Variety of Desserts

And we're off on another grow. I decided to grow photoperiods because I want some more control over the shape of the plants and I don't want as much stress when it comes to getting everything perfect. After growing 7 plants last grow I decided I only want to take care of 3 on this grow. When temperatures get above 50 degrees outside I tend to spend as much time in the great outdoors as I can. I didn't want to work around a feeding schedule and try to do all of the things I want to do outside of growing. I was planning to do a grow without feminized seeds but that would involve learning how to clone and right now I'd rather just grow some feminized seeds. I'm going to learn to clone on my next grow. I'm thinking if I veg these girls for about 6 weeks with some topping and training I should be able to get 4 ounces per plant which will be more than enough for me. I have a medical need for cannabis so the thought of running out causes me a lot of anxiety. After this last grow I'm far less worried about running out and I'm getting more confident in my ability to provide for my needs. I don't have a set schedule and will flip them over to flower when I think they're ready to provide what I need.

I took the plants out of their cups and put them in their veg pots. I kept worrying about the amount of water in the cups because it's hard to tell by lifting them if they're dry. So instead of worrying about it any more, I transplanted them. I put about 2 gallons of soil in each pot and used equal parts Light Warrior, Happy Frog, and Ocean Forest, all from Fox Farms. I wanted a soil mixture instead of straight Ocean Forest because it was too hot on its own in my other grows. Using Recharge with Ocean Forest was too much too fast for plants in veg. Rasta Jeff from Irie Genetics said that Orange Gasm is a vigorous strain and it looks like that's holding true for me. It might not be easy to tell from the pictures but Orange Gasm looks healthier and is growing faster than the other two. In about another week things should start taking off and then I can start topping and training. The first few weeks of veg always feel like it's going to be an eternity before you have any fruits from your labor but once things take off and the plants require more attention, time really flies.

Not too much new going on. Things were growing a little slower than I expected so I turned the light up just enough to raise the temp a couple degrees. After burning the plants with the light last grow I'm going to err on the side of too little light over too much. They're all getting about 290-300 PPFD. Right now I'm using half a teaspoon of Recharge every other watering which is about every 10-12 days. I'm confident the soil will have what the plants need for a few weeks before I have to worry about adding any nutrients to it, and Recharge will help the plants get everything they can out of the soil. I'm going to wait until they all have at least 5 nodes to start topping and training. Thinking about training makes me want to get them into their flowering pots as soon as possible because having to undo and redo a bunch of tie downs seems pointless, but I'm not going to rush anything.

All plants have now been topped at the 5th node and training has started. It looks like veg is going to go a little longer than I planned. I really don't think they're going to be ready to flip to flower in a couple weeks but we'll see what happens. There seems to be some yellow tips developing on newer leaves and I'm thinking it's more likely it's actually nute burn than lack of food. My plan is to not use any nutrients until they're in their flowering pots and well into flower, but this is my first time with photoperiods so I'll just try to keep an eye on the plants and feed them only if I'm 100% positive that they need a feeding and not something else. Ocean Forest is so hot that even with it being only 33% of the soil mix I still think it's to blame for the yellow tips. Recharge more or less makes all of the nutrition in the soil available so using Recharge with a hot soil can lead to nute burn, if I understand it correctly.

They've really bulked up with the topping and training. I want to get them into their flowering pots as soon as possible because I want to get them into flower and there are some deficiencies starting to show up. Looks like potassium from what I can tell, but it could be a pH issue since that always seems to happen. The transplant will give them some fresh soil to feed from. There's also a problem developing with leaves touching that I never experienced with autoflowers. On these plants, anywhere leaves touch, the surface of the leaf on the bottom will have lots of residual water on it from transpiration being blocked. So now about a half hour before the light goes out, I go in and clear all of the water off the leaves and hope the dehumidifier will keep the tent below 60% when the light is off to avoid PM. I also got a new fan and filter for the tent which I'm trying to decide if I'm going to hook up during this grow or not. The cheap Vivosun filter I've been using has done just about all it can do at this point. Last grow my entire house smelled like weed for the last couple of weeks and I'd like to avoid that for peace of mind. It's legal here but I don't like that kind of attention.

