4th Grow - Royal Gorilla

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 4th strain selected for my personal 6pk Challenge. Purchased from Seedsman.com Breeder's stated Flower time is 60-65 days. This is the third and final Gorilla Glue strain I chose for the challenge. This little lady fit right into my chosen criteria for The Challenge. A stated 50/50 Sativa/Indica strain with potential for 27% THC. How do you not give this a try? 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. Can you see in the Day 20 "Mutant" pic that there is a third leaf growing out of the 2nd node? Cool & interesting. I can't wait to see what she does.

I've think that I've inadvertently decided to challenge myself even further with this plant. Due to the Royal Gorilla's mutant structure, I decided to try and keep the natural mutation and left it instead of chopping them off when I Topped this plant on Day 22. The mutation would have been the node to chop but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. ...and to make a long story short, by the end of the week I noticed that I FIMMed again. !@#$%$#@! But I hadn't gotten the growth from the mutant nodes that I wanted...so I decided to re-Top on Day 27. Not just take off what was still going. I went another level down. So now there is the mutant 4 stalk layer and then right up to the new Top. One side of the mutant level is obviously shorter than the other as 2 stalks were only being supported by the photosynthesis of 1 leaf...but I think that with patience and love Royal Gorilla will grow to be a beautiful plant. Day 26 also included stakes for LST.

Decided to add some Grow XL this week to try and help the girls recover from the trauma that was last week. Day 29 marked an "extreme training" day for The Queen's Royal Gorilla. You can really see it in the before & after pics. One side of the 4 branch mutation is still much shorter than the other so I decided to take some extreme measures. Trim away some of that under growth and stretch them branches out. I was a little worried over the course of the week that I might have thrown a little too much stress her way, but I think you can see by the pics on Day 34 she has really started to come around. 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 spotted a split in the Top so I employed the same strategy that I did with the Bubba Kush. I don't know if it happened when I was doing some LST or tucking leaves. It was just another reason to leave her alone this week. She didn't even get the trim that everyone else got.

Because of all the stress we had early on I'm still hesitant to do too much at one time to this little lady It was all LST & leaf tucking until Day 48...as you can see in the pictures. She hasn't produced a lot of foliage but the leaves she does produce get huge. This of course adds to my paranoia about trimming her but I've got to get the light through somehow, right? I'm not terribly worried, but she does look kind of funny all bare like that. Like little palm trees almost...or maybe I'm just high as f@ck right now! 😎😁 Almost forgot. Took height measurements this week. She's the 2nd smallest of the group coming measuring in at 12" even.

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. My oh my what a week can do for you. Last week this little beauty was only 12" tall. This week her 2 main tops are 14" and 17" respectively. You can see in the pics on Day 54 how I've had to start training the 2 tops down so the outside branches can have a chance to see some more of the light.

My how far this lady has come. At one point the smallest plant. Struggling with a mutation, but we've made it. Week 7. Flower Time <Hammer Dance> Yea, I'm dating myself but IDGAF! 😆😆😆 After a 1 gallon cleanse and 32 hrs of darkness I rewarded my Royal Gorilla here with 1 gallon of nutrient rich water on Day 1 of Flower. On Day 4 I did a little large leaf maintenance. On Day 7 I took some measurements. The 2 main tops measure up @ 20" & 17" respectively, with the rest of the canopy hanging around the 16" mark.

Let me just apologize up front for the pics this week. I tried something different, and I won't be trying it again. Y'know, with all the trouble my baby RG had starting out I've pretty much tried to let he do her own thing. Adding a gentle hand when needed. A pulling of a shading leaf here, a little bend in a certain direction there. Nothing really to write home about. On Day 13 of Flower, towards the end of the week, I put in a couple of strategically placed stakes to spread out the branched for light penetration and I also turned the plant to try and light up some underdeveloped spots. I'm facing shading issues from another plant in the space. I also had to raise my light to it's highest point, but that should put the RG at just a little outside the recommended 36"...maybe around the 40" mark.

Just a regular week. R.G. jumped up to .75 gal of water/nutes per day. Sorry for the pic quality again this week. I struggled a bit with my new Method 7 filter that came on the last day of the week. So the scramble to take the pics themselves didn't help. Still infinitely better than holding a green clip-on lens over 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. I think that Royal Gorilla has the potential and I look forward to tangling with her again in the future.