The buds are starting to bulk up and so is the smell!
It's been less rain this week but the hot summer days are here and humidity is getting uncomfortable and thick. It's around this time of the year I get nervous about powdery mildew and bud rot.
I've found some buds affected by rot but just cutting and removing the affected parts. But - no powdery mildew at all, which is awesome because I would normally start seeing that. Something I've done seems to have worked, but I'll comment on this at harvest...
Had another snake visit this week, a brown house snake. Harmless - but it did get a few bites into my thumb before chilling out and seeming to enjoy basking in the sun on my warm hand (you never really know what he was thinking though, he is a snake after all).
My daughter wanted to name him "Handsome", but I wanted "Thnake" - so we settled on "Handsome Thnake", before releasing him.
Cheers buddy!π
(apologies for sharing a lot of the writeup each week with other diaries of mine, but they have very similar info and it makes these updates a bit easier!)
Thanks for writing so much and I love this style; doing some autos in organic pots myself trying to make them no till. Have you had any success or attempted to cut down cover crop then cover with hay to get a surge of N in the soil?
@Complicate, hey :) I wouldn't really be able to call this no till because I remove the medium after each grow, remove major root mass and mix all the soil together before amending for the next grow. At that point (between seasons) I've tried planting clover, hairy vetch and alfalfa which I let grow, then let decompose into the soil. I like having a diverse plant based source of nutrients slowly breaking down in the soil over time, even though I will feed with much more readily available nutes during the grow. It's the same reason I add some rock phosphate between grows - like a backup insurance policy. I think true no till would need 100L or more of soil to be truly left undisturbed and also accommodate good worm colonies. As far as I've read up, this is difficult to achieve in smaller grow bags. My reasoning for the hay in this grow is purely just a cheap way to prevent the soil from drying up too quickly on our insanely hot days (while adding some organic matter back into the soil slowly over time)
@Shooey, thanks bro - I've since harvested and dried and the one plant came out okay but the one is a leafy larfy mess which will probably be turned into hash or crumble since there's nice trichomes amongst all that leaf. But yes, I think I have conquered powdery mildew to some extent this grow, but the rot was another beast all together...
Beautiful plant, beautiful Bush snake.. Being from London i would have emptied my bowles and ran screaming like a small child if that crawled out of my plant ππ
Good luck for the rest of the grow..
@Theia, haha thanks π. I've grown up with these snakes being common visitors and used to keep them as pets when I was young. My wife on the other hand still screams as if we're under siege ππππ