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My seeds have germinated and I was just about to plant them in their pots when I noticed something that resembles mildew on the walls of my tent. Is this mildew, mold, or anything that needs to be addressed? It's the white powdery stuff in the pictures. It's in different spots all over the tent walls. When I wipe it off it comes off easily and there doesn't appear to be anything on my fingers and it doesn't have any kind of a smell. I took apart the humidifier I've been running non-stop for two weeks and it definitely has a mildew smell coming from it so I'll be getting a new humidifier.
Before I get things planted and off and rolling, should I sanitize my tent? I set it up brand new about two weeks ago.
I was running the tent with the light, exhaust fan, floor fan, and humidifier to see what temps and humidity would be like. Before I put pots with soil in the tent the highest the humidity got up to was around 60% with a temp of around 68. After putting pots in the tent the humidity got up to 75% and the temp again got as low as 68 degrees. If there's any other info that might be helpful just let me know. I want to get started the right way.
Edit: I went in and wiped it all down and it appears to have been dust, but at least it helped me discover that my carbon filter was a little too close to the wall, so at least I prevented a potential problem. There was a little pocket of the fluffy stuff where the filter was almost touching the wall. It would still give me some peace of mind if someone could confirm that it looks like dust to them too 😅
Edit 2: I'm just going to keep this as my first week and update as things need updating. First seedling popped through the soil on 8/19. I figured I'd also give a little info about myself if anyone is interested. I did one grow about 15 years ago in a closet. As a newb in prohibition land and no one to mentor me, I bought Foxfarms TOP SOIL (you know, for the garden, not for pots) and a 250w HPS and did the best I could do with that. Two plants ended up yielding something like 30 grams so I gave up on growing until it was something I could do legally. I currently go through about 2 ounces per month of flower so eventually I'd like to be able to provide for all of my needs with my 4x4 tent. Even though I've got the "proper equipment" this time around, I'm still going to be extremely happy to get even an ounce per plant. Patience was a major ingredient missing from my first grow that I'm going to use a lot of in this grow ;)
Edit 3: As of 8/21 all seedlings have broken through the surface of the soil. Will update with pictures in a few days.
Edit 4 8/25: Seedlings seem to be doing fine. Plant 1 made it through the soil about 36 hours ahead of plant 2 and 48 hours ahead of plants 3 and 4. For simplicity, after this week I'm just going to say they're all on the same day. I'll count 8/21 as day 1 going forward. I changed the light to 20 hours on 4 hours off to help keep temps up. Watered them each today with 1/4 gallon of water ph adjusted to 6.5. I'll wait at least another 3 days to water again. Looks like the leaves might have a few little trichs on them already.
Hard to see from the picture but if your fliter was there then it is probably dust. It is always a good idea to keep your tent disinfected anyway though. You can wipe everything down with clorox wipes to disinfect it.
Day 8 - Plant 1 is clearly ahead of the rest as far as growth goes. I wasn't planning on doing any nutrients yet but I noticed plant 4 is yellower than the others and her tips a little yellow too, so I added just over a quarter teaspoon of Recharge to a gallon of water and gave them each a quarter of the gallon. I'm guessing there's a "hot spot" in the soil that plant 4 is dealing with and I'm hoping the recharge will even things out. I could be completely wrong so any advice regarding the yellowing on it would be appreciated.
Plant 2 has leaflets on its first set of leaves which is something I don't remember seeing before. Plant 3 has an oddly shaped leaf but I don't think it's being caused by stress. I'll update with more pics in a few days.
Also, I looked at the PAR ratings of my light and I realized I can safely start to turn it up with its current height so I'll be slowly turning it up little by little over the next couple of weeks until it's at full power.
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Day 11 - So yesterday I thought I saw a fruit fly in the grow tent. I saw it again later and watched it crawl into the soil. I've never seen a fruit fly do that before so I thought maybe it wasn't a fruit fly at all. What it seems like is it was a fungus gnat. Damage on plant 4 seems to be consistent with fungus gnats.
So until I get some "real" gnat traps, I put some Vaseline on some colored paper that attracts the gnats. Nothing yet. I'm 100% positive I saw a small black bug because I managed to swat it and slow it down a couple of times, but so far I've only seen a single one every time I see it. There's no way it's a fruit fly, it's too fast and it doesn't fly nearly as much as it crawls on the soil.
So if there's fungus gnats that's means I'm over watering so I'm going to let these girls get thirsty before I give them anything else to drink. Hopefully that will take care of the problem with the gnats. Next time I grow autos I don't care what other people do, I'm starting them in solo cups and transplanting them to avoid these head aches :P
Anyways, plant 1 looks a little bit like it wants to start yellowing so when I do water I'll give it a small feeding. Plants 2, 3 and 4 are all still growing very slowly, but if I was over watering that would explain it. It seems odd that plant 1 appears to be thriving with that much water while the others are struggling but maybe it's just stronger. If anyone has any advice, I'm all ears.
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Day 13 - No pictures with this update but the one fungus gnat that I saw seems to have disappeared. Having not watered in 5 days all of the plants are looking healthier. The stunted growth of 2, 3 and 4 seems to be getting better. Just hoping the new growth on plant 4 will be a little healthier. More pics in a couple of days.
Day 15 - I added a small oscillating fan to get the air moving in the lower part of my tent. I moved the light to 19/5 to give the plants a little more rest since they seem pretty stressed. Today makes 8 days since I watered and they aren't showing any signs of getting thirsty yet. Soil still feels moist just a couple inches down. I'm thinking the little bit of yellow that plant 1 is starting to show might actually be the beginnings of a zinc deficiency which could be caused by root stress which can be caused by over watering. So when I do finally water I'll just throw some Recharge in there and see what that does. No nutes yet.
