Gelato Auto FastBuds

This first week was a vey good first week, al ten seeds germinated into little seedlings. Fastbuds Genetics really did a very good job with this strain! This is the first time for me that all seeds germinated into seedlings... Besides Plagron Power Roots, there will be no nutrients give in the first two to three weeks, as I'm growing in all-mix from BioBizz...

Day #08 - The seedlings are going pretty well into week #02. This week FloraMicro will be added from General Hydroponics, I've started using this since my last growth. I use the hard water version and I really like it. My plants seem to do definitely better with this nutrient added, so I decided to always use this nutrient together with my other nutrients. I also decided to try the FloraGrow and FloraBloom nutrients from GHE, as I've seen very good results with the nutrient line of GHE. At the end I will also use their Ripen, which gives the plants growth boost in their buds at the end of the blooming phase. Day #09 - I decided to give the ladies a little more water, so I raised the water amount to 0.25 liters per day. Further on, everything is going very well! Day #11 - The little ladies are going ver, very well if you ask me... Growing like a charm, at the end of the week I must be able to top them without any problem. Day #14 - I wanted to top the girls, but I decided no to do that, as not all the plants have reached the right height. So topping is postponed until tomorrow.

Day #15: Today I was able to top 5 of 10 ladies. The rest will be topped tomorrow, except 1. I will give this one ladie LST by bending it down btw. I'm not topping 1 plant, so I can see if it makes a positive difference. Normally it does, but if you keep on plant not topped you can easily compare the end result... Day #16: The topped ladies are recovering, one a bit faster that the other but that's OK with me... In doubt now if I should top four of the other five, or if I should keep it this way so I can compare what five topped Gelato Auto's will do compared to five non-topped Gelato Auto's... Need to sleep a night about that... Day #18: The ladies I topped on day #15 are full recovered and showing good signs of growth, so I don't think I will get any trouble with these ladies. The ladies I topped yesterday, will get a close up picture tomorrow. So I can see if they recover well. The other two ladies will be bent down tomorrow. That will be the start of LST on those two... Day #20: Very please with the development of my ladies after 8 of them being topped... All plants are recovering very, very well... So now it's time for defoliation on day #21... The garden will have a slightly different look when we go into week 4... Day #21: Defoliation day... So I removed all the big leaves, and gave the branches some more space. Later in week 4, I will be bending them down...

Day #22: The day after defoliation day... And for now it seems that the #AutoGelato ladies are recovering pretty fine, but let's not be too enthusiastic... Things can still go wrong in the next few days, but if all goes well I will be bending the ladies down in a day or two... One of the ladies is growing very nice, all branches seem to be growing towards the same height, exactly like you want them to do... Day #24: The Gelato Auto ladies from @Fast_Buds are recovering very good from their topping and defoliation last week. I must say that my LED lights from Lientec LED are helping a lot with their high quality light... Today I will start with LST, so I can create as many 'main'-branches as possible 😋 Day #26: I decided to LST just two plants for now. The rest is growing good and has a lot of branches at even height... I'm also almost at the point that I won't be adding Fulvic to the water anymore. So in week 5 the plans will only have FloraGro and FloraMicro as nutrients. Day #28: Tiny buds are slowly developing over the garden. Plants are still looking extremely good, growth is very good for 8 plants, 2 are a little behind in growth. But they were behind, before topping and LST already... In the new week, the lights will be slowly set to a higher power setting, so when blooming starts, they already have the best light they can get...

