Weed 4 JennyB

Week one saw a few rookie mistakes as this is my first attempt at growing anything. Firstly I didn't realise the effect humidity was going to have on my little sprouts. I built a 50L TD/DWC Hydroponics set up using household items and some aquarium parts from local pet shop. Stuffed it all inside a wooden 6 foot tall cabinet that I light proofed and painted flat white on the inside. I created my own light wing reflector using some ducting and some bathroom fans for heat exhaust, and stuffed a 600w dimmable HID lamp in it. Well... I guess it wasn't going to be so simple. Growth nearly halted because I didn't use any plastic wrap as a humidity dome and cold dry winter air meant my nighttime temps were dropping too low. Not much growth happened and I was disappointed in my hydro set up thinking maybe I was making a mistake being rather ambitious for my first run.

Well this week was awesome! I solved a problem and made another even worse one. Realizing that my nighttime temperatures were dropping too low and my humidity would drop to 20% seemingly no matter what I did, I decided to be super smart and add an aquarium tank heater to my hydroponics reservoir. The thought being that a warm tank of water would act as a temperature as well as humidity buffer. It worked great! Overnight temps rose to 18C or so and humidity rose to 40% and stayed. Initial growth was super fast, and then stalled out. Ph had risen to 6.5 and I had knocked it down but now it was up to 8!!! Even after recalibrating my ph pen. The aquarium tank heater actually gave off visible light and my tank tho only a week old was completely brown slime. Ughh.

Ok well I googled a ton and decided on bleach as the solution to my solution problems. I drained my tank using the pump from my TDWC setup and filled it completely back up with clean water which I added a bleach solution to. After about an hour I ph'd my water and added my nutes. Fresh Start! Hooray! Immediately the plant starts looking improved and new growth appears!!!! And then stops.... I forgot to put the lid on correctly for about 2 days. Back to step one and another week lost due to brown slimy goo. I suck. On the plus side I'm learning. Also I added the aquarium tank heater to a 5gal bucket which I placed inside the grow chamber, with a mop head hanging inside it makes a great humidifier. Nighttime temps and humidity rose to optimal and also seemed to help regulate the daytime temperatures as well!

Alright. So, this week I did not almost kill my plants. Temps, nutes, humidity, everything went well and finally my babies started going. Root development kicked in this week especially. I couldn't find net pots and got lazy so what you see in my pictures are regular plastic pots with many holes drilled in them... well they suck and i think I created a root bind issue that eventually worked itself out. Also I topped them and it worked basically instantly! Things are happening finally!!! Positive things I mean.

Super exciting news this week as the Scrog screen went in and the plant continued to grow. I myself did not mess up anything nor will I admit what I did to screw up the seedling process, yknow... the part of the diary that I completely skipped. Suffice to say that the 'Green House Seed Co.' sold some hearty seeds :P

This week I installed a C02 generator. It's made of a high tech combination of a bottle of vinegar and some baking soda. Does it work? Who knows, it looks hella cool! In other news I am starting to panic. I have no idea what Im doing and this is no longer 'just a science experiment'. I'm invested and I want to do the best I can. Research into flowering lighting schedules etc intensifies. Google servers are able to cope. This week I weave and use zip ties to create horizontal growth instead of vertical. Do not use zip ties! I didn't realise how fat my stems would swell,

Continuing my trend of just winging it I decide this is the week to start migrating my light schedule, and to switch from Metal Halide lamp to igh pressure sodium. I have no idea if this was the right time or what. I made the decision based on reading that I should switch lighting once scrog screen looked about 75% full. I manually changed the timer so that the plants lost one hour per day of light. Tank was completely drained and bleached for prevention of algae and also to refresh tank with new nutrients in a new ratio. Also I opened my box in the morning and was almost knocked over by the humidity. Up till this point I am running heat extraction only when the light is on. With warming temperatures and humidity outside as well as an ever growing leafy canopy AND with my 5 gal humidifier, my nighttime humidity is at 95% So the extraction fan is switched to run 24/7, the humidifier tank is removed, and I remove all foliage below the scrog screen, now nighttime temps drop a bit low but overall humidity and temperatures are remaining nominal without any interference from me. Looking back I would probably choose to use 2 5 gal buckets instead of the 50l rubbermade tote that I am using. Changing the res is kinda a pain but on the plus side the girls are beginning to drink about 10 litres a day! I'm starting to chew through the nutrients but at least having 50l in my res means I can feed every 2 days and the ph doesn't swing so fast. Unfortunately from now on the the pictures are taken with yellow HPS light ...eww. I didn't know:(

Wow... growth explosion. This thing is growing to beat heck. I can't believe how much its drinking. The canopy is so dense i lost my Thermometer! Like ... it was hard to find and harder to recover. I am suspecting that I might be doing something wrong again not sure. Did I start flowering too soon? I see pistils ( i think) but not much else... i guess its too soon maybe? After growing this monster I really hope not to mess up now.