Sorry about not having many pictures this week. Things weren't very pretty this week anyways. I got busy and had to alter my grow schedule. I wanted to transplant a few days ago but wasn't around to do it. So I transplanted them today right after I got done hanging up the new fan and can. They're all in 5 gallon fabric pots with a mix that's 5 parts Light Warrior, 5 parts Happy Frog, and 7 parts Ocean Forest. Once I'm convinced that the plants are happy with their transplants I'll flip them over to flower. They all got watered with a heaping teaspoon of Recharge in a gallon of water and nothing else. At the beginning of week 6, runoff was showing 100ppm from every plant so I fed them nutrients twice in a row. Oddly, Chocolate Chunk and Orange Gasm both showed 200ish ppm runoff after two feedings and Gelly Biscuit had 900ppm runoff. I think that means GB isn't eating her food for some reason which makes me think a pH problem is developing for the third grow in a row. The fresh soil should have enough nutrients in it and a correct pH for a couple of weeks. After that I'm going to start top dressing 1 tbsp of dolomite lime once a week for 2-3 weeks on every pot because the lime really seemed to save my grass last grow. I kind of got lazy on the training and said "good enough" for now. I'm really not trying to grow a pound this time around, I just don't want to feel like I wasted any seeds. The canopy should be even enough that the horsepower of the HLG will fatten up everything. More pictures next week!

So deficiencies have progressed but it seems like feeding last week stopped most of them. I took the chance of not feeding any nutrients after transplanting just so I don't put a bunch of salt in the fresh soil. I'm treating this grow as more of a learning experience than my first two and I'm not really worried about getting it perfect. With all of the pH problems I've been having every grow I'm just going to completely stop using any kind of pH down and just let the Recharge take care of it. Next grow I'll start feeding nutrients just after the 2-week mark and I think I'll do a tiny amount of epsom salts every watering. I top dressed two tablespoons of dolomite lime right around the main stems to keep as much of the lime in the pre-transplant soil as possible. I'll check the pH of the runoff next week after the lime has had some time to work, but the plants are already showing me that they're really liking the new soil. I put a half a teaspoon of epsom salts in every gallon that the plants were fed which is a little more than the recommended amount but I'll go to a quarter teaspoon each watering from now on. Anyways, I got a little worried about the height of the plants so I did a little bit more LST on Gelly and Chocolate and I can see I've got to tie down two more nodes on Chocolate after the pictures I took today. I'm confident enough in the transplant and lime that I'm going to flip to flower tonight because I don't have the space to wait for the deficiencies to all go away. If I end up with a less-than-stellar harvest I'm totally fine with that and I'll learn for next time. I'm getting really excited to see what kinds of smells are going to come out of the tent. Chocolate Chunk leaves your fingers smelling like breakfast sausage and just getting your face within a couple of feet of her gives you a really strong whiff of something herbal/spicy. I get the faintest hints of maple syrup from Gelly Biscuit already. Orange Gasm isn't really putting out a lot of smell yet but I know citrus terpenes are really volatile so when she does it's going to be glorious :)

There's a lot that went on this week and I'll try to keep it concise. I had second thoughts about my lighting schedule for a lot of reasons and decided to push back the start of flowering by a day to get the right light schedule. I was trying to get the environment dialed back in with the new fan and found I was having a hard time keeping things as warm as I'd like. I might run during different hours of the day next grow, we'll see. I decided to do a minor 500 ppm feeding on all of the plants just to feed the roots that are in the old soil. They all seem to be doing a lot better than they were prior to the transplant. Gelly Biscuit is drinking over a gallon of water every ~72 hours and I'm wondering if it's because of where she is in relation to the intake vent. The other two plants are taking an extra 24 to 48 hours on top of that. I wasn't expecting to open the tent to a dry plant today but I had to water her before taking pictures. She's not normally quite that droopy. Part of the droop seems to also be coming from a nitrogen toxicity which happens a lot when combining Recharge and Ocean Forest, in my experience. Gelly won't get any nutes for a couple of feedings, especially since she's drinking so fast. Also, Orange Gasm looks really yellow in these pictures but she's pretty green to the naked eye. All plants are showing pistils and the stretch is on. No new smells yet but in a couple of weeks things should be nice and stinky.

