Navy vet in the Pacific Northwest here. New-ish grower. Thanks all for the awesome welcome. I hope I’m adding this first grow diary right.
I only bought my first seeds a few months ago, from BF. I bought Cheese, Acapulco Gold, Laughing Buddha and Amnesia Lemon. Before that, I tried Bruce Banner clone (harvested too early) and Gary Payton clone (spider mites). I’ve gotten maybe 100G total of usable weed since 2022. Cheese is my third grow.
Popped seeds on Dec. 11. – EXPECTED HARVEST: VERY EARLY APRIL 2024
Two weeks in a 1 gallon fabric, then transferred to 5 gallon fabric (one up-pot only).
FIMmd on Jan. 12, light trimming/tucking since then.
My first experience with REALLY straight, strong branching plant and such short internodes.
Soil/vermiculite/sand (60/30/10) in fabric.
Filtered water, light on nutrients (nitrogen, CalMag, and soon adding Flower Fuel’s Bloom Booster for flowering this cycle).
Using 1000W MH for veg, 1000W HPS for flower, in 4x5 Vivosun (never used HID before).
In market to swap to higher-end LEDs.
I’m in awe of some of your grow set-ups. I tend toward OCD and I keep things stupid-simple, especially when I’m just learning. Which I VERY much still am.
I’ll be really interested in your impression on that cheese. Especially the smell after cure. I only ever grew one cheese, Dragon Cheese, which I thought smelled like yogurt. And cherries. So that makes me wonder if yogurt to me is cheese to someone else.
Here are the girls on Day 48 after germination. They are currently getting 17/7, as I taper the light down to 12/12 over the next week-ish. I’m using a free app called Photone for my PPFD readings and working hard to getting a better handle on lighting this round. With 1000W I have all the horsepower I’d ever want – but it’s a lot of heat to manage, too! I have a 6 in cool tube pulling air through with an AC Infinity set to max, and a 4 in intake fan I dial up and down as needed.
Here’s been a problem: I screwed up pulley installation and basically have the light fixed near to top of the space – instead of lowering/raising the light, I’m finding different household items to put the pots on. I have to stop growing long enough to reposition the tent into it’s permanent home in a garage corner, and I’ll rig the whole set up more permanently then.
So. . .in the interest of gradually raising PPFD into latter veg, I’ve got the girls pretty high up now, getting about 770 PPFD. (Weird thing: I could NEVER have the plants this close during flowering, because the HPS bulb runs so so so much hotter. I can literally set the pots pretty much on the ground and they’ll get 600-700 PPFD with the HPS. This is something I need to understand better.)
These plants are progressing fine even though I’ve trimmed it back about three times since the FIM. It grows very dense, so I’ve tried to keep the air flowing through it. The symmetry and the high angle of the branches is amazing – I’m used to taller, lankier plants.
Anyway, the plan is. . .Wed/Sat feedings with Flower Fuel Bloom Booster (never tried before). . .tapering the light each day from 17/7 to 13/11. Then basically lollipopping, thinning the middle, and staking the branches apart a bit.
If all goes according to plan, I’ll be changing the MH to HPS and getting to 12/12 on Saturday or Sunday.
Thanks! Here are more recent pics: Feb 15 (~6 days since 12/12). I’ve switched to an HPS now, which is apparently much better for the flowering stage.
Here’s what’s got me concerned a bit: check out the pics. A day or so before I switched over to 12/12, I got a net down on them, and I’m basically not sure if I did it right.
Maybe worse, I’m not even confident these pictures help much!
Why Cheese? So, I began with four Barney’s varietals – Laughing Buddha, Acapulco Gold, Amnesia Lemon Haze and Cheese. I wanted to run only one type, and only two plants – because I had a lot of other “new” things happening on this grow and wanted to simplify a bit. It was random, for the most part. I’m really looking forward to AG and ALH, in particular, but felt like those were too near/dear to screw up on. So it was Cheese. (Not sure why I even bought LB in the first place, actually!).
I’m trying to get the PPFD right. It was pushing 800 before and it seemed a bit much – it sorta bleached them out a bit. So I changed things a bit, and it’s closer to 650-700 now. Heat at 77, humidity 50, still never worry about pH.
Use the net to spread the plants branches out so light can get down low. Also helps with ventilation and gives lower branches a chance to develop more/better colas. Also helps keep the canopy even in height and makes best use of the light.
I’m a big fan of Scrog nets.
You’ll get the hang of it right quick.
LB is supposed to be a great happy mood ganj. Don’t discount… you might like it.
Here’s a little flyover of my girls. cheese flyoverThis is two Cheese plants, scrogged, on Day 19 since I flipped to 12/12. This is my first time scrogging, so I’m not sure I’ve done it correctly. I plan on one more de-leafing/tucking round in the next couple of days, because there’s a fair amount of shadowing. PPFD here is around ~900 in the center and ~775-800 at the edges.
Again, I’m running a single 1000W Hortilux HPS. Seeds are from Barney’s Farm.
scrog net looks fine. it’s what you want. spread things out so they are mostly same height to maximize the light distribution and also open things up for better ventilation.
looks good man. got any stank yet, or still too early?
I’m a white noise kinda guy myself, so I’m cool with it. (Or maybe it’s red noise? or green? Lots of choices out there nowadays).
But yeah, I get to every party a little bit late. I first discovered Xbox and Halo in about 2007. I found a new show called Modern Family only after it was in its 6th season. And I’ve never bought a Michael Jackson album, even though Thriller came out when I was in high school.
Updated pics will come later, but I just have to tell somebody: We are about three weeks from harvest and this is the smelliest weed I’ve ever smelled in my life, and I’m old.
And cherries. So that makes me wonder if yogurt to me is cheese to someone else.
