Fastbuds Fast Flowering Tester FF-04

Week One! - Back into the breech! This time FastBuds was kind enough to send me tester seeds for their new fast flowering strains! I'm doing up eight of them, planning to go long in veg, either sixty days or until they're too crowded. The plan is growing them all in smaller paper pots and transplanting once they root up a bit. The grow will utilize heavy training, taking advantage of the flexibility of photoperiod plants, which I haven't had the opportunity to do yet. Defoliation (Lollipopping full on), topping and manifolding, and ScrOGing the girls will all be on the agenda. Days are being counted from inserting seed into coco and getting them wet. Apart from FF-01, who is late to the party, the girls are all fairly indistinguishable from one another at this point, being tiny and cuter than a room full of kittens.

Day 8 - Week 2 begins! As seedlings, they are small, cute, and not very big. You know, like seedlings. FF-01 - She came out two days late, then last night she popped out of the cube and stretched so fast that she's the same size as the other girls now. FF-02 - This girl is super tall, tied in the race with FF-04 and FF-08 FF-03 - Middling sized with big leaves. FF-04 - Very tall but her cotyledons and first leaves are the smallest of the batch. FF-05 - Another Middling girl, but get stem is pretty fat. FF-06 - Another big leave girl, middling height. FF-07 - The smallest girl, height-wise. Leaves are developing well. FF-08 - Another super tall girl. She also has the thickest stem in the grow. Day 11 - Tragedy! Left humidity domes over the girls right after watering. Too much water! All of the girls developed dew drops on the tips of their leaves, and subsequently a little bit of burn on their first leaves. FFT-01, however, being a couple days younger, gave up her tiny little ghost and damped out. I've never had this happen before so I was pretty distraught. I planted a new FF-01 and hopefully she can manage in 15% humidity as a sprout/seedling because I'm not risking cooking another girl off.

Day 15 - Week 3! They are coming along slowly but steadily! They're coming along slowly but hitting their stride. Hopefully the girls shift into beast mode over the next week or so. Day 21 - They seem to be getting ready for the burst now, finally. They seem to be doing fine at this point.

Day 21 - Apart from FF01, all the girls are doing well and looking great! Probably going to transplant them at the end of the week, depending on how they look. Day 28 - Transplant time soon! They're looking good and getting near ready. Each will be transplanted then topped, in preparation for the SCROG.

Day 29 - Transplant day! Let's see how these girls recover. I've never done this before about I'm going to be extra careful. Day 35 - This girl didn't show any signs of transplant shock, so by the third one I must have been being careful enough. :-D

Day 36 - Transplant recovery was fast for everyone but FF03, but she IS recovering. Everyone is alive and well, and seem to be doing fine. Day 42 - Girls FF02, FF04, FF05, FF06, FF07, and FF08 got topped on day 40! FF01 is still a Lil' Shit, and Girl FF03 took almost a week to recover from her transplant and will get topped in another couple days. It was my first time transplanting a plant, ever, and I must have manhandled her a bit.

Day 43 - The veg explosion has begun! All the girls are doing well. FF01 is jumping into the game and doing well. Topping recovery has pretty much completed for everyone but FF01, who is a long way off from decapitation. Day 49 - A WHOLE lot more plants this week! Net is up, and training is happening in earnest. Lollipopping and defoliation continues. FF06 seems to be coming along slower than the other girls but she's catching up. Her branch density deems to be much higher than the others, with ridid, short branches.

Day 50 - This is probably gonna be a big week? A huge chunk of veg appears to be starting. They may be big enough to fill the grow space in the next week or two, at which point I'll switch to 12/12. I'm going to try and push it as hard as I can, getting a completely full canopy under the net if I can squish them up into it. Day 56 - They grew well! FF01 is still behind, obviously, and FF06 is thriving, but still so dense and packed in, she looks tiny compared to the others. I may be receiving a nice new grow light courtesy of Mars Hydro in the next week or two, as a T&E/Review light. If so, I'll probably pull FF01 out from under the net and stick her into a tent for a couple more weeks so she can get a respectable mass before moving her back to the rest of the grow for flowering. I don't want her lateness to diminish her yield. The rest of the girls are as fat and sassy as all get out. FF04 and FF07 are the biggest, by far.

Day 57 - Gonna switch the girls to 12/12 this week! Probably Monday or Tuesday coming. Mars Hydro is being kind enough to send me out one of their 300w lights for T&E/Review so I'll probably place that light over the two girls growing under the RapidLED Cree Cobs and he ChilLed Puck. As FF01 is a month behind the rest of the grow due to those seed issues, I'll pull her from the grow, put the tent back up and stick her under those lights for several weeks to a month before pulling her back out and sticking her into the main, who will be flowering it up. Day 63 - EVERYTHING HAS PROCEEDED AS I HAVE FORESEEN IT. Switched to 12/12 on day 62, so I got my 60 days of veg in. FF01 is sequestered in a tent by herself, under 24 hours of light, so she can catch up to the rest of the grow while they flower. Switched to half and half of Maxigro and Maxibloom. (I have already been sneaking 1/4 Maxibloom into the grow because of some phosphorous deficiency showing up in the lower leaves.) They are all pretty monstrous, considering that they will now probably double in size from the flowering stretch. Defoliation is continual. Anything that is more than three or four inches below the net gets removed every day. Hoping that by mid flower I'll have a fairly flat canopy of buds. Hoping for big, sexy yields!

