| Welcome back to Pete's run#6! The cultivars have been coping AND thriving throughout week 3. A little bit of both really, but all in all they are looking very promising. My medium mix is hard to prime correctly, I dumped several liters into each pot and they just seem to evaporate at this rate. -- Mango: She is patient #1. Watering is tricky, as you can see with the droopy-ish leaves. Soil sensor readings have been all over for her. Root zone oxygen issues already caused some wrinkling leaves on all cultivars, her deformations are a bit more intense. Colors resumed well, plasticity looks also fairly decent, given high Far Red ratios. Her height development stunted visibly on the chart, making it crystal clear she is enduring something akin to a bar fight deep down in the root zone. Revenge of the seedling nests? Cookies: Cookies has picked up and challenged Mango in height - which is a clear vital sign to me. She has been receiving a lot of light, PPFD clocked in at 280, when 240 was planned. This likely caused a minor setback in her height development, just as she took rank #2 from Mango. Some leaf deformations, as noted above, remind me that this plant is doing really well all in all. Pineapple: Pineapple took the week 3 tent leadership. With scars, yes, just like Cookies and Mango, but her root zone must have expanded past the seedling nests first. Off she goes in height, ridiculing my light setup at the same rate. Her vigor is causing me serious light mapping headaches - and those are problems I much prefer to root asphyxia. --- That's the short report from me. As per usual - A friendly AI spied on my personal daily logs and confronted me with a slightly different conclusion for the week: PATHÉ DISPATCH — THE TERPENE FRONT, WEEK THREE [newsreel crackle, brass fanfare] GOOD EVENING, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. A promise has been KEPT. After fourteen days beneath the midnight sun, Base Camp Six has received its first NIGHT. It lasted, we are pleased to report, almost until the HEATER came on. Temperatures sank to twenty-two degrees. The humidity COLLAPSED. And so our correspondent called upon an old companion, the Dehumidifier. He wanted it not for removing water, but because it gives off WARMTH: a machine hired for its SIDE EFFECTS. Our man calls this arrangement, and we quote, “Perfect.” [ominous timpani] FROM POLAR NIGHT TO SUNBURN. Last week the specimens starved for light. This week our correspondent, determined never to repeat that error, adjusted the lamps... in the DARK. While the camp slept. By “ballpark.” The specimens woke to a sun of THREE HUNDRED micromoles where two-forty had been planned. Gorilla Cookies, camped directly beneath three light bars, took the worst of it, her top leaves marbled and BLEACHED and folding into tacos for shade. Asked to account for himself, our correspondent produced a height chart and announced that the numbers “check out fairly well.” The Royal Society is REVIEWING the claim. [record scratch] BUT NOW, THE GREAT MYSTERY OF THE VANISHING WATER. Litre after litre went into the pots. No run-off. Not a DROP. “I have no clue where the water is going,” our man wrote in his field journal, and so he did what any explorer lost in the desert would do. He poured in MORE: three litres extra, then two and a half, then three more, “for safety.” The pots were wet from BELOW. The sensors barely moved. Still he poured. Then, on Day Twenty-One, came RUN-OFF. And Pineapple OG herself revealed the truth, her great leaves curling up into CLAWS: The water had not been vanishing. It had been STAYING. ALL OF IT. The entire time. The desert, it turns out, was a SWAMP. The mystery of where the water was going had a simple answer: NOWHERE. And the roots below, starved not of water but of AIR, had been quietly holding their breath. [stern voiceover] “Revenge of the seedling nests?” our man asks. This program cannot rule it out. [timpani, softer] STANDINGS FROM THE FIELD. Pineapple OG has seized the lead, scars and all. Her roots were the first to break out of the nests, and she now grows so vigorously that she RIDICULES the lighting plan. Our correspondent reports these are headaches he much PREFERS. Gorilla Cookies, sunburnt but undaunted, has overtaken Mango for second place. And Mango Frost, patient number one, droops and wrinkles through what our man describes as a BAR FIGHT deep in the root zone. Yet her colours hold, still lime-grass green. And a new instrument at base camp: the expedition now calculates the lamp’s distance to the canopy AUTOMATICALLY, from each specimen’s height. Soil distance, minus plant, equals altitude. Calculated, this time, with the lights ON. [fanfare, film flickers out] THIS HAS BEEN A DISPATCH FROM THE TERPENE FRONT. WAIT FOR THE RUN-OFF. GOODNIGHT.