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My first indoor grow! Been doing a ton of research and I'm super stoked.
My buddy and I have been watching a kabillion videos, and like a lot of people we're pretty big fans of Mr. Canuck. So we're both utilizing a lot of his techniques, with some individual tweaks ofc. I'm planning on growing all Veganic, and as such the amendments I'll be using are a bit different than the Gaia Green that he tends to use. Aside from that though, I'm going to be doing this batch using his coco plus dry amendments and perlite blend. The other half will be using the potting blend that I have been mixing up for most of my life for use in general gardening, featuring a huge amount of screened homemade compost and sphagnum peat moss instead of coco. (Yes, I am aware of the reasons people say coco is superior, especially sustainability, but they were selling 2.5 cu ft BALES of it for $1.97 on clearance so... yeah, doing that.)
I have planted 2 seeds each of 4 different strains:
1) Juicy Fruit
2) Raskals OG Kush
3) Purple Headband
4) Orange Daiquiri
All are photoperiod seeds; I believe they pretty much all came from plants that hermed to some degree. Unknown if they are feminized, however so far all of the other seeds obtained in this manner have been female, and have grown very well.
The Juicy Fruit as well as the Raskals OG were already grown over the summer outdoors, using an earlier batch of the same potting blend described here. All plants have done very well, and have been 100% healthy the entire time.
🌳 Sept 15 - Seeds in Soil
Today I mixed up a batch of custom potting mix, using about 45% homemade compost, 45% sphagnum peat moss, and 10% or less of humus and manure.
The compost was made from my organic gardening efforts throughout this summer plus composting all my food scraps. Every kind of vegetable imaginable plus lots of yard waste, grass clippings, and other good stuff. The pile cooked all summer, stirring it up a couple times. I screened the entire pile and made a huge pile of nice light compost that smells great.
To this I added the peat moss and humus/manure, and then stirred the pile up well, ultimately screening it all one more time for maximum siftage before packing up 3 big tubs of it to take inside.
I tested the pH of the soil with my Apera pH meter. I tested distilled water at 6.5, and tap water at 7.6. After blending with the soil, both glasses of mud read 6.5; when used as a dilutant the pH of water has negligible effect on the pH of the solution being diluted. So the compost blend mix itself is a perfect 6.5 pH.
I filled regular seed starting trays with this mixture, and then placed one seed in each compartment, lightly pressing it into the soil and covering with a minimal amount of dirt. I watered using a spray bottle just enough to wet the top of the soil, as the mixture already had a decent amount of moisture to begin with.
Covered the tray and placed it on my seed starting shelves on a Vivosun 3" x 20" heat mat, under a CXhome LED light strip; I'm excited to find out how it performs.
As of now the plan is for the seedlings to stay here on this shelf for the next 1-2 weeks depending on how they grow. I'm currently planning on vegging these new plants in a closet somewhere for the next few weeks. The indoor grow tent is almost set up, but I'm planning on using it to dry the outdoor crop, which should be harvesting in a little over 2 weeks!
I fucking love growing Marijuana! It's honestly probably as much fun as smoking it... maybe more? We'll see!
🌳 9/18 - Day 1 - All emerging already! Dang that was fast.
🌳 9/19 - All helmets off. I checked the light levels and thought I had 5000 lux. Apparently that was not enough. But looking at the pics they're literally already too tall. They needed more light (and perhaps no cover? Probably just light though?) right from the start.
🌳 9/21 - Already 3-4 inches tall! No bueno! Won't make this mistake again. Josh did tell me it wasn't enough light, and he was definitely right.
🌳 9/22- I put them in the tent under the Spider Farmer to try to stop the stretch, but it was already too late. It was also way too dry in the tent, and I unsuccessfully tried a lot of things to raise the humidity.
🌳 9/23 - After much debate and research, I decided to try a delicate procedure. I transplanted the tiny seedlings, and buried the stem, covering 2 or more inches of growth on each one in an effort to make them "shorter" and sturdier. This was a pretty nerve-wracking thing, but I figured if I was gonna fuck these up, I might as well do it early on in the game. Stated differently, I wanted these to have as many advantages and desirable characteristics as possible, and starting off tall and leggy is not one of them for me. Fingers crossed!
I did, however, figure out how to solve my low humidity issue. I had read people suggesting to put other mature plants in the tent with the seedlings, and that has really done the trick! Plus it looks nice in there now too.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Vivosun 3" x 20" Heat Mat:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B073PTZCJ4/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
CXhome LED Light Strip:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B086R14MFW/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Apera Instruments AI209 pH Tester:
https://smile.amazon.com/Apera-Instruments-AI209-Waterproof-Accuracy/dp/B01ENFOHN8
🌳9/25 - Looks like I'm out of the woods on the transplants, whew! Glad I did that, the seedlings seem to be thriving, and I can see the beginnings of the first real leaf set forming.
