Speedy Chile and friends

Starting out a four plant budget grow. Using 50/50 coco/soil -mix as a medium in 10 litre pots (buckets with holes drilled in them). I know this sounds weird but decided to give it a go since I had few blocks of coco and few bags of pre-fertilized soil laying around. :). I have no idea if I should treat the plants as coco or soil grown, so how this goes and what I´ll do remains as a mystery even to myself. Time will tell :) As this is a small budget grow, I am using and re-using whatever supplies I have already left over from previous grows or can get very cheap. As fertilizers I have Bcuzz Coco -kit which I won from some competition so I will be using those as fertilizer even tough I am using 50% soil. I will just have to try and adjust the dosages as I am using prefertiled soil and coco nutrients are far stronger than those ment for soil. For lighting I ordered a LED from Amazon, 300w (about 140 true). I have been using HPS on all my previous grows so this is a new thing for me. I decided to go for LED as I don´t want to battle with temperatures all the time or use Cooltube since it eats away a fair amount of the light. I am also tempted to see how the current LED-systems do, my previous go with them was about 4 years ago, used a high-end 180w light which ended up being total crap :) I got the seeds from Royal Queen Seeds, I have been using them most of my growing "career" because everything have always been top notch, you just simply can´t get anything better. Original plan was to grow 4 autos, 3 of which I choose myself and one as a surprise since they send an extra mystery seed with orders over 25 euros. I was in a bit too "creative" mood when I placed the order, and for some reason mixed up "fast flowering" and "auto-flowering" in my head and ended up with Speedy Chile (fast flowering), Stress killer automatic and Northern Light automatic. As a free seed I got Royal Cheese auto, couldn´t been more happier when I opened the package since I was considering between that and Northern Light so I got them both :) I know that autos will suffer in yield and speed since I have to flip lights to 12/12 at some point but I am OK with this. I am also going to take a cutting from the Speedy Chile before I switch the lights and let it veg in another space until these four are ready and then put it into flowering, so I will be mostly focusing at her in this diary to gather all possible info and data about her habits and likings so I will get the most out of her in the next run.

Thank you Royal Queen Seeds for sending me a male seed! I was away for few days and anxious to see my plants and got home only to see that the Royal Cheese Automatic was a male. Most likely it has already pollinated the other 3 plants which were already flowering and doing very well with no signs of stress. Either their Cheese has the weakest genetics ever, or it was a male seed from the beginning (which is my guess, as you can see the top bud is all pollen sack and no hair at all...). Also, I have NEVER managed to get autoflower to go hermie, let alone this badly, no matter what I have done to it and what the conditions were. I sent Royal Queen Seeds a polite email explaining the situation, and all I got was a rude reply indicating that this was all my fault and best they can do is offer 20% discount for my next order :D. I have lost 6 weeks in this grow, plus the money for seeds, Electricity and supplies. So pissed off at the moment, specially after the obnoxious reply from RQS :( Definitely the last time I will ever grow anything from them. It's understandable that sometimes there will be bad quality seeds, but how they handled this situation is the thing that angries me. I have been their customer for many years and grown almost exlusively their strains and this is what it ended up to :(

Looks like I left WAAAAAYYYYYYYY too much moisture in the coco before I mixed it with soil, the pots are way too heavy for my liking. Won´t be needing watering anytime soon, maybe in the start of week 3 :D I also do foliar feedings every night when the lights go off, I spray them a light seaweed extract. Recommended to try, all my plants in all my grows have loved that stuff! Managed to stun my plants a bit on this week by lowering the light too low and some of the leaves started to show signs of light stress. Seems that it´s far more powerful than I tought it would be. I am starting to think that it was actually a very good purchase for 79 euros. Because of this little accident I once again followed the best advice I have ever got with autos; Run them on 24/0 as long as the conditions are perfect and there is no visible stress, when something unexpected comes along switch to 18/6. This will allow your plants to rest a bit and get over the stun sooner than continuing 24/0. Anyway, the plants grew absolutely fantastic during the second week! So far the 50/50 coco/soil -mix seems to be doing very well, even tough there´s still far too much water in the pots. Weeks 1 and 2 were backogged, the grow is now on day 18. I will try to update every day and maybe add a live camera feed at some point since I have a currently useless IP-camera in the drawer :) I had to go on a weekend trip from friday to monday, I was a bit worried to leave them for even few days since I hadn´t done any feedings yet due to water residue from soaking the coco and they were on a spurt. But check the pics from the end of week 2 and the start of week 3, wow :)

