. So I decided to do the same thing I did with the GSC: plant them directly into the soil, further away from the light than the others, and pray. I wanted to try this to see the difference in development when topping much earlier, with only two weeks of vegetative growth. We experiment and we learn. As always.) Thanks for reading! All the photos are arranged in the correct chronological order, showing the plants’ progress from left to right! Ciao, Growers!

LevureDeBiere_ams Hi Growers! This week has been really tough. First of all, I couldn’t understand why the babies were staying so bushy without really growing taller. After doing some research, I realized my mistake: the light was too close, so they weren’t stretching enough. I adjusted it, and they definitely seem to be responding well to the change. Then, on the plant on the right, while I was doing some LST, the apex snapped like a piece of stale bread. I immediately cut the tops cleanly and treated them like clones: I applied rooting gel and cut the stems at an angle. At first, I thought they hadn’t survived, but two days later I realized they had completely perked back up. So I’m going to try to salvage the situation this way. (See the last two photos.) I’ve done quite a lot of LST and training to prevent some of the tops from getting too far ahead of the others in height. You can compare how they looked before and after — it’s actually looking pretty good, and I’m happy with that part. At first, I arranged the branches so they would leave more space in the center, but afterwards I realized my mistake: there won’t be many buds in the center anyway, so why make sure it gets all that light? Instead, I decided to remove all the small growth from the lowest parts of the plants. I made a lot of defo. I’m pretty stressed about this week because I’m not getting the results I was hoping for. I had originally planned to switch to flowering around now, but I’m not satisfied with what I currently have. I’m going to wait another week or maybe 10 days to try to gain some height and give the clones some time to recover and get stronger. I also added two more seeds. One has started vegging, and I’m going to start giving it some root nutrients. The other one is only just developing its first pair of round leaves. These plants are going to have very little vegetative growth, and that’s intentional — I’m trying to gather some information and experiment with the “no veg” approach. I have the feeling (especially in the third-to-last photo) that my plants are starting to go into flower on their own. Am I wrong? I’m watering with 3L each time, and it’s funny to see how much thirstier the one on the right is. The one on the left is still moist even though it had more runoff than the one on the right. Conclusion: I’m starting to recognize some mistakes that I definitely won’t make again: keeping the light too low during the beginning of veg, and topping too late. I topped at around 4–5 nodes because that’s what I had read in a book. Looking back, I think I should have done it earlier, at around 2 nodes, to create 4 main branches, then topped those again later to divide them further and eventually end up with a plant carrying 8 or 10 strong upward-growing branches. But that’s okay. I’m learning, and I won’t make the same mistake next time. I’ll start a separate grow journal for the new ones so I can track all these different behaviors and experiments and figure out what works best. Welcome to my laboratory.

LevureDeBiere_ams As usual, another complicated and stressful week. Hey Growers! So, the week started off with a bang: I did a pretty heavy defoliation and strong LST and gave each plant 3L of water. The one on the right didn’t take the watering very well and looked completely defeated all night. By the next day, everything was back to normal. I’m wondering if the watering itself was what made the poor girl droop like that. After asking about it on GD, I got quite a few replies suggesting that the watering may simply have been a little too heavy. It’s honestly the first time this has happened to me. So I gave her two and a half days to recover, with no trimming and no watering, until the top 2 cm or so of soil was properly dry. I watered her again this morning, and I actually think she would have preferred me to do it last night. I still haven’t watered the one on the left. Then I started wondering why I couldn’t get the humidity down inside my tent. I messed around with my filter a little — it had some kind of sock around it, which I removed — and suddenly I was able to get rid of the humidity properly and bring it down to around 50%. That’s still a little too low for now, so I’m keeping the humidifier running and letting them stay somewhere between 60 and 65% RH. But at least now I know I can get down to 50% without too much trouble. As for the two cuttings you can see in the last photos, they came from a branch I accidentally cut off and decided to try cloning. They seem healthy enough, but they aren’t growing. Earlier today, I transplanted them into an 11L pot, and the root ball accidentally fell apart, which gave me a look at the base of the cuttings. They still don’t seem to have developed any roots, even though they’ve been in the soil for over a week now. I don’t really want to buy cloning equipment because cloning isn’t actually one of my goals. I was just trying to salvage what I could. I’m afraid they probably won’t amount to much, but hey, they’re still alive, so I’m not going to throw them away! At the bottom, you can also see a small Pink Runtz under the bottle and an OG Kush, which is looking nice and green. I’m going to try growing those with basically no veg time. I’m waiting a little before starting their journal because there isn’t really anything interesting to show yet. But I’m taking plenty of pictures and measurements! Today, I also tried completely flushing the plant on the right with 3L of dechlorinated, pH-adjusted water and no nutrients. Someone advised me that I shouldn’t necessarily feed nutrients with every watering. I’ll see how she reacts, although to be fair, she didn’t exactly seem unhappy when I was feeding her with every watering. Anyway, in about 4–5 days, as soon as the tiny one under the bottle at the bottom perks up a little, I’ll transplant her and switch everything to 12/12. More next Monday! Cheers!

LevureDeBiere_ams What a wonderful week this first week of flowering has been!! Hello Growers! I decided to flip the babies to flower on Tuesday the 25th. That was their first 12-hour day — kind of like going back to school a little early for them! Everything went really well. I increased the light intensity so they’re now getting around 900+ PPFD across the canopy, and they seem to absolutely love it! They’ve started stretching like crazy. The one on the right still clearly has an advantage over her little sister. I also started SCROG training to get a nice, flat and even canopy. Whenever some stems stretch too much, I move them into a square further away to leave more space in the middle of the cheese. Humidity is still my biggest issue. I’m struggling to get it below 60%. I removed the carbon filter for now, and luckily the smell isn’t too strong yet. I think the filter probably got clogged because of the high humidity. I made the mistake of installing it right from the vegetative stage, when I was keeping the humidity around 70–75%. I decided to get the Mars Hydro dehumidifier, which should fit nicely with the rest of my setup and can be controlled directly through the controller. I’m also going to try drying out the carbon filter because I really don’t want the smell to become too noticeable. I’ve done quite a bit of defoliation to open things up, and most importantly, I cleared out a lot of space underneath the SCROG net, as you can see in the photos. I really don’t want to run into any humidity issues. A few leaves each day! The thing that worries me now is that they might stretch way too much and eventually end up tickling the light! But let’s not talk about things that could ruin the mood — we’re not there yet! In the last photo, you can see the two little clones that came from the plant on the right after I accidentally broke one of her branches. I remember panicking when I broke it by mistake. Looking at where she is today, I realize I clearly didn’t need to panic that much. Nature finds a way to do its thing anyway! For these two little ones, I’m currently only watering them with Power Roots at 1 ml/L to help them develop a strong root system. I think I’ll start giving them some flowering nutrients half dosed this week, and they’ll eventually get their Green Sensation just like everyone else. I just don’t want to burn their young roots either. For now, I’m really proud of what I’ve managed to achieve. GrowDiaries is an amazing website. There’s so much information available, and being able to ask questions has helped me a lot! Thanks to everyone who takes the time to answer my questions and help me out. Let’s grow! Ciao, Growers!