Way to Grow One

Seed started in a wet paper towel kept warm at 28C in an open plastic bag. Sprouted 2 days later and stuffed into a Jiffy pod, although in retrospect it would have been a better idea to just start it in there. The first seed I tried to start rotted and white goo oozed out. Once it was clear it was actually going to grow, I buried the jiffy plug in a 7 gallon smartpot filled with groswtone in the Ebb and Flow system. The top was cut off the smartpot due to it being too tall, estimate size to be about 4 gallon now. The temperature started to drop and I was worried that it would get too cold to grow, surface temperature is fine but due to evaporative cooling, the wet plug was quite a bit cooler than ambient temps. Lighting is 2x Gen 7 Vero 29 4000k COBs on 120mm pin heatsinks running at ~70W each for 157W at the wall. Tent is 32"x32" with a 22"x16" tote as the ebb and flow tray fed by a 19 gallon reservoir below (70% filled).

Not much to report, no activity. Only flooded twice this week. I think the Jiffy plug is saturated so there's not enough oxygen?

Starting to see a little growth finally. Why won't you be big and tall, little sprout?

Leaves are becoming darker green. Plant was topped the night the last photo was taken. Doing a nutrient flood every other day to encourage roots to spread out looking for more juice.

Week 5 already? Plant is struggling to catch up after such that two week lag period where it didn't do a thing. Still, things are starting to get encouraging so now watering every day at 2 hours after lights on. Added a webcam to the tent to watch what is happening. Noticed that at 12 hours after lights on, the leaves would start to wilt. Flooding at that time didn't have any noticeable effect before lights out, so I added a flood at 9 hours in (half the period). Pushed the wilting back to 14-15 hours after lights on, and just a little now, but still not completely solved. Grew from 2 inches to 7 inches this week!

Wow! I thought it took off last week but this week has set a new record. This plant is bushy as hell. I've done a lot of LST this week, but it seems like every day there's a new tallest branch that needs to be roped up and tied down to the sides. My hetero life partner says I am being mean to the poor P.Sprout, but it is tough love and sprout will grow up stronger this way. Each day I've taken a branch that has grown about an inch above the rest and tied it with masons twine in a loop to the edge of the Ebb and Flow container and attached it with a binder clip. The next day there's some new growth that's taken its new light and shot up past the canopy and the process repeats. Interestingly the primary two shoots that came from topping are growing very slowly after being pulled off to the sides-- kind of falling behind the shoots coming out of their nodes. I've now tied off 7 shoots to the edges of the container and I'll probably have two more committed to light bondage tomorrow. I'm still struggling with the plant wilting in the evenings. By 6 or 7pm everything is looking a little sad and droopy. I've tried changing flooding schedules 2x, 3x, and 4x a day during the 18 hour lights on but it always seems to happen around the same time now. Temperature is not an issue as the temps at the plant are around 27C and the tent has been below 25C. I'm going to try upping the number of waterings to 5x 6x 7x and 8x this week. The webcam running the timelapse also flaked out a bunch this week but that has been resolved.

Can you believe this is just one plant!? She may only be 12 inches tall but she be over 20 inches wide. Looks like we're done with the webcam because this week the plant has grown to fill in all the space and swamp the camera. Did a few more LST bends as new shoots would start bursting through the canopy. It really seems to stunt their growth once they get pulled away from being the solo star in the limelight. My light is just two COBs so once things get off to the side you can really see the effects of the light dropoff. Plant still looks healthy A.F., I saw one leaf that had a couple brown spots on it but it disappeared beneath new growth so fast I don't really care to do anything about it-- I think my pH might be a little low. The little sucker is growing almost an inch a day, so I've been having to raise the lights every morning. I've decided to switch to flowering light schedule to 12/12, even though I've heard that a mature plant will have nodes with leaves that alternate and this plant seems to have them still coming out at the same place. To this end I've added 10x CREE XP-E HE Photo Red diodes to supplement my 4000K COBs. COME ON BLOOMS

Yo ho ho things are getting a little out of control here. By the end of this week the single plant has grown from the windows to the waaaaallls, measuring 30 inches across and somewhere around 20 inches tall. Humidity is a real problem now with all that transpiration, and because my house is 60-65% RH it is pretty hard to keep the tent humidity below 70% even with ventilation and a dumb thermoelectric peltier dehumidifier. The dehumidifier pulls 160-170ml of moisture out of the air each day but I feel like I might need something bigger (although I'm pressed for space already). VPD ranges from 7.6hPa in the morning and climbs to around 9.5hPa by lights out as the tent warms up. I've seen a lot of people who use the Growmau5 / RapidLed "Far Red Initiator Puck" to help kick their plants into bloom but $37 shipped and it doesn't even have built-in scheduling? I designed my own puck with 4x Cree XPE-2 Far Red (730nm) LEDs, a driver, wifi access and control for scheduling and setting brightness, and while I was at it I added in 0-10V dimming with override dimmer potentiometer, as well as a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor for logging. I call it the Initgnokt. I am also seeing pairs of fine little hairs coming out at nodes, we definitely got a ladyplant here, hope to get some blooms coming soon?

