4th Grow - Strawberry Lemonade

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 6th and final strain chosen for my personal 6pk Challenge. I received this strain as a free gift from Barney's Farm after they contacted me through the Grow Diaries chat and asked if I would share my pictures with them. Thankfully I I saw the chat and responded in time to take them up on the offer. Breeder's stated Flower time is 60-70 days. In reality, this was actually the very first strain I chose to be in The Challenge. I received 3 strains from Barney's as a gift, and this was the only strain that I hadn't grown yet. It didn't fit into my last grow due to it's slightly longer flower period than the others I was growing. You can't harvest and hang to dry in the same space you still have a plant growing, so this strain had to wait. Having removed the tent from my grow equation and being able to have it as a separate place to dry now, frees me up to grow any plant as long as it needs to be grown. I felt that I absolutely had to get this strain into this grow. Shout-out to Barney's Farm for reaching out to a n00b grower and showing some love! I expect this strain to be just as good as the previous strains that I've grown...and that's been pretty damn good so far. Thanks again! 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 that I thought I Topped this one...but I was so sadly mistaken a few days later when that main branch started growing again. When I Topped, or thought I Topped, I took off the 2 lowest nodes because they were too low, getting wet all the time when I watered, and in the long term would have never caught up to the tops and would have just been cut off later on...so why waste the energy. Cut them now and let the energy go into growing what is staying, right? Well, that's my hope anyway. Since I took off 2 nodes, I've decided to let the FIM grow out instead of fixing the Top. We'll see how that goes for the short term anyway. Stakes for some LST were added on Day 27.

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 leaf trimming on Day 29 followed up with a big training session on Day 31. I really wanted to open her up and get some light inside and some air flow...and from the looks of the pics towards the end of the week, the stress was worth it. You can also see where my missed topping has started to fill in and get bigger. I was a little worried that I should have re-topped but that fear seems to have passed. 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 really easy week with this lady. She got a nice trim close to the end of the week on Day 40. She had a little slow of a start but I'm starting to expect big things.

Yes. Surprisingly so my sweet little Strawberry Lemonade has measured in as the shortest of my 6 ladies at just 11.75" Even shorter that the Royal Gorilla I'm also growing with the mutation that I've managed to keep. She measured up @ 12". My my little Strawberry Lemonade here has some great structure and she's also got the most even canopy of all the plants. No worries she's got another week before the light flip and then there will be the stretch so there's time. The leaves are getting so big I had to cut this b'iach twice while still trying to save some. Tough work (boo hoo 😆) but oooooh so worth it at the end of it all. hahaha

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. Once the smallest of the group Strawberry Lemonade grew an extraordinary amount this week. Adding 8.25" during the week to go from 11.75" all the way up to 20".

...and since I do my best to write these in order I get to say this now...and last, but not least my sweet (and possibly sour) Strawberry Lemonade. If you've ready the other 5 diaries you know what's up already. A 1 gallon of water flush and 32 hrs of darkness later we are here on Day 1 of Flower. My girl here received 1 full gallon of nutrient rich water to start the week. The calendar marked Day 4 says that I did some large leaf maintenance. Day 7 was time to take measurements..and...it appears that I pulled yet another bone-head maneuver. I have the measurements of my 2 main tops. 18" & 20"...but I don't have a measurement for the rest of the canopy. Knowing the plant I'm gonna take an educated guess and put it around 16", give or take. Hopefully I'll get it right next week...or buds will have started to show and it won't really matter anymore. 😎 Till next time...Peace

As with all of my plants from Barney's Farm so far...there's not much to do. I gave her a little under growth cleaning on Flower Day 9, and that was it for the week aside from a little LST & plenty of TLC. Her main top measures up @ 28" and the rest of the canopy is about an inch or 2 below that. My apologies for the quality of the pics this week. I tried something different and failed miserably. I won't be trying it again.

Really nothin' goin' on this week. S.L. graduated to 3/4 of a gallon of water/nutes per day. Other than that just a hands-on love with some LST to try and get them branches stronger. Buds are starting to show and if they get any serious weight, this plant is in some serious trouble if I don't support her. Let me apologize again for the quality of pics this week. I just received my Method 7 lens filter at the last minute, coupled with still re-learning how to use my camera, and well...let's hope they come out better next week. Thanks for comin' by and checkin' 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. I was happily surprised by the turnout of this lady. She gave me about 1 ounce more than I was expecting but more importantly, she really tasted great. Which was really good because it made up for it lack of potency...which I believe was due to the "issues" I had. My wife and I are generally not sativa people but I would consider growing this one again just for the taste.