GEN 2: 8 Ball Kush - Send in the clones!

Yay! Clone A and clone B are both now well-rooted. So much in fact, that they were almost root bound in the solo cups even though they aren't much to look at on top! I had to move them into 1-gallon buckets. Time for the second generation to get its own diary. I may keep these as moms and clone off them, or I may just grow them out for a second 8BK harvest before moving on to another strain. As my adventures in perlite truly begin, I'm now going with a sterilized 50% soil / 50% perlite mix in the new buckets. The plants have only received distilled water at this point in their lives as there's still nutrients to use up in the soil. There's a little more perlite on top of Clone A because I was running low on soil and needed to stretch it enough to fill the bucket, so when I started running low I mixed extra perlite in to finish off the top 1-inch or so of the bucket with perlite-heavy mix. Applied LST to Clone A at the same time, as it's definitely ready for it. Honestly even if clone B, the weaker of the two, doesn't make it -- I think if I take my time with LST this time and apply what I know, I could easily make one bushy plant that covers my whole grow tent :D Onward she rolls. Will update every week on either Tuesday or Wednesday when time permits.

Week 2 of the clones has finished. Having trouble measuring plant to lamp distance as I change it around a bit. I want these to grow much slower than a typical plant as there's still 6 to 8 weeks before the grow tent is available again! Clone B was showing some nutrient burn (just from the stock nutes in the soil) because I didn't feel comfortable flushing the clones until now! Yesterday, I flushed with about 1/4 gallon each of 6.2pH distilled water, bringing runoff down to 6.4pH. They both have responded well so far. Today, I applied LST to clone B, and tightened up the LST I already did on clone A. Not much to do... just keep them alive for 6 to 8 more weeks or so.

EDIT: Was just convinced to go full perlite-only in the buckets. Which means I'll either need to start a pair of 3rd gen clones for the buckets off the clones I have now, or just flower the clones I have now in the pails they are in and start new seeds in the new buckets. Things are going well. Slow, controlled grow. I topped plant A about 4 days ago, and topped plant B today. (you don't HAVE to top to make LST work, I'm just doing it to a) be able to spiral out 2 main colas on each plant and b) temporarily slow the growth even more. Flushed both plants midway through the weekly cycle, then today I flushed again right before watering with nutrients. "Still" waiting on the last part to build my still... They really did put it on the slowboat. I'm super excited about my new 4-gallon buckets!! Thanks to someone on here who discussed grow methods with me, I was able to build a kind-of hybrid (two actually, one for each clone) hempy bucket. I'll be manually watering. Normally you fill them with perlite, cut a hole in the lid of the bucket, and use rockwool in the perlite to germinate -- but if you do that without a proper hydro pump setup, you'll be manually watering at least twice a day. So I'll fill about 1/2 of the bucket with pure perlite, then the rest of the bucket with a soil/perlite mix which will a) hold down the perlite on the bottom without needing to mangle a perfectly good lid and b) give me a good amount of water retention so I can water every other day or so and c) provide the micro-nutrients that only come standard in soil. The idea is that there's about a 3" reservoir of water held back in the perlite below the spigot. The plant will grow roots down to the perlite, where it can sip from the reservoir without drowning. From what I understand, it should get used to this reservoir being constantly there and just dip some root tips into it rather than burying down into it and drowning. This will supposedly cause the plants to need to grow less roots to reach water as well, meaning I can grow bigger plants with less overall volume. PRIMARILY, though, I'm doing this so I don't have to pull the plants out of the tent any more!!!! I'm growing tired of having to lift them out twice a week without breaking them, then put them back soaked with water without breaking them, after spending an hour letting them drain. Just hook up the hose into a container and open the valve, pour in the water, come back an hour later and close the valve! Should be interesting! :)

