I forgot to take photos this week - and opted to snap some frames out of videos I took. Sorry for the low quality!
- Mango is finishing up quickly!
She looks very far ahead and noticeably halted bulking for a bit. Addicted to phosphor from the bottle, her soil network likely has ceased to supply it. That's what I found out this week and have been very, very busy to correct.
She is basically a hydro-plant in a complicated root zone environment now, where some nutrients are simply not available a few hours after watering. At the same time, watering stress (reduced uptake noticed too late) caused reduced O² availability, so fine roots were suffocating & dying as well.
I am getting exactly what I hate to see - purple leaf petioles, with strokes wandering down towards the stem.
Her (highly subjective) smell involves numerous nuances. From a laid-back but stingy mint note (my sensitivity), an overripe bright fruit-adjacent "entity", the typical not-quite herbal musk that a good hybrid carries, plus some spicy notes of caryophyllene carrying warm wood, oriental spice mixes and a slightly stingy finish reminiscent of a warm, mild chili pepper.
- Pineapple has SETTLED into her structure, focusing on bud development now instead of looking for more creative ways to touch the sun.
That also means it's very hard to find support for her colas, as training more is out of the question and her post-training stucture is quite terrible. She is pretty squeezed together due to light limitations - but other than that, seems to enjoy her time. That trichome coverage is exceptional, but what fills them is the most important part.
Notes of tropical fruits, now also "ripened" in character, give me a hard time to place her profile. Tangy notes have moved to the background, which I am a bit sad about, but in their place classical cannabis notes are starting to pop out, with that sliver of spicy caryophyllene as with Mango.
During flower, many strains smell unlike cannabis for a long time, until the plants fill up their trichomes with broader defensive cocktails. In my environment, gassing out of such terpenes is still invited more than retention, due to the air exchange.
So retaining more fleety terpenes = finding a way to cool & dry the space WITHOUT exchanging much air.
That move would increase existing CO² delivery (bed room meeting a schedule where plants are up at night) and also enable cost-efficient, direct CO² delivery as an installation option. This would now also cause or plants to breathe a lot better and use more of the light for actual photosynthesis instead of treating it like heat. That = bigger, happier plants, more diverse profiles and more total terpenes produced & retained.
- Cookies is doing Gorilla Cookies things.
Unwaivered by any complications, she lines out why "strong" genetics can be easier to grow than others. With the additional veg time acquired through a single HST event timed just about right, her flowers present like as if she was 6-7 weeks young. Within my setup she receives the most light which translates well into her large and fairly even frame, when plants sharing the other side of the tent struggle to find good positions. I know her to be very resistant to light-based problems, but am watching carefully how those top-leaves cup and behave. There is no point in growing large plants with blistering trichome coverage - containing largely sun-screen and no terps.
She is VERY mild in flavor so far, which is not a compliment towards her soil conditions & my daily nutrient mix.
I am actually worried about that, but time will answer more questions. Which reminds me of my confessions for the week ..
I'll leave it to my AI-reporter to outline the gritty details, this time attached as images (I am running out of text space), while I'll just leave quietly saying good bye & until next week :)
- Pete