Plants 2, 3, and 4 are still stunted but they're giving me hope that they're going to recover from the over watering. They weren't doing much for a few days and now their growth is noticeable every time I check on them. Plant 1 is probably doing better because I didn't give it as much water from the spray bottle early on. I was afraid the seeds that hadn't made it to the surface yet needed to be sprayed far more often than they actually did. So the longer they took to make it to the surface, the more water they got. Plant 4 must have been drowning.
I haven't seen any sign of a fungus gnat in a few days so I'm guessing it was just one that managed to fly in through an open window. Fingers crossed.
I also got a new (expensive) pH meter and after cross-checking it with four different methods my cheap pH meter I've been using is actually accurate.
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Day 19 - I finally had to water on Day 16 when plants started to show first signs of thirst. I had to go out of town for a couple of days and I got home to a lot of new growth. At this point my plan is to LST plant 1 and probably leave 2, 3, and 4 alone. The internodal growth on plant 1 has more competition than the other plants. We'll see what happens though.
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Day 21 - Plants were showing some signs of thirst again so I watered them with nutes because the deficiency I've been seeing that I thought was zinc is probably a magnesium deficiency. The lower leaves are thick and crispy in addition to that yellowing. I started LST on plant 1 and I'm probably going to have to start to LST plant 4 just because it's twice as tall as any other plant now. Plant 3 has absolutely entered flowering and it's definitely female. Do autoflowers usually flower at different times or is it strain/breeder dependent? I was planning to harvest all of them at the same time and dry them in my grow tent but I think I'm going to have to get a harvest tent if they're flowering at different times. Oh, and I opened up the humidifier to refill it the other day and there was a dead fungus gnat in the reservoir. I haven't seen any since so maybe it was just a loner. More pics tomorrow.
Day 22 - All plants seem to be growing at a much healthier rate than they were in the beginning. There's a mild dank grapefruit smell when I open the tent now. All of the plants look like they're showing a mild magnesium deficiency but I'm also worried it could be too much fan or too much light. I'm guessing plant 3 has entered flowering because of the amount of stretch happening at the internodes. Plants 1 and 2 are now also showing pistils but they don't look like they're flowering the same way that 3 does. Plant 4 isn't showing any signs of preflowers but it's stretching in height like it actually is flowering. My tower fan that's currently in the tent is too strong for how flimsy plant 4 is with how much stretch it has going so I was forced to start training it. I'm getting a new fan with a slower setting for when plants 2 and 3 start stretching and get tall enough to start getting hit by the fan so I don't have to worry about wind damage. I'm planning to just let them grow naturally and see what happens.
For the first few weeks I had a lot of anxiety about getting things perfect and I'm just accepting that I'm never going to get it perfect, so I'm going to learn as much as I can from this grow and totally disregard harvest amounts. I was going to see if I could get myself through the winter with this harvest without having to buy any but I'm giving up on that so I can just grow and enjoy it while I learn.
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Day 23 - So I got the new fan in the tent and I was just kind of paying extra attention to air flow and I realized the exhaust fan isn't doing anything. So again, I've learned the lesson of why you don't use tap water in a humidifier in a grow tent. That mineral dust is so fine that now the prefilter on my carbon filter is completely clogged. It doesn't matter how high I turn up the fan, hardly any air comes out of the exhaust. I know if I run it without a sleeve on there it will ruin the carbon filter so I ordered a new sleeve that I'll put on as soon as I can. In the mean time I'm going to see what happens with the humidity without a humidifier running because this time of year I can probably get away with it. If and when I need to use a humidifier, I'll be using distilled water only from now on. If I get tired of buying distilled water I'll consider getting a cheap RO system I can hook up to my laundry faucet.
This also could possibly explain the apparent magnesium deficiency in the plants. If their stomata are constantly being dusted with calcium, the leaves are going to eventually "lock out" magnesium, I think... 😕
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Day 24 - So I just watched a video on tobacco/hemp mosaic virus and it seems like plant 3 and possibly plant 4 have it. I've been touching all the plants regularly so it may have spread to the entire grow. The video I watched recommends cutting down any infected plants before they can spread the virus. I'll look for advice in the comments.
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Day 25 - The pattern that resembles mosaic virus isn't spreading to any other growth so it's probably from a deficiency since I don't use tobacco or know anyone that does. I watered with cal-mag and all of the plants except for plant 1 seem to be appreciating it. Plant 1 probably could have gone another day before I watered it.
I'm sure everyone that grows from seed says this at some point, but all of the seeds I planted were from the same pack and all of the phenos are so different I feel like I'm actually growing four different strains. I'm excited to see how they turn out. Plant 4 noticeably smells way more dank than any other plant. I'd say if it weren't for that plant in the tent, there wouldn't be any smell when I open it. Plant 3 looks like it's showing some sativa traits and its leaves smell a little bit piney. Plant 2 is developing purple stems and plant 1 is has gone full indica bush mode.
Does the issue on the leaves look like a magnesium deficiency, or something else? On plant 1, the worst looking leaves are crispy and seem thicker than other leaves, but the set of leaves below that one is still green and soft, and in shade.
Looks like the beginning of a magnesium deficiency. With my autos I usually start giving cal/mag week 4 at 0.5 ml per liter. It usually works out fine. Your lights are very strong so adding in the cal/mag helps them deal with light stress better . Hard to tell in your photos but your pots look pretty dry make sure you are giving them enough water and nutrients. They are large enough to give them a good watering but don't soak the whole pot. Start a nice wet dry watering cycle on her letting her dry out a bit between waterings. It will force the roots to grow deeper in the pot looking for moisture. Also if possible try to lower you ph to 5.8 to 6.2 which would be ideal for the best nutrient absorption. Up to 6.5 ph is acceptable for soil. If the magnesium issue starts to present itself on new leaves You can use 1/4 teaspoon of Epsom salt (Magnesium Sulfate) in 1 quart of water and use it as a fine spray solution once a week. Be sure to get under the leaves. Also try to spray at lights out to avoid burn spots on your leaves or early morning before the lights come on then leave a fan blowing on the plant until it drys then it can handle the light. The existing deficiency on the leaf may not improve or change go by the newer leaf growth. Good luck👌
Day 29 - Things seem to be progressing as they should. Plant 4 finally started showing some pistils and it looks like it started flowering. As the plants continue to grow, I'm amazed at how different they are. At this point my plan is to let things stretch out and just put a box under plant 1 when I need to raise the light.