EDIT: I've added some pics and video of my negative pressure setup to ensure no smells in my little 8x8 office! In fact, this room has the freshest smelling air in the house because it's constantly filtered XD This is what hospitals do when they quarantine people -- they put you in a negative flow room so any drafts you feel under the door, from the ceiling and windows, microscopic holes in the room, etc are going INTO the room, and exhaust is controlled through some decontamination method (I'm unfamiliar with that part of it). This week was a huge struggle with the clones. Self-inflicted. I was going to keep them in the buckets for a while, but when I watered them mid-diary-week pot A was not draining even though it has some decent drain holes and rocks on the bottom. I tried digging out the sides down to the bottom to try to open it up, I tried mashing on the sides and bottom of the pot to break stuff up... But it just would not stop being a pool of standing water :( So, I had to do an emergency transplant into the new perlite hempy bucket. Now other than a washed out soil/root plug about the size of my fist, I'm hydro in 100% perlite. (Manual Hydro though, I am the pump! :P) Been giving it MaxiGro since, and I think it actually really loves being in the perlite :O After having such success with the transplant for A, I decided to transplant B right after just because. But, I didn't cut one of the LST strings all the way :facepalm: When I went to lift it out I didn't get very far at all and the main stem snapped off, leaving only one fan leaf and some tiny growth! I figured since it has a healthy root system, it'd eventually recover / stabilize. So I did one of those "whistle while sweeping it under the rug" things, and just put it back the way it was. I've noticed a bit of growth today on official end of week clone servicing day, so I went ahead and transplanted B into a hydro bucket too! Gave it 2-7-7 cactus food and a splash of CaliMagic, the higher P and K of the cactus food should help it recover faster (or so I've read). We'll see how this goes moving forward. Even if it's a flop, it'll at least be a learning experience. I've moved plenty of plants from pot to pot, but never from grow medium to grow medium -- which is actually quite stressful and dangerous to the plant if you don't do it perfectly with all the precautions in place (like using gloves so you don't touch the roots!) I'm excited at the prospect of not having to screw around with soil any more. I can just rinse and sterilize (will use steam most likely) the perlite and it's good to go for the next grow! A shout out to someone I met on here that has been patiently answering all my questions regarding the hempy buckets, perlite, hydro nutrients, etc. I don't want to reference them by name because I don't want to risk causing them to receive a flood of questions from a bunch of random people.

Clones are still slow growing, as intended. I just harvested my main diary though, will be posting that over there soon, and then moving these girls into the tent for their turn!! I'm watering on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday... then letting it go over the weekend. They really love the perlite and the maxigro! I have a feeling once they are in the tent they are just going to absolutely explode.

UPDATE: FOUND THE PROBLEM! My pH meter had become uncalibrated. Where I thought my buckets were at around 6 pH, they were actually around 6.8/6.9! Which is way too much for hydro and even more than I would want for soil. I flushed out the buckets and watered with nutes, got plant B down to 5.8 pH and plant A to 6.2 pH. Going to water every day with same nute setup at 5.9 and eventually they will balance out. Also going to keep the light blocker in place for a bit, I think they were also kinda like WTF because I went from desk lamp to ZOMGWTFBBQ with no adjustment. EDIT: (Pic added) Just raised the light a little bit, angled it slightly toward the back corner of the grow tent where the exhaust is located, placed the SCROG net that came with the tent, and put something on it to absorb some of the light. Probably cut the light that's reaching the plants, in half for now. Also going to blast the air conditioner and take it down to around 66F external temps, which should put the tent around 68/69, for a couple hours. Gave them a bit of a flush and then add nutes at a slightly lower concentration than before. Added CaliMagic this time, and added some spring water for Boron. Changed LST position on Clone B, which is recovering from the break pretty well. A couple days after moving into the tent, clone A's oldest fan leaves got all sickly. I removed one. Both plants have extreme purple stems now whereas under the desk lamp they were completely green. Pics above. I'd appreciate input please! I'm watering M,W,F and doing a flush on Friday. Maybe I need to water more or cut back on the light somehow? Maybe these leaves were nutrient burned already and the extra light hitting them is making them go all gnarly? 🤷

For anyone just landing here, these are clones that I did a slow controlled grow with under a desk lamp, and just recently moved into a grow tent. After resolving the problems with my pH meter, and giving them an adjustment period to the bright light, I'm now able to expose them to the full light without more degradation! You'd never know I broke plant A almost completely down to 1 node a couple weeks back. Man they grow fast in these buckets when all the conditions are perfect! I hit them hard with a combo of LST and defoliation for 3 days in a row to get the final product in the pics of them together in the tent. The whole idea of the buckets is to not have to pull them out of the tent, but I still enjoy pulling them out from time to time :) Just nice that it's my decision and not mandatory. You can see some of the crazy bends I did with LST. Not only exposing more colas, but also keeping the canopy all near the same height. This upcoming week will likely be the final one before I flip them to 12/12.