Day #31: As I was a little bit busy with other things the last few days, I didn't have the time to update my diarie on day #30. Tuesday I got a nice surprise delivered from Lientec LED lights, they sent me three led strips as addition for my growroom. Two led strips have 660nm red leds an one led strip has 385-405nm UVA leds on it. Which means in blooming phase I can add more red light, which is positive for bud development. But also the UVA light is positive for THC development. Research has found out that UVA led light, in the right wavelength, is capable if uplifting the THC development with max 5%. That is in very optimized conditions. If all goes well a little bit, I might be investing in two more led bars with red and UVA light in the future... In the meantime the little buds are growing nicely, all plants show signs of good growth, so this week I will be slowly adding some bloom nutrients towards the end of the week. In week 6 I want to start with only bloom nutrients beside the FloraMicro nutrients. Also I'm adding CalMag once a week... Day #33: I added some FloraBloom nutrients, but forgot to mention last update. I'm going to change slowly from only FloraGrow as second nutrient, to FloraBloom as second nutrient next to FloraMicro. This weekend, I'm going to change the Fan, because the fan I'm using right now isn't capable of keeping temperature as I like it. But further one, everything is going very good. Flowers are growing pretty nice, I think the extra red LED light is doing it's job perfectly. After this week, I still got about five weeks to go until harvest. UVA light will be added slowly around the end of week 7. I need to build that up slowly, because the plants are not used to the UV light and if I start with 18 hours UV light right away, they probably will get overstressed and my harvest will be killed... All electric has been reset, so I can use an extra timer within the 18 hours of light for the UVA led strip. Day #35: I decided to start using the UVA light tomorrow, at the start of week 6. Slowly building up the hours of usage. First days I will be adding 1 hour ov UVA light, and then I will start multiplying the hours, until I'm at 12 hours a day. The plants are flowering pretty well in the meantime, next week I will be adding more bloom nutrients and less grow nutrients, but I will still be adding some grow nutrients, to make sure some nutrients still will be available for the plants. Als I will be starting to add Silicium once a week, as the temperature is getting a bit high and the new fan is still not here... So to avoid heat stress, Silicium will be added onze a week until the new fan will get temperature as I want it to be...

Day #37: Today one of the plants already started with showing signs of making frosty tops in the end (picture #09) and that always gives a good feeling to a grower... At least this grower is certainly getting happy of those signs... I doubled the UVA light schedule this evening, so tonight they will be getting two hours of UVA light. Hopefully it will do them some good! Day #39: Posted a day too late, but I had to change my fan for a better on, because the temperature was much too high (between 36 and 39 degrees). The old fan wasn't capable of restoring the temperature to around 28 degrees. It was a little stressy to get thing done and because the carbon filter had to be placed behind the fan in a very precise way... Finally, a few minutes after the lights should go on, we managed to do so and now the temperature is kept easily at around 27.5 - 28.5 degrees... But have a closer look to the close-up shots I took with my camera and look at those trichomes already showing up around the little buds! 😲 Amazing, isn't that? Further on, I decided to defoliate two of the plants on day #38, and they restored pretty good. So I will defoliate 4 more on day #41 and the other four on day #42. Let's see if this will bring us some good at the end... 🙏 Day #41: So, I defoliated some more today... Still don't know if it's the best decision to make, but If you don't try you won't succeed... The UVA light is working btw, as yiuo can see in the first two pictures of day #41. You also see the qunatum cubes from Lientec Led very good, those are great lights. So if you're living in Europe, you should give them a try if you can... Hopefully the plants will do good after these two defoliation days, fast recovery for faster growing on some good buds... 😊 Also I tried to make some good closeups of some already icy, little buds... Not the best shot, but you can see the potency of this autoflower already!