Plant 4 looks like it has a magnesium deficiency, but could it just be a genetic trait that makes it lime green like that? It's growing so fast and none of the old leaves are dying, it doesn't seem like it's struggling at all. It's just weird that the other plants are barely showing a deficiency and plant 4 is a completely different color.
Plants 2 and 3 might look a little droopy because they got watered today and the water was probably too cold. 1 and 4 were watered yesterday and they look healthy to me, minus the lime green color.
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Day 33 - Looks like 2 and 3 are showing signs of nitrogen toxicity so it was too early to give them nutes is my guess. I watered 1 and 4 last night with a half gallon each of just water pHed to 6.5 At this point everything is looking overwatered to me but I'm digging down into the soil before I water and I can't find even a tiny bit of moisture when I do decide to water. Right now they're each getting a half gallon of water about every 4 days. I use a pressurized garden sprayer/waterer to water but I do it slowly. It takes about 45 minutes to disperse 1 gallon the way I do it. If they start to look thirsty I check the soil and if it's absolutely dry I still give them another 24 hours before I water and as soon as I water they just droop and look like they're struggling to survive for the next couple of days. I noticed the soil on top of the pots was kind of hard packed after I watered last time so this time after I was done I stirred up the top 1-2 inches to see if that helps. I feel like I'm doing something absolutely wrong and I can't figure it out for the life of me. Plants 2, 3 and 4 look like garbage. The first time I grew I never had any issues like this, but I also kept it really simple. I've literally reached the point of frustration with these plants that I almost want to scrap them and start over. I ordered seeds from Exotic Genetics and it's going to be really hard not to pop them...
Day 37 - I probably should have watered plant 4 last night but I was sick. I did more training on it a couple days ago because I think it's going to stretch more. I wanted to see how much I could bend it without snapping the stem, just for learning purposes. Plant 2 never bounced back from the last time I watered it so I'm wondering if there's potentially some root rot forming. Plant 3 was drooping in a similar way when they got watered and it bounced back just fine after watering. Plant 1 looks like it's done stretching so I'm going to put it up on a small milk crate to get it up even with the rest of the canopy.
I did some asking around on forums about "wilting" long before they should be getting ready to go to sleep and the consensus is that with the early over watering, their roots can't handle the heat of the light on at full power with fans blowing directly on them. The plants are "breathing" faster than the roots can replenish the water. So I took the fans that were blowing on the plants and put them so they're blowing on the pots so the air is more indirect. It's actually made a hugely noticeable difference.
I found a cool app for my phone that allows you to measure lux/PAR and there's something like a 20,000 lux difference between the top of plant 3 (tallest) and plant 1 (shortest). It's available for Android for free and it's called "Lux Light Meter."
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Day 38 - So I watered plant 4 yesterday and it looks better but I noticed its new leaves are still getting yellow patches. I've never measured run off before for TDS and saw the water in the splash tray and decided to measure it while I was watering plant 1 today. It kept coming in at 6500 so I thought the TDS meter was broken. Then I remembered if the water is evaporating and the solids aren't, it's going to increase the PPM. So when I got done watering plant 1, I measured the run off and it was steady at 3200 PPM. I watered it with 750 PPM and the run off was coming out at 3200. This is the 2nd time I've ever used nutes. My water comes out of the tap at 150 PPM. Soil is Foxfarms Ocean Forest. This seems like waaayyyy too high of a PPM for autos, let alone a normal plant. I guess I need to start flushing the soil. 😕
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Day 39 - Did some research and pH is all that really gives an indication when it comes to runoff so I'm less worried about the high PPM, but I'm still going to dial back the nutes about 25% and water with about 1.25 gallons each instead of a gallon each.
I just wanted to post a family pic where they weren't all droopy from not watering. I'll post some more pictures soon.
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Day 41 - Posted some more pictures. There's some spots on some leaves that have me wondering if I'm getting my watering mix on the leaves or if there's some more evidence of root rot forming. I really don't smell anything "bad" in the tent. At worst it smells wet like it could be the home of something that would smell bad, but it's not there yet. Plant 4 is definitely flowering now but the stretch I was expecting hasn't happened yet. It's going to be at least a week behind its sisters when it gets the chop.
Day 43 - Plants 1 and 3 are starting to get some sparkles on them. It really looks like plant 1 is further along than the others at this point but we'll see what happens. Plant 4 keeps looking like it's thirsty when the soil still feels moist. It was watered about 3 days ago so it should be ready for more, but I want to wait and see. It's the biggest so it should be drinking the most. Plant 3 was watered 4 days ago and 1 and 2 were watered 5 days ago.
I found out the light was a little too intense at 24 inches at full power (~1400 PPFD) so I turned it down to where there's about 1000 PPFD on the canopy. I think there's a little bit of light burn starting to show on a few leaves so I turned it down to be safe rather than risk it.
The plants aren't drinking as fast as I'd like so I'm not going to give them plain water again until the flush at the end. I'll give plant 4 a couple more drops of gro than the others, I still really think she's going to stretch another few inches.
