1ère plantation extérieur 2020

O_GrowTom Hey everyone, I wanted to share my first outdoor grow from last summer. A hot summer like we often get to enjoy in the south of France, but it ended with wind, rain, and cold. To keep it simple, it was a mix of all the little surprises that nature can throw at us without being too extreme, and I know many of you don’t have the chance to benefit from such a favorable climate. Here we go!!! It all started with the idea of using our beautiful sun to reduce my electricity bill and boost the 9 plants I wanted to flower indoors. They’re starting to get to a pretty nice size, but since the heat isn’t here yet, I’m still waiting a bit while filling in the missing hours with a 125w CFL. Seeing that I don’t have much to keep my hands busy, I decide to prepare cuttings of Banner and Gelato since I had a mother plant of each variety. A little while later, a few cuttings take, they look ugly, but they’re alive. Like with the birth of an ugly baby, I decide to keep them and put them in the ground. We’re still talking about plants!!! The light times are on the impeccable growth. A good amount of time passes, and my motivation to take the 9 plants in and out every day when it’s nice starts to fade. Solution: they’ll stay outside, and we’ll see. Bad idea!!! 18L pots for outdoor flowering. Time goes by, one Gelato cutting is alive and 7 Banners, we’re talking about plants in the ground, the ugly babies need to be monitored. They still look grumpy, and my hopes are pinned on my 18L pots. Well, we decide that’s their name. Very quickly, I realize that the pots are going to be way too small and that the summer heat will likely be fatal. Damn, I should have made 2 pots of 70L, but transporting them would be a hassle if I have to hide them when mom and dad come over. Innocent me. LOL. To tell you the truth, they stayed in their pot, I messed up the nutrient cycle, and I think I was pretty lucky to recover a little something from each of them. Plus, they weren’t that bad, but a nightmare to manicure. The season has already started well, and the babies are slowly starting to give a bit of hope. I only feed them with leftover compost, but nothing too fantastic, my idea being to water them with mineral fertilizer. There were 2 waterings, and I realized I was wasting my fertilizer by ruining the soil for nothing. Really not practical next season, it’ll be super soil straight away. I quickly understood that when the sky decides to cry and you wanted to water with your fertilizer, well, go back to bed, it’s not possible. Moreover, what surprised me was the little watering I had to do, maybe 5 throughout the summer, and they never complained. That’s also why I prefer to enrich my soil beforehand because if they start drinking without asking my opinion, I won’t have a chance to feed them. To tell you the truth, it’s our beautiful old earth that did the job. Weeks go by, and I realize I might lose control of the height, so I do a trim here, a pinch there, tie up the branches, and it’s done. It sounds quick, but it becomes almost a temporary job, lol, with added pleasure. I kept playing with them as much as possible throughout their growth, which allowed me to get beautiful little bushes with a consistent height for each hedge, allowing the smaller plants to stay level and not be dominated. Then comes the intense heat, the holidays, and the surveillance helicopters—great when you live near a highway. Don’t overlook this point, especially when you’ve put way too much in the garden. Luckily, the rest of the vegetable garden helped to hide it. One beautiful afternoon, chilling in the garden with a good piece of magic cake in my belly, enjoying the garden, a helicopter flies overhead, but not the kind where you think, “It’s fine,” but the kind where you see the mark of its glasses, and the pressure hits you—a slight paranoia sets in, but I quickly calm down and think, “With all this laziness, it’s going to sting!” Damn it, 10 minutes later, big screeching brakes in front of my gate, and let me tell you, there’s only one. Guess who? THE POLICE!!! Oh yes!!! The two dogs sensing my panic rush to the gate with a not-so-friendly look, I hide the big Gelato pot, run around, and think, “Don’t mess it all up; if it’s for that, you’re dead.” Well, the adrenaline calms down a bit; I look discreetly, the dogs are still gone, and no one’s there. Ten minutes later, I go out; they had just put up a barrier because the road had collapsed 100m further. BREATHE TOM! Coincidence or warning, that very night I was building shelters with pallets. Cool in the fields, a little messed up all night, no one bothers you. After that pressure moment, everything went relatively well; an invasion of caterpillars made me buy Bacillus thuringiensis soon at the price of cocaine—I’m joking again, but 15 euros per gram versus 30 euros for 500 grams online, I felt the 60 euro sodomy coming, but no time, and I won’t see him again with his homemade bags, and one day maybe I’ll have my own grow shop, and we’ll see who you’ll come to. Enough with the hate, lol. Anyway, it worked super well; the little ones died very quickly, and the bigger ones stopped feeding. AH, a little technique that took me time but worked super well to clean the infected buds... THE COMPRESSOR!!! Barbaric but so effective, I blew each of the affected buds, branch by branch, a little piece of cloth to mark what’s been done, careful not to blow too hard, and I managed to save the vast majority of the flowers. I admit it was a rough moment of panic, but in the end, when I look at the number of branches, the loss wasn’t terrible. The 2021 season will be more preventive. I’ll share the cocktail I use for prevention and control for outdoor growing during germination week.