First grow ever! [Critical Purple Auto]

najo91 I'm glad I found this website, I've been logging everything on a Google Sheet but will continue with this. This is my partner and I's first grow ever. We have read countless numbers of diaries, watched videos, and read forums before we germinated the Growers Choice seeds we purchased. Our goal for our first grow is to go through the entire process successfully. Any grow is a good grow right now! For a next time, we can get more detailed. Here's what we have so far: 03/03 (Tues) - Germination begins. Used a traditional method of putting seeds (x2) between moist paper towel in ziploc. 03/06 (Fri) - Seeds popping. Both seeds have popped and are showing a tiny tap root. We prepped two 5 gallon pots with a mixture of Ocean Forest soil, earthworm castings, and a healthy amount of perlite. We pre-watered both of them and set them in the grow tent under the veg light to warm up and soak up a bit of the water for the whole day. 03/07 (Sat) - Seeds potted. Watered the top of both a little (6.5 pH, which is a constant we will be maintaining throughout). 03/09 (Mon) - Cut plastic cups in half and drilled some holes in them, misted pots with warm water, and placed domes over seedlings. 03/10 (Tues) - They've both broken ground! Two healthy looking seedlings. Keeping humidity domes over them. This is officially Day 1 of Week 1. I'm a little concerned about the Ocean Forest being too nutrient-heavy for autoflower seeds, and we won't be feeding nutrients this week. We are still figuring out a choice for nutrients and schedule!

najo91 Week 2! Plants are looking healthy, and not much is going to change from last week. No nutrients this week, either. We are giving them 6.5 pH water when the soil is fairly dry, so it's hard to have a set schedule for that. It's just whenever we think they need water! I've labeled the plants now, as well. :) Plant 2 is growing slightly slower than Plant 1... they're about 2-3 days of growth away from each other. I'm hoping this is normal? Hope everyone is staying safe.

najo91 Plants are coming along, albeit it seems a little slowly, but they are healthy and that's all that matters to us. No nutrients, watering at 6.5 pH and we had the opportunity to measure run-off which was at around 5.5 pH, so we might feed with slightly more acidic water next time around, just to balance it out. We began some LST with paperclips, really simple. We also introduced fans to get a little airflow in the tent and strengthen the stems, and we also raised the light a little higher from 17-18 inches to 20, as the plants are significantly taller than Week 1. Week 4 will finally introduce nutrients! We will be using the Fox Farm trio. We are already using a super hot soil (Fox Farm Ocean Forest) so our nutrients will be relatively light. The schedule we will be roughly following: Week 4 - 1/2 recommend strength Veg nutes (Grow Big) Week 5 - 1/4 Bloom nutes (Tiger Bloom) Week 6 - 1/2 Bloom nutes Week 7 - 1/2 Bloom nutes Week 8 - 1/2 Bloom nutes then pH adjusted water on next water that week Week 9 - pH adjusted water til harvest

najo91 Big feeding with first dose of nutrients ever on Day 2 of Week 4 (day 23 overall). Kept water pH at about 7.0 because run-off is running a bit low. LST with some garden wire of the main stem for both throughout week for both and saw some significant growth by end of week on lower nodes for both plants. Plant 2 is the more troublesome out of the two and I'm seeing some downwards clawing on the leaves. We had two fans in the tent so we removed one and placed the other further away, on top. Also increased light distance by an inch. Plant 2 is beginning to pre-flower (showing pistils) and Plant 1 is getting there. Next feeding will probably do veg nutes again one last time before moving on to bloom.

najo91 Feeding with more veg nutrients here on Day 1 of Week 5, even though Plant 2 is showing signs of pre-flowering. The smallest of pistils on Plant 1. Next week, we will either transition into bloom nutes fully or do a 50/50 transition of veg and bloom. We think they're looking fairly good! We have also turned on the bloom light this week. We are continuing a little bit of LST but honestly the nodes we wanted to grow out have already done so and the plants are forming nice canopies. Watered again on Day 6 with a tiny bit of veg and bloom nutes. Both plants grew quite a bit this week during pre-flowering.