Researched endlessly and could not find a definitive answer so as usual I went HAM and made a huge decision in line with my 'winging it' philosophy. The plant was so bushy I just figured so much bud sites would be in shade so I looked online and read to trim every dang fan leaf. So I did. Controversy? IDK. Plants didn't die, what they did was regrow every fan leaf over night and spring up a few more inches... intended... maybe? Things look ok at this point but now I'm not so sure about pruning so heavily. If its just going to regrow every fan leaf that I trim then doesn't that mean the plant is growing leaves not buds? Aahhh. After scouting around this website for grows similar to my own I have solved the mystery of what I did wrong. I now realise I probably should have switched my lighting weeks sooner. Now the beast is growing at a phenomenal rate and I haven't even started to see bud sites. What I took for bud sites was just pistils I guess. Now I'm not sure what to do.

This week started off with a bit of disappointment as I had been hoping to see more bud production after the last pruning. What ended up happening was that the plant bushed out so fast again that I decided to prune it again. Now I realise why people say to stop pruning in week 3 of flower. THIS time when I pruned the plant on the left hand was beginning to show definite flowers, and this time after pruning it down I could tell immediately the next day that the plant hadn't tried to bush back out again... it is now putting its energy into bud production!! Hurray! But ... the plant on the right hasn't really started flowering after 4 weeks of 12/12. Finally it occurred to me that the plant on the right didn't just look like it was lagging behind in maturity, it was starting to look a bit wilty. Further investigation has lead to the discovery that the air stone underneath the right hand root ball had a kinked air line. I figure it has been this way since the last time I changed the reservoir, which was a full 7 days ago. There is enough other air stones in the reservoir that the plant didn't die, just couldn't thrive. I swear 1 hour after repairing the air line, the plant looks visibly sturdier! I expect buds on the right hand plant by tomorrow. I have more head space in the grow chamber so I have moved the lamp up another 4 inches. The temperatures at the top of the canopy were a bit too hot. At this point I can let them stretch another 10 inches or so maximum, tho I feel the stretch is probably over and shouldnt have to raise the lamp again.

Well this week saw no major problems. The right hand plant is still lagging behind by quite a lot. Perhaps it was slowed down enough that now the left hand plant is choking it out. Fact is that both plants share a reservoir so other than light pruning to keep it getting some light I cant do much. Regardless it is growing flowers, harvest day might end up being 2 harvest days though. In other news I've added Big Bud and Bud Factor X by advanced nutrients and I'm totally hoping to see these buds continue to plump up. x fingers. Well...my right hand plant still not doing so hot and here we are at the end of another week. These plants have always responded so quickly to damage and seemed to thrive no matter what, until now. Today looking in the top of the right plant is showing signs of heat stress despite being slightly shorter than the left hand plant. All other things being equal I can only surmise that the problem is to do with the roots perhaps being restricted in some fashion. And I'm not super sure what I could do about it anyways. But it was looking wispier and wispier. So I figure that the left hand plant is doing so well I could technically stand to lose the entire right hand plant and not really sweat it. Therefore I decided to remove any and all growth from the plant that either did not look 100% healthy or did not seem like it had a chance of receiving direct sunlight. I worked from the bottom and traced every branch up, if it didn't reach the top of the canopy it got snipped. This is probably the type of lollipopping I should have done 4 or 5 weeks ago. Maybe the plant recovers, maybe it doesn't. x-fingers.

This week I changed very little, my sick right hand plant responded extremely well to the lollipopping, maybe too well. Now I have been going every few days to remove the topmost fan leaves in an effort to halt the upward growth. I had planned on using a late stage ripener but now I realise the error of my ways in not having a separate reservoir for each plant. Oh well looks like I will have to harvest the lefft hand plant and then use the ripener on the slower developing plant.