FIRST GROW: Lemon Cheesecake

Germinated some seeds from a bag. Not sure if the grower just accidentally pollinated his flower room or if the plants will have hermy genetics /: Either way I've always wanted to grow and currently in a good situation to do so. Once the seeds popped I started doing a ton of research but the plants were moving quicker than I could possibly get up to speed so kinda winging it at this point. I have some good seeds on the way so treating these as "warm-ups" and will be experimenting with different types of training and hopefully just getting the basics under my belt. The largest plant (Big Mumma) popped her roots out the jiffy bag before the end of wk 1 so I pulled off the netting and transplanted her into a 5L fabric pot with Canna Coco mixed w/ 30% perlite. At this point I'm watering with rainwater and mixing with the recommended dose of Professors Go Green (guy at the hydro store recommended I use it as cal-mag). I do not have a way to measure the EC or PH as I'm waiting for my meters to arrive. The tent arrived by the end of the week and I got it setup and transplanted the rest of the girls.

Got hydro halos setup because I need to be able to go away for work for a few nights, Was actually really easy to setup and works awesome, I got most the parts plus all my nutes from my local hydro store. I'm using cocoforcannabis.com as a guide for most of this grow and his site includes details on how to setup an auto watering system. At this point I'm still using Professors Go Green for cal-mag and following the GP3 feed chart to mix nutes to the right ratio and then diluting with cal-mag water to target EC (300-400EC for wk 1). Some of the plants had clawing leaves and were really dark green - I read that this could be caused by nitrogen toxicity and I'm concerned this may be due to the Go Green as it seems to be intended as more of a deficiency fix rather than a regular use cal-mag supplement for coco. Some of the leaves on one of the plants started getting rust spots like calcium deficiency, Canna Coco comes pre-buffered and I was adding Go Green so it had plenty, I think the likely case is that nitrogen toxicity may be blocking calcium intake also. I intend to change to Green Planets Pro-Cal which has low nitrogen and is made to work with their line of nutes. Also we named the girls! My roommate and I were pretty baked if you can't tell...

Tried my hand at training this week, mostly just LST but I did top one (Lank Dawg). The girls seemed to react well. For nutes I'm still just following the GP3 feed schedule for ratios but keeping it on the low end of their recommended PPM (recommended 550-650/ I'm running around 500) - I'm also adding Biodiesel Aloevate for silica plus a bunch of other good stuff.

Potted up from 5L fabric pots to 10L air pots. I got these air pots because they are tall and narrow which helps disperse the water laterally (I also use Yucca and Silica additives), it's important because I use the auto watering halos.

Added the first screen into the tent. Decided to kick Big Mumma out because she just wasn't growing any taller and the other plants were really over growing her. For the new setup I used kitty litter trays and mesh to sit the plants on - each plant gets its own tray so I can track runoff EC individually and I cut little flaps in the mesh so I can wet vac the runoff. With this setup I shouldn't need to move the plants out of the tent until harvest. For the scrog I just tied some builders rope around the poles of the tent and tied the trellis netting off with training wire. I've been manipulating the growth just to try and fill out the whole screen, I also gave them a good haircut because I plan on flipping them soon, don't want them to outgrow the tent.

First week of flowering went well. See pic descriptions for details or hit us up if you want to know more!

Got a new light this week, it's basically a HLG 260 R-Spec except locally manufactured using the same Samsung LEDs. Big Mumma got her 60x60cm tent today and will go in there under one Viparspectra 300W blurple (130w from the wall). I trimmed her, super cropped her main stem and added a scrog net in preparation of flowering her in the next couple of days. Because my other plants were getting up past 75cm after 7 days of flower (100cm is my absolute max) , I decided to supercrop the canopy back down to about 60-65cm - it was pretty scary and I definitely broke the outer stem on some of them. Also gave them a good trim. Fortunately most bounced back strong the next day which are the most up-to-date photos you see (17/4/20).

Everything coming along well. Big Mumma (the plant in its own tent) has flowered much quicker than the three other plants in the main tent. She has always been a much stronger plant and is half the reason I separated her, the buds smell a lot nicer and are super dense already. She was actually switched to 12/12 11 days after the main tent, she had already started throwing pre-flowers everywhere in her last week of veg.. Once flipped she didn't really stretch too much and just kept growing her nugs - is this some kind of autoflower gene that could be in the seeds?

END OF WEEK 4 FLOWER Seems to be going well, nice to be able to sit back and watch these girls grow :D Had some bleaching on a few of the nugs, so I dimmed the light slightly and managed to raise it an extra 5cm. I also bent a few of the taller stems out from directly underneath. Big Mumma is killing it, some real nice and dense little nugs on her.

Run-off got pretty high on the plants in the main tent when I tested it this week (2300ppm) so I flushed the plants down to around 900 over a few water events with half-strength nutes (~450). I think this, plus (mainly) the plants being too close to the LED caused them to throw some foxtails - particularly the middle plant (although I still think that spindly shit is also partly due to the bag seed pheno). Noob mistake on my end and I didn't realize until it was too late. Now the light is turned down and the run-off is back in a good range. It got high because my auto-watering halos were mostly running off the pots and not sinking in - this is because I filled the pots to the brim with coco (another noob mistake). Looks like I'm hand watering until harvest :) Big Mumma in the blurple tent on the other hand is still killing it.. Apologies for having to upload videos of the microscope - too hard to hold it still and press the button for photos lol.

Plants in the main tent are coming along well since correcting the light intensity and run-off ppm, the one on the left is filling out now, so is the one in the middle just much slower. Not sure if I will let that one cook longer or just pull it with the rest... will see how she looks in a week. The plant on the right I spread out to take up almost half of the tent (I didn't want the spindler taking up unnecessary space) - her nugs are real nice - some foxtails and bleaching on the taller ones but for the most part looking good. Plant on the left has filled out a lot more despite its weirder more "wiry" bud structure - does't look as nice as the good plants but definitely better than the spindly plant in the middle. Big Mumma is still killing it - wondering if its getting close to flush time for her as it looks like some of her tricomes are starting to brown...

Purple plant good. Other plants not so good, herming a bit. Glad they are in separate tents. Don't grow bag seeds...

Start of flush.

Ended up flushing Mumma for about 10 days - got her ppm down real low. Night before harvest I set the timer so the light would not come back on in the morning before I harvested (I've seen people who swear by this and other who say it doesn't do anything but figured it couldn't hurt). At this point the other plants are pretty disappointing compared to Mumma so they aren't getting as much "love" lol.

The community is dope. Very helpful and supportive.