najo91 Definitely in the pre-flowering phase now, both plants are growing rapidly day-to-day. The only "grow techniques" being used are tucking larger leaves beneath smaller ones hidden beneath them and rotating the pots once or twice a day for even light distribution. We had a small bit of nutrient burn on Plant 1 last week, so we are cutting that down a little. We have also added a small dehumidifier in the tent to keep things below RH 50% or so.

najo91 I think we learned our first big lesson this week! The plants seriously shot up in height, I imagine this is the stretching phase of pre-flowering. Plant 2 grew 2 inches almost everyday, Plant 1 also saw growth but less drastic. The plants need to be watered more frequently than ever. We've gone from once a week watering to once every 2-3 days. Our issue is our tent is fairly small (24x24x48 inches)... and our pots are huge for the tent. 5 gallon pots. Next time, we're going to use smaller pots. For now, we are really hoping some LST to bend Plant 2's main stem horizontally will allow the plant to fit in the tent and still produce good buds.

najo91 We're laughing watching our plants outgrow the tent drastically. We're not sure what to do anymore! LSTing as best as we can but honestly no amount of training is going to keep these plants confined. We are stunned at their growth. Plant 2 (the taller one) is further along than Plant 1 but they overall seem pretty healthy, actually. We defoliated the bottoms of both plants a bit for watering ease and energy redistribution. Also, these plants are THIRSTY. We went from once a week waterings during veg state to every other day waterings now. Crazy. It's getting super hot here in Southern California so we're on top of humidity level and temperature... keeping things below 80 F and around 50% humidity.

najo91 Going along... getting some nutrient deficiencies, the light is still super close to the plants, space is cramped. However, we angled and pulled to the side the light (as suggested by a growers comment on here) and that's helped the plants with a bit more vertical space for them to grow into. Doing the best we can given the circumstances!

najo91 Nothing unusual to report, I think we're just waiting for the buds to fatten up. That's what we really want. We are rotating the pots and switching their positions every now and then for more even light distribution since we're working with limited lighting. Humidity is a little high, might get a better dehumidifier. These plants have survived two mini heat waves and finally the weather is better, thank goodness. They definitely seem like they still have a lot of time to go before harvest, like loooots of time. May 18, 2020 - it's been 68 days since sprouting 8)

najo91 Going strong, plants are doing all the work. We added a better small humidifier in there, as it's getting pretty steamy. Trying to keep things around 50%, at least. I would say at this point we probably have about 4 weeks left until harvest, at least for the more mature plant (Plant 2).

najo91 Same old, it's getting hard to stay below 80F in the tent, but doing our best. Trichomes cloudy and glassy, I think we're going to harvest next Saturday, June 6.

najo91 This is harvest week! Yay! Trichomes are mostly cloudy. We're going for a high THC harvest so not really waiting for too many ambers to come in. They're ready to go and we'll probably harvest Saturday. We're going to do 48 hours of darkness before harvest, just to try it. We stopped nutrients last week and fed Flawless Finish once, then have been giving just plain pH water this week. We're a little disappointed that Plant 1's buds are so tiny. Trying to figure out where we went wrong.

najo91 We lied, we didn't harvest yet. We took the "two more weeks" mantra to heart and don't want to rush the plants. We think we can squeeze a little more growth out of them and see a few more ambers. One of the main colas on Plant 2 broke in half! :( It super-cropped itself. Hopefully it'll be OK. Harvesting will either happen at the end of this week or definitely next week. Getting so close! In good news, we had the opportunity to sample the plants. We took some airy, weak buds from both plants and dried them for a few days. So far, I think we're feeling pretty good with the results and are excited for sampling once we go through actual drying and curing.

najo91 Chopped them down on Tuesday, June 16 after 48 hours of darkness. They dried until Monday, June 22. Probably a little over-dried, could have been brought down over the weekend... trimming has been WORK. There's a lot of larfy bud, which is disappointing, but we're making the best of it. They were jarred on June 22 and 23!