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Day 45 - No pictures this update, just thoughts. So as much as I'm trying to be patient, I had to get a few trichs on my fingers and give them a smell because there's a new smell coming from the tent. After giving things a smell, I'm more convinced than ever that I actually have different strains going, not just widely varying phenotypes. I don't want to talk shit about Crop King Seeds without knowing for sure, so if you're reading this, keep in mind I made some major newbie mistakes along the way and all of the variation I'm seeing COULD be a result of my mistakes. But...plant 3 smells like straight up cheese. Plant 1 has the typical under-ripened flower smell that I'm familiar with. The morphology of the plants alone was an indication to me that maybe I'm dealing with different strains, but the smells are so different I really think they screwed up and gave me a mixed pack of seeds. I've already decided I'm going to grow out my remaining 8 "White Widow" seeds for my next grow. There will be a myriad of things I'll do differently (better) and with twice as many plants it will be easy to see if my mistakes created the differences or if it's the genes.
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Day 46 - Just wanted to throw a family pic up.
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Day 48 - More pictures. At this point, plant 4 is a constant source of anxiety for me. She looks thirsty but the top few inches of her soil is moist, if not wet, and she was watered about 72 hours ago. I'm again thinking she's overwatered so I'm going to just wait another 24 hours and see what happens. If the drooping gets worse, I'll water.
Plant 1 smells like it has a lot of myrcene, terpinolene, and linalool in it. Plant 2 smells like pinene without a hint of any other terpenes. Plant 3 starts off smelling like pinene but after just a couple of seconds it shifts drastically into smelling like cheese and I have no idea what terpenes do that. Plant 4 still just smells like a funky grapefruit skunk without any really distinguishable terpenes, and all of the smell is coming from the stems, the buds aren't producing trichs or terps yet. My wife doesn't partake in any kind of cannabis consumption so to her "it smells like weed." I had her smell plant 1 and plant 3 and even she can tell a major difference. Without putting words in her mouth, she describes plant 3 as pungent and plant 1 as flowery/fruity.
Day 50 - I got a new macro lens to help me identify when it's time to harvest. It also takes really cool pictures :)
Each plant is getting different nutrients at this point. Plant 1 is clearly entering its final stages of life so I'm just giving it 2ml/gal of micro and 4ml/gal of bloom. Plant 2 got 2ml/gal micro, .75ml/gal gro, 3ml/gal of bloom. Plant 3 got 2ml/gal micro, .5ml/gal gro, 3ml/gal of bloom. Plant 4 got 2ml/gal micro, 1ml/gal gro, 2ml/gal of bloom.
I did some minor defoliation on every plant. Plant 4 had some huge leaves that were removed and I'm just hoping they were the right leaves to remove.
I got the harvest tent all set up and ready to go. I'm thinking plant 1 is probably about 3 weeks away from the chop, 2 and 3 should be a few days behind that, and I don't know if 4 is ever going to make it to harvest. Plant 4 seems to be having root issues and the stress is making me think it's going to go hermaphrodite. I'm keeping a really close eye on it. If it does go to harvest it's probably got another 5 weeks before it will be ready. I'm getting more and more excited to get my next grow going so if plant 4 gets replaced by 8 solo cups I won't be too disappointed.
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Day 52 - Wanted to put up a pic of the canopy height. Plant 4 is still stretching and it makes me really glad I figured out how to measure PPFD with a lux meter. My light (HLG 550 v2) uses QB 288 v2 3000k quantum boards and this website allows you to convert lux from that board into PPFD:
https://horticulturelightinggroup.com/blogs/calculators/converting-lux-to-ppfd
The first calculator I was using to determine PPFD wasn't actually from the maker of my light. It was giving higher values so when I thought the light was at 1400 PPFD it was actually lower. Anyways, now that I'm aware of that official calculator, I'm keeping the canopy at 1000 PPFD.
If I have to, I'll move the light away from the center of the tent and keep 1, 2 and 3 centered underneath it and move 4 off a little bit to the side. The light can go up but it's at the perfect height for the other plants, so I'll just move 4 if I have to. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with feeding plant 4 going forward because it's just so late it feels like doing anything to help it is a lost cause. Its top growth wilts 24 hours after watering and it's basically just showing all of the classic signs of root stress and overwatering. I guess I'm going to see just how dry I can let it get without killing it, then try giving it a tiny bit of water every other day with a little bit of Recharge. I'll consider it a success if plant 4 makes it to harvest and produces even a gram of bud worth using.
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Day 55 - I'm kind of giving up hope on plant 4. I noticed that every time I move it it smells like cut grass so I thought maybe the LST was stressing it. I removed the LST this morning and I'm just going to see what happens. At this point I'm 99% certain plant 4 isn't going to make it to harvest so any little thing I can do I'm going to.
I'm watching the trichomes on plant 1 and 3 and so far I haven't seen any ambers. They look pretty immature to me but the structure of plant 1 tells me it's getting close to the end. As soon as I see an amber trichome I'm going to flush the soil, or I'll just flush it at the start of week 10 for plant 1 and week 11 for 2 and 3.
The dank and skunky smell in the tent has been almost entirely replaced by fruity and flowery smells. It's actually less "weed like" now that it's further into flower. It's finally starting to feel like harvesting some decent buds is an actual possibility.
Day 57 - Plant 4 is continuing to get worse but I think it might be drying out enough to give it a tiny bit of water. We'll see what happens. At this point it kind of feels like a waiting game with the other plants. They're doing what they're supposed to do and they keep getting bigger. I'm getting really excited to see how things turn out. I'm getting more optimistic the closer I get to harvest.
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Day 61 - Plant 4 got a little bit of water and Recharge and it seems to be a little bit happier but with all of that yellow I don't know if there's anything that can bring her back. Everything else is progressing like it should. I'm keeping an eye on the trichomes. Speaking of trichomes, plant 4 is actually producing a few here and there so I'll salvage what I can.
