4th Grow - Thai Fantasy

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 2nd strain I chose to grow for my personal 6pk Challenge. The seeds came to me as a free gift/promo/bonus buy for a purchase I made from Seedsman.com Breeder's stated Flower time is 58-63 Days. When I saw this strain offered to me I got pretty excited as the name immediately brought back to the "good 'ol days" smokin' on some Chocolate Thai with my boys. That was some good stuff back then. A real distinctive taste and smell It's been a long time since then, and I know that this isn't the same sh!t we got back then, but if it tastes anything at all like that back in the day "Chocolates" I'll be a happy guy. 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.

Day 21 - Disaster Strikes! 😵😲 My fucking portable AC fell on top of the Thai! Yes. You read that correctly. A fucking portable air conditioner vibrated itself off the table that it was on and fell on top of my beautiful (not so little) Thai Fantasy...but she did not die! She was a little shaken up. She lost 2 large leaves on lower nodes, but she is no worse for wear. Thankfully, it seems that the pot took most of the impact, which is why I'm not also telling you all that I had to go out and buy a new portable AC unit for the grow room...or that I lost the entire grow because freon spewed out all over the place. Praise be to Cannabis. 🙏 Needless to say, the AC is more firmly secured to the table that is is on...and after the incident the day before I decided not to Top Thai Fantasy on Day 22 when I Topped everyone else. I waited until later in the week on Day 26 when I added stakes for for some further LST. Sorry, no pics of the actual disaster. I was more concerned about saving the Thai and the AC, which meant the rest of the plants too.

Decided to add some Grow XL this week to try and help the girls recover from the trauma that was last week. Did a little trimming on Day 29 to try and get more light in the middle. Her structure is great, but I'm not seeing the secondary lower branch grown that I'm seeing in the other plants this grow. She's by far the tallest plant this grow but she's also very "stringy" if you get my meaning. Lots of stretch between nodes compared to the others. 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. I've updated to "distance to light" since this tall drink of water is so much taller than the other plants. She's probably closer to 30" from the light by my guess-timate...and I had to re-arrange the plant locations as well because she was causing shade for others in her original spot. Other than that it was a fairly straight forward week. Didn't need to spend too much time in the garden. Gave her a trim 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 42, the beginning of Week 5, and ...apparently I did another trim on Day 48 that I didn't mark on my calendar. Did some daily leaf tucking throughout the week. This b'iotch just don't quit. She's double my smallest plant, coming in at an even 24". Short of super cropping I don't know what I'm gonna do if she gets stupid big during the flower stretch.

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. I've got two measurements this week because the two main Tops are of slightly differing heights. One is 29" and the other is 33". Hopefully her buds get a big as her branches. But not too big...she's got some spindly little branches and I'm already thinking that I'll probably have to provide some support later down the line. You can see in the pics on Day 54 how much I've been trying to train/bend her down. She's significantly closer to the light than everyone else right now. Maybe only 20" away. I've raised the light a bit to try and induce some of the other plants to stretch a bit and that has helped some, but I am going to run out of ceiling space eventually. Hopefully since the light is low for her she won't have a big stretch for Flower.

Oh F**K me! Despite my best intentions I seem determined to beat the cr@p out of this plant! First I drop a portable air conditioner on her (Week 2). ...and now I'm breaking all my tops off. WTF is wrong with me?!?! I broke one a week or two ago. I didn't mention it because it was very high up and I really only lost a couple of inches. But this time, ugh, I almost snapped off the largest top, and pretty far down too. With this plant being so large I was really working the LST to get this monstrosity bent over...but I guess I just didn't feel where I was grabbing and when i applied the slightest amount of pressure I heard and felt her snap. Such a soul crushing sound...so I hope you can forgive the lack of picture. I was more concerned about trying to save the branch. All I had at hand was some Velcro and a plant name stake. My make-shift splint seems to have worked because a few days later the branch hadn't withered and died so I removed the bandage to take a look...and it does look bad...but I think she'll pull through. Once the emergency passed I fed this giant beast 1 full gallon of nutrient rich water to soak in after her 32 hrs of darkness and previous 1 gallon cleanse. Day 4 saw me do some large leaf maintenance. Measurements taken at the end of Flower Week 1 saw this giantess measure up around 36" and higher for her largest branches...I'd still like to see her branches take on some girth tho.

I don't even know what to say. I don't even know what to do. This plant is out of control. On the one top I haven't super-cropped she measured up at 48". The 2 I super-cropped were bigger than that one. It took me 3 days this week to clear out her under growth (Days 8-10). On Day 11 of Flower I added some bamboo poles and some ties to try and keep the Thai from falling all over the other plants in the space...and Day 13 saw the final trim for this behemoth. I tried to keep her to .5 gallon of water per day this week but I had to go .75 more often than not...and Day 14 saw her take up a whole gallon because I thought she was a little light. I think she might just need to stay @ 1 gal now anyway because SHE'S FUCKING HUGE! I had to raise my light as high as it will go and it's still terribly too close. I hope it doesn't become too hurtful to the plant's production either.

"Fantasy" indeed. Every day when I walk into the garden I am amazed at this plant. I see all of the fantastic bud sites and I think and I hope for the best. I've had to super crop just about every single branch that there is. Even secondary ones at this point. She's so tall she's shading one side of herself. There's nothing left to super crop without hurting my yield, if I haven't done that already. I fully expect to have to add support as the grow continues. She held at 1 gallon of water/nutes per day. Tried put put fingers to branched as much as I could to get those branches nice and strong. Other than that just I just let her grow and tried not to get too much in the way. Got my new Method 7 camera filter on the last day of the week. I hope you think the pics are better than last week. It certainly felt better that holding a green clip-on lens to my phone camera,

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. This was by far the largest plant on the grow. Physically she was out of control and I had to super-crop many times over to even keep her under the light. Looking back now (5 months) I'm still somewhat impressed that I got what I got out of this plant, but I feel that still should have gotten more. The bugs hurt more than I thought.