4th Grow - Gorilla Girl

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 strain actually replaced the 3rd strain I had originally chose to grow for my personal 6pk Challenge. I received this strain 'sort of' through this wonderful site that we all share. I received a chat message from Sweet Seeds looking for diary submissions to qualify to test some seeds from them. I submitted and was selected. One of the strains I chose was Gorilla Girl. Breeder's stated Flower time is 63 days. I really wanted my 6 pk Challenge to be all different strains, by all different breeders, but wanted to keep all the plants withing a reasonable harvest time of each other and try to keep a nice balance between Indicas & Sativas. The Sweet Seeds seeds arrived just in time to help me round my challenge out as Gorilla Girl replaced my tried and true "control group", Critical Kush, that I have grown in all my previous grows to this point. A shout-out to Sweet Seeds for the love. I hope I do you proud. 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.

This little lady seems to be robust! Topped her on Day 22. Threw some stakes in on Day 26, and gave her a trim on Day 27. I felt that some of those big leaves were starting to get in the way of air flow and light penetration.

Decided to add some Grow XL this week to try and help the girls recover from the trauma that was last week. The structure on this plant is coming along nicely. Gonna have a nice number of main colas I think. Can't wait! 😃 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. My G.G. here grew so luscious that she needed a trim on Day 38 and another on Day 40 Hopefully some of that lower secondary growth I left will be able to support some bud...or worse case I snip them and try my first attempt at cloning. 😁😎

The plan was to take it easy this week. Don't want to stress the girls out in the last couple weeks before the flip. Plenty of LST/leaf tucking during the week but on Day 48 it was time for a trim. Took my first height measurement this week so I can track "the stretch". 16" Not too bad. We'll see what another week adds on.

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. Gorilla Girl here added another 2" during Week 6 to make it to 18".

A nice and simple week for my Gorilla Girl here. After her long sleep she was greeted on Day 1 of Flower with 1 full gallon of some nutrient rich water. I have marked down on the calendar that on Day 4 I did some large leaf maintenance. I took some measurements at the end of the week on Day 7. This lady here has developed 3 nice tops. They all measure up @ 26", 23", & 23" respectively, with the rest of the canopy hanging around the 22" mark. There were a couple of smaller branches in the back that I will have to move the plants around to get to and clean up.

I had to raise my light to as high as it would go at the beginning of the week because of this robust beauty and a couple of other plants that I am growing...and that still only brings her back to the preferred/recommended 36" distance...which I don't think is going to last for very long. There are 4 main tops measuring in @ 34", 33", 33", & 31" Ooooohhh getting excited! HaHaHaHaHaHaHa My G Grl here was pretty much on her own this week. I stopped by daily for feeding of course. She got a little trim of under growth on Day 10 of Flower with a follow up at the end of the week on Day 14.

An uneventful week. My G.Grl started taking 3/4 gallon of nutes per day. Other than that, she's tall, she's strong, and she growin' buds. Not much more you can ask for in this like, right? Sorry again for the lack of quality pics. My new Method 7 filter was delivered on the last day of the week so I had to scramble a little to take the pics. I expect that they'll get better with experience. Thanks for stoppin' by. 'till next time. -Good Growin'

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. 2nd largest plant, 2nd largest yield. Can't really complain y'know what I mean? Not the high that I was looking for but I certainly ain't gonna know her for it