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Day 63 - I typed out a long update but the website refused to save it. Basically, plant 4 is rebounding enough that I'm going to hold off on popping my next seeds until I harvest plant 1. I just want to see what kind of recovery is possible. I'm planning to start flushing plant 1 tonight and harvest 10 days from now on day 73, November 1st.
Day 64 - I've started the flush on plant 1. The trichs aren't turning amber yet but the bud structure alone tells me it's time to start flushing. I'm assuming plant 1 will be ready for the chop on day 73, but I'll let the trichomes dictate what happens. Plant 2 is really fattening up and showing a lot of frost. Plant 3 is showing some amber trichomes but I think they're just in areas where I've grabbed the leaf for a test smell. Next time plant 3 gets watered I'll start the flush on her too. Plant 4 is just kind of hanging in there. I've probably taken off half of her leaves by now, but there's a few trichomes popping out here and there. If nothing else I'll make some air freshener or something out of it 😝.
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Day 66 - I just had to note that I chopped down plant 4 this morning. The little bit of green growth in her bottom leaves basically turned completely yellow overnight and I took it as a sign that it was time. I'll dry her out and see if there's anything worth saving. I'll be watering tonight and I'm going to start flushing both 2 and 3. Everything looks like it's within two weeks of being done to me so it's flush time.
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Day 68 - I continued to flush plant 1 and started flushing 2 and 3. I read that some people need to put 15 gallons of water through a 5-gallon pot to get the PPM coming out down to what it is going in, so I started measuring the PPM after every gallon of water that went through plant 1. After 8 gallons of 150 PPM tap water it was still coming out at 1200-1500 PPM. The first time I ever measured the run off of plant 1 (about two weeks ago) it was over 3200. After 10 gallons it was showing ~500ppm so I decided to quit there. I put 3 gallons of water through 2 and 3 and their PPMs were at about 700-800 PPM. I'm still learning about flushing so I'm just doing it a little differently with each plant. I use a vaporizer 99.99% of the time and I've read that an improper flush is a lot worse for vaporizer users, so I want to figure out how to do it properly.
I'm so perplexed by the amount of salt in the run off because I thought I was going really easy on the nutes. I don't think I was physically watering properly. I was afraid the water would run out of the sides of the fabric pot so I went very very slowly until it got to the point that it was just taking too long and I decided to try to use a regular old watering can. When I did that I saw that the water pools up and only a few drops will run out of the side of the pots. I'm guessing that things were building up until I started using a watering can, but I'll find out with my next grow I guess.
I also decided to take apart the root ball of plant 4 and just see how bad the root rot was. Well, there wasn't any. The roots were all white and healthy and the entire 5-gallon pot was one giant root ball. There was absolutely no smell or anything that would indicate that the roots were in any way unhealthy. I'm just going to chalk it up to a genetic defect. Plant 4's leaves were soft like velvet before they ever yellowed which meant to me it wasn't absorbing or processing something important.
Things are getting close and it's getting harder than ever to be patient.
Day 71 - I feel like it's just a waiting game at this point. I'm keeping on eye on the trichomes and when they get to about 10% amber, I'll bring down the plants. Plant 1 has stopped fattening up so I'm expecting her trichomes to start turning any day now. Plant 2 looks like it will be the last one to get chopped, leaves are showing issues from pH fluctuations and probably some cal/mag issues. I don't want to feed her so I'm going to ride it out and see if she yellows out early. Plant 3 is getting so frosty it's making it really hard to wait.
Plant 1 smells like a combination of fruit and pine at a distance, when you put your nose right in it it smells like eucalyptus and frankincense on top of the other smells. Plant 2 now smells like you're getting smacked in the face with grape candy. And plant 3 still smells a lot like cheese at a distance, but on further inspection the smell turns really skunky and almost starts to smell like diesel. Lots of caryophyllene in plant 3 is my guess, more myrcene and terpinolene in plants 1 and 2. I'm anxious to see how they smell when they've been cured.
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Day 72 - Apparently after posting an update it may be necessary to delete your cookies to get the website to load in firefox, just fyi. I tried to update this last night and it wouldn't let me. Anyways, last night I continued to flush plants 1 and 3. Plant 1 took 18 gallons until the water was finally coming out at the same PPM as it was going in. Plant 3 got 12 more gallons to get down to about 200ppm and I'll do the same to plant 2 today. I started with ~80 degree water for the first 10 gallons to help loosen up the salts and went back down to ~65 degrees for the last gallons to make sure the roots can breathe. I'm hoping that after today all of the flushing will be done and I can just water here and there as needed until the end.
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Day 75 - I'm still keeping an eye on trichomes and giving 6.5 pH water as needed until the end. Time for more pictures.
Day 78 - I'm continuing to keep an eye on trichomes and water with 6.4-6.6 pH water as needed. I'm really surprised I'm not seeing any amber trichomes at all at this point. The buds on plant 1 are so dense I'm kind of worried about bud rot when drying. I've got the harvest tent ready to go at 65 degrees and 50% RH. When I think a plant is ready for harvest I'll give it 24 hours of dark before chopping.
As far as my next grow, I decided I'm going to finish this one up and have a day where there's nothing going on in the grow tent so I can do things like wipe any and all dust off my light, fan/filter maintenance, clean up the tent floor, and all of that kind of stuff. I'm definitely going to pop my remaining 8 seeds I have of this strain for my next grow and see what I can do with those. I'm a little nervous about a few different things regarding this strain, mainly herms and keeping a close on twice as many plants as I did for this grow, but I want to try again and see how much I can improve.
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Day 79 - Breaking with tradition on pictures and putting up a couple of only trichomes. Just wanted to note that all plants are showing an amber trichome here and there about 36 hours after the last pictures were taken. I'm going to let the light run for one more "day", or about 17 hours, then all the plants are going into 24 hours of dark before getting cut down.