Day 70 - The first week of flowering seems to have gone well. Things are getting pretty weird around here so my updates will still be happening but possibly not as consistently, for obvious reasons. (The Plague) Anyway here they are, and more to come, as always. Be strong, be of good cheer.

Days 70-77 - Flowering is actually beginning to happen now. Still stretching crazily, and disturbingly... a lot, but I'll have enough vertical room for certain. :-D They're all doing very well, and seem to be responding to the flip nicely. FF04 and FF07 are monstrous abominations, FF05 and FF06 are the compact, dense girls of the grow. The others are all large but not scary. I'll need to defoliate again, but my back is sort of iffy right now so I may not be able to pull it off. We'll see.

Days 78-84 - Been lax in updates, but I still log every week to completion. Back injury in addition to The Nineteen, Rona Style, has been a bit of a pain in the posterior. (That means ass) Plants are gigantic and sassy. Had Dangergirl come out and defoliate/lollipop the bottoms out of the girls, saving me painful labor and increasing my yields, so yay for her! Plants are happy, pompoms are getting thick, and everything looks good. Switched FF01 to flower on day 84.

Days 85-91 - Sorry again for not updating daily - This Coronabullshit plus my recovering back is really slowing things down on the documentation. Still getting a pic every day but time to sit down each day for the log is just not happening. Day 85 was another Banana Day! As you can see, a banana is almost superfluous as a means of comparative scale as they disappear into the monstrosity that is the grow room. :-D However, they are all doing really well and happy as clams. FF01 had to be switched to 12/12 a few days earlier than I had hoped as the zipper on the tent blew out and can't be repaired, which left me with two options: Trying to bend down with a bad back every day and taping the entire tent closed in hopes of blocking out any sort of light leaks, or just plugging her lights into the main timer and saying screw it, let's get this show on the road! To be fair, she is a freaking monster and will likely stretch out to be just as large as the other girls in the grow so I'm not sweating it at this point. This week, they went from pompoms, to almost full on colas, so things are getting hairy in there.

Day 92-98 - The stretch if over for everyone but FF01 due to her month behindness, but she is not in flower. The rest of the girls are settling at this point into putting on bulk. And bulky they are getting. :-D Not much to report other than they eat like horses and and stinking up the joint. Mostly citrus and candy smells for all of them. A couple (FF05-06) have a flowery undertone.

Days 99-106 - They're all looking good! Seriously bulking up and colas are looking like colas now. :-D FFT07 is JUST getting he popcorns on, of course, but she's looking, as always, fat and sassy. The other girls are probably a little too large to manage properly without a lot of TLC for an indoor grow. 62 days of beg was probably a week too long? Next time out with photoperiods I'll ease them back to 55 days or so veg. FFT07 had to have some string run around her perimeter because a couple of her branches just plain collapsed and kinked under their own weight. This is one of those problems that shouldn't be considered a problem. :-D The whole room REEKS.

Days 107-113 - Defoliated some more! Boy oh boy is humidity a battle this time. Broke down and turn the dehumidifier on. It's always a battle because I don't have good venting for it and end up in a heat vs. humidity struggle. After this crop is done, I'm going to do something about that. They're all looking great, if scraggly after the leaf removal. Had a worry a early in the week as my runoff was full of wiggly white things. Turned out to be springtails. I'm still getting rid of them because they horrify me but there's no danger to the girls from them. Couple more weeks?

Days 114-120 - They're getting close to done! Did another round of defoliation. The last one. Many of the outstretched side colas are starting to lean precariously but are bulking up. Everyone is looking good. FFT01 is a little too crammed in to the tent, but FFT07 will be out of the grow within the next week, probably, so I'll move FFT01 over to that spot to give her some more spaces once 07 is chopped. FFT04 is getting purple fall colors and will be ready soon, as well. Grow is growing. Life is pretty good in spite of the state of the world.

Days 121-127 - Getting mostly close to the end! FF04 is going to probably be the first to get the chop, followed by FF07. FF05 and FF06 are behind, apparently due to the blueness of the Mars Hydro light. FF01 is a month behind all the rest so a long time down the road for her.

Days 128-134 - Coming into the home stretch! FFT04 is definitely going to come down first, as her fall colors and strong and her trichomes are getting amber. Followed probably a day or two later by FFT07, who isn't purple but her colas are READY. Wish me luck!