Outdoor Organic Gorilla Glue in Alberta

Late start for outdoor, but there are reasons. 😎

Plant was started in a Rapid Rooter and had to be placed in a plastic solo cup for a while, but she’s now settled in to her 5 gallon grow bag. June 30: rain all day. July 1: heavy rain most of day with some sun at the end.

July 4: normally I think I would fim this plant, but I’m experimenting with just using LST to get the fastest possible outdoor crops. I’ll let this plant get a bit taller and then I’ll tie it down as suggested on the Fast Buds blog (which is well written with lots of good tips, BTW). July 8: the plant grew a lot this week and seems happy. The summer weather has been very rainy and cool so I’m sure it would be doing even better if the weather was more ‘normal’. It’s surprisingly hard to resist the urge to top or fim it now to try to maximize yields, but I don’t have enough time left in the season for the delay this causes.

July 9: started LST tie down last night. July 12: released LST and now tying to the pepper cage. July 14: very rainy summer this year and I’ve barely had to water any of my plants in the last month.

Tying it to the pepper cage to pull it off vertical is a good way to open up the plant to more light. Easy to do and easy on the plant. Tying it down for just a few days seems to have got the lower buds going and the whole plant is bushing out nicely. It’s growing at about an inch per day now and there are lots of bud sites forming. Check out the difference in height between Day 41 and Day 42 😳 I’m using LST (no topping or fimming) for the sake of speed and also having read that Gorilla Glue doesn’t like being stressed. Maybe the ideal speed/yield technique for outdoor is tying it down for about a week followed by an off vertical LST onto a support (cage or bamboo) with the stem pointed north. Guess I’ll find out. 🤔

July 25: added some soil as some roots were showing. Included some Superbloom nutes in the mix. I find it’s okay to use these cheap Home Depot type nutes in early flowering and then just molasses later on. July 26: Tying down branches using pipe cleaners and paper clips. Super easy and effective.

July 30: it grew an inch overnight...you gotta like that kind of progress. 🤠 Aug 3: still growing at about an inch per day, but it seems to have been slowed down a bit by the high temperatures the last few days. It’s cooling off to the low 20s C this week so that will likely help. Aug 5: hot again for a few more days.

Aug 9: plant has stopped gaining height and hopefully now the buds really thicken up. So far so good. Will now just use pHed water with molasses added in every few days. There’s really no need for expensive cannabis specific nutrients, and especially if the soil is right to begin with.

Aug 16: Rolling along nicely. Very hot the next four days so I’ll have to keep an eye on the water. Aug 17: my water has elevated sodium so I’m going to re-start adding Epsom salts and calcium citrate routinely to keep the cation ratios more balanced. Sounds complicated but cation exchange is pretty basic soil science. Aug 18: hot again but buds are looking good. Thanks for the helpful comments and I think I have been using molasses a bit too late in the flowering cycle on other plants. Aug 19: yep, I’m using molasses too late in my grows so far this year. This is bad for the smoke so I decided to give a good flush using pHed water. It might be a bit early but there’s likely 2-3 weeks still to go so the timing is about right.

Just pHed water this week. Aug 23: drilled two 3/32” holes in main stem and this is equivalent to stem splitting. Harvest is likely in a week to 10 days. It was only 7 C this morning but the forecast lows are mostly still above 10 C for the next two weeks. Aug 25: buds are getting pretty hard and have got a nice purple colour from the low overnight temps. 😎 Aug 28: done? Pretty much I think but maybe I should keep going....(The usual struggle).

I think she’s almost done, but holding out for a few more days. The purple colouring is getting really dark, but she still seems to be putting out new pistils, so I’ll wait a bit longer. The chop is coming though. 😎 Aug 31: it was only 2 C this morning, yikes, but the plants were on the warming table (Sand box with soil warming cable) and they all seem fine. The GG buds are now really dark and very dense. 😎. Will harvest In the dark tomorrow morning. Sep 1: chopped in dark this morning, 82 days from seed. Overnight low was a more normal 13 C last night after that more extreme low two nights ago. 275 g wet trimmed.

Harvested at 82 days from seed. The only training applied was to tie it down for a few days, and then mild LST to open it up to light. No topping or fimming as I didn’t want to delay harvest at all due to a late-ish start. With our low overnight temps here all plants in the garden take longer than advertised. Most autos take about 100 days outdoor here, but this one was faster. Designing the nearly ‘super soil’ to include dolomite lime and Epsom salts eliminated the hassle of having to add Cal-Mag with the water and the plant never showed any deficiencies. I used vinegar to adjust the water pH, molasses as a bloom booster, and super soil so this would be considered an organic grow. Super easy grow, fast, and decent yield. I expected the plant to get bigger but I guess the good weather didn’t arrive at exactly the right time during the veg stage, or maybe I could have added more N early on. Or maybe the tie down caused lower branches to grow more but stunted the overall height. I doubt it but maybe. It likely just rained too much in June. I also had it in a Solo cup a bit too long at the start (long story) that may have stunted it a bit. The nights are so cool here it’s not possible to start the seed in the final container and it’s more important to keep the seedling warm than to avoid transplanting. If you have transplanted anything in the garden before, then you know how to do it. Just don’t wait too long as you risk dwarfing the plant. It was only 2 C two nights before harvest and the plant turned a really dark purple. It had been on the warming table with the other plants and did just fine despite the low temperature. The buds are really quite hard at harvest with zero sign of mould or other sorts of problems. Very impressed as always with Fast Buds genetics. Thanks for checking out the diary.