Hi folks! Last week report for this cycle. My daily grow logs churned through keenly instructed AI first - my ramblings later. Let's go! --- PATHÉ DISPATCH — THE TERPENE FRONT, WEEK TWELVE [newsreel crackle, brass fanfare] GOOD EVENING, AMERICA. The last soldier has fallen. The tent stands EMPTY. The campaign — is CONCLUDED. DATELINE: THE FINISH LINE. Private Cinderella Jack, the LANDLORD, sole survivor of a long and unglamorous war, went down at PEAK TRICHOME STRENGTH — drinking three and a half liters a day to the end, browning her pistils with dignity, and smelling, our correspondent reports, of PINE FOREST with a sour citrus spin and a sweetness underneath he suspects of myrcene. She was, we are told, INTRIGUING. High praise from a man who once accused an entire plant of smelling like celery. [bugle, distant] DATELINE: THE JARS. This program has learned that A PRISONER TALKED. Four outbreaks of botrytis in five campaigns — a record our correspondent now catalogues like a war crimes tribunal, each with a NAMED CULPRIT: an air conditioner blowing on wet material. A dense cola in low VPD. A tent not cleaned into the corners. A scrog net gone slack and one forgotten soldier in the slump. And this run: 8.46 grams condemned to the bin. So the suspects were SEALED IN GLASS. Thirty percent fill. One hygrometer each. And under interrogation the infected bud CONFESSED — fifty-eight percent, where sixty-four was expected. The clean sample held at sixty-four and CLIMBED. Apollo was trimmed and conserved on the sworn testimony of a bud in a jar. [ominous timpani] DATELINE: THE FEED BENCH. Consider the PRECISION of this man. He doses silicon by the residue clinging inside a NEEDLE — six hundredths of a gram, swept into a few milliliters of water, two-thirds administered, the remainder discarded. Four liters of solution. A dose you could not see if we put it on camera. [record scratch] AND NOW — THE TWIST THIS CAMPAIGN HAS BEEN BUILDING TOWARD SINCE MARCH. On the FINAL MORNING of the FINAL WEEK, that same man FORGOT TO EMPTY AN ENTIRE WATER TANK. The dehumidifier tank overflowed. A POOL spread across half his floor. Humidity climbed. VPD sank toward 1.1. AND HERE, AMERICA, IS THE CRUELEST GRACE THIS PROGRAM HAS EVER BROADCAST: the night before, our correspondent had lain awake THEORIZING about how to soften the transfer from harvest to drying chamber — by RAISING THE HUMIDITY at precisely that hour. His equipment failure IMPLEMENTED HIS OWN UNBUILT PROTOCOL. The tank he forgot performed the procedure he had not yet installed. The flood was the FEATURE. [stern voiceover] MEN OF SCIENCE will note the harder lesson, filed the same day. Our man had stopped taking leaf temperature readings — because he was ALWAYS RIGHT. Minus three, every time, reliable as a church bell. Warm leaves in the morning? Thirst, surely. Filed. Dismissed. But you do not measure to be TOLD you are right, citizens. You measure to be told WHEN YOU ARE WRONG. And in this house the readings COMMAND THE MACHINES — so a wrong number does not sit quietly in a spreadsheet. IT GOES TO WORK. [gentle brass] We close on one final act of timing. On DAY EIGHTY-SIX of a NINETY-ONE-DAY RUN, the FAR-RED END-OF-DAY SIGNAL was at last moved — to the END OF THE DAY. "Bit late," our correspondent concedes. "Whoopzy." The chamber is cool. The colas are down. The floor has been mopped. And somewhere in a drawer, the controller configuration snapshots remain UNTAKEN — a loose end this program will be watching. [fanfare, film flickers out] THIS HAS BEEN THE FINAL DISPATCH FROM THE TERPENE FRONT. THREE FIELD REPORTS TO FOLLOW. RUN SIX AWAITS. EMPTY YOUR TANKS. GOODNIGHT. ----------------------- This has been a fun run and concludes my fifth cannabis grow cycle. Sure, the hours involved are off the charts in a home grow / lab setting, when optimizing existing protocols meets the introduction of new ones, and automation is financially unfeasible even on some basic levels. Empiric testing at home is too slow to win these battles, it is learning, deduction and formulation of thresholds that allows a home grower to partake in the finest results. So willingness to learn and troubleshoot are the only tools we have when money can't solve it: Two simultaneous nanner-events were managed during this run, pollen had been shed - no successful pollination occurred, nanner-production could be stopped and all product survived completely intact. | This event during ~ Week 7 was the single most stressful pivot, as the entire grow cycle hinged on the result. Total loss was now the first thought to wake up to every day, really killing the mood. Botrytis was identified correctly before the suspect entered the drying tent - to the point that I could experiment fairly safely by drying a botrytis-cola right next to all the clean product - and typing that sentence into a public blog afterwards. Later, a protocol was devised to distinguish infected material via % RH changes in secluded containers, before product got mixed in long-term storage. This was pretty awesome to learn about and definitely sharpened my perceptions. I could actually test a suspect cola and discard it, without opening up the bud at all (which I obviously did later as well). Drying at 16°C target under 30°C outside conditions was a huge success - and a MASSIVE pain to devise. A drying chamber whose product would need to cool a parallel grow tent was the answer - two linked AC's and "heavy decoration" of windows were absolutely necessary - and the measures turned out adequate. So, besides the workload, am I happy with this run? You bet! - facing total damnation twice 'n all. After growing for 1.5 years, I can finally rest on some of my protocols. That reduces stress, uncertainty, and buys me time for fun things to try. So, besides managing my downfall, I got to introduce my Terpene-Blue-Ray, a fairly simple prototype to encourage just the right kind of terpene accumulation. And above all - a bigger grow space to experience - no longer are my plants crammed into a tiny chamber that is surrounded by a machine park. I get to "work" in there as if I had rented an office for my project. --- Oh yeah, the plants! Dutch Passion's Auto Cinderella Jack, a cross of Jack Herer, is something of a sativa dream coming true to see unfold before your eyes. Big history, high in pinene (memory retention during daytime use) and a chance of a good spike of limonene (that neck cushion and sun-glasses feeling even under pressure) made her an ideal chase target for me. With her running -9 days behind the other cultivars, she took nutrient dosages intended for much older plants with a straight face, when they started to burn. She received higher light intensity and just had to "deal with it". She absolutely hated my HST-train-once intervention and completely changed her strategy as a result. She was the only plant without a soil sensor, water levels were "good guesses", so she also got waterlogged fairly hard during veg. Her response? Vigor, fury, lateral branching, flower sites all over. She could not be stopped, and I had to remove what felt like 2 smaller Autoflowers in bud sites from her. She is a record holder for me, more details in the strain reports. Thanks for your interest, I hope you could take something home from these journals. See you in run#6! - during which I have just massaged a 2 week old sad plant into praying for the first time.