Day 31 Update Christmas 2020
Merry Christmas everyone. Had a great day capped by checking on the plants to find that they’ve recovered from being underfed and are starting to look really good again. This morning the plant in the back left was ever so slightly showing me some clawing, but I’m going to continue with Jacks321 at 100%.
Happy with their recovery, I’m going to give them a few days of healthy conditions before removing the lowest leaves/eventually topping.
This is what I suspect went wrong… I was watering the plants with my tap water when they were in solo cups… the ppm of said tap water is about 280PPM
When I transplanted and gave them nutes for the first time, I switched to RO water AND conservatively fed 1/4 strength Jacks producing a ppm of 300 ish. If I’m understanding PPM correctly, there wouldn’t have been much difference between watering with tap and watering with RO water and 1/4 strength Jacks.
Went too conservative and would have likely been much better off watering at 1/2 strength. Flip side I suppose is that this temporarily slowed them down and I could have nuked the plants if I had a “hot” bag of Happy Frog.
Little lessons that add up to dramatic differences in a 20 week grow.
Plants look good, always easier to feed them up if needed than dealing with an over nuted situation which takes longer to recover from. I’ll take a little under fed over nute burn every time.
merry Christmas! lookin good in the tent
Day 34 Update 12/28
Plants just woke up and are a little droopy, but I think things continue to go well. After being underfed, I’m just letting the plants grow right now unbothered. At the time of my next watering, I’ll probably top them and remove a little lower growth! Hard to believe I’m half-way through veg already, time seemed to move in slow motion during my first grow.
@Hellraiser Regarding topping, did I read somewhere that you will remove the lower nodes and then leave 4 nodes higher on the stem??
Hard to explain, but let’s say X is chop and N is a node, so it would be:
X
N
N
N
N
NX
NX
NX
^chopping above 4 nodes, but also removing the lower nodes that won’t reach the screen?
Yup. Tambien.
Bienvenido
Yes, that’s what I’m doing with the current Zkittlez grow. My reason for it is to get the branches starting a little higher on the plant so the branches won’t have to grow so long.
I like it!
So, just grow 8 nodes, chop above the 8th and prune the bottom 4.
Or 7 nodes, prune bottom 3 and top above 7th node.
Yeah it’s hybrid of my bottoming technique I did on the Cherry Bubba Kush, where I removed the bottom 10 nodes and then let 6 nodes grow and then flowered. I liked that the branches started higher up on the plant and didn’t have to grow so long and less stuff to clean up on the lower parts of the branches, so trying a variation of that.
I like it very much in theory. Watering plants can be miserable when you have that lower growth and I mostly produced larf and nothing to write home about with those branches my last grow. You lose a couple of buds BUT hopefully strengthen the rest of the plant.
Need to make sure we have some strong stems.
We are going to call this my sophomore slump grow I think…
Day 43 Update 01/06/2021
So, it’s funny how one mistake become compounded in farming. You will remember I underfed my plants after transplant… ok, so then I fed them at 100% sooner than planned because they needed nutrients badly. Turns out the front two plants in the pictures below were a little less nutrient tolerant than the back two and started showing the dreaded “claw.”
Now, re-enter my oldest growing nemesis: WATER. Y’all remember how I was an over waterer (read: I’m user R0ck and I’m an over waterer). Well, my PTSD caused me to become an UNDER WATERER this grow if you can believe it… it’s also the soil… I used a water retentive ProMix last grow and this time around I’m using more cannabis appropriate Happy Frog so I’m having a heck of a time lol.
Finally, I haven’t been as dedicated and attentive this grow. I achieved burnout by the end of 2020 in almost every respect in life, and I wasn’t finding the joy in this grow. For example, I was feeding all 4 plants the same despite two of the plants showing me they didn’t need as much nutrients as the others (darker green leaves and claw). Ok, so stood there with my plants for like an hour a couple of nights ago like you idiot you need to get this fixed.
Here they were that night showing signs of being under watered:
Here they are last night after being watered and looking good again:
Finally, we got these girls topped this morning much later than I would have preferred to do so, but damnit I wanted them to be healthy before I did so:
^last pic they are a little droopy I suspect because it was a couple of hours before lights off. These plants seem to do that.
Amazing how they bounce back!
nice recovery, keep on keepin on!
Well, I’m starting to get the hang of this grow I think lol…
Day 46 update: 01/09
Plants looked good again tonight, so for me that meant it was time to start defoliating. I’ve been trying to get the plants right before doing so, and my underfeed, underwater, and eventual overfeed (of 2/4 plants) meant they just weren’t praying to the lights… tonight was the second night in a row where they seemed to be doing well, so I removed the biggest fan leaves.
Can’t believe the size of the fan leaves I removed. Multiple leaves the size of my hands, even more impressively they were healthy. Defoliation is a great time to inspect for bugs IMO, but everything looked great and I saw zero cause for concern. Jacks321 so far seems to be working really well, I just need to get dialed in.
Day 46 already means we are probably looking at a 10 week veg., but I’m expecting some explosive growth to start soon having started defoliation + getting closer to having the hang of Happy Frog + Jacks321.
Day 48 Update 01/11 (last night)
Things are looking up and I’m getting close to finding the groove with this grow.
The combination of defoliation + watering on time + dialing in the nutrients has resulted in happier plants and more rapid growth. The front 2 plants and back left plant all showed signs of being sensitive to 100% Jacks321, so I am feeding them at 50% strength. I started doing that with the front 2 two waterings ago, but I noticed the back left plant looked stunted and switched to 50% as well… it now looks the best it has looked in the last month…
Back right plant would have to be candidate #1 for cloning if I decide to clone this grow. She takes 100% nutrients with zero signs of issues and is noticeably much bigger than the other plants… now, that may not have been the case had I cut back nutrients on the other plants sooner, but I would assume a plant that knows how to handle her food is a desirable trait.
Currently, we are at 3 days between waterings. Growth was stunted, so I’m going to wait until that falls to 1 day between waterings before transplanting to their final home in either 5 or 7 gallon bags.
Girls looking excellent!
Boys, life took a cruel turn for me, but I’m back and my plants are doing really well at the end of their 3rd week in flowering.
I couldn’t take great care of them in veg., so I got way behind schedule and things were far from optimal, but I think we are going to see some massive fruits on at least two plants.
I’ll post pics soon.
