Sweet Seeds Me and my Sweet Dark Devil alone at last!

[Bilbo]

I've got them on 24 hours since I've got no heater in there, I can have the two panels on OR the CFL. I like the cfl to be on for late flowering 24/7 so hopefully it'll be cold enough by the end of the month to keep it on with the panels. Overkill but fun

 

[Bilbo]

Been really busy for a few days so here's a few pics.

The Vitalink Easy one pack nutes seem to be doing the trick, it looks worryingly like mud when you add it to the res and it doesn't say it on the bottle but the trick seems to be to feed it once a week when you change the water to the correct ec. Then just top up with calmag/booster ph'd water for the rest of the week without adding any more nutes. EC is staying level at 1.4 now and I'll reduce that a bit by adding less Easy next water change.

Weather has definitely turned and I'm getting down to 19.8c with ALL the lights on, res is staying at a lovely cool 20c now though

It's the usual mental battle to keep the ph within boundaries, she sucks up some of the pk booster at a rapid rate, ph drops like a stone so I raise it a bit then at some totally random point she sucks up the rest of the pk dropping the ph again! It's great seeing a female plant behave like it's human counterpart. (I'm going to get a slap when the wife reads that!)

You'll notice in the pics that some of the huge older fan leaves are starting to yellow, this is new territory for me as I've never left the leaves on long enough to die so if it looks like a problem I need to do something about let me know. Rest of the plant seems healthy.

 

[Bilbo]

Getting nice and frosty plus packing a bit of weight on now!

 

[GMan]

Looking good Bilbo, you getting much colour in the buds yet? Mines gone a lovely dark red with some hints of black & purple.

 

[Bilbo]

Looking good Bilbo, you getting much colour in the buds yet? Mines gone a lovely dark red with some hints of black & purple.

If I close my eyes and squint at it in just the right light I can see imaginary purple

Not really though Gman, I've got one of the green ones still so I might be in for quantity over colour!

 

[GMan]

The real colours didn't start showing till about day 55 with mine, so there's still time for yours!

 

[Bilbo]

Well it's day 67 from seed so time for an update and a few questions.

The trichs are about 10-20% cloudy now so I'm working on at least another 10 days before I start to flush. Just pure water flush this grow since I've got plenty of time and I can shorten or extend as suits the plant. I'm aiming for the 50-60% cloudy point at harvest and 7 days hanging to get good strong smokes.

I'm slowly lowering the nutes, cutting right back on the magnecal+ (1ml per litre now) and just keeping the pk 9/18 at full dose until a day or two before flush. As you can see from the pics the lack of calmag has produced a more or less instant effect on the leaves, I won't let it get too bad but I want her to get hungry towards the end.

1st question - have I got that planned right so far, time frame, nutes, etc?

I'm still in new territory with all the fan leaves, I've managed to restrain myself and for the first time I've not touched a single leaf the whole grow.
The biggest difference I've noticed is the speed of the grow, much faster but imho I'm not going to see the best yield I could get without giving her a good pruning and waiting an extra week or two for harvest.

So 2nd question is - at this stage of a grow I have seen others give them a light pruning to let more light through to the popcorn bud. Apart from delaying the harvest what other downsides are there to a light trim?

I've put a picture of my last grow at day 80/two weeks before it would have been ready to harvest for comparison. It's a different plant, COTC Cash Crop and it was heavily defoliated throughout so I'm leaning back in favour of doing the same next grow and putting up with the longer grow to get a better yield.

Anyway, all thoughts and advice welcome.

 

[Feenix]

Hey Brother Bilbo,
I got a pretty positive "No" consensus when I asked about trimming too. For the same reason, healing slows development effecting yield. It was suggested I try weaving the leaves behind the growing buds. I still find myself harvesting in layers to give the popcorn extra time and the week or two does add good bulk to them.
I'll not try to comment on the nutes I haven't used or strain I've never grown.

Just my 2cents.

 

[Bilbo]

I read plenty of arguments for/against defoliating before I started growing and decided to go for it based on my tent size. I got halfway through growing NL and a Power Africa, getting them used to defoliation from two weeks onwards as per the advice.

The plants really seemed to love the airflow/light but then I had one of those great "OH SHIT!" moments when I discovered you can't defoliate autos! Since then I'm torn between doing what I am supposed to and doing what I have seen works but takes longer.

Next grow is in a taller/wider/thinner tent so I can grow two plants if I defoliate, one if I don't, major conundrum lol.

 

[Feenix]

I read plenty of arguments for/against defoliating before I started growing and decided to go for it based on my tent size. I got halfway through growing NL and a Power Africa, getting them used to defoliation from two weeks onwards as per the advice.

The plants really seemed to love the airflow/light but then I had one of those great "OH SHIT!" moments when I discovered you can't defoliate autos! Since then I'm torn between doing what I am supposed to and doing what I have seen works but takes longer.

Next grow is in a taller/wider/thinner tent so I can grow two plants if I defoliate, one if I don't, major conundrum lol.

I'm sorta in the same fix, old habits are hard to break for me. But I chose to defer to the experts who's advice I asked for.
This run I am in now has shown me that the calendar may be less in control than the maturity of the plants when it comes to flowering, 1 Flowered on time at 28 days, 1, stunted, caught up a week later, and a third, dwarfed and was moved outdoors where it is making a come back pubed last night at day 43.
Time will tell how it effected the yields