4th Grow - Gorilla White Widow

After the success of my 3rd grow I've decided to push myself a bit with the 4th grow. I've ditched the 2x4 tent and finally put a door on the walk-in closet. I've decided to expand my footprint a touch and expand my garden to 6 plants. My light is stated to handle a 5x5 footprint but I thought 8 plants would be a little too much for a number of reasons, and I wanted to leave the girls room to flourish. I bought some 3/4" electrical conduit and a hand pipe cutter from Home Depot, and connected them together with canopy fittings I bought on Amazon to make a "frame" from which to hang my light and fans and run wires. This is the 1st strain that I chose for my personal 6pk Challenge. I purchased this strain from Seedsman.com Breeder's stated Flower time is 55-60 Days. WHAT!?!?! Gorilla Glue #4 crossed with White Widow! Two of my favorite strains! Are you friggin' kidding with me?!?! Not even a question that I was going to grow this. For me Day 1 is the first day that the plant pops up from the soil/coco, or in my case this grow, the Rapid Rooter. I do not begin to count Week 1 until I have changed the light intensity from Seedling to Vegetative strength. The seed was placed into it's wet paper towel to germinate and the plastic topped container was placed on top of my refrigerator (Friday). On Sunday I placed the sprouted seed into a Rapid Rooter. Initially my plan was to leave the sprout in the Rapid Rooter and leave the rooter in my tray and under the dome on a heat mat...but I didn't have a temp controller for my heat mat and after about 2 hours of leaving them only in the rooters I got paranoid and placed the rooters into some small peat pots with coco for an additional layer between the heat mat. The rooters were soaked in a nutrient solution consisting of 2ml CalMag+ and 2ml each of Cyco Bloom A & B per 1 gallon of distilled water. Yes, I did mean to type BLOOM. The person that designed the feeding system that I currently use believes that in the seedling stage of growth, the Bloom nutrients are more beneficial because the plant is able to use the higher amounts of potassium and phosphorus to develop it's roots faster. She received about 30ml of this mixture per day for her first 7 days. On Day 8 I decided to switch to Grow nutrients. On Day 13 I transplanted from the small peat pot into a 7 gallon fabric pot and watered just down directly under the plant, maybe a little bit wider. I did this because I saw a video where a grower believes that this promotes the roots to grow down, before growing out. According to the video this will give the plant a stronger anchor into the pot. I decided to try this because in previous grows I have seen roots in my plants roots "reach up" where I was seeing roots rise above and then got back down into my coco. I didn't believe that my plants were very well anchored until much later into the grow. We shall see. Day 14 was a Sunday and started Week 1. I setup my CO2 tank and timer and switched my light to it's Veg setting. Each day my circle of watering got a little bit larger until I the entirety of the pot had been watered.

Week 2? Must be time to Top. I know, it's too early you say. I don't care. I feel crazy. Like a wild man. Yeah, no, none of that shit. I felt that she was strong enough and I wanted to get the stress out of the way early so she can get all big and tall and strong...so Day 22 Top Chop! Gave her a couple of days recovery and then I threw some stakes in to get her trained and growing the way she needs to...or more to the point, the way I want her to so I can hopefully end up with some beautifully big fat nugs at the end of this grow.

Decided to add some Grow XL this week to try and help the girls recover from the trauma that was last week. Took off some big leaves on Day 29. You can see where I missed my Top last week so I had to re-do that. After that just some LST love and feeding for the rest of the week. Please check out the 5 other strain diaries for this grow. Thanks for stopping by!

Decided to add some Silica into the mix this week. Fairly straight forward week. Didn't need to spend too much time in the garden. Gave her a trim on Day 38 and a follow-up on Day 40.

Gonna take it easy this week. Don't want to stress these girls out too much . Just a little trim on Day 48, the beginning of Week 5, and they'll have the rest of the week to grow out big and strong. Did some daily leaf tucking throughout the week. Nice and easy. Took a height measurement for sh!ts & giggles this week. She was 12.5"/13" thereabouts.