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Day 81 - Chopped down all three plants at about noon. I also forgot to take pictures as I went so I've only got a picture of the plants hanging. I took off a few of the biggest fan leaves but I think I'm going to have to take a branch off of plant 1. Two colas ended up growing kind of together and there's an area in between them that's all white (from no chlorophyll) that looks like prime real estate for mold. Otherwise I'm going to let them hang whole and dry like that for a few days until I can just pick off the major fan leaves. Then when the stems start to pop when they bend I'll jar things up and go from there. I've been curing my own stash for the last ~4 years so I actually have some confidence in that part. I'll update when things are dry and weighed out.
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Day 82 - I was getting nervous about plant 1 and bud rot so first thing this morning I went and took every cola off the plant. About 5 colas in I made the discovery that nobody wants to...bud rot. I think it's only showing up on this one bud, but I'm not sure if the white areas on other buds are the beginnings of mold or if it's just areas that lack chlorophyll. I posted some pictures to help identify.
Update: I decided to wet trim plant 1 to help me keep an eye on any potential mold and to speed up the drying process. I figured it's a choice between buds that dried too quick and buds that turned moldy, so I'd rather have them dry too quick. I separated the buds into two groups, those with areas of white and those without. The white areas don't look like mold, but I don't want to take a chance. I trimmed the two groups separately and I'm also going to dry them separately. The group of buds with no white gets to dry in the tent and the buds with white are just going to sit out with lots of air exposure. I'd rather have nasty dry bud that is usable than moldy bud that isn't. Also, I just had to weigh the main cola and after trimming it was 76 grams wet. I'm glad there's more weight than I was expecting but now I'm pretty much freaking out about plants 2 and 3. Did plant 1 get moldy for the reason I suspect, because the buds were too dense and too close, or was it the conditions in the tent? I don't know for sure and I don't want to assume that the other plants are just going to be fine. I'm about five minutes from heading to the grow store, getting a hanging drying rack, and just wet trimming the entire harvest. Any advice is appreciated.
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Day 84 - No more mold has showed up. I broke every piece of bud off every stem with plant 1 just to get as much air as possible moving through the buds. It's going to look like crap in the jars, but it's not going to have mold on it :) I took every branch off of plants 2 and 3 that were touching another branch so there's no areas where buds are touching other buds. That white growth inside the buds that I was worried about (like in the picture that says "future bud rot?") actually turns green after it's been exposed to air for a little while. The one little part that turned brown/rusty was actually the top of one of the colas and I think it's actually light burn that turned that one little part brown. It's the only place on the entire plant that that brown material has showed up. I was worried I wouldn't be able to cure plant 1 but things are drying slowly even though I've got it all pulled apart. The smell that comes from the buds when you disturb them a little is pretty amazing and it makes me want to do everything I can to keep that smell. Speaking of smell, the grape smell from plant 2 is getting stronger and plant 3 now smells exactly like mashed garlic cauliflower. I was pretty hopeless a couple of days ago but now I feel optimistic that everything I have now will go into jars at some point. Next update will have weights and final results.
Can I salvage any of the buds from a plant with bud rot? I'm not seeing any actual fuzz anywhere on the plant besides where I took that picture, could I throw out that bud and keep the rest? Should I take everything from that plant out of the dry tent so it doesn't spread?
You should definitely put that bud and the buds next to it out of the tent but be careful not to shake that bud to prevent massive spore release. Take some time and carefully watch all the other buds for signs of mould and do this daily. I would advise to dismantle the bigger buds to prevent more mould and dry them on a rack. Thats one of the options you have to make sure enough air can flow around those big dense buds. Better dismantle before risking more mould and a bigger loss.
Update: Things have been curing for about 30 days now so I've been digging into the jars and sampling some of plant 2 and plant 3. I turned plant 1 into what I'm calling hash oil, but I made it with the RSO method only I decarbed everything in the oven first. I'm not really sure if I should have used more alcohol and gotten more out of it but I got about 11 milliliters of hash oil using 32 ounces of 190 proof ethanol. I mixed some of it with some cacao butter and when I make edibles really potent they actually do have an effect on me. The sativa effects are really apparent when I eat the oil. The first time I ate it I ended up staying up about three hours later than I normally do which is the first time that's happened to me in over five years. The oil from plant 1 tastes amazing. It's fruity, piney, and I swear there's even a hint of wintergreen.
Plant 2 smells like what I assume White Widow traditionally smells like. I've never actually vaped or smoked White Widow before this, but I went through about a half pound of Blue Widow last winter and it smells exactly like that, minus the blueberry. It's extremely similar to plant 1 in smell. If you didn't know they were different plants it would have been hard to tell them apart. Very fruity with hints of pine and wintergreen. Vaping/smoking plant 2 is all I've done with it and all I plan to do with it. The taste after curing is pretty good but not where I want it. If I paid for it I'd want a little bit of a discount for flavor alone. I think things dried too fast when I got worried about mold. It's definitely a lot better than plant 3, but you can tell an amateur grew it. The potency however is out of this world. I thought I had a high tolerance but with this stuff I can actually get "too high" if I do too much. The stuff I was buying before I started growing tastes infinitely better but the more you use the more tired and sedated you get, no matter which strain. This stuff just gets you higher and higher and higher the more you do. I tried vaping about a gram without stopping and I had to tap out.
Plant 3 smells a lot better than it did right after harvest, but it still doesn't smell good to me in any way. The most accurate description I can give it is something super sour mixed with some garlic and a single square inch of a dryer sheet. My wife who doesn't smoke describes it as sour milk and garlic. I think it dried even faster than plant 2 because it has this awful kelp/fish food taste when I vape it that I know is coming from the leaf material and not the terpenes. Plant 3 isn't as dense as plant 2 which is why it probably dried out too fast. However, it's even more potent than plant 2. The potency is so amazing I'm willing to overlook the terrible taste, which again, I think came from drying too fast, not from genetics.