First of all, Gelly and Orange have switched places. I didn't realize that Rasta Jeff has a podcast on all of his strains so I listened to the one on Orange Gasm and he said it's the perfect strain to put in front of the fan in the tent. Just look on youtube for "#441 Orange Gasm" if you want to hear it. I added Armor Si to the mix because I want to reduce the chances of light burn as much as possible with the plants being different heights. Right now I'm using the position of the light and a lux meter to make sure they're all getting an even amount of photons but Chocolate is still getting taller and pushing the limits of my ability to do that. I might need to try super cropping. I also added just a hint of cal-mag since the only other calcium the plants have gotten this grow is from lime and I can still see some of the lime sitting on the surface of the pots so I know it's not all making it to the roots. Speaking of lime I'm watching the pH of the runoff and it's made it down to 6.2 Once it's down to 6.0 I'll top dress another tablespoon of lime and that should correct pH for the rest of the grow. I realized I was reading the TDS meter wrong. My old one went to 9999 and my new one goes to 999 and then adds an x10 once you reach 1000ppm. I thought I was seeing 110 ppm runoff when it was really 1100. With feedings of about 500ppm right now Orange is eating slightly faster than I'm putting it in. Chocolate's runoff showed 1500ppm tonight so next feeding will just be water for her. Not much else I can think of to add right now. I'm getting hopeful that things are going to get really stinky soon.

I might update this post later and add more details but things are rolling along as normal. Gelly Biscuit is developing some type of immobile nutrient problem that looks like molybdenum deficiency. I checked it out and my tap water has about half as much molybdenum as average tap water so the fact that it's present in my tap water at all means it shouldn't be a deficiency caused by absence in the root zone. I'm leaning towards an iron excess after doing just one small feeding of calmag plus, which contains iron. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be slowing down the production of trichomes so I'll keep an eye on it but I'm not too worried at this point. I'm battling humidity because the grow is in my basement. Even with dehumidifiers running, air conditioning, and all that I'm struggling to get the ambient air in my basement below 60% RH. Night time RH is hanging around 62% which just won't work come harvest time. I've been feeding at about 500 ppm with slightly different ratios on each plant depending on what they need. For example, Gelly Biscuit gets less Micro and more Gro/Bloom because of nitrogen toxicity. At the end of week 4 of flower I'm going to start feeding at about 800ppm and raise the shorter plants up to get them up to about 1000 PPFD. Orange and Gelly are both getting about 750 PPFD right now, and the top colas on Chocolate chunk are getting anywhere from 500 to 900 depending on how close they are to the light. Speaking of the light, I raised it to its absolute maximum height so if chocolate chunk keeps getting taller it's just going to keep going further into the corner to get as far away from the center of the light as possible. I think it's too late to super crop. Just a piece of advice, but every once in a while poke your head into the tent during the dark period and check for light leaks or glowing equipment. The tower fan that's in the tent has a button you can use to turn off the light on it. Apparently this button only turns off the light on the fan temporarily because I decided to look in the tent today and it was glowing bright as could be. I'm not going to risk any issues with light leaks so I covered four separate "on indicators" with electrical tape. It's too early to really tell what the smells are going to be like but all three strains so far have a very similar sweet smell. It's been at least 20 years since I've had one so I might actually be thinking of something else, but I swear they remind me of blue sherbert push pops.

Kind of busy this week so not a lot of details or pictures. I got a new TDS meter and it confirmed ppm in run off was as high as the plants are showing. I'll be flushing next watering. Gelly Biscuit is starting to darken like it's supposed to, but the lockout makes it kind of hard to see in pictures.

I got a new TDS pen because I managed to drop my other one in water and killed it. I decided to pay a little bit more and get one that's a little more accurate. Using three different readers in three feedings gave me doubts about lockout so I gave Chocolate and Orange another 500ppm feeding. Deficiencies got worse immediately so I'm going to flush them all tomorrow. Run off pH has been between 6.2 and 6.5 on all of the plants so I'm sure pH isn't the problem. Everything is getting very frosty and as long as I don't drown the roots in salts any more than I have it looks like things are going to bulk up nicely too.