I didn't want to stress my lovely little ladies out in the final week before Flower so there wasn't much hands-on work this week, but I did want to show my love... My reservoir was empty to start the week and since I knew that I would be flushing at the end, I saw no reason to mix up a big batch of nutes for a short week. So it was back to the good 'ol days of mixing daily...and on the first day I was staring at the shelf of these nutrients directly on my shelf directly in my face that I wasn't using, wasting away. So I decided to use them before they go bad and I've completely wasted my money. So the girls got a nice treat of some extra nutes in their final week of Veg. And I think they really responded. Day 54 was a Friday and for all my girls for a large leaf removal and a 1 gallon flush of distilled water ph to 5.8. Then when the lights turned off it'll be 32 hrs of darkness before the lights turn back on and it'll be the first week of Flower. There is no particular reason for 32 hours. That's just the way the timing turned out to be. ...and before I forget I did take another height measurement before sending into Flower, but my GWW here didn't grow at all. She measured in at the same exact 13". Odd considering everyone else grew at least 2".

The beginning of the end...Week 7...Flower Week 1...Bud Time! (we hope) Always hope. Never expect. This way you're not too terribly disappointed if things don't work out your way. Just a little life lesson for ya from Samson420. 😉 Anyway, after 32 hrs of darkness I gave this little lady a full 1 gallon of nutrient rich water to soak up on Day 1 of Flower after that 1 gallon flush before the dark. According to the calendar (which is why we write these things down) I did some large leaf maintenance on Fl. Day 4 I took some measurements on Day 7. The 2 main tops measure up @ 15" & 17", and the rest of the canopy hovers around the 14" mark. Still the smallest of all my girls this grow but she's healthy, and that's really all you can ask for. I think that about covers it for the GWW this week. Until next time...Peace.

Day 8 of Flower on the calendar has me marked down for giving her a clearing out of under growth that isn't going to amount to anything and suck her energy from going somewhere more useful. It was easy sailing the rest of the week until Day 13 when I did a little follow up trim and strategically placed some stakes to hold some of those branches a little farther apart for light penetration. Her 2 main tops are measuring up @ 19" & 17" but unfortunately the rest of the canopy is down around the 1ft area. 😢 I had to raise my light at the beginning of the week because of other plants in this grow. If I can't find a way to prop The G DubDub up higher up to the light, she's gonna get swallowed up really soon 😱 Apologies for the bad pics. I tried something different this week. Won't try it again.

I was finally forced to take some action. If I wanted this beauty to have any kind of a chance of producing me some sweet buds I needed to get he up off the floor because she was being devoured by the other plants in the space. You can see in the 2nd pic what I was able to come up with . It's not too much, but it's something, and more importantly, it's stable. Last thing I need is this plant falling into another plant and losing 2. NO THANK YOU! Besides getting her a little higher up off the floor it was just a regular week. Got hands on as much as I could. Twisting up those branched trying to get them nice and string to support them buds. GWW graduated to 3/4 gallon of water/nutes per day now. She the last plant in this grow to show her hairs. She's keeping to what she's been all along so far. Small...but it's not the size of the plant, it's the size of the buds. So there is still plenty of time. Got my Method 7 camera filter on the last day of the week so I had to run in and take pics. Not the best pics as I'm still getting used to it, but I think it's going to beat the hell out of holding glasses up to my cell phone. 😆

My apologies for the log lay-off. The proverbial shit hit the fan in week 10 as I got a bug issue. Now, I'm fairly certain that it was fungus gnats and some other species of gnat that came in from outside and found it's way into the garden. That was obviously my priority instead of documentation. Sticky traps, peppermint spay around the room...I managed to get them under control to finish the grow without losing the crop. I had already done whatever damage was done to this plant before the bugs came. She was stunted and if I had it to do over again I probably would have culled her before sending to Flower. This Gorilla White Widow has the potential. I look forward to tangling with her again in the future. Unfortunately I feel that the entire grow overall was compromised which hurt my yield, taste and potency. 😕😔 My yield was so low that I barely bothered to trim.