So this is it. After five and a half months of work today is the day I cut my first plant ever. To be honest it's been hard to take it's life after all of the joy it gave me and seeing it grow from seed, I didn't expect the feeling of harvesting would be like this. But let's get on with the details.
This journey started on Nov 1st 2018. The seed was germinated on a 10L textile pot with Biobizz's Light Mix. It was placed on my backyard, which recieved about 3 hours/day of direct sunlight which I know it's not ideal, and I topped the plant after a month and trained it to look like a bush all throughout the grow and it worked almost exactly like I'd imagined it. I used Biobizz's basic nutrients (Biogrow/Biobloom/Topmax and Alg-a-mic) on a regular basis (feed/feed/water schedule) with conservative doses and had no problems with under or over fertilization.
I had to struggle with whiteflies/thrips/aphids on different stages of the grow, this being the most challenging part. I used neem oil every 3 days during veg to control them and placed yellow traps, but after I got into flowering I had to stop using neem oil and the pest really started to be a challenge. What I ended up doing is using the same solution of neem oil with a sponge and washing the leaves about once a week during flowering to control the pest. It was very time consuming and obviously it's not scalable, I lost some leaves but the objective was to keep the pest controlled during the second half of flowering and I'm sure it made a big difference.
Heat problems were also a critical point during the hottest days of summer. Let's get on the with the pictures! I documented every week of the grow but I'll make it shorter:
Day 0:
End of week 4: I had just started to fertilize with Biogrow. As you can see the growth was not that much in the first month, probably due to the pot being too big for this stage and the low ammount of direct sunlight hours.
End of week 6: First train. The plant had been topped the prior week if I remember correctly.
Week 7: Just one week later you could see the lower stems fighting for dominance.
Week 8: First big problem. I had to leave for 5 days and the heat and my city got so hot (over 100°F under the shade) that the stone floor barbecued the roots and the plant got severely dehydrated. The pictures doesn't show this clearly but a few leaves died and others turned yellow/half dead instantly is these few days.
Week 9: The solution was to transplant to the final 30L container (still using Light Mix) and adding mycorrhiza so that the roots got fresh space again and didn't get too hot. I also moved the plant to a location that got sunlight only in the mornings where the heat wasn't that bad and then could rest in the shade the rest of the day. I also started using Alg-a-mic which is recommended to reduce stress and it worked like charm. The plant recovered it's vitality almost instantly after the transplant.
Week 12: Fast forwarding a bit, the training continued and I started to prune the lower parts of the canopy. This was by far the most fun part of the grow; proyecting which branches would be waste and which would be dominant and cutting away all of the useless branches. Now that I saw what happened during flower, I should've cut way more branches and leave only the most dominant colas. I got greedy in a way and because of that some of the buds you'll see afterwards are not really that impressive because the plant didn't focus on them.
Week 13: This photo is exactly one week later. The flowering stretch happened in about 3 days and it was HUGE. A few days after this I saw the first pistils and started using Biobloom/Topmax.
Week 15 (End of W3 of flowering): The buds started slowly forming.
End of W5 of Flower:
This journey started on Nov 1st 2018. The seed was germinated on a 10L textile pot with Biobizz's Light Mix. It was placed on my backyard, which recieved about 3 hours/day of direct sunlight which I know it's not ideal, and I topped the plant after a month and trained it to look like a bush all throughout the grow and it worked almost exactly like I'd imagined it. I used Biobizz's basic nutrients (Biogrow/Biobloom/Topmax and Alg-a-mic) on a regular basis (feed/feed/water schedule) with conservative doses and had no problems with under or over fertilization.
I had to struggle with whiteflies/thrips/aphids on different stages of the grow, this being the most challenging part. I used neem oil every 3 days during veg to control them and placed yellow traps, but after I got into flowering I had to stop using neem oil and the pest really started to be a challenge. What I ended up doing is using the same solution of neem oil with a sponge and washing the leaves about once a week during flowering to control the pest. It was very time consuming and obviously it's not scalable, I lost some leaves but the objective was to keep the pest controlled during the second half of flowering and I'm sure it made a big difference.
Heat problems were also a critical point during the hottest days of summer. Let's get on the with the pictures! I documented every week of the grow but I'll make it shorter:
Day 0:
End of week 4: I had just started to fertilize with Biogrow. As you can see the growth was not that much in the first month, probably due to the pot being too big for this stage and the low ammount of direct sunlight hours.
End of week 6: First train. The plant had been topped the prior week if I remember correctly.
Week 7: Just one week later you could see the lower stems fighting for dominance.
Week 8: First big problem. I had to leave for 5 days and the heat and my city got so hot (over 100°F under the shade) that the stone floor barbecued the roots and the plant got severely dehydrated. The pictures doesn't show this clearly but a few leaves died and others turned yellow/half dead instantly is these few days.
Week 9: The solution was to transplant to the final 30L container (still using Light Mix) and adding mycorrhiza so that the roots got fresh space again and didn't get too hot. I also moved the plant to a location that got sunlight only in the mornings where the heat wasn't that bad and then could rest in the shade the rest of the day. I also started using Alg-a-mic which is recommended to reduce stress and it worked like charm. The plant recovered it's vitality almost instantly after the transplant.
Week 12: Fast forwarding a bit, the training continued and I started to prune the lower parts of the canopy. This was by far the most fun part of the grow; proyecting which branches would be waste and which would be dominant and cutting away all of the useless branches. Now that I saw what happened during flower, I should've cut way more branches and leave only the most dominant colas. I got greedy in a way and because of that some of the buds you'll see afterwards are not really that impressive because the plant didn't focus on them.
Week 13: This photo is exactly one week later. The flowering stretch happened in about 3 days and it was HUGE. A few days after this I saw the first pistils and started using Biobloom/Topmax.
Week 15 (End of W3 of flowering): The buds started slowly forming.
End of W5 of Flower:
