By continuing to use the website or clicking Accept you consent to our cookies and personal data policy and confirm that you are at least 18 year old. For details please see Privacy Policy and Terms
Day 1 of vegetation:
These girls got off to a rough start due to the dryness in the house (humidifier is coming this weekend). Plant #1 will probably wind up being culled, but I'm leaving it for now to see if its horrid growth gets any better. You can see by the picture that is it really gnarly. I think it's just a bad seed because it had trouble from the start. #2 is a week behind the rest because the original seed I planted didn't make it due to me damaging the taproot when I put the seed into the rooting plug, so I just sprouted a new seed a week after the others and replaced it. I also over watered them last week so they aren't looking as good as they could at this point. I will probably transplant them into 5 gallon pots, within the next few days to a week, depending on how the roots are looking.
Day 8 of Vegetation:
All 4 plants are looking nice. The humidifier I added to the tent seems to be helping keep the humidity where I want it, although it could be a little higher. All plants were transplanted into their final 5 gallon pots which were each filled with a 4:1 ratio of ProMix HP w/mycorrhizae and perlite with 8 table spoons of garden lime mixed in.
All plants are growing well and are looking good. The only plant that has some weirdness to it is plant #3 which has some light green speckling on the leaves. Not sure what this is being caused from, but it has been present since it was a seedling, so could it be just an issue with the pheno of that seed? Plant #4 has some brown tips on the edges of one fan leaf, but it isn't present on any other leaves, so I'm not concerned about that. I will likely top the plants either at the end of this week or sometime next week.
Plants were topped mid-week and it didn't seem to set them back at all. I tied down each node toward the end of this week. The two back plants are growing huge fan leaves and I'd be interested to know if that is due to a difference in lighting or a difference in the airflow they get. I wouldn't be as confused if this happened with the two in the front, because those two plants have seemed the most consistent with growth, but the back left plant was stunted early on, and the back right plant is a solid week behind the rest.
All plants were topped at the beginning of the week and, due to them continuing to grow quickly, they got their final topping today. Light defoliation was also done on the lower areas of the plants. I plan on letting them do their thing for another week or two before I flip them into flower. The plant height measurement hasn't really changed due to me tying the branches down.
I decided to defoliate the plants on Saturday and tried something different this time to see how the plants react to differing amounts of defoliation. Plants #1 & #2 (rear left and right) got the heaviest defoliation of them all by removing fan leaves from the entire plant except the new growth. Only the large fan leaves were removed from plants #3 & #4. After leaving them be for two days I tied down all nodes to even the canopy out so the new growth can all grow up.
I know I said I was going to flip these to flower in 1-2 weeks, last week, but I think I may let them fill in with new growth for possibly another 2-4 weeks depending on how fast they grow. I really want to maximize my yield with this grow so I think keeping them in vegetation for a minimum of two months would really help ensure the plants are strong and dense enough to support a large number of colas. Also, in case some of you are curious about my LST 'technique'... What I did was somewhere between mainlining and regular LST. I waited until the plants had 6 or more nodes, then topped above the 4th node, and removed everything below the 3rd node. The two levels of branching are the 3rd and 4th nodes.
I finally added a humidity/temp sensor that I can tie into my control system so I am now able to only turn on the humidifier when necessary.
These plants are filling in much faster than I expected. As you can see, the canopy is filling in the tent nicely, so I think I'm going to continue with LST for the rest of this week and then flip them into flower at the end of the week. I pulled all the stakes out that were holding the inner limbs down and that has made watering a little easier to manage. The velcro tie downs will stay in place until I flip the plants into flower and get the trellis in place.
These plants are doing very well and I'm happy with how they are growing. This was the last week of vegetation and I topped a few nodes on the plants to keep the canopy even for when they go into flower. The light schedule has been flipped to 12:12 today and I built the trellis to help keep the plants nice and even during the stretch. I started recording a time-lapse video so I'm hoping to get a nice video of the growth during flower.
