3rd Grow - 3 Plants & Strains

Hello everyone and thanks for checking in on my third ever grow. I hope you get a good laugh from my n00b growin' a$$, and anyone newer than I am can learn what not to do. 😂 I'd like to start off by thanking Barney's Farm for sending me some free seeds. They asked for nothing in return other than pictures of my grow, which I will be happily sending along to them at the completion of a two week cure when I take final pics and weights. Barney's actually sent me 3 strains. Two of which, (the Blueberry OG and the Peyote Cookies), are in this grow, and Strawberry Lemonade. Unfortunately because of the longer grow time, Strawberry Lemonade will have to wait. I dry my harvest in my grow tent...and you can't really dry a crop when you're trying to finish flowering another plant for 2 weeks...so another grow it will have to be for some Strawberry Lemonade. 😭 Anyway, enough of my rambling and lets get to what's important. This grow! What am I growing now? How am I doing it, and how am I going to f@ck it up? So, what I'm growing is: the aforementioned Blueberry OG and Peyote Cookies...and then we've got good 'ol Barney's Farm Critical Kush as my little control group from seeds I bought myself. CK has withstood all of my mistakes so far, and has given me a consistent yield in my two previous grows so she should be a good barometer of how this third grow goes. A couple of changes since my 2nd grow. During the 2nd grow I thought one of my problems for low yield was a weak light. There was a sale, and I was flush with another form of green so I upgraded from a Kind LED XL600 to a Kind LED XL1000. Point of fact, before the grow started I had already changed my opinion about that. The XL600 is a fine light and "weak light" was not my problem in the least...unless you count the weak light in my head. HA! But seriously, the XL1000 had a couple of nice features such as wifi that allowed me to ditch the wall timer and it has a seedling light preset which changes the light levels (basically, super paraphrased, it's got a built in dimmer) so it doesn't kill the children. That allowed me to dump the crappy fluorescent light that came with my seedling dome. I had ballast issues with that from day one but wasn't even worth replacing...but I digress. I think that covers it...nope. One more thing...and I think this one is a learning moment for all of you n00bs like me...and yea I'm probably gonna ramble on a bit here but hey, take a toke and hold it in an extra second, and enjoy the ride. If you've read on this long I promise this'll slide right into Week 1 and you're not even gonna realize what I did to you. In my opinion, my 2nd Grow was pretty much a complete failure. None of the goals I set were met other than keeping the plants alive. So I went back to basics. I got my feeding schedule and brand of nutrients to use from growpotcheaply.com so I went back to the source so to speak. I started watching the videos again on this guys YouTube channel. Paying just a little more attention...and I'm watching this one video and he's talking about people coming to him with issues with their grows and and he always comes back to the same thing; Environment Environment Environment. Here I am, Day 5 from popping out of the coco and I'm still trying to figure out environment issues. I've got an air-conditioner, a de-humidifier, a humidifier, heaters, fans, multiple thermometers and hydrometers, proper flows. My sh!t is regulated! What the hell am I missing?!?! I decide to throw down the $7 for this guy's amazon e-book to see what I'm missing. It's Day 6 now and I don't know what I'm missing?! Maybe I need Grow Weed Easy for Dummies, I don't know, but I'm doing something wrong, or not doing enough of something right but I'm not getting what I'm putting in if you get what I'm sayin' here. There is a point where ROI has to play a factor. The proof is in the puddin' as they say, and this guy's got it. He's got the yields. I read pretty much word for word the whole thing and I decide that I need a CO2meter (and an automatic watering system, but that's a story for another week). That's the only thing that is in this guys info that I have absolutely no control over and no idea how much there is or isn't in my environment. My tent is in a walk-in closet in my master bedroom. There is no door to the closet but there isn't ranything around to make any CO2 (yes I have an in-take fan for cooling. I'm a n00b, not brain dead 😜). Thank the Cannabis Gods for amazon. A CO2 meter in my hands in what is Day 9 since my seeds popped thru the coco. 400-500ppm 600-800ppm if I sit in the closet with the tent open. Yikes! This is not going to work. 😱 Saturday, Day 12, I get a 20lb CO2 canister (I already had a regulator that came with a hose) and hook it all up and hit the girls with their first nutrients. (I also turn off my exhaust fan for the tent so I don't exhaust my newly purchased CO2). I took it back to basics with the nutrients too. In my 2nd Grow I had bought all in on the line of Cyco Platinum line of nutrients. And I still do believe in them 100%, and look forward to using the entire system again in upcoming grows. But for this grow I wanted to minimize my variables from what I considered my "control" grow. My First Grow...so, back to minimum nutrients and the grow weed easy watering system. Which is, first 7-10 days seedlings get hit with Bloom instead of Grow. According to the author, Neil (and paraphrased by me) Bloom has the same nutrients that you would be feeding to your plants early on. Well, hold on now. Just look at this sh!t for a second. I already f@cked up. It's already Day 10 as I'm realizing what I've read and I hadn't given my girls any nutes. Just above I said I gave them their first nutes on Day 12. What the hell is wrong with me? 😔 Saturday, Day 12, Nutes and CO2. BOOM! Sunday, Day 13. What I have decided is the beginning of Flower Week 1. These girls love the nutrients & CO2. They look so much perkier and greener out from their dome. Tues. Day 15 the girls move into their 7 Gallon forever homes and started getting Grow nutes. Fri. Day 18 I changed the power setting on the light from Seedling to Flower, closing out Week 1 on Feb. 29th, Day 19. *As I write Week 1 of this grow diary, this grow is actually in what should be it's final week or two before cut down and drying (barring any setbacks) so I'll just be filling in as much as I can day-to-day to catch up the weeks. Sadly with the current crisis there were a couple of weeks where I didn't take pics. I just had other things on my mind. But I have my notes and my musings, so stay tuned for more to come...and best of all...how much more I f@ck up. Thanks for stickin' with me till the end and checkin' out my grow. Till next week. Keep smokin'.