Week 3 started off good! The plants are just absolutely thriving and they grow at insane speed. First feeding was on monday at day 15 of Speedy, I gave 0.5 litres to everyone with 1/4th strenght nutes + some seaweed extract. I am a firm believer in seaweed, I use it both foliar and in the waterings. Altough Cheesy is the smallest and youngest, she seemed to enjoy the watering the most. So far Cheesy and Speedy seem to be most resistant to problems, while StressK seems to be very easy to stress; she doesnt like water, too much light, too much fan, too much heat, nor anything else :). Very sensitive plant compared to the other ones, I have to be more careful with her. From this day on (21/2/2018) we are up to date with diary and will be reporting daily how things go. If you didnt read the previous weeks, I started this grow on 4/2/2018 and backlogged the first two weeks, luckily I had some pics taken so I could put them up aswell :). Edit 21/2/2018: Started to LST all the autos, bent them gently outwards from center of growspace to expose side braches to light. Speedy will be topped tomorrow, I will give a little more time for the 5th node to develop before I cut her. Everything is going very well, the temperature is steady at 23c and they grow so fast it´s almost unbeliavable. I check them every few hours and the ch ange is visible every time :). Speedy is on day 17 and her foliage spread is 30cm. The LED I am using seems to produce very squat plants, no stretching on plants, quite the opposite. The gap between nodes is very tight. Edit 22/2/2018 Speedy is doing very well. Decided to top her today. She has a very nice fruity hash-like smell, I have high hopes for her future :). I think I will give her two more weeks before switching lights to 12/12. I will wait for the side branches to grow a bit and tie them down to get a nice and even canopy of colas. I don´t want to veg her too long tough since I have only 10l pot for her, I don´t want her to be rootbound when I flip lights and she starts to stretch. Edit 23/2/2018 Speedy recovered from topping very fast and is reaching for the skies! She is a very vigorious plant, seems to have good genetics, so thanks @James for always providing the highest quality :). The lime color just keeps getting better and she´s develeping very beautiful smell, fresh & fruity. Today I also received the grow tent I ordered, decided to go over the budget with it - altough it was only 50 euros from Amazon - but still a lot of money for me at the moment. The closet ain´t completely lightproof and I don´t want Speedy to go full tranny on me, and I would have problems with ventilation if I tried to seal the closet with something. And I can´t drill air holes into it since it ain´t mine and I don´t want to pay for a new one :). Not sure if I will put the tent up today, because today I also received some Amnesia Haze from a friend and it seems to be doing it´s job very well, feeling a bit too soft to do anything that requies me to move :)

Start of week 4 for Speedy! Switching to 12/12 soon, maybe today or few more days of veg at most. She is doing very well and is growing like a champion :). Only problem so far in this grow has been low RH, it´s middle of the winter where I live and the temperature is around -20 celsius so the air is very dry. I have to spray the girls few times a day to give them even a little bit more humidity. Speedy got a little trip to the barbershop before switch, A little time to recover from shock and then we are good to take off into flowering :). She has 8 main shoots now, and I think I will keep it that way and trim out new branches and shoots. Branches are thick and have tight nodes so they will produce some very nice colas and I will rather take it that way than let her spend energy making popcorn. UPDATE 28/2/2018: Two of the autos have started flowering, cheese and stress killer showed their first pistils today :). I have raised the nutes to half strenght few days ago, and every other feeding is with no nutes, only seaweed extract. I think I will have to do a flush this week, the top of the soil looks like there might be some salt build-up and and don't want to run into any problems with nute lockouts. Low RH is still a problem, I have to spray the girls all the time. Altough it might be a good thing once the plants are in full flowering since they are very short and stocky and will most likely make very thick colas, I don't have to worry about possible mold or bud rot :)