4th Grow - Bubba Kush

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. The 5th strain chosen for my personal 6pk Challenge. This strain came to me as part of a promotion from Seedsman.com Breeder's stated Flower time is 60-65 days. 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 22 was the day to Top, and I took off the 2 lowest nodes instead of the traditional 1 node. I felt that the 2nd node I removed wasn't going to be much in the long term so I just removed it now so the energy can be directed elsewhere. Stakes for LST were added on Day 25, and on Day 27 it was time for a trim of some of those big leaves.

Decided to add some Grow XL this week to try and help the girls recover from the trauma that was last week... ...and it look like it was a good idea too. It was a rough, rough week for Bubba Kush. On Day 30 we were doing a little LST and I guess the "S" wasn't so "L". I snapped a lower branch clean off. 🙀 Soul crushing 😔...but it gets worse. I split the stem at the Top. 💩😔 WTF am I gonna do?!? This bi'otch is growin' like a mutha'! I don't want to lose her. I've got no wrap. Don't want to use any kind of tape. Super glue?...No! I decided on some wire wrap as you can see in the pics on Day 34. The idea is that hopefully it will keep the split closed enough that she can repair herself, and if not...that's what stakes are for...but she's looking pretty good through the end of the week here so I'm hopeful. 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. A trim on Day 38 and another on Day 40 were mandatory as you can see from the pics. Another flourishing beauty. I can't wait to start seeing buds on all of these beauties in a few weeks time. She's recovering nicely from the spit. Still growing like a weed...pun intended. 😏

What a journey this lady and I have been on. Just a few weeks ago I was worrying if I was going to lose her after (or at least a couple of Top Colas) after splitting the stem during some not so LST...and now she's the 3rd largest at 15" and a pretty even canopy aside from the 2 larger tops. She's done so well on her own I've been trying to apply a very light hand. She got a light trimming, more like thinning out even on Day 48. I'm just gonna let he do her thing. She's like the moody middle child. I don't f@cks with her, she don't f@cks with me. She'll do her thing, I'll do mine, and we'll meet up and at the end of this thing we'll both be happier for it. 😎

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. BK added 4" in these final days before Flower jumping up to 19"

Another beast of a plant I've got here. Day 1 of Flower, after 32 hrs of darkness and a 1 gallon flush, saw my baby Bubba Kush here get a full 1 gallon of nutrient rich water. On my calendar here I've got marked down that i did some large leaf maintenance on Day 4. Day 7 was measurement day...and my baby Bubba here has developed 3 main tops. 25", 23" & 22" with the rest of the canopy hovering around the 20" mark. I'm such the proud poppa. 😜

Another beast of a plant here. Bubba Kush got a cleaning of under growth on Flower Day 9 and another shape up at the end of the week on Day 14. BK's 2 main tops measure in @ 36" & 24" with the rest of the canopy fluctuating btwn 21" - 27". My baby BK here was also the first to show her hairs this week on Day 11 of flower. My apologies for some of the pics this week. I tried something different that i will not be trying again.

This plant right here has to be the plant that I'm most excited about, yield wise, right now. If her buds continue to grow at this rate, I suspect she'll be my largest harvest. Do you see the sugar on those leaves already? YUM! Enough drooling for now 😉😄 A breeze of a week. She started taking 3/4 of a gallon of water/nutes per day and I just let her do her thing and stay the hell out of the way. Apologies again for the quality of pics this week. I'm still re-learning how to shoot with my camera and it seems there may be a bit of a learning curve with this Method 7 filter I got at the end of the week. Hopefully I'll get back on track next week. Thanks for checking out my diary. 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. Stick traps, peppermint spay around the room...I managed to get them under control to finish the grow without losing the crop. ...the rest is in the Strain Review...