(✿◠‿◠) Organic Red Hot Cookies

***ALL SUGGESTIONS FOR TRAINING, GROWING, ETC ARE VERY WELCOME IN COMMENTS. THANKS! ✌️ *** Week 3 Day 15 (28/08/2020): Girls are doing great today and I forgot to mention this in last week’s diary but at around day 13-14 both of them started smelling when I open the tent and when I get close to them. It really is a great smell! I did however notice that the bottom new leaves of girl #1 have some kind of defect or burn or insect bite on them. No clue what it is though, I checked below the leaves and did not notice any insects but sometimes fruit flies get in the tent because of the bright light when we open it, maybe it's them? Will keep an eye on this. Day 16 (29/08/2020): So we were planning to do training on them today but after watching some videos we decided to wait another day or two because if we do it too early they might take longer to recover so it’s better to wait a few days in my opinion. We did decide on the training techniques for all of the girls though. On the first day we will be topping + low stress training + defoliating the lowest two pairs of fan leaves. After they grow a bit bigger into week 4 we will do Screen of Green and will defoliate throughout the grow (but in small batches of 20% of the foliage). I think that should be some good techniques to practice as we have only done LST previously. Can’t wait! Day 17 (30/08/2020): I check the soil and in these pots the soil gets quite dry by the edges of the pot but the centre is still very very wet which is a bit confusing to me but I usually wait until the part in the midway between centre and edge is dry 2cm deep. Today it was still not dry enough for me to water. This is what I’m a bit confused about is whether to water it more because it is getting more dry around the edges or is that going to be overwatering them? I will definitely water them tomorrow though. Day 18 (31/08/2020): Today is a big day and we have done the first parts of training! We topped (or maybe more like fimmed?) both of the girls as they both have 5 nodes and I think are strong enough to recover from the stress. Hopefully we didn’t fuck it up but we will see how they react in the next few days. We also wanted to low stress train the tops to give light to the bottom bud sites but we decided that it might be too much stress for one day so we will see how they feel tomorrow and if they are doing fine then we will LST them as well! I also watered the girls with 1.5L of water and still 1ml of BioGrow and the water does come out of the holes because the soil gets quite dry there and it’s a bit messy. Day 19 (01/09/2020): The girls were doing great today and I don’t think the topping stunted their growth at all, it feels like they didn’t even notice 😄 So we decided to LST train them today, for girl #1 we just tied the main stem and will let the bud sites grow and then tie them down. For girl #2 we tied down the top and also some of the stems with bud sites (and one of the big fan leaves) so make space and light. When they grow bigger we will be putting a net to do ScrOG as well. I love how far apart all the stems are growing, it’s going to be so easy to train them! Day 20 (02/09/2020): So today I’ve noticed a very bad thing, there are flies in our tent. At first I saw one or two every few days and thought that they were fruit flies coming in because there was an opening in the tent for air to come in. We tried to kill the ones we saw in the tent but today I noticed that there are more and I have seen them on the soil 😞 This could mean that they are not actually fruit flies but gnats, I tried to look at a dead one but I couldn’t really tell. Well whatever they are, we are going to buy some need oil to spray on the leaves and soils so hopefully it should arrive on the weekend. Really unfortunate but I haven’t seen any effects yet on the plants and hopefully the neem oil can kill them before they can do any damage. Day 21 (03/09/2020): Saw some more flies today crawling on the leaves and tried to kill as many as I could. Other than that the girls are doing really well and I have not seen any stunts in their growth. Opening the lower leaves definitely helped in letting them grow bigger and they are looking very strong and healthy. The progress since the end of last week has been crazy! They haven’t been phased by the topping (or more like FIMming for girl #1) and they are going to keep growing bigger and I think we can start on defoliation and ScrOG next week! 😄