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We planted these seeds directly in to the 5 gallon Smart Pots of Fox Farm Happy Frog. They are now 1 week from breaking the surface. We have been actively trying to hone in our environment and have struggled to maintain higher humidity while keeping temperatures below 79/80 degrees. We eventually found a balance of about 55% (which I know is a bit low) and 75 degrees by increasing the ventilation to 30%. Had a couple seeds that had shell issues, likely due to not planting the seeds deep enough (we tried for about 3/8"). The largest plant lost its shell under the soil and has been growing rapidly. Very exciting to watch leaves come out of nowhere!
The plants really took off this last week, but we started to notice some other issues. The plants looked a little dark in color after the watering/CalMag, and some of the new growth looks a little droopy. Hoping they bounce back in the next couple days and the CalMag fixes any issues.
The CalMag definitely helped. No new growth is showing signs of deficiencies. Last night we hit them with a low dose of nutrients and more CalMag and they looked amazing this afternoon! Already seeing some pistols popping on all 4 plants, so I think we have 4 females! Going to up the nutrients next watering.
This week we doubled the amount of nutrients we were feeding the plants (1 ml of each nutrient in 1.5 l of dechlorinated water per plant). We fed them once and they absolutely loved it, so we waited about 3 days and fed them again. After the last feeding, I noticed some slight tip-burn, so we'll probably hit them with just water or cut the nutes in half for the next watering. A couple of the plants are really starting to fill up up with flowers already, whereas a couple others appear to still be vegging out. I feel we did a great job training 3 of the 4 plants, but one of them (the fastest growing plant of the 4 in the first 2 weeks) has remained tight in the main stem as we weren't able to bend it over when we started LST. We're trying to spread it out now. I do feel like we didn't give the plants a chance to stretch up (we were re-training them almost every day) which kept the plants very close to the ground from the get-go. This left a few leaves still touching the soil, so we let them kind of stretch up for a few days. They look awesome now! Wondering if/when we should put the scrog net on. Thanks for reading, and any tips are appreciated!
A few days late here. We both got a little sick and haven't been able to update. But we've pretty much just been sitting back and watching up flower at this point. Seems as though they've stopped stretching and are starting to fill in with bud. There's one plant that might be a different pheno? It's way behind on flowering compared to the other plants and is lighter green, and way bushier (bottom right plant in the main tent photo). The others are starting to get frosty and smell amazing. One plant (the bag left) seems very droopy most of the time, almost like it's under-watered? We gave it an extra liter of water last night and it seems a bit happier.
Should we remove these large yellow crusty leaves near the soil? The plants are at about day 38. I've heard people say you shouldn't defoliate this early in flower. Should I be concerned about these leaves dying off or is this normal?
To me, these look like older leaves that are not receiving enough direct light. You should remove them once they have gone yellow, for if you leave them, this could invite fungal/mould to form. My advice is to remove any yellow leaf and never remove any healthy green leaves, for it is these healthy green leaves that are producing the energy required by your plant to grow. When the leaves go yellow for whatever reason, stored vital elements in the leaves will be "recycled" by the plant to be used for new growth. Premature removal of healthy leaves robs the plant of these stored elements (carbs, sugars, amino acids etc), meaning the plant will have to "re-manufacture" the previously store elements anew, denying energy away from growth/flower production. Defoliation to increase energy going to flowers is the biggest MYTH in the cannabis cultivation world. Removing healthy leaves, lowers available energy production and can lead to smaller flowers for the reasons stated earlier. Energy in a plant can not be "channelled", all energy is used in all areas of growth equally. Cannabis has been evolving for Millenia, it has not evolved to dropping healthy leaves when flowering. In fact, more leaves equals bigger and healthier flowers due to maximum energy production (photosynthesis). Reducing a plants ability to photosynthesize by removing leaves, starves the plant of energy, resulting in smaller and weaker plants. It does no harm to leave the leaves, most of the light will pass through to the lower leaves anyhow. There is no way the small leaves that grow within the flowers can produce enough energy for optimum growth, as compared to just one large and healthy "fan" leaf; the energy makers for the plant. Hope this helps... Organoman.
