Cheese Autoflower (GCS)

It's a week where lots of things are falling apart in my personal world, or where they would be if I were not grinding my teeth & pulling it together, but also where all that work is proving very satisfactory. Case in point here; this, my first grow, has been a tremendous labor of love. This cheese autoflower greets me each time I visit her with a swift pungent smell (nothing that makes me worry about my neighbors yet, thankfully), and always-lush leaf coverage. I am struggling in this godawfully humid summer to keep the heat & humidity down, and I think this light runs quite hot. It's my first grow, so I've got no sense of comparison, but I can't manage to get temps under 24 C no matter what I do. Still, I find that consistent temps are better than low temps that I can only achieve for a small amount of time. She doesn't appear very stressed about the situation at all, and I always let her dry a few hours past when I think she could use a feeding just to be sure I don't err on the side of causing mold. I am also growing in a homemade fabric grow bag, made using some landscape fabric & my sewing machine, to help increase air flow and encourage root health. This will hopefully keep things from getting too stagnant. I knew going into this summer that humidity would be a challenge; now the trick is just keeping this little girl healthy despite the conditions. Occasionally I've found she needs a lower pH or less nutrients (I already feed about 1/3 portion of the Fox Farms recommended schedule, and she still burns if I feed her more than once a week!). Once I started lowering the pH, though, I haven't worried a bit. Checking in on her growth multiple times each day has gotten soothing, even as I worry and fuss over the environmental conditions. I can't believe I've made it through her first week of flowering. Every once in a while I've trimmed a few larger fan leaves that are obstructing too much light for the growth beneath them. Usually it's no more than 5-7 leaves, and as few as 2-3, at a time. Thus far I've eaten all of them afterwards, as leafy dressings on hot dogs, additions to a fried-kale-&-steamed-rice bowl, anywhere a leafy green might go. They've always been pleasant, but today the leaves had a delightful sharp bite, a clear kick, and I was delighted. (They were placed raw between a slice of toasted white bread and some homemade chicken salad of chicken leg meat, grapes, celery, snap peas, spices, and mayo.) I wonder what this girl will taste like by the end of flowering?