FIRST GROW - HLG550 - Bubblelicious

Howdy all! So this is my first grow indoors, and I have little idea of what I'm doing. We've got 4 x Bubblelicious autos and 1 x Jock Horror auto (a freebie) from Nirvana. I thought I'd go with an easy to grow strain, and autos so that I can power through my first grow. All planted in a great soil produced by a local farm here. Lights are on 24/0. Water is pH'd to 6.5. Growth is amazingly quick under this light!

Week 2 and things are going mostly well. B#3's new growth is very light and lime coloured compared to the other three. Not exactly sure what's up with that. Jock Horror is having a bad time. It's youngest leaves are very yellow and developed brown dots on it. In retrospect I think it may have been over watering. It's lagging behind a lot compared to the bushy guys. Still plain pH'd water, lights on 24/0. Using a tiny humidifier to raise the the humidity slightly on drier days.

Week 3 and things are going along mostly smoothly. B#3 started to show some deficiency: older leaves with yellow edges, new growth staying really light-green, and growing extremely stubby. To combat this, I gave 1/2 strength GHE Flora trio for the growth phase. This was fed to all plants, including the Jock Horror which helped it a bit. B#4 has much more pointy and sharp leave fingers, maybe a different phenotype to the rest. Going to top 3 of the plants in the coming week, and leave one as a test to see how differently they grow.

Week 4 and things are getting a bit more serious now. The growth is exploding. I topped 3 of the 4 main plants, leaving 1 un-topped to see the difference in yield and growth. I did some LST on unwieldy branches to even out the canopy. By the end of the week I started mixing 'pre-flower' fertilizer, just below half strength but it was definitely too much for the plants. They were droopy as heck, and new growth was twisted and shrivelled. Big oopsie. Out of the 5 plants, 3 were showing pistils. B#3 and #4 seem to be stubborn. The Jock Horror seems to be a lost cause at this point. Too scared to pot it up or do any training with it. Will keep it going, maybe it'll yield half a gram. Lights are 20/4 and pH is still at 6.5.

Week 5 started off a bit rough. Continuing to over nute the plant babies, I realised I should flush and step back a little. The flush helped a lot. I keep the plants outside on days where the weather was good, and put them back inside to maintain 20/4 light schedule. I defoliated a large fan leaves at the bottom of the plants, as well as any of the yellowing leaves. This, coupled with the flushing, really seemed to perk them up. I trained some more of the branches and tucked away fan leaves blocking bud sites. All 5 plants are flowering, with B#2 (the untopped one), leading the charge with a solid main cola. I'm surprised by how little they stretched, but perhaps that has something to do with me nuking them with fertiliser at a critical point. Eh.

Week 6 has been pretty smoothly. It seems that most of issues have been ironed out and it's pretty smooth sailing. The buds are appearing and fattening up slightly. The ambient temperature has dropped a bunch in my region so the tent is a lot cooler now which is great. I've noticed a bunch of older leaves yellowing and dropping, with brown, almost blue patches on them. Surely some kind of deficiency, but it doesn't seem major. Hopefully now that I'm feeding them nutes again they'll be fine. Otherwise it's pretty chill.

Week 7 and things are just bobbing along. The bud sites are starting to flesh out nice and it's getting a bit stinky in the tent. The buds are smelling very unripe, super green, but I can sense how it'll deepen and get sweet and pungent. The last watering was with the same ratio of fertilizer - which is now around 1/2 strength as recommended on the bottle. I think that went a little too fast on the smaller plants. There's some purpling on the higher up growth. On all of the plants, besides B#2 (which is doing the best, non-topped), they are dropping lower leaves very rapidly. It's probably normal, but the fact that the largest and most successful plant isn't makes me think there's something wrong. Perhaps it's a phenotype thing, or watering for the smaller plants is too much? Anyway, hoping to push this grow out for a few more weeks. Due to COVID-19 I have to move house which is right in the middle of the peak fo these plants blooming. Hopefully it ain't too stressful. Will see how it looks on the other side. Peace 😌