April 20, 2024 Happy 420 Everyone! A new diary for a new contest by Seedsman! Sit back, because there's a lot to talk about today. Just like all of my grows, this run will have daily updates with pictures, a weekly video and as much detail as I can muster in the stats. Let's get started. First off, let's talk about the setup. I have 4 plants in my main tent that won't be done for a couple more weeks. So these ladies will be starting out in an AC Infinity Germination Center with their Germination grow lights, a heat mat and a small computer fan to keep the air fresh. The DLI will be around 12 mol/m²/d. They will be planted in root Riot Plugs until they show roots. Then in their final 3 gallon fabric containers. Then into the Mars Hydro 2x2 tent with the TS600 light. 100 watts of pure power. Haha. This should only be for a couple weeks. Just enough time for them to be well established. Then they will go into my AC Infinity 3x3 tent with the S33 grow light. 240 watts of power. I have 2 oscillating clip fans running a slight breeze at all times. I'm using a 4" exhaust fan with filter. I'll be using the AC Infinity bottom feed wick system. I've been using it for quite a while and I find it to extremely efficient. More about this later on in the grow. Let's talk about the strain. Sour Diesel Auto by Seedsman. This strain should be with us for the next 8 to 10 weeks. In my experience, add another week or two just Incase. We can expect a really good yield if I don't screw anything up. Up to 650/m². She has some environmental requirements. Heat is the main thing. Slightly humid for the veg stage and dry for the flowering stage. Being a sativa dominant strain, she will grow tall. I'll be implementing LST and light defoliation for this plant without a doubt. That's about it for now. I'll describe characteristics throughout the run. Finally to our actual ladies. I'm germinating 5 in a glass of water. I plan on keeping 4 total. That's all my tent can fit. So I'll do away with the 5th and work with the 4 best seedlings. They should sink overnight and start to open up. As soon as I see the tap roots, they go in the Root Riot Plugs. That's all for today. See you tomorrow. Oh, and thanks for reading. Wish me luck on this journey. It is a grow off after all. Lol April 21, 2024 4 of the 5 seeds have sunk to the bottom of the cup with my assistance. The 5th one I still floating. However, I don't see any tap roots, so another day or 2. I may pop the sunken seeds in the Root Riot Plugs tomorrow afternoon. The 5th seed may be the reject. If it doesn't pop in a couple days, I'm calling it a loss and working with the 4 other seeds as I originally planned. I could also go down to 3 plants, but I frankly would like the even number of 4. 1 per quadrant. We shall see. I wonder if I should do three 5 gallon plants or four 3 gallon plants. We shall see. The biggest obstacle will be the tight space I have to work with for the next 2 to 3 weeks while the plants already in there are done. I plan on dry trimming for a faster dry. Normally, I like to hang the whole plant. This time around will be wet trimmed and hung in parts. OR placed in my bud drying rack. That's large enough to hold all 4 plants' buds. I should also mention that these seeds are in constant darkness until they go into the plugs. Kind of obvious, but these diaries are not only for my records but set up as an educational piece of work. The environment is looking fine. The air temp is 82°, but the water is definitely no where near that warm. I did have to drop the exhaust fan down and increase the heat mat temp to get the water temp up to a proper temp. Germination Center Environment: I'll be keeping the temp around 82° and the humidity doesn't matter for now. When it matters, I fill the bottom of the Germination Center with water. It helps perfectly with the humidity for growing seedlings. It will also help regulate the temp to around 78° to 79°. April 22, 2024 All 5 ladies have sunk to the bottom of the cup. Now it's just a matter of time for the taproots come out. Somehow, the Germination Center was cold this morning. Like 68° cold. So I took the riser off the dome and cranked the heat mat to bring the heat and humidity up. That being said, the seed water is much cooler than I want. I like warm water for germination. Oh well. The heat mat should fix things in a matter of hours. Everything else looks good. Germination Center Environment: Currently it's at 77° and 94% humidity. It should level out to about 80° and the humidity should stay about the same. I also took the fan off the dome. I'll put it back on when they pop out of their plugs. April 23, 2024 All 5 seeds popped. They all have tiny taproots just starting to form. This is when I plant them in the plugs. They should take a couple days to break surface, but definitely germinated. Now it's just a matter of choosing the 4 best looking seedlings. They are now in the Root Riot Plugs with the