Well, I think we prematurely cut out the Nitrogen, because you can see the two taller plants have some leaves and are very very light green in color overall. We're going to give them some Micro tonight and hopefully that fixes that and the long-term side effects won't be detrimental. Other than that, the two super short plants have sticky frosty buds, the 2nd tallest has some thick hairy nugs, and the tallest one seems to be lagging. The buds are probably 25%-40% the size of the other plants. Not sure what's up with that, but we're going to let it go longer if we have to. We were really nervous about defoliating anything, but we defoliated the one that seemed the most stunted and it seems fine. Anyone have defoliation tips for autoflowers? Some say don't do it at all, some say not in flower, some defoliate the crap out of them.
We also made the sad discovery that our light wasn't plugged in to the timer. It was the exhaust fan. So every night, the exhaust fan would shut off, the humidity would sky rocket, and the plants never saw darkness. 24 hours of light. Stupid rookie mistake. It's fixed now, but I felt like an idiot.
Starting a new grow tonight as well! We have two 7 gallon pots of Happy Frog mixed with 20% perlite, pre-soaked. Going to see if we can have two plants as seedlings and two as mid-late flowerers. Could be interesting! Anyone have any advice on perpetual harvests in one tent?
3 of the 4 plants have really packed on the bud, and the pistils are about 50% red/brown. The one very tall light green plant still seems behind on flowering; about 90% white pistils still. The trichomes on the 3 are mostly cloudy, with one here and there showing some amber. We are at about 54 days since the seeds were planted, and 50 days since sprouting. MSNL and others have said these plants should go 75-80 days, so we're going to keep her going and watch them pack on weight! We have noticed some Calcium deficiencies started reaching late-stage. I don't think we fed them enough CalMag from the get-go, but we upped the dosage to 2 ml/liter, which is what the bottle actually recommends. Getting anxious. I think we are going to start flushing the 3 plants next week!
Does this bottom left plant need more nitrogen? The last two waterings we've given it 1.5 ml/liter of Micro. Should we give it more? The other 3 plants of the same strain are much smaller, much darker green, and further ahead in flower. These Blue Dream autos are 51 days old.
From every seed, you get a different plant, if you want them all to looks the same you need to take clones.
She probably has just stopped intaking nitrogen, the greener one may still be intaking it but will eventually stop aswell.
The reason why the smaller ones are still greener is because they are smaller thus requiring less nitrogen, the bigger ones need more of it so they show the sings of lacking N more quickly. I wouldnt supplement with nitrogen at this point excluding the nitrogen in the bloom nutes, they usually have less nitrogen amounts specifically due to this, and that little ammount is enough for the plant, if she doesnt want to uptake it, then dont force her. :)
Stay lit growmie. Best of luck.
We started flushing a few days ago. We're starting to see some amber in the trichomes, and most of the pistils are brown. Some of the plants are showing major signs of calcium deficiency, and it's creeping in to the buds. It really doesn't seem like the buds are getting much bigger. We're thinking we'll harvest next weekend, which would make for 2 weeks of flushing.
She's a week plus out imo from what I can tell. A 3 week flush won't hurt a darn thing. They look nice just let them trichomes all cloudy up. Look for around 20% amber for a harvest window. 🤘😤
It's an auto flower, so doesn't always play by the same rules as a photo period. Go by your Trichomes for harvest in either case.
For your question, a couple extra weeks of flushing won't hurt, IMO. My current grow has been flushing for about 5 weeks.
Been flushing for about 9 days now. The leaves are starting to die and fall off, leaving the buds behind. Probably going to harvest on Sunday! That would make 73 days since seed. Seeing some amber trichomes in spots. Pretty excited. Home stretch on our first grow. We have grown weed!
Well, we cut em down. We were going to let the biggest plant go another week or so, but decided against it. We ended up skipping a watering session for the other three plants so they dried out a lot. Not sure if that's good or bad? We'll see how differently the dry plants trim compared to the wet ones, but the dry ones seem a little crispy to me. A few more days of drying and we're going to start trimming. Overall, I would consider this grow a success for our 1st time. The main thing I think we would do differently is to add perlite to the soil, and to take it easy on the LST. I think we started it a little too early and went a little too hard. We may have stressed them a bit, because a couple of the plants got a little stunted. Will report back in a few days with a full weigh-in!
This was a such an awesome grow experience; the grow, the help from the Grow Diaries community, and the end result. We're super stoked, and we learned a ton. We definitely needed to start feeding Cal-Mag earlier, but it didn't end up being a huge deal in the end. We also may have over-dried the flower a bit, as the humidity in some of the jars is as low as 54%. Hopefully it won't effect the taste of the product. Excited for the next grow! Thanks GD fam, and shout-out to MSNL for the dope genetics!
Inigo_Chrontoya