Happy with humidity levels
Week 3. Little seedlings are starting to push out true leaves. PH1 has ended up really runty... which was fine because Kirby ate it. She's really got a taste for leaves, and especially young shoots. She has definitely eaten my seedlings before, and it seems that she goes for the small ones; she's started developing a habit of thinning the herd for me and she often eats the weakest one so, thanks I guess?
🌳 Week 4: I discovered that I've been underwatering, or at least recently. I try to err on the side of not overwatering, but I guess I took it too far. After doing a test with soaking the pot, the seedlings showed clear signs that they liked it, so that's what I did, and they all perked right up.
🌳 Week 5: They're looking great and I'm getting the watering dialed in. They're taking about a half cup each, every few days when they start to dry out. They're looking a lot stronger and healthier now, and I think I'll be topping them soon.
🌳 Week 6: Getting bigger, and starting to make some branches.
I was also gifted a couple of clones - a Poontang and a good old Gorilla Glue #4. I hit them with a little Great White (mycorrhizae+), and welcomed them to the family. They were just a little bit behind the seedlings in size, but caught up pretty quickly.
🌳 Week 7: Transplant time!
Pretty excited to mix up soil and get these babies into their forever homes. We're going into nine 2.5 gallon, 10 inch standard pots.
Soil mix:
This is a custom blend of
• compost I made myself
• sphagnum peat moss
• coco coir
• worm castings
• and perlite.
It's about 50% coco, 25% compost, and 25% sphagnum.
Dry Nutrient Amendments:
• Down to Earth Vegan Blend
• Bat Guano
• Mycorrhizae pack
• Rootblaster (trace metals)
I gave them all a small amount of pH 6.5 water and they were good to go!
🌳 Week 8: Time to start training! At this point the plants have all recovered from topping, and have a couple strong tops going.
I'm using supercropping on a consistent basis to bend and shape the branches to spread them out and down, and open up the canopy. If I get a little too aggressive I fix it with some plant tape; at no point in the future of this run did I ever actually break and kill a branch. I encourage everyone to supercrop as much as possible. There is of course a tradeoff of time lost, but the returns you get in terms of branch strength and thickness are amazing. Thicker branches = thicker straw = more nutrient uptake and transmission.
I will also basically top/FIM indiscriminately in order to create more tops, as well as level off the branches, to create that desirable flat canopy.
🌳 Week 9: Training continues. Lots of supercropping, and more topping; my goal is to slow down the tops enough to allow the side and bottom branches to come up to their level. The canopy is filling out nicely and these girls are exploding in growth!
🌳 Week 10 and training is in full swing. I am very aggressively shaping and manipulating these plants, and they are responding very well. Main trunks are thicker than a pencil, and we've got many strong secondary branches that are making their way to the top.
It's time for some defoliation! I took the plants all out of the tent for the first time since flipping them, and worked on each individually, thinning the tops and removing lower growth. My main principle with defoliation is to remove all leaves that are growing towards the inside of the plant, and all leaves that are blocking light to lower bud sites. If a leaf isn't bothering anything, I try to leave it alone. As you can see, the plants start to take on a wreath-like appearance from above, allowing light to penetrate all the way to the bottom bud sites.
I also did some intentional pruning, and cut my first-ever set of clones! I think the underside of the plants is looking great, and they are filling the tent out nicely without being too dense.
🌳 Week 11: Training has come to fruition! Each plant has at least 4-6 strong top sites now, and they are all nice and level. The canopy is as filled out as we want it to get, so it's time to flip these babies! So stoked.
🌳 Week 12: We have liftoff!
All 9 of these beautiful girls are pumping out preflowers, and the plants are super happy. I continue to aggressively defoliate, and it is truly mindblowing how many leaves I am pulling off these plants almost every day. It is clearly not bothering them whatsoever, and they're really opening up.
I installed an elastic scrog this week to try to flatten the canopy out a little more as they started to stretch. I only ended up leaving it in the tent for a couple weeks but it did its job.
🌳 Week 13: Well, they're happy... almost too happy! The canopies are filling up again and getting incredibly dense down below.
Especially with the squatter, Indica-leaning strains, I'm honestly getting concerned that they might be too dense, and cause mold issues. We do not want that!
So, they all came out of the tent again and got their most aggressive cleanup yet. I took more bottom branches off and made more clones, and then also just cut out some other smaller branches, particularly ones that were growing back inward or in some cases even crossing over others.
The differences between the indicas and sativas are starting to become more apparent as the plants stretch, and some of the sativas are almost 16" tall. I actually ended up topping a couple of the very tallest branches before they stretched any further, again in an effort to keep the top of the canopy as level as possible.
I'm also experimenting with using some wire rings as inserts to spread out the top of the canopy, and pretty pleased with the initial results.
SquarePeg