temp at 77° and humidity at 95%. The dome is on without the extension for now. Once they show leaves, I'll install the extension and turn the light on. I'll be leaving the light on for 24 hrs. While in the Germination Center. Once out and established, I'll change it to the normal 18/6 light schedule. I was considering starting at 18/6 from the beginning, but I've tried that and feel like it wasn't as successful as 24 hours. Especially because these are autos. The kickstart of light makes total sense. We will see if my theory is correct. Germination Center Environment: Temp: 77.4° RH: 95.4% VPD: 0.15 kPa April 24, 2024 Nobody hopped surface yet today. I don't even see green in the plugs yet. I'm definitely not worried about it. I expect them to break surface in a couple of days. Maybe tomorrow or the day after. Honestly, I won't mind if they take a little bit longer and I can keep them in the Germination Center for a bit longer. It will work out best for my whole grow operation. Small as it is. I gave each seed plug a bit of filtered water today. Just to keep the moisture up. It shouldn't matter too much. The plugs are pre-moistened, so there shouldn't be any issues there. I'll be turning the lights on when I start to see green. They will be on 24 hours for the first week. Then into the main light at 18/6 for the rest of the grow. The environment is a bit bouncy while I work to get the system right. The heat mat is perfect a it's setting, but the fan needs to be messed with and the dome port needs to be adjusted as well. So far it's not too bad, but the temp keeps dropping below 75°. I'll keep a closer eye on it while I get it to acclimate to the proper total environment. Germination Center Environment: Temp: 80.4° RH: 94.7% VPD: 0.19 kPa April 25, 2024 Some ladies are starting to show green! Today we have 3 of the 5 ladies breaking surface with the shells. One of them is absolutely going to have helmet head. Or whatever it's called. I'll be needing to fix that. I'll wait til tomorrow to see how things go. The other 2 are still working their plugs. That being said, I reinstalled the dome extension and turned the lights on to 20% power. The DLI is around 10 mol/m²/d. I'll increase the light power in a day or 2 when the rest of the babies pop up. We should end up with the DLI of 12 mol/m²/d when we start seeing leaves. The environment hasn't been the best. Not my best start by far. I can't keep the temp at a good range. My night time temps are super low and then I get a decent day temp, but then it gets too hot. I'm going to have to figure out the heat mat I think. It's back to normal now, but was like 65° last night. Not good. With the light on now, the temp shouldn't be a problem. Germination Center Environment: Temp: 72.6° (too low) RH: 76.8% VPD: 0.64 kPa April 26, 2024 So far I have 4 ladies fully showing with the 5th lacking any movement. She mush not have actually popped. Or maybe a little late. I'll give it 2 more days and see what happens. Anyway, I think I already have my 4 plants now. They will be labeled A through D. Everything looks great for now. The environment is looking great at 80° and a humidity of 82%. I won't need to mist them at all at this rate. Maybe when they get into the nursery bags I'll need to mist. We shall see. I'll be leaving the light at 20% for another day or two. Then I'll increase the intensity to 12 mol/m²/d. It should start this run out swimmingly. One of the babies had a helmet, so I gently removed that this morning. Other than that, nothing else for the day. Germination Center Environment: Temp: 78.7° RH: 80.0% VPD: 0.69 kPa April 27, 2024 This is when I normally would start a new week, but these ladies are only in the very early seedling stage. Not on veg. Honestly, I would love for a seedling stage week. Now I'm kind of stuck until I see the first set of true leaves. Another few days no doubt. So it throws off my schedule. Oh well. I'll do my best to keep track. I have 1 seed that rooted, but never grew up. I'm calling it a loss for now. So 4 of 5 seeds made it out of the plugs. I also have a 4th one that is super wonky. I'll keep it for now. If it looks all messed up over the next few days, I'll have to toss that one as well and just work with 3 plants. Hopefully it won't come to that. The 3 seedlings that are looking good, look really good. Roots already starting to get exposed. They will be going in the 1/5 gallon nursery bags in a matter of days. Maybe even tomorrow. I don't like too much root to show before transplanting. So that may be a thing tomorrow. I'll increase the light intensity when they are transplanted. It makes the most sense based on the speed they grow. The environment is pretty good. Hovering at a temp of 80° and 87.4% humidity. I also gave them a small misting to keep the humidity up and the babies getting all the water they can get without overdoing it. Germination Center Environment: Temp: 81.2° RH: 88.9% VPD: 0.41 kPa