Day #43: Two of the plants don't seem to have any problems after defoliation, which I did with these two on day #39. Seems they haven't even been feeling anything, as good as they go! Four plants are recovering pretty well, they were defoliated on day #41. The two plants I defoliated yesterday, still need to show recovery, do that's a little exciting still. But as the other plants are recovering good, I've got some positive feelings about the last two... Day #45: OK, it seems that the plants didn't recover that well from the defolation I did late week 5. The leafs ar showing all kinds of stress now, and I hope this won't become too much of a problem now. I just wanted to do this as an experiment and knew that things could go wrong, but when it goes wrong you still panic a bit. A good friend of mine advised me to start adding ActiVera from BioBizz, as Aloë Vera extracts will help the plant to stress down a bit... Let's see what happens... Hopefully the bud will keep on growing... Day #47: Still big signs of stress on the leaves, as you can see a lot of yellow leaves on the pictures. But after two days of adding ActiVera, I add it as nutrient to the water and also as foliar spray to the leaves, I see some hopeful little kinds of de-stressing. It seems that there aren't getting more yellow leaves at the moment. Hopefully it will keep going the better way fro now on. Buds are still growing, so I hope there will be still a decent harvest left in a few weeks... Day #49: And then all of a sudden it came back to me... I remembered the day that I went to the growing room and saw the temperature being at about 45 degrees celcius, when look ing at my thermometer... I had to wait two full days before I could replace the fan, so they had two days of awful heat in the the growing room and then I also decided to defoliate them... How could I be that stupid to forget that! no wonder there's stress in the growing room, especially with autoflowers, who are easily being stressed too much if you don't watch out... Well, looking back now, I think they are doing amazing considering what happened to them! About ten days until flushing, so I will start giving them 'Ripen' from GHE tomorrow and also a few days of F1 Booster from BAC.

Day #51: Felt like a relief that I got back in mind that the plants were stressed BIG time by the two days of overheating... Luckily I also gave them some silicium in that week, but that as after the damage was probably already done... But now I can appreciate more that they are still developing them and still continue to grow their icey buds slowly bigger and bigger. I tried to make some good pictures of the icey look they have due to the massive growth of trichomes on the buds... Looking really delicious, I for sure know that I will grow this strain more often if they taste the way they look! Day #53: Fall is entering the growing room very fast now... But, the plants are still doing a great job and the buds are getting slowly bigger and denser. The ice on some of the buds is really amazing, never had that in this way before on other plants I've grown in the past on my balcony. I'm going to grow this strain again for sure in the near future, just to see what it can bring me when conditions are good all growth long. The UVA light is in the meantime set to 8 hours of light, I've slowly build the light hours up to make sure the blast of UVA light is not overdone at once. I can't test how much extra THC will be produced by the plants but hopefully it does it's job good... Day #55: Vanilla Ice couldn't have sung it better for tis strain: Ice, Ice, baby! Man what a magnificent look when you look closer to the buds... Ripen is also doing it's job very good, all the buds are showing signs of extra growth now and are slowly building up getting bigger. The bigger buds are also getting real dens now. So, again, considering the stress they've had, I think I may be pretty happy with the way they are developing in the last week... Five more days of nutrients and then flushing will start for ten days...

Day #57: It's 4 days until I will start flushing, as FastBuds is suggesting to give this strain a flushing period of 10 days. When doing this, you should get an even better taste sensation when smoking this strain. Recording their own lab test, Gelato Auto could give a maximum of 26% THC if growing without any problems. Well, that is where my growth has had a little heat stressing problem of 40+ degrees Celcius for two days. Just hoping now that the UVA light of 8 hours a day will compensate the loss a little. The smell of the Gelato ladies is magnificent, makes you want to smoke it right away... Still the buds are showing signs of (new) growth in the, so I'm very happy with the Ripen nutrients from General Hydroponics. Don't know what they've done exactly, but it works for sure. Day #59: The smell of the Gelato ladies is getting better and better per day. Today I accidentally bumped my nose to one of the buds, while removing some dead leaves and I could smell the typical Gelato smell for hours afterwards. Hmmmmmz, wish I could smoke it already. Also I discovered that one of the branches was bending down under the pressure of the bud it was carrying, so I had to tape it together with another branch and I also used a paper clipper to make sure it can't bend down again. I love the color change on some of the flowers, they are slightly turning kind of pinkish it seems. Wondering what it will do in the last ten days. I know I have to keep a good glimpse at the crop, when only feeding water for ten days, as some of the plants are already showing pretty yellow leaves. I don't want to have any problems, so when signs of new problems are showing up I will just cut them down earlier and have to accept the loss of some taste en maybe accept some more chemical feeling when smoking. But let's hope all will be fine... Day #61: Still everything is going very well in the last week of nutrients. Ripen is really a fantastic nutrient, buds are stil growing and getting very, very dense! The green color is leaving my growing room in a very fast manner though... Wonder if there still will be green available on day #70, if it keeps this pace, lol... One of the thiner branches had to be cut down, as it seems nog strong enough to keep the bud in the air. So that one is drying already above the boiler, so it can get dry a little quick... Looking forward to try that one very soon! Day #63: The last day of week number 9 and as you can see I really like the 'ice look' the trichomes are giving the buds. Man, I really would like to know the amount of THC in this one... Found an app that should be able to tell that, at least that's what they promise.I had to order a special camera for that, hope it gets here soon so I can test it out... The leaves are loosing their green look in a steady tempo, so I think the growing room will look very yellow in the last days... Tomorrow the last 7 days until harvest start...