This was the final week of veg! Exact same pattern as the previous week. Same nutrients, same watering frequency, some very minor LST and defoliation. Last night I reduced light to 15/9, tonight will be the first 12/12! Will do some heavier defoliation in the coming week as they start to stretch. I've used some silicone to attach hoses to holes in lids for my gallon jugs, so I can just screw the jug on, tip, and watering is done! No more leaning in the tent to fuck around with moving branches out of the way so I can water, and no more gaping holes in my perlite where I've poured the water a little too fast that I then have to go back and fill in. Excited to watch these girls stretch and harvest my first ever clones of a plant. Good to see that the process of cloning is actually really simple, and they just take off and grow like a regular plant once they root. Once these clones finish the stretch, I'll pop some GSC seeds for the next diary :)

I've been trying to get this posted all day and having technical issues :( Nothing to do with Grow Diaries, just one of those days where you wish you could throw every piece of technology you own into the back yard and beat it to death with a baseball bat! Yeah, I know you know what I'm talking about. I wanted to put together a video but I just now got everything working well enough for me to make a quick post, so the video will have to wait. Anyway!! First week of flowering was a huge success. They grew 6 inches taller and bushed out quite a bit. Kept the nutes the same. Defoliated quite a bit to open up to light, toward the end of next week I'm going to defoliate inside/below, hack off the fan leaves and colas that aren't going to ever get enough light. Let the plant divert its production efforts in the proper direction.

Smooth as butter this week! Switch to 1/2tsp (5ml) of MaxiBloom per gallon, along with the standard 1/2tsp (5ml) of CaliMagic. No more MaxiGro as they've stopped stretching! Starting to hit that same "sweaty gym sock" phase the moms had before they started smelling really good! Today I defoliated all the stuff underneath that won't get light, including small colas. I accidentally snapped a nice cola off of A though :( You probably notice the hole if you look closely. But otherwise, it was good. This will be in the diary entry for next week but just to mention, today I dropped back on the MaxiBloom and added a little bit of Bud Blaster, which should zap those buds out nicely now that the stretch is complete. I have to be careful though, the moms burnt some lower leaves with the bud blaster. But that was also in soil where it's harder to flush out. Man they really grow fast in these hydro buckets, I can't wait to see what happens now that I hacked off all the useless shit. Onward we go! I might need to trim a leaf here and there or something, but otherwise I'm done messing with them. If anything like the moms, they'll be ready in about 4 more weeks.

Smooth cruising this week too! No new fan leaves of course, but the ones that do exist just keep growing like crazy! The plant also stretched another 2 inches in the 3rd week which was not something the moms did -- I guess it's due to the hydro growing. I know I said I wasn't going to touch them any more but I had to defoliate two more times this week. Cut back on the MaxiBloom, maxed out the Bud Blaster, and doubled the CaliMagic (which I found out last grow, you gotta do with the Bud Blaster or you'll get weird nute problems). As of now I can't tell exactly where one plant ends and the other begins without really looking... which is a good problem to have. These plants are so much bigger than the moms, looking back at week 3 flowering pics for the moms I don't think the buds were quite as big either!

4th week of flowering is done. Trichomes everywhere! Still clear. Will probably be ready in about 2.5 to 3 weeks. Still feeding 1/4tsp MaxiBloom + 1/4tsp Bud Blaster + 1tsp CaliMagic. They seem to really like it! If I need to, I'll tie branches to the net using string to hold up colas as they plump out more. Not much else to say. I took off about 5 more fan leaves during the week that were growing so large they were getting in the way of the light. I think from this point forward it's just autopilot until about a week before harvest when I'll stop using nutrients.

Autopilot again this week! Watering once a day, same nutes. Don't smell anything through the carbon filter but when I open the tent, woooow. Stinks out the house! Growing hydro really helps them get bigger, faster... stack on some buds... more potent smell than last time in the soil. Man, I can't wait to try my 'dro!!! :P 2 weeks left, tops, before harvest. 1.5 weeks left until we hit the point I harvested the moms. Everything I've been reading says to flush for only a couple days before harvest when growing in perlite. Which is nice, because you can't always pinpoint when you're harvest will be ready 2 weeks out!!

