WEEK 6
Well the plants are really shooting up, looking really lanky with big internodal spaces, but seem to be setting up for some large plants. Flowering seems to be progressing at a relaxed rate, which is fine by me. They really seem to be responding well to minimal nutrients and a sparce (every 2 to 3 days) watering regime.
DAY 36 - Watered with a nutrient solution of 0.8 EC and PH 5.9 - 2600ml per plant with a 700ml run-off.
DAY 37 - No changes today.
DAY 38 - No changes today
DAY 39 - No changes today. One of the plants is really rocketing up. Its almost 60cm tall.
DAY 40 - No changes today. Plants have switched into flowing mode.
DAY 41 - Pots finally light to lift. Switched from Vegetive nutrient to bloom nutrient blend. Fed with nutrient EC=1.0 PH=6.1 at 3000ml per plant with 500ml run off. Might have left them a bit long without watering. They are a bit sad looking. Going to move to bi-daily waterings.
@ivik80, Aww cheers man. I spent a bit of time revising the previous two grows and decided I need to get a proper feeding strategy in place after I realised I'd pretty much been watering my coco like it was soil. Which still works (arguably just not as well as watering it for coco lol). The strength of nutrient on any given day however was pretty much guesstimating/praying. It feels good having EC ranges for each stage of the grow to guide me now. In the next iteration I'll likely be including a complete full list of everything needed to do the entire grow. It's a surprisingly long list, over 120 individual items, so over 60 components per tent, not including any seed orders. lol. I'll probably keep perfecting the start page on every grow, so even if my plants don't always grow bigger, my diary start pages will LOL.
I would check your runoff ph to see if its high. I just replaced my ph pen my old one was running really weird and wouldn't calibrate properly so I don't trust it anymore. So difficult to see true colors from photos but if you have a high runoff ph it could be too much calcium build up it can lockout magnesium and potassium. You can try to use a low ppm foliage spray of Epsom salt (Magnesium Sulfate) and water a couple of time per week to see if they green up a bit more.
@Philindicus, i agree with your firendsπ if you grow more some Cambodian Cubensis πβ¦.tell me too ππ.
sry for not being able to participate to this threadβ¦.it was interesting π but i was again projected into a black holes this last weeks ironicly caused by a fungi. i going to become an expert of that shit πβ¦
forntunatly Skislopes was in a good hand with you dudeβ¦.π i gonna check the next Week of this grow
@ProfessorSkiSlopes, Sorry for not getting back to you sooner.The GD website seems to be having some issues on my end the site is very slow and my page access seems to be limited/different than usual. Are you in Europe?Australia?Timbuktu? You can check out @Budofpray he did a bunch of research in his "Let mother nature do the job" diary about Mycorrhiza. I believe he listed some sources where he ordered from. He is a bit prolific in his writings but has some great insights in the beneficial microbe area. Part of the deal with beneficial bacteria is only a few species actually will associate with each specific plant species. In other words if you were growing peas one specific species benefits peas to help accelerate growth but that same species may not benefit cannabis. This is why you will find a mixture of many different species of bacteria in the product sold online. With mycorrhiza there are endomycorrizae and ectomycorrizae once again there are many different species found in mixtures sold to suit a wide variety of plant species. Best thing is to try a few different kinds a see what's most effective for your grows. You need to be aware that some manufacturers will add a bit of fertilizer to their mixtures to provide starter food to feed the microbes so they get off to a good start. I say this because if the product contains fertilizer you need to account for that so you don't burn any young seedlings or plants. It should tell you on the product. Good luck with the mushrooms I grew some Cambodian Cubensis from a strain supposedly collected around Angkor Wat Temple several years ago still have friends asking if I will grow some more. Could happen. Good times when your camping and enjoying the outdoors.
@Philindicus, I pulled the trigger on the endoboost. I got a concentrated version of it that does 400 gallons, so it should last awhile. I'll look forward to sprinkling it in the seedholes of the next crop. I did a bit of reading, and it seems to be the general consensus that this stuff is like liquid gold. Thanks again for the advice.
@ProfessorSkiSlopes, 2 purple 1 green so far for me. I had some good stretching on mine also even after trying to control it. I'll see if I can pull some decent buds out of her.
@Philindicus, Cheers :) Interestingly of the two light green plants one turned out to be the most deep purple plant (plant 6), and the other turned out to be a mostly green budded plant (plant 7), but both ended up being very sparse and will likely be the lowest yield out of the entire crop.
@FrostRailz, Thank you very much! It has been a really enjoyable experience seeing purple buds in person for the first time ever. Their rarity them an almost mystical vibe, and from the small test bits I've tried, the taste and stone are quite beautiful.
You definitely got some nice purpling and I agree these genetics are not very consistent as I'm experiencing myself with my current grow. I still want to order some more FastBud seeds and was thinking about the gorilla glue for my next grow.
@OhcanaDAbiz, It's incredible huh! It's like someone snuck in the tent at night with some purple paint and carefully painted all the buds.. it's still quite a surprising moment every time I open the tent and see all the purple... The next 4 weeks will be really fun to see!!
You'll like this. I get to put my foot in my mouth. I just popped 4 FB blackberry kush seeds. 3 of the 4 are dark green one come out lime green! Beginning to think your right about it just being a different phenotype.I'll try to torture it while it's young to see if I can get her to green up ro redeem myself.
