Gold Bar Corona Solo Cup Challenge

2020-07-14 (Day 1) Big thanks to @416fireman for setting this competition up! This will be my first entry for the Solo Cup Grow Comp. @spliffseeds has a great lineup of genetics and I’ll be testing out their Gold Bar Kush that I won last fall with my Outdoor Ontario Grow. Drinking a beer, tending to the garden I realized that a bottle of Corona could make an interesting container. After watering everything I took two bottles downstairs and used my Dremel to put some holes in the bottom of a bottle. First bottle I managed to get two holes and broke the bottle on the third. Second bottle I got two holes bored and decided not to test my luck any further. I filled it with promix HP and planted the germinated seed. Next day boom she emerged! Fingers crossed 🤞 I can take this grow to the finish line, if I fail it’s 100% my fault! We’ll start this outdoors and bring her inside to flower to keep her under the veg time cap. Stay tuned and see if we can pull this off!!

2020-07-24 (Day 11) I made one major mistake when preparing the bottle, I did not compact the soil into the bottle very tightly. I was hesitant to do so as I didn’t want to over pack it, but as I watered a ton of voids began to form in the medium. The seed also dropped about an inch in the bottle. To remediate this I dremeled the drainage hole on the bottom larger and slowly and painfully pushed more soil in with a pen until all the voids were filled and the plant pushed back up that inch. Thank for the bottle didn’t crack! Stay tuned, it’s almost training day!

2020-07-31 (Day 18) Well thank you to all the comments and suggestions. Immediately after last update I covered the bottle with 2 layers of tinfoil to protect the roots from the sunlight. It appears to have worked as roots have reached the bottom of the bottle with one beginning to protrude through the bottom drainage hole (I’m going to trim once it gets through so I can remain in the competition). As for the watering questions, for the time being I’ve watered her once upon sewing the germinated seed, and again last night (day 17), the latter feeding I added some veg nutes. Once the stem gets too big to top water(if I don’t kill it or if it gets that big) I will set the bottle in a container of water, the bottle will be suspended by gravel and I believe this should allow the roots to suck up the water required. There doesn’t appear to be any more voids in the medium so I think I added enough soil last week. Stay tuned and watch this “experiment”

2020-08-06 (Day 24) She’s chugging along! Only watered from the bottom now. Just a beautiful little plant, far surpassing my expectations in this “pot”. Stay tuned, force flowering is 1 week away!

2020-08-13 (Day 31) Well she’s gotta be under the 12-12 by day 35 to still be eligible for the contest, so I’m going to have to put her indoors in my tent on Monday. I’ll have to get the girlfriend to do this as I’m leaving town for over a week. I gave her a good dose of nutes tonight since she’ll be feeding just water. This Gold Bar Kush is just thriving, I can’t wait to grow her out properly!

2020-08-23 ( Day 41) Well, she suffered a pretty decent nitrogen deficiency while I was away, my fault, I asked the girlfriend to water with straight water, no nutes. The two lower sets of fans yellowed but that’s about it. I plucked them and fed her, and she looks awesome again. She’s in the tent under 12-12 to stay within the 5 week veg cap. Stay tuned, flowers should form soon!

2020-08-30 (Day 48) Still trying to rectify the nitrogen deficiency but she’s still chugging along and starting to put off some flowers 🌺. Love the look of this girl, I put up a video too!

2020-09-06 (Day 55) Same as last week still trying to get the nutes under control, a little trickier than I thought! But this should still turn out awesome!

2020-10-20 (Day 99) Did I fool everyone into thinking she died? I’m also surprised how this thing has handled constant cold damp nights and days and 4 frosts. She’s going to finish up on my windowsill as the weather is just too far gone to support my corona grow. Spliff seeds genes are what have kept this thing alive and healthy, can’t wait to try gold bar kush properly in the ground. Out of the SOLO contest since I haven’t kept up to date with my diary but this years outdoor harvest was just too insane. I will 100% do this and other bonsai style cannabis grows again! Try Spliff Seeds, can’t recommend them enough!

2020-11-15 For how poorly I took care of this grow she grew amazing! This strain handled under watering, overwatering, was WPM resistant and for some reason the aphids didn’t like her even though they loved neighbouring strains. I will repeat a bottle grow, quite possibly do a 4 strain bottle grow-off in the future. Tips and tricks using this custom “pot” I found letting the medium dry out near completely and then submerging the entire bottle in a 5 gallon pale of nutrients until the soil was saturated worked best. Be cautious when filling the bottle with soil! When I first watered the seedling the soil condensed as it got saturated (I put the soil in near completely dry). And there were huge voids throughout. I tediously filled the bottle from below with soil in that tiny 1/4” drainage hole. Fill your bottle and saturate it prior to planting your seed, you’ll see what I mean. All in all super happy with how this grow turned out. Shitty I got caught up in life to properly document flower but at least I kept her alive! Updates to come but no new journals until spring unfortunately. But stay along, more Spliff Seeds and others grows to come!!!! P.S. if your starting out buy this strain, you can’t fuck it up and it smells and tastes wonderful 🍊!