Day 55 - going into the 9th week..... trimmed em, stabilized the flowering solution.... lookin nice..... buds startin allll over... haha 👍😎

After one month late, two girls gave me nicebuds smelling diesel and strawberries.. Two other are still in flowering for 3weeks i think.. Colas are good size, the head buzz will blow you

Ripening started way faster than anticipated and I started flushing the other Critical at day 46 and she looks like she might be ready at the end of the week.. BUT I'm going to send her all the way to couchlock heaven so I'll probably chop her at the same as the other one which I reckon will be receiving at least one more full-dose nutrient blast and around two weeks of flush but lets see.. I want her to be close to fully finished but not too many ambers since the other one will be majorly overcooked. Didn't put too much effort on this timelapse since my PC is hiccuping pretty darn hard trying to process the camera RAW files to video if I put some effects on them.. wonder why since I got a pretty solid rig with 5950X and 128GB of DDR4-3866 RAM.. damn shitbucket can't handle somewhere around 1.5-2GBps bitrate video realtime😂

In this week wheatear was very bad. It rain a lot and plant suffer, It was attacked by mold in one of the apical buds. I remove it in the first stage of mold, I hope that spores was not spread on the rest of plant🌧️😥

Alright grow cycle, mistakes, improvements, etc... She did stay in veg for too long, her growth was slow and not the best and so she took quite long, next time i'll be there from the beginning so I can take care of her throughout. But her growth is really fun. It is a tall growing sativa with fairly tight noding when trained accordingly, producing long filled colas. The buds grow fairly dense and fluffly but do air out a little when dried. Trichome production was pretty impressive as well as terpene production. She had thrips since her early days but did not seem to mind them at all. I did spray them initially but once flower started I stopped. I believe predatory mites might have been feeding on the pupae in the soil, if that is what this specific species of thrips did, the reason I say that is I could never see adults only larvae. Whatever the case maybe they were there but the population never really increased. Something I did not mention during the grow is that those plants were played music during the days, music that is apparently developed for plants. The 10L pot was WAY too small for a true sustainable living organic and to provide enough space for the plant, that was a mistake, I'd say a 20L would be the bare minimum and still. The bigger the better. The hempy transfer did not hurt the plant and I believe even helped to some extent, BUT, I am still running test on the subject and so can't confirm anything, here are my observations Roots did not colonize the perlite, a little on top and the sides but that was it, I was expecting to see a big root mass in there. I believe hempy are great for salt fert as it hold a soup of nutes where the plant can feed from since the coco only holds very little Whereas in nature most nutrient are in the top soil where the highest amount of decomposition happens, this is where the highest microbial activity happens and so where the plant will find food. Living organic is trying to reproduce nature and so there is no need for the plant's roots to gather at the bottom of the pot. Although it could have potentially provided the plant access to a larger amount of water and possibly more oxygenation of the pot. Those are all theories, please speak up if you have other proofs. In conclusion , unless i get proven otherwise by someone or my latest running experiment , I will not be using hempies again as I believe it brings more complication and issues than a simple fabric pot. The lights, The 600w at the start was good, then I decided to add a 400w...😂 That was completely overkill and not necessary. Waste of electricity. And they started suffering from too much light it seems at some point, I raised the light by a good 30 cm and they were fine. 600 is more than enough. I am happy about how the soil performed but it has room for improvements. As for the watering technique I have been watering large ammount every few days, next time I will be giving constant small amount of water each day and a soak every week or so, I believe the soil might perform better under those conditions. She was also an easy plant to harvest whit her long colas which had very little foliage, I do trim in excess as I like my buds extra clean but the buds are not excessively bushy. The trims were use to make some bubble hash, around 100g of wet trims yielded around 1.5-2g of bubble hash. I did add a negative effect but only because it wouldn't give me a smile otherwise, but to be honnest it barely dries your mouth. The soil is going to be recycled and reused in a next grow. I can't think of anything else at the moment but if you have any question don't hesitate.