@Philindicus, Hehe interesting. The two light green ones from my grow never responded to the epsom salt foliar spray, or adding it to the nutrient mix. I get the feeling it is a pigment mutation associated with the purple pigment that makes this strain so colourful... Certainly the two lime green plants never showed any less growth or health deficit compared to the other plants. WIll be interested to see if your stays lime like mine (Although they are now a couple weeks into flowering, and the general shade of green has darkened across all the plants now),
Wowww!!! What a complete diary, and it's just week one!! Well done!
Have fun growing our Blackberry Auto =)
If you need any assistance, let us know! ππΌ
Happy Growing ππ±
Nearing the end of my grow with this strain, growing 4 of these and I must say, these plants are very picky, they either are too sensitive to a certain nute or require way more so I had to make separate feeds for each plant at one point which got annoying growing in CoCo since I am feeding often which means I have to make feeds often.
Going to drop down to 3 plants and do two more grows after but next strain I am going to grow is the pineapple express from them, I have a few seeds that I am yet to try of it and hopefully they are more stable.
The smell is AMAZING though and they look amazing (the ones I am growing) but these plants all have had an issue which tells me the genetics aren't as stable as they could be.
@ProfessorSkiSlopes, Yeah when purple lemonade was coming out I saw it in my email and it was available for pre order and now it's officially out but I am awaiting reviews and diaries to see what the end result looks like, it looks way more dense so it is somethnig I would definitely be open to trying because I love genetics that give you dense buds. If they come out with a purple punch I would love to know what the lineage of the genetics are that they are using too because that could be interesting.
I have about a week and a couple of days before I stop feeding and I can just start prepping for harvest, my buds are fairly dense and some plants just thickened out way more but overall they all fattened up nicely and I can't wait.
The WstCoast OG actually caught my eye because of the look of the bud, the density and the high so I hope it goes well for you! I'm gonna do 3 pineapple express next and after that I can do two more grows with 3 plants each of blackberry (not in the mood to do 4 at a time in case I have to make 4 feeds, I rather just do it for 3 plants if anything lol) or I'll grab some new genetics.
So many fastbuds strains I want to try but I also want to give Dutch Passion a shot too and get a Durban Poison auto going.
@TheSweetScience, Yep, pretty much my thoughts exactly. The Blackberry definitely needed way, way less nutrient strength than any other fastbuds strain I've grown, the run-offs were high for the first month and I only used 25% strength. I think this probably was a big factor in the large number of low yielding plants. But that said, the buds were absolutely first class. I had several people say these were simply the best buds they had ever smoked and that's with over ten years of experience. I personally found the Kush indica stone to be the nicest, low anxiety, happy stone and I would happily smoke it always, excepting for its troublesome growing requirements. I am planning to do an WestCoast OG tent next, that has the same Kush lineage as blackberry, and sounds like hopefully a similar stone with more consistent genetics/yield. I see fastbuds just released a new purple strain (purple lemonade), looks like they knew Blackberry was inferior and have been working for awhile to create a replacement. I also saw on another seedbank site that they are expecting a strain called Purple Punch from fastbuds this year as well.
Nice going mate!
You know I just started working with Coco, so I have tons of questions :D
For now, how come the plants have different runoff EC? They are all the same strain, does it mean that they still all eat nutes at such big difference?
Have you noticed if "eating" is in anyway connected to where the plants are located, how near they are optimal light conditions?
I was thinking perhaps the ones directly in the center of the tent, getting best light but also warmest perhaps eat more nutes?
I'm actually looking into if one needs to check runoff with autopots, not sure even how that would be possible since it bottom feeds?!?
@ProfessorSkiSlopes, That is also what I hope I get from autopots, just removing those daily watering and issues with ph and ec.
From what I understand you check ph and ec when u add everything in res and then perhaps double check couple of hours later to make sure everything is good, after that it should take care of it self... I'm planing to change res each week, I think... who knows, lets see how it goes but each week seems like a good idea and perhaps add some strength to the nutes twice a week so the jump to stronger feeding is not that big. But I hope after week 7-8 I can fill res for the time remaining until flush, if I could get all those feeding and checks to once a week or even twice it would be really nice, from what I read halfway through flower u can more or less let it be for couple of weeks...
@ivik80, Ask away :) I'll do my best! Hmmm well, one thing I've noticed with growing autos from seed is that there is a lot of variance per plant - but the majority of the plants (80% approx) will conform to an average and have a fairly similar phenotype and give similar run-off readings. But I always get a few than outside the average - I actually removed two dwarves from this crop of Blackberries because they were so tiny and were growing so poorly. Even then, two of the seven that remain a completely different shade of green to the rest and seem to be eating way less than the other 5. Those two have consistently had EC readings at least 0.4 higher than the other five. The other five are usually within 0.1 EC of each other. Eating doesn't seem to have any correlation to location or light level. But I think I noticed some quicker drying out of pots near the vents - I've since changed from using just one vent fully open, to using all three vents open partially. This seems to have addressed this issue. Hmm I don't think you have run-off with autopots. I guess that is why you said you bump up the perlite level to 50% , because they are saturated all the time. I'm imagining the only thing you need to worry about is the EC and PH of the main reservoir. I'm very keen to see how you go. I've considered autopots for sometime, as the hardest thing I find with growing in coco is the frequency of watering, and how often to do it and at what EC/PH. Autopots would seem to sort out the frequency..
@Wachsemilian, Thank you very much!! I'm really looking forward to getting even better pictures over the next few weeks as the tent fills up with purple buds.