Just for frame of reference for what kind of weed I'm used to, my provider (this is all according to him so it could be complete BS) gets his clones from someone that won the Michigan Cannabis Cup and that same guy mentored him (they're family) and taught him everything about growing. He's spoiled me with what I'm used to when it comes to taste.
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Before I get into details of the harvest, I just wanted to note that the way I did this grow journal was intended to help the next person that was overwhelmed by all of the details of growing, but still wants to take a shot at it. Growing is something I've been passionately interested in for a long time, but it just seemed too overwhelming to me. Seeing the entire grow process broken down week by week and seeing the details that people look for in their journals helped me a lot, so I wanted to make this journal as helpful as I could for people like me. In the future my journals probably won't be as well-documented as this one.
Losses to mold were minimal. I probably scrapped about 15-20% of plant 1 and no other mold showed up anywhere else. I'm thinking the humidity got up too high in the 24 hours of dark before chopping so I'm going to avoid dark period before chopping unless I can get the humidity stable at 30% during the dark period. I really don't know if the mold should have been better or worse so I'm just saying this strain has neutral resistance. I need more grows under my belt to know if it's actually resistant or easy to grow.
Plants 1 and 2 are somewhat similar in smells, very fruity and if you leave your nose in the jar it turns into a lavender smell with a hint of camphor. Plant 2 had a grape smell going when it was growing but now that it's dry, that grape smell is completely gone. Plant 3 smells like straight up cheese in the worst possible way. It's the worst smelling weed I've ever smelled in my entire life, but it's every bit as potent as anything I've ever encountered. I have a severe dairy allergy so if I take a big whiff of anything that smells even a little bit like dairy, it makes me gag. Plant 3 literally makes me gag if my leave my nose in the jar. Plant 3 is so close to having a chemdawg smell profile but it's like it's just missing one really important terpene that makes the gas/mothball smell appealing. The taste is luckily a lot better than the smell, and the potency makes me just fine with how it smells.
I'm some kind of weirdo that can't tell a difference between a sedating strain and energizing strain. I've yet to encounter a single strain that has ever given me energy, but I always have ~10mg of CBD in my system, so that might have something to do with it. I haven't experimented too much with any of the plants yet because I want them cured before I start digging in, so take these descriptions with a grain of salt. Plant 1 is just a standard "mild high" and I think I'm going to make an alcohol extraction like RSO out of it so I can have a odor-free method of consumption, plus that should kill any mold that remains. Plant 2 has more of what I assume to be a "sativa" high because I notice I can't sit at my computer for very long after vaping it. I just feel like there's stuff to do and I HAVE to get it done after vaping plant 2. Plant 3 has a full body melt kind of high where lifting your arms feels like something you should be getting paid to do. I might have just been really tired when I tried plant 3 though.
I went really light on trimming since I only use a vaporizer and edibles do nothing for me so weights might be a tiny bit higher than normal. Plant 1 produced 67 grams. Plant 2 produced 93 grams. And plant 3 produced 107 grams.
Before I get into details of the harvest, I just wanted to note that the way I did this grow journal was intended to help the next person that was overwhelmed by all of the details of growing, but still wants to take a shot at it. Growing is something I've been passionately interested in for a long time, but it just seemed to overwhelming to me. Seeing the entire grow process broken down week by week and seeing the details that people look for in their journals helped me a lot, so I wanted to make this journal as helpful as I could for people like me. In the future my journals probably won't be as well-documented as this one.
Losses to mold were minimal. I probably scrapped about 15-20% of plant 1 and no other mold showed up anywhere else. I'm thinking the humidity got up to high in the 24 hours of dark before chopping so I'm going to avoid dark period before chopping unless I can get the humidity stable at 30% during the dark period. I really don't know if the mold should have been better or worse so I'm just saying this strain has neutral resistance. I need more grows under my belt to know if it's actually resistant or easy to grow.
Plants 1 and 2 are somewhat similar in smells, very fruity and if you leave your nose in the jar it turns into a lavender smell with a hint of camphor. Plant 2 had a grape smell going when it was growing but now that it's dry, that grape smell is completely gone. Plant 3 smells like straight up cheese in the worst possible way. It's the worst smelling weed I've ever smelled in my entire life, but it's every bit as potent as anything I've ever encountered. I have a severe dairy allergy so if I take a big whiff of anything that smells even a little bit like dairy, it makes me gag. Plant 3 literally makes me gag if my leave my nose in the jar. Plant 3 is so close to having a chemdawg smell profile but it's like it's just missing one really important terpene that makes the gas/mothball smell appealing. The taste is luckily a lot better than the smell, and the potency makes me just fine with how it smells.
I'm some kind of weirdo that can't tell a difference between a sedating strain and energizing strain. I've yet to encounter a single strain that has ever given me energy, but I always have ~10mg of CBD in my system, so that might have something to do with it. I haven't experimented too much with any of the plants yet because I want them cured before I start digging in, so take these descriptions with a grain of salt. Plant 1 is just a standard "mild high" and I think I'm going to make an alcohol extraction like RSO out of it so I can have a odor-free method of consumption, plus that should kill any mold that remains. Plant 2 has more of what I assume to be a "sativa" high because I notice I can't sit at my computer for very long after vaping it. I just feel like there's stuff to do and I HAVE to get it done after vaping plant 2. Plant 3 has a full body melt kind of high where lifting your arms feels like something you should be getting paid to do. I might have just been really tired when I tried plant 3 though.