WE GOT BUDS! Started the week with a nutrient swap, going from the 3-2-1 ratio to 1-2-2 (Gro, Micro, Bloom) with one day of just pH 6 reverse osmosis water to start. I also switched out the individual KMC70011 wifi smart outlets I use to control lights and pump to one 4 outlet wifi power strip, allowing me to control a nighttime dehumidifier and exhaust / circulation fans separately. The 22W thermoelectric dehumidifier doesn't do squat. They say it is good for 1,100 cubic feet, and my tent is roughly 45 cubic feet. However, with the exhaust fan the air is changed out so many times per hour that it is only really slightly lowering the humidity of the exhausted air. It collects 170ml of water per day at 80F 75% RH. Theoretically, there is only around 20ml of water in the air in the entire tent, so if I sealed it off the humidity should drop maybe 10% in an hour or two right? Well instead of dropping, it climbs about 5-10% with the exhaust fan off and just stays there. This device can't even keep up with the plant transpiration during the day *or* at night. I had a bit of a SNAFU early in the week when I swapped the power strip-- forgetting to change the flood pump address so my poor plant went 36 hours without watering while I was out of town for a day. I came home to a really sad wilted plant. It took another 36-48 hours to recover and I reduced the concentration of the nutrient fluid by half (to 500ppm) to allow the plant to take in more water without getting over-nutriented while recovering. I don't have any fun timelapse images this week, the plant has grown too tall for my tripod to see over. Just a boring post about watching grass grow 😏

Started the week by popping the LEDIL Angelina reflectors of my grow lights. Their 90 degree spread was making it difficult to keep the light on the whole massive plant so no we're running bare COBs hashtag YOLO. I considered doing some defoliation and went as far as cutting off 4 or 5 fan leaves before I decided to just let the plant do what it wants for this grow. Over the course of the week it shed maybe 15-20 of its bottom fan leaves which I removed as it became obvious that they were shut off from the main plant. Just brushing against them they would pop right off. I'm starting to see sparkles around the bud sites. I'm not sure what those are, so I tried to google "sparkles on cannabis question mark" and felt a little silly. Are these trichomes? I didn't know they'd grow on the leaves, or are they bits that have fallen off the buds themselves? This is my first experience so I don't know what anything is.

Every time I see my plant her hands go UP! The fan leaves have now decided they way to stand straight up, which I thought was a call for help but googling appears to indicate that's perfectly ok. To my eye it looks the same as it did last week, but comparing the pictures from last week I guess there is some progress after all. Plant is dropping a few leaves a day from the bottom, on average 1-2 small leaves and one big one, I guess it knows they'll never get any light now. A couple of the buds are showing non-white hairs in them, not sure if that is progress or a warning sign that it is turning evil like a ginger.

Pictures are really sort of crap this week due to a general lack of activity. Growth has pretty much ground to a halt, maybe an inch taller than last week if I am being optimistic. There's a bit of a different smell now. I would have described the odor previously as being like a mint plant, but now it is a little more like a dank smell. I've also started using some dechlorinated tap water in with the RO water when mixing the nutrients (1gal tap / 5gal RO) as it is hard to keep the pH from going below 5.5 without adding a ton of "pH Up". The water here is very hard (HCO3 230ppm/CaCO3 190ppm), which should have a bit of a buffering effect. The big news is that I for the most part assembled my new light and put it into place. It is **9x Bridgelux EB series Gen 2 strips**. 4x 3000K, 4x 5000K, and 1x 3500K (which would have been 3000K but I already had it on hand). They're arranged on a 28" x 24" sheet of aluminum and driven with a HLG-185H-C1050 driver. At top output that's 178.5V 1.063A or just under 190W, and pulls about 205W at the wall. There's also a switch to disable the 4x 3000K strips which I'll use for veg next time so that I'm not lighting the whole array when there's just a plant in the middle of the tent. I'm only driving the strips at 850mA to match the output of the Vero COBs just as a comparison. I lost a *lot* fewer leaves off the bottom of the plant this week, maybe just one a day. The light is spread so evenly across the whole area that I'm getting a ton more penetration and because the heat is spread out as well, I was able to lower the light to within 5" from the canopy (vs 9" previously). I had two vertical fan leaves that started to show signs of stress, but because only because they were were a couple inches taller than the rest. They have been *eliminated*.

I think we're coming to a close soon! No growth to speak of this week on the green side, but with the new light I'm seeing a lot of bud growth all around. Plenty of light colored pistils in the perimeters and down inside the plant. It looks like some of the early buds have trichomes that are starting to turn cloudy though. Should I chop the early buds off the plant before they get "too ripe" this week? There's two or three flowers that are almost entirely covered with tan to brown pistils like in the closeup photos, but a ton of flowers that are just getting filled out (green/white hairs). Halp!