Do you have the Xs Factor? email [email protected] for open apprenticeship spots. Open to Canada and USA (no cost) MARS HYDRO LIGHTS: https://www.mars-hydro.com/mars-tsw-2000-led-full-spectrum-hydroponic-led-grow-light DISCOUNT CODE FOR LIGHT: BudXs CULTIVAR: BudXs2 GROWER: @PsGrowers ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Notes: @PsGrowers - How much longer???? Im sure this is what you are saying. Its been a long journey, and typically autos will finish sooner. But this is an XL version as you can tell by their monstrous size. You will have a lot of bud, however you will have a lot of larf due to the penetration shortcomings of LED vs HPS, tit for tat. This will be a pleasure of a smoke, and well worth the wait I promise. Continue your excellence through the grow, I really look forward to your harvest

Week 7 - The Bounce Back - The Plants Bounce Back Quite Nicely From Last Week’s Defoliation. You Can See Drastic Growth Day By Day Everytime The Lights Go Off And Comes Back On.

House got a little cooler so they been doing really well the tent gets at it hottest 80 to 84 degrees .. I’ve been feeding a little more since I don’t know if they need more but the looking outstanding . There’s no info on these two strains. I’m going to let the coco dry out alittle more but for half soil half coco there doing great. lol

Jungle is growing on top of my washing machine! On the last day of week 6 I lowered lights to 35cm from canopy, this week I’m going to monitor that number and adjust as necessary because the plant is still in stretching + bud setting phase. I’m feeding with high N+mag and I’ll continue until growth slows down, than I’ll switch to megacrop 2parts. I expect that to happen end of this week, 10 days max. Day 42 - changed the fan Day 44 - finally installed the blumat auto irrigation system. It wasn’t that easy since branches are really near the substrate but at least I had the carrot already placed so I was able to do it. High frequency fertigation on coco is a must, you can’t take advantage on coco great qualities watering 1 or 2 times a day. My system has 5 drippers placed in a Pac-Man shape, more or less. Day 45 - This is an important day since it marks the halfway point of this crop, based on my previous results. Coincidentally I’ve also spotted few small trichomes on a leaf, I guess the plant is now ready to build up mass and flavors. I did a minor defoliation to open up the inner canopy and to get rid of some plant’s nitrogen reserve. I prepared 20L of my bloom solution and mixed that with the veg solution in the reservoir. For a week I’m going to use this transitional feeding. Lots of sulfur, seems to be on a volcano 🤣 Day 46 - spotted a minor P deficiency. There is probably too much calcium in my solution that is antagonizing P absorption. I mixed another batch, this is the ppm breakdown N 100 P 100 K 280 Mg 85 Ca 150 Before I had P 40 and Ca ~190, my tap water has 80ppm of Ca that is already counted it. I’ll keep this value for a couple of weeks than I’ll lower everything except K. (Edit from the future - K is too high) Day 47 - plant looks happy and bigger, it drunk 3+ liters yesterday. There is no need for humidifier anymore so I’m getting rid of it. Temperature is 30-32C with 50-60% humidity. Day 48 - buds are swelling, some branches are already showing the spiral structure. Plant drunk 5 liters yesterday, impressive.

Thickening up nicely. I recently did a light defoliation to make sure nothing was blocking the light. Nice medium sized buds. Nicely frosted. She smells delicious. Like cookies & cream. 😏

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coming along nicely, this one did not like the low temps. I found 1 bud with some rot on it, cut that out. NO PWM thanks to the foliar sprays of Si. Buds did not grow much from last week to this one due to cold temps. This is an indoor strain here or its going to need to be crossed with something that likes the cooler fall temps.

Nights are getting chilly and colors are getting beautiful.

Pulled her a bit earlier than I would have liked, due to pest pressure

Well she is coming along great. Looks great, very healthy girl. Can't wait to start revealing what is behind the curtain so to speak. Good luck to all the other growers and DON'T FORGET TO UPLOAD A VIDEO EVERY WEEK!!

The stretch seems to be done, and the buds are fattening up

End of week 5 Nono start drybag Moments so i don’t get them to much water the next 2 days And Than Instant last 2 weeks of fertilzer before Fish in week 7-8 3-4 weeks left

I believe I couldve done better with this strain. I shouldve fed veg nutes earlier and payed attention to ph but i didnt have my ph pen until later in the grow. All in all though shes super frosty. Responds better to training rather than not. Takes about 4/5 weeks to veg and she couldve done 9/10 weeks of flower but i chopped at 8. Started trimming and drying on 4/3 and didnt finish until 4/7. But some of the early chop will be dry in the next couple days