I went really light on trimming since I only use a vaporizer and edibles do nothing for me so weights might be a tiny bit higher than normal. Plant 1 produced 67 grams. Plant 2 produced 93 grams. And plant 3 produced 107 grams.
Just cut the bud with the rot generously, and check the other plants often, b4cause this Girls grow very dense and its hard to discover rot... if you see wilting sugarleaves is a sign for something going on
@Mrs_Larimar, Thanks. I kind of opened up every part of the bud with mold and deep inside it was getting fuzzy all over so I threw out the entire bud. I washed my hands in between touching buds I thought might have mold and anything else. The weird thing is with the white areas on the buds is that I'm pretty sure it's just "albino" plant material that never got any light because it's not fuzzy with anything but trichomes as far as I can tell. I'm going to let the buds with the white areas just dry in their own corner of the house and see if those areas turn into mold.
@@Sublime374, I've seen a lot of great grows using the GH Flora line up. With the LED if your going to to do a lot of growing you may want to think about getting a good PPF/PAR meter to measure the intensity of your lights at different distances. Their not cheap but they take away the guess work.
@Philindicus, Thanks, I appreciate it. I looked around at some other reviews of the light I'm using and some seasoned growers have suggested increasing cal/mag when using it. I had an overwatering problem in the beginning and now I'm watering about every four days but I've got a fan blowing on the pots so the top dries out quickly because I've had some fungus gnats. Next time I water I'll just do 2ml of cal/mag in a gallon of 6.2 water. New growth looks healthy and happy but I want to keep it that way.
I would try to treat each plant indiviually. They may have different feeding and watering schedules. Personally on my current grow I went from growing 4 plants to 7 plants and lost track of who got what. They were all drinking at different rates. I discovered I forgot to feed one plant. Which caused an issue.Now I write everything down. For some reason in my mind I expected to water and feed them all at once. Not the case.
@Philindicus, Thanks. I've got a whiteboard in the grow room that helps me keep track of watering and feeding. Each plant is getting slightly different nutes at this point and I water them when they start to look thirsty. I watch the big fan leaves to know if they're thirsty. Last time I watered they all just happened to get thirsty on the same day, except 4. I'll give plant 4 about a liter of water when I do water it. It's yellowing so fast I'm really giving up on it, but that's ok, because I'm starting my next seeds in about a week and I'll need the space.
@@Sublime374,I cannot rubbing and they’re very green they look very healthy but growing very slow there in a 5 gallon in a 3 gallon pots how do you send a picture on there so you can see the plants can you do that
@Lancemosh, A lot of times slow growth is caused by over watering. Check out this website and see if it helps: https://www.growweedeasy.com/cannabis-plant-problems/overwatering
The other thing that can stunt a plant's growth is if the container it's in is too small. Plants that are older than 3 weeks should be in at least a 3-gallon pot.
Just another update. I looked closely at some pictures and the mold was on plant 1 before it went into the harvest tent, which means the grow tent was exposed to mold. So I wiped every square inch of the grow tent with bleach wipes, let it air out for a couple hours, moved plants 2 and 3 to the main tent so that I could wipe down the harvest tent the same way. Now I've got the harvest tent with a floor fan blowing into it to make sure it's totally aired out because I don't want that smell getting in the bud. When that's aired out I'll move plants 2 and 3 back to the harvest tent so that tomorrow I can get started in the main tent with the seeds that I popped. Oh yeah, counting is hard, I actually have 9 seeds.
I completely took apart every cola on plant 1. Every bud has been pulled apart and while there isn't any mold visible, there's lots of the "albino" plant material in areas that never got any light. It looks like after that white material gets exposed to air for a while it to turns a dark reddish brown, like bud rot. I'm assuming it's bud rot waiting to happen but I'll just have to keep an eye on it and see. All of plant 1 is far away from the harvest area. All of the materials used when trimming and harvesting have been cleaned or thrown out.
I went in and cut one of the "twin buds" off of plant 2 because that's the kind of area that has all of the albino growth on plant 1. The part of that bud that was growing into its "twin" has some of that same albino growth. If it is bud rot, I'm hoping that's the only part on plant 2 with it. The area where plant 1 got moldy is kind of a dead zone for air flow so I'm trying to stay optimistic that it's going to be contained to that one bit of bud, but that albino growth is telling me something isn't right. I'll update when there's more to update.
@Majormolasses Right now I've got the light (HLG 550 v2) turned all the way down and daytime temps are around 75 with it falling as low as 66 at night. With the new humidifier I put in the tent, the humidity is remaining much more stable, around 50-60% at all times. I keep a tower fan running 24/7 in addition to the exhaust fan that's pulling about 250 CFM. I had a filter over my intake vent but I noticed the walls of the tent were getting sucked in so I just have what's basically a hair net over the intake to catch any dust bunnies or anything like that, so fresh air should always be flowing in without a problem. There was one time when I forgot to turn the tower fan back on (I turn it off to spray water on the soil) and the humidity got up to about 80% for a couple of hours, but I don't know if the air up higher was actually that wet. It was right after I got done spraying water and the thermometer/hydrometer was directly on the pot I watered. I also have two clip-on fans above my light to push hot air towards the exhaust fan, but it really doesn't produce much heat so I've been using them to push hot air down to the plants. My tent is in my basement, but it's not a true basement. The side of the basement my tent is on isn't below ground. The basement is usually 5 or 6 degrees colder than the rest of the house but the humidity is the same throughout. Keeping my temp high enough is the biggest challenge I've had so far which is why I use the clip-on fans to push the hot air down. So yeah, there's lots of air flow in the tent. All of that air flow is why I'm more and more confident it was just mineral dust from running the old humidifier. Also, after removing that humidifier there's no longer any kind of smell that resembles mildew. Thanks for the advice :)
Sublime374