I'm still very pleased with how this grow is going. All 4 plants have started flowering over the course of this week and I'm not seeing any issues with the health of the plants. I have noticed some small holes on the fan leaves of one of the plants. I have not been able to find any small bugs on any of the plants, and I went through hem pretty extensively with my 40X jeweler's loupe, but I did see and remove a stink bug from the tent a few days ago, so I'm thinking that bug may have done the damage. The plants are getting pretty densely covered in leaves, but I'm not having any issues keeping my humidity in the target range, so I'm going to leave them unless I start seeing any issues. My though is that the more light the plant can take in over the first few weeks of flower the better.
These plants are stretching slower than I expected but they still seem very healthy. The underside of the plants was getting very bushy so I thinned them out today so they have better air flow and can focus more on the canopy. If they don't stretch another 6-8 inches over the next two weeks then I will lower the trellis. Lights were raised to 24" above canopy to help them stretch for that light.
The plants are budding nicely and have started stretching more over the last week. I've been sticking with the same feeding/watering schedule but the pots are starting to dry out just a little more frequently than previous weeks. I'm very happy with the way I was able to keep these plants shorter and wider than my previous grows. It's nice to not have to worry about running out of vertical space for the lights. Only minor pruning was done to the underside of the plants this week.
Another good week for these plants. They all seem very happy and they have started to focus more on bulking up the flowers. They are starting to smell amazing and I'm getting anxious to see these flowers develop over the next few weeks.
I'm still very pleased with this batch of plants. They have been very easy to maintain and haven't given me any issues yet. Still sticking with the same feeding schedule and dosage since the plants seem to be doing so well.
Ok, so I've been feeding my plants the Sensi line at the recommended dosage and they just started showing signs of nutrient burn on one plant, and another plant has some "rust" spots on the larger fan leaves, so I think I've been over feeding them. I was also adding a low dose of CalMag to my waterings (none added to feedings) that I believe was unnecessary. I skipped this weeks feeding and, instead, did flushed each plant with 2mL/L of AN Flawless Finish in hopes that I caught this early enough and can get them back on track. I only flushed with 8L/Plant, and got about 3L of runoff, so I may run another 3L-4L of pH'd water through each plant once the pots finish dripping.
I'm going to stop adding CalMag and will start feeding at 1/2 the recommended dosage since I have had no issues at that dose with my last grow. Other than this issue, the plants still seem to be maturing well. The buds are starting to fatten up and I have been recording a time-lapse of a single bud up close that I'm hoping will come out well.
I believe I caught the nutrient toxicity early enough as the leaf damage I was seeing has stopped progressing so I skipped feeding them all nutrients with the exception of Bud Candy this week. Today I removed all of the large fan leave that were damaged and the flowers look great. The plants are getting very sticky and the aroma is incredible.
Buds are still filling in nicely. All I've been doing to them is watering and removing fan leaves that have been dying off (mostly from the colas where they are closer to the lights). I gave them one more dose of Flawless Finish at the beginning of the week as well.
Lots of color changes on the larger leaves this week, but I expected that since I haven't fed them in quite awhile because I was worried about how much I had overfed them. The flowers look and smell fantastic and they are just covered in trichomes. It has a great lemony pine smell and the plants are very sticky. I'm thinking these have a minimum of a week to go...maybe two to three?
The plants look and smell amazing. They had a decent amount of larfy bud on the lower branches, so I could probably improve my pruning, but I won't let it go to waste and will use it for hash or edibles. I will update the dry weight, when they get trimmed and jarred for curing, and the flavors once the curing is complete. I'm very pleased with how these plants turned out!
Trim Update April 15th: I yielded much less than I anticipated, and the buds weren't as dense as they appeared, but I'm still very happy with the results. I'm starting to wonder if the yield is being limited by the cheap COB LED lights I'm running, or if it has something to do with my growing technique. I'm suspecting it is a little of both. I really need to prune off all the lower branches and shoots into early flower with my next grow because I pulled about an ounce and a half of larfy bud off the lower end of these plants. I'm in the process of building two 32" x 24" 240W F Strip LED lights that should be much more effective than the two COB LED lights I'm running now. I'm hoping they will be finished before my next set of plants go into flower