Day #65: A lot of leaves are moving towards the end of their life... So I've got to be sharp on removing the dead leaves, don't want to risk anything at the moment. The buds are still growing slightly and they look very tasty! They're not drinking enough water, so they should be healthy if you ask me. It's five days from harvest-day. So if all keeps on going the way it's doing now, it still will be a pretty decent harvest considering the heat stress (and perhaps the 2nd defoliation afterwards). The buds are also feeling very, nice dense. Day #67: i had to put an airconditioner in the barn, where my growing room is standing. The sun was too heavy, so the temperature in the growing room was getting towards 30 degrees celsius again and I didn't want to take any risk at all. The buds are still growing on by the way and are getting denser and denser also. The smell is fantastic, sweet like hell! Makes you wanna have a gelato ice cream right away... Every day I'm removing (almost) dead leaves, just to avoid any risk of getting a bud infected with (if possible) some rot through that way. Can't wait to have it dry and weigh how much smokeable buds are going to fill my jars... Day #69: One day away from harvest... Plants are still doing good! The ten days of flushing have left the growing room with nearly all yellowish leaves, only a few plants that also have some purple colored leaves and a few green leaves. The amount of trichomes on the plants is really unbelievable, I'm stunned with it. I saw pictures before of growers having these ice crystal looking buds and I was just dreaming of having that also, when I decided to grow the Gelato Auto from FastbBuds. And now look at these buds, it's just awesome. In the meantime I'm building a dryer from wood, so I also have a space where I just can dry the buds. So I can start a new growth pretty soon, instead of having to wait a week or two until all is dry... It's almost done, just needs some finetuning and some wires need to be hung, so the buds can hang in the right airflow until they are dry enough to be cured....

Day #70: It was a great experience on growing Auto Gelato from FastBuds. Especially because when I thought that the stress would kill the growth, after defoliation and heat stress, the plants recovered pretty good. The leaves where showing pretty heavy signs of stress, but still the buds kept on getting bigger and denser. Perhaps there would have been more growth if the heat stress wouldn't have happened, but that's just guessing for me. The first diary on GrowDiaries was a pleasure to do, sometimes a bit stressful to keep an eye on pictures, stress of the plants, the problems with the fan, etc. But overall I like keeping the diary and will continu to do so, as it's also handy for myself. Day #71: I had to drill some bigger wholes into my dryer, as it seemed that the flowers near the bottom of the dryer weren't getting enough airflow. They were loosing density, so I had too handle quick before they would get ruined. Day #72: After a night with bigger wholes at the bottom of the dryer, it seems that all the buds are drying in a decent tempo now. Also the flowers that where at the bottom of the dryer are feeling better... Day # 76: The buds are drying in a very nice way at the moment... All buds are getting dryer and dryer, still one week to go now till curing. The smell in the dryer is still good, let's keep it this way!