As pure as the Californian Snow!

I just wanted to send a huge thank you to @Fast_Buds for sponsoring the Christmas video contest. What an amazing selection of seeds... It was a tough deciding which one to start with! but, I'm going to give the Californian Snow a go first. Soaking seed in 4ml/L Rhizotonic overnight. Will update more over the next few daze as she pops and I get her in some coco... or maybe this will be my first DWC. I'm all set up for it now, just not sure if I'm ready yet. Six days later. So, this seed was slow to pop. after three days the hull was barely split.. just enough to let me know it was doing something. I made the decision to go the DWC route so I took the seed out of the paper towel and placed it in a 5.8pH soaked rockwool. Now, three days later and it has just broken though the top of the cube... it's not even standing straight up yet. I'm sure it'll be all straightened out by the morning and on it's way.

Well things are starting to look up for this one. It got off to a really slow start, seemed stunted for days. I'm going to chalk it up to learning DWC. I'm happy to say the roots are just visible below the tophat today, I've been waiting to see something poke out the bottom. My main concern now is that I've pooched my rotation, I should have treated this grow as an experiment while running another one in coco just to be safe. Live and learn I guess.

Well I've been on the fence about this one since the beginning, Got off to a real slow start, but it seems to be doing ok now. I though I was getting root rot, but it looks like its just residual dust in the water from the hydroton... it was freaking me out at first. I noticed when I did a res change that they were much cleaner after putting them in the new bucket lol. I'm not counting this plant into my regular rotation, just gonna treat it as my DWC experiment and see how I feel about it. I'm really comfortable with my coco growing method, so I may just stick to that for a while and hone my DWC skills on the sidelines for now. Pretty late for my week 3 update, I normally do all that stuff at the beginning of the week. I'll update this one again for week 4 in a few days and get back on track from there.

Still a bit slow going for 26 days I think, at least she's healthy. This girl will start getting a little more TLC over the next few days as I harvest a couple of her larger tent mates. This poor thing has been choked out from real light for a couple weeks now as the larger ones around her take it all. I'm still confident she'll produce, but I'm not expecting much... hopefully more knowledge for next time if nothing else.

It's really unlike me to miss a week, but looks like that's what happened. Quite happy with the progress on he Cali Snow! For a plant that I didn't think was going to make it, she's doing just fine. Looks like the week 6 stretch is in full swing... I'm seeing new growth every day.

I can't believe how good the Cali Snow is doing. For a plant that got off to a slow start, she sure is growing up nicely. Everything is lush and healthy. The fan leaves are just massive and show the Indica traits of the strain. I was caught off guard by how much water the plant consumes, I didn't check the levels for a couple days and it was down over a gallon. So I'm watching her every day now to be safe. I'm really looking forward to what the next couple weeks bring.... and also think I'm going to take this DWC thing a little more seriously too, I'm starting some new beans this week and think I'm going in this direction rather than coco.

The Cali Snow is turning into a monster, her growth over the last week has just been explosive! Everything looks really healthy, no burnt tips and fan leaves bigger than my hand. There are bud sites starting to develop all over her now, I'm anxious to see what the next few weeks bring.

This girl is getting out of control, I stripped the bottom of the plant and the top exploded! Almost 17"of growth in the past seven days. and not just upward growth... She takes up over half of my 4x2 tent. I can't crank my lights any higher, and as a result I'm getting a little light bleaching up top. Nothing severe, but it's noticeable. Other than that she's doing great! These pictures make the light bleaching look worse than it is. I have a LED light bulb on above my plants when I take my pics and it's so close to this one that it makes it look more yellow than it actually is. Very excited to see how this monster is going to fill in. This strain is estimated to finish between 9-11 weeks. Probably gonna run a little long by the looks of things, I'm guessing 12-13 weeks total.

I've been trying to keep this beast under control for the last week, it really stretched up and was touching the lights. I've since tied it down in six or seven spots spreading the canopy open a bit. I tied the main cola down about six inches. Within two hours it had stretched up about 70 degrees to face the light directly again. The growth on this plant is just explosive! If it was not tied down it would easily be in excess of 60". She seems a little behind in budding for a 10 week old plant, but I'm going to assume it's just had some kind of extended veg period and will finish a couple/few weeks longer than average. She's been drinking three to four litres of water every 24 hours, it's a full time job keeping up with it lol. There are many bud formations everywhere, the upper canopy is going to be abundant now that she's tied down a bit. Still no real smell to speak of, and not much trichome development yet, but we'll see what the next couple weeks bring.

I'm more impressed with the Cali Snow every day, she is a magnificent beast! This plant would easily be in excess of 65" if I didn't start panic training her a couple weeks ago. Her upward growth seems to have slowed down a lot as she starts to concentrate more on fattening those buds. The whole upper canopy is is going to look really nice in another week or two! She is still drinking two or three litres every day. I'm about to run out of my Remo nutes and will probably have to switch to CellMax before she's done. I hope she takes the switch with no issues.

She's not looking so great the last couple days... She's been too close to the light for too long! and I think I may have stopped using the Cal-Mag a bit early. Just hoping to get through this grow with some buds that haven't lost all their potency from being fried by my lights. The buds have noticeably fattened up over the last few days, but have barely any scent... and even less trichomes. Lots of things learned on this grow!

Overall this was a good learning experience. I wouldn't say it's scared me away from DWC but I want to educate some more before I make this my go to method. For now, I have three other DWC projects to deal with that I started before this one went off the rails. I'm going to get through them best I can, but the seeds I germinated today will be coco plants... I'll go back to what I know until I feel I'm ready. Ended up with 238g wet bud weight and 66g of popcorn... still a decent sized harvest under the circumstances. I'll update more over the next few days once she has dried a bit and I try some to see if it has any potency to it. Well, end result was 90g of small buds and popcorn... I just threw it all together this time, there wasn't much difference in size. Didn't get a proper flush so it's giving up black ash when smoked and it's a bitch to keep lit... not really harsh, but not smooth. Thankfully, It does have some potency.