Over the weekend, there was a stomach virus in my house. In the middle of that, on Sunday, I'm like "crap I gotta water my plants!" Open the tent, look through my loupe, and see a few amber trichomes. Now I'm locked into a 5 hour harvest/trim with sick kids, a napping wife, and un-flushed plants, DOH! Not my usual happy time of putting on music and trimming away with no one home. But whatever, I got me some nugz! XD Will come back and post the harvest after drying/curing. I don't think I got as much as I wanted this time due to several factors, not the least of which was not being able to defoliate enough. They grew so thick and bush from the hydro!! Plus I need some more powerful light, but in order to install one I need a tent that's taller than 5-feet or I'll end up burning my plants. So I'll just have to go with what I've got until next year sometime. Got TONS of trim, there's a few more popcorn buds in there to pick out once it all dries (going to smoke them first while the main stuff cures for at least a week). Last time (my first time) I threw it all out because I was unprepared -- too focused on the growing to figure out how to deal with trim. This time I'm going to run it through a kief screen and make some hash! I'm trying to find a bottle of Everclear to make golden dragon tincture for edibles, but it's banned here in all provinces except Alberta. Which means I either have to drive 7 hours over to Alberta, or go down to the US and stay over for 2 days which will allow me to bring back up to 1.1 liters of liquor. Or find someone in Alberta willing to ship me a bottle. I love Canada, but they like to slap everything with a ban-hammer whenever some idiot hurts himself doing something stupid. ("Hey guys, watch me chug this bottle of Everclear!".... thanks for ruining it for the rest of us, dumbass) Side note, I bought a Happy Hydro Kief Collector. It's like 3x bigger than I thought it would be! Really made trimming a lot easier having a surface to set it on, and there's a little bit of dust in the bottom after the harvest. I just left it in there, will probably scrape it up today if I'm not having to take care of sick family members. Expecting around the same dry weight as last time, about 2.5oz total, though it looks like there might be slightly more than last time so I'll say 3oz. I also trimmed most of plant B really well, much better than my first time around. I was trying to do a really nice trim job but after a few hours I was like screw this, I gotta get it done, and reverted back to the trim job I did last time. With a wife and kids I think I'll have to just do quick trims like that to get it over with for now. Though my wife was watching me for a bit and said it looks like fun -- told me to get another pair of Fiskars for the next harvest and she'd help! :D Side note, my lungs are screwed from "cold, cold, flu, chest infection, cold" so far this season. I can't inhale smoke any more or it just about kills me and then I cough up a bunch of fun stuff. I can, however, dry-herb vape and I'm just fine. So no more smokin' for this guy, at least for quite a while. Also I've learned not to mention the word "vape" around the general public. The government has everyone so scared of vaping -- when it's the LIQUID pre-filled vape cartridges that are killing people due to super-high temps converting the chemicals inside into even nastier shit that kills people. Dry herb vape is perfectly safe! I hate having to constantly explain that. Wish news outlets would broadcast the truth about dry herb vaping.

These were clones of the previous moms I grew from seed. They lived most of their vegetative life under a 13w LED desk lamp! (which is also why they were in veg so long, they grew but of course slowly, until they went into the tent) It took about 3 days to dry out the stemless, trimmed buds. They've been curing for 5 days now, which I feel is enough to post a harvest. When I posted the harvest for the moms, there was a distinct smell/flavour in pheno A that I couldn't quite identify so I marked it as diesel. This time around, I think due to less stress on the plants and an amazing grow medium/nutrients, I can identify it! It's a minty-licorice! Pheno B has a slight minty smell, but pheno A reminds me of opening a bag of fresh Australian black licorice and a bag of those "spearmint leaves" candies next to each other at the same time. Which is funny because black licorice and spearmint leaves are some of my favourite candies :D They don't have "licorice" as a flavour on Grow Diaries, so I marked it just as "minty". After drying, I was able to grind and freeze the trim, then run it through a kief screen. I collected a ton of kief, which I then pressed into a block of "lazy man's hash" as I call it. You just use a glass bottle full of extremely hot water, roll it across the kief while it's inside some parchment paper, and it all melts together into a thin block. Man it's potent! It also has an extremely strong pine smell when you smoke it, which confuses the crap out of me because the buds don't have a pine smell... I've been smoking(primarily dry-vaping) almost exclusively the lazy-man's hash for the past 5 days while curing the buds, and I still have about 85% of it left at this point. I predict if I stick with this pattern, I can get a full 3 or 4 week cure on the buds before I switch to them. Going to give some away as Christmas presents too :) NOTE: Dry harvest weight includes the lazy-man's hash. Because, why shouldn't it?! Looking forward to seeing the results of my GSC grow currently in progress, and then I'm going to switch back and grow another round of 8BK before moving on to something else :) 8BK is seriously my favourite bud of all time, hands-down, nothing even comes close to comparing.