8 Ball Kush

👌👌 love the diary

Dope looking lady 👍🏽💯

Bought a 100 pack of 18oz "solo cups" for $6, two $0.95 2-liter bottles of soda that I may or may not drink, but plan to build "cloning chambers" for solo cups to sit in ;), and a $12 tub of Miracle Grow rooting powder (what can I say, Cheapee McCheapington is my best friend). Plan for the "cloning chambers", is to boil a bunch of small-ish rocks from the driveway. Cut the bottom of the 2 liter off about an inch or two up from the bottom. Fill the indentations in the bottom with rocks to create a level surface. Open up holes in the bottom of the solo cup, and put a few rocks in for weight/to help hold soil behind the drain holes. Fill with sterilized soil (I have some expensive cannabis-specific soil for this which has the nutrients to support clones through the first couple weeks). Transplant clone straight into solo cup soil after prepping (should work just fine, may take longer to root but I'm in no hurry). Force the remaining part of the 2 liter bottle down onto the bottom part (it won't line up perfectly but I can get a pretty good seal). Then I can open the cap to spray water down in or to air it out a little if it's too damp! I'll also drill a few small holes in the bottom part of the 2 liter before I put the rocks in, and maybe one or two small ones up top for flow, because I don't want to completely suffocate the clones. I'll be around to spray them a couple times a day or air them out or whatever needs to be done! Once they take root, I'm going to move them under a low powered light that will hopefully keep them growing slowly while the main ones flower. I'll prune fan leaves or whatever as I need to as well to keep them as small as possible for now. Will this work? I don't know. Is it worth a try with $20 of materials that would support 100 future clones without needing to buy anything else? Absolutely.

The answer to my grow question was awesome! After reading about air pruning, I now understand that it's actually a GOOD thing if a couple roots poke out the drain holes here and there, it causes them to stop growing in that direction and branch out elsewhere, creating a healthy root pattern :)

Snagged up some Girl Scout Cookie and Bubblegum feminized seeds for future grows :D

Next grow, I will be more proactive and less reactive. Basically this time I'm just fudging my way through it, learning by reacting to situations as they occur rather than preventing them from happening in the first place. Fortunately for me, 8BK is very forgiving. To cure the deficiency/ies in plant A, I've ordered some Bud Blaster which is high in Phosphorus and Potassium, something like 1-51-34 if I remember correctly. Thanks to @BC_CropGoddess for posting a picture of the label of this stuff! I believe it is exactly what my plants need. It should be here Tuesday. Clone B is showing Nitrogen Overload, and clone A started curling up today. The soil I put them in says it has enough starter nutrients for the first couple weeks, well it's been a couple weeks. I think I had salts building up in the soil, so I flushed both solo cups. We'll see what happens. I have some 5-liter buckets coming too, which I'll move the clones to... I plan to mix the soil with a hefty amount of perlite, probably a 1:1 ratio. I also will be creating a new diary for them at the end of this week, as "week 1" for them since they're both rooted now (even though clone A rooted an entire week before clone B). Haven't decided if I'm going to keep these as moms and pull clones off them for growing... or if I'm just going to grow out these clones and then order another set of seeds. I think I'll know more about how I want to proceed once I see the yield of my work this time around. If I were to get several ounces between the two plants I'm flowering now (high expectations for my first grow but I'm staying positive), I'll probably just grow one more round of 8BK with the two clones and grow something different! My primary goal for growing is to eventually stop paying for cannabis. If I can achieve that result year-round, I'll be happy...

Middle of week 7: Still waiting on clone B, but clone A has rooted! It's perked up and the top leaves doubled in size in 24 hours. Also, the yellowing got even worse... so I fed each plant 10x the dose of miracle grow I normally give them, just for kicks (figured I can always flush out if I need to) and they are finally slowly starting to turn green again :)

NOTE: I must have FIMed my FIM, because the leaves just started growing back the way they were on both plants?!?!?!?!?!?!?! They just carried on like I did nothing. So, last night I topped them both. I also removed a second fan leaf on plant A to better help expose colas. I woke up this morning AND THEY ARE STILL F'ING GROWING like I did nothing at all to them (except of course now I've got multiple colas shooting out that also literally sprouted over night). 8BK is an amazing plant for the growing process itself. RE: Clones, I think they are both already starting to root. The day after I put them in the chambers, the leaves were curling a bit. Today, they've uncurled and look great. I swear there's also already some minor new growth on clone B, but that might just be my imagination.

Excited to spend my weekly fun time with the plants tomorrow. I'll be attempting to start my clones. Spent about an hour tonight reading up on cloning, FIMing, and topping as well as selecting my clone sites and finalizing plans. After setting up the clones and applying more LST as needed, I think I'm going to top plant B and FIM plant A. Then see where I'm at the following week -- if the main plants have recovered and the clones have rooted well, I may start flowering as I'm going to run out of horizontal space :/ Wishing I had a 3x3 instead of a 2x2!

Only at the beginning of the 5th week, but man... I thought plant A was going to be the amazing one because of the growth pattern. Turns out plant B is a rockstar. Plant A responds horribly to nutrients and to light. It's 30 inches away from the grow light and still wants less. Plant B is the "uglier" of the two plants but has turned out to grow like a weed. Resilient to light. spaced out nicely. After LST, plant B exploded (it's only about 30 hours after I bent the main stem over and gave it some nutrients, and it's bushed out like CRAZY!! Can't wait to share pics) If this keeps up, I'll likely just make multiple clones of B as it seems to grow well. (but of course still plenty of time to see what happens)