It's the final countdown! I harvested a couple of the flowers this week because the pistils were almost entirely brown and I couldn't see any more clear trichomes on them (they were all cloudy). I think this will be the last week before the first major harvest because growth has stopped. There were a couple flowers that grew a little this week, but for the most part things have come to an end. I don't think I lost a single leaf off the plant this week, either I've culled the weak leaves or they're getting enough light everywhere now. The plant's leaves in full light are starting to change color to sort of a dark purple/black and I am seeing a couple spots of yellow as well. Not sure what is happening there but I've decided to stop adding nutrients to the solution from now on out. I've just passed under 900ppm and I'll let the plant slowly use up what's left in the reservoir. Looking forward to chopping the top half of the plant this week or next weekend!

Looks like I've got a bud coming out of some of my buds? That's weird. Almost as weird as all the leaves that are under lights turning black/yellow/purpley. I had figured the plant would have finished up this week so I had just been adding RO water to the reservoir, no nutrients, but seeing as it still seems to be growing a bit I went ahead and brought it back up to 1000ppm after the photos were taken. I've been checking the trichomes among various flowers every day and haven't seen any turning brown at all so I guess I'm still ok to keep growing? Although some flowers pistils are completely colored now (no green/white pistils) which makes me think it can't be long.

Uh oh spaghetti-os, we got a problem. When I was checking the plant for ripeness on Thursday, I found a bud with fungus or mold or something! Daytime my temps/humidity are about 80F/60% and nighttime down to 72F/75% humidity. I can't do much about the night humidity so I am guessing that is the problem. Not a huge deal, I just harvested that bud because it was pretty done anyway and snipped out the fuzzy bit. It hasn't come back during drying because there's better airflow now so it should be ok. Buds continue to grow on all the buds, which I think is called foxtailing? This is my first experience with growing but I am seeing about 45000 lux at the highest bud (~630 umol/sec) and about 30000 lux at lower buds (~420 umol/sec) so I don't think it has to do with too much light, and at 80F I wouldn't think heat would be an issue either. /shrug Doesn't matter though because we. are. done! Trichomes on all the buds are starting to turn amber so it is time to start singing the Ballad of Butcher Pete who is hackin', whackin', and smakin', chopping that plant. Going to harvest about half the plant vertically and drop the lights down. I just refilled the nutrient reservoir and it would be a shame for it to go to waste so let's see if the bottom flowers fill out any.

"Wow, your plant looks roughly half as tall as it did last week" You're right, harvest has begun. I cut off the top half of the plant and gave it a rough trim and hung the stems up to dry. I did not have enough clothespins or binderclips or clotheshangers or even space to hang it all up. The smell in my house was almost overpowering from all the fresh cutting and took a day to work itself out. Wet weight was right about 1100g and after 6 days I trimmed it all up. One third of all the stems went into a big box and hung with a small thermoelectric dehumidifier in the box. Temps were round 84F and I'd run the dehumidifier if the humidity was over 70% and turn it off when it went under 60%. Those stems dried a couple days faster than those hanging in the grow tent, which were at a humidity of about 65% at night, 55% during the day. Dry weight so far is 180g, but there are a few bits of stem in there so maybe a little less. I need to get another jar to cure in for sure. This is my first time trimming and I wasn't sure if I am supposed to leave the sugar leaves on that are completely covered in trichomes. Some are super thick with em! I've been trimming almost all of them off, so as an experiment I loaded up my Pax with some of the ground up leaves. It tasted different obviously, but not objectionable and it did seem to have the desired effect. Am I supposed to leave them on? The stems dried in the dehumdifier box were definitely more dry on the outside than those hanging naturally in the tent. It took 3 days before the humidity in their jar climbed from ambient (55%) to 65%. Those in the tent were more sticky and the humidity in their soup container jumped up into the 60s% overnight. I also found some fluffy mold on a few of the buds (5-6?) when trimming, I cut those off and put them in their own small jar so I can measure the waste weight before I dump them. The second layer of buds changed a lot this week, bulking up a bit and definitely getting more frosty all over. They should be ready to harvest this week so I can get my final numbers - 193g so far from one plant!

Flowers left behind after the first harvest immediately threw their fan leaves straight up in the air. They bunked up a little bit but started to grow new structures which the internet says they're reaching the end of their life. There was not nearly as much good looking stuff in the second harvest as there was in the first, so after 2+ hours of trimming I decided to just cut the decent-looking stuff into the jar and just snip everything else into the scraps bag without trimming anything but giant empty leaves away. There were some flowers that were loose enough to almost see through. Scraps bag weighs 165g. We did it though! I've wanted to grow my own for decades and it was really friggin' easy. Total power for lights and fans and dehumidifier (which was worthless) came in at just 304kWh Weeks 5-7 of this diary have timelapse grow videos folks might find interesting. Don't miss those!