Filling up a 2x4 in a Midwestern basement

Quiet Monday with few work meetings, so time for another garden update! I’ve been more aggressive with watering the past few days and the plants seem to be liking it. Only one that’s kind of giving me grief is the Lemongrass from Humboldt Seed Co. A couple of the leaves are “clawing” which means too much N, right? None of the others are doing this, so here is where having such a wide array of genetics might come to bite me. I ain’t gonna start mixing up multiple batches of nutes, so at a certain point it is what it is. A couple of close ups of the Lemongrass:

Whole garden shot:


I’m gonna do a couple days of 12/12 to sex the regs and then cull so I can get the plants arranged in their long term homes. Then I’ll go back to veg a few more weeks before flipping. I think I’m gonna put the remaining females in 1 gal. airpots. I really dig the airpots. I have enough fabric pots to use those but I figure might as well go for something closer to uniformity. This way I would end up with 4 2 gal airpots in the back row with the smaller ones in front. I might end up having to water the small ones every day, but looking at my schedule from now until the end of summer I won’t be taking any long vacations so I think it’ll be okay. Will just really douse 'em before a little long weekend in August.

Anyway…here are some closeups of the other plants:
Mandarin Cookies V2 Fem (Ethos):


Sour Diesel Fem (NASC White Label):

Pineapple Chunk Fem (Barney’s):

This plant was kinda stunted for a while but it’s thriving in the bigger pot. Leaves are kinda wonky as you can see.

Finally, here’s my assistant gardener inspecting the plants :smiley_cat:

Have a good one!

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Howdy, I up-potted everything on Friday last week and the plants are loving it. Whole garden shot:

I had this bright idea that I would put the plants on 12/12 for 3 days and then it would be easy to sex the males. For all but one plant the preflowers were not obvious to me, so I just bought enough orange airpots to accommodate everything. The good news is that my most vigorous plant appears to be female :dancer: so I’ve got that going for me.

Most of the other regs are just now getting to that 6th or 7th node where maybe the preflowers will be more obvious. Either way, I think July 1 will be my flip day. Easy to remember that way haha. I need to get my carbon filter set up before my in-laws come to visit for 2 weeks :grimacing:…luckily they are not staying with us and almost never go in our basement. You do get a faint whiff of weed at the top of the stairs though which of course will only get more obvious after the flip.

Anyway, here are some more shots of the plants. This is a more zoomed out shot of the plant with the pistils above:


The Lemongrass is almost to that level but not as tall. It does have the biggest fan leaves though:

Here is the OG Kush:

And finally the top node of one of the other regs. Maybe showing some male preflowers but I have no idea. I probably won’t cull anything until it’s completely obvious.

Thanks for reading and have a good one!

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What’s happenin’ dawgs, it’s been a little while since I had time to document the grow here! Parenting life…lol.

At some point last week I topped everything about 1 node down. The plants responded well. Getting some good knuckling:


Possible male preflower? Not the best photo I know.

Some different views of the plants. Here’s the lemongrass. It’s really bushing out!

On the opposite end of that spectrum we have this OG Kush. None of the leaves are extending past the edge of its container. Is that typical for an OG? This is just a NASC white label but I think they would at least try to ensure that it’s a decent approximation. I don’t really care much either way but just curious.

I switched to 12/12 for good yesterday. Looking forward to being able to cull the males and get things arranged a little neater. Then I’ll probably put up a scrog net to help space the bud sites out nice and neat. Carbon filter/fan has been hung to capture all the dankness :nose:

Since I had the camera out anyway (I use an old DSLR for this since my phone storage is basically full and I don’t really need a bunch of weed pics on my phone in the midst of baby pics…not to mention pesky metadata), here are some photos from my yard since a lot of stuff is blooming!

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Can’t wait to see the tent filled up! Nice ‘other’ flowers too :+1:

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Nice gardens, midwestern bud!

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Well, the boys have been kicked out. Out of 7 regs, I got 4 males. I’ll take it. This was my first time growing regs and it took about 5 days to be able to clearly identify them. Hopefully in the future I can get better at identifying preflowers.

Thank you for your service, boys!


They make a nice little snack for the kittehs :smiley_cat:

Now we have the final lineup. 8 plants total. In the back row from left to right we have Mandarin Cookies V2 (Ethos), Sour Diesel (NASC white label), OG Kush (NASC white label, and Lemongrass (HSC). Front row left to right is Lilac Diesel BX3 (Ethos), Puprle Sunset x Lilac Diesel (Ethos), Grape Diamonds X Lilac Diesel (Ethos), and Pineapple Chunk (Barneys Farm).


The only one of these that I’ve grown/smoked before is the Mandarin Cookies which I enjoyed. Just based on reading I’ve done here and elsewhere I’ve grown pretty skeptical of anything in the Cookies family, but I had the seeds already and I will say the first few pulls of the vape were pretty tasty. I’m stoked to try everything else!

This OG Kush has been interesting to watch grow. It’s stretching way more than the others which is interesting. I would’ve expected the SD to stretch more since I think I’ve read it’s normally a stretchy one. But then again these are just the white labels so who knows what I’m actually getting. I don’t think NASC reveals the parentage for these. :man_shrugging:

In outdoor yard news, the poppies are blooming! I think they are beautiful flowers even if they only last a few days. The bees love them too. And what can I say, I get a kick out of growing controlled substances! I’m not planning to harvest any opium from these, but it’s fun to know that I could. If I was gonna do it I’d try the traditional score and scrape method - golden triangle style lol.


I’ve got another photo of these with this cool bee in it, but I’m gonna save that for the yard wildlife thread I think.

Cheers! :beers:

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Don’t worry man, you’ll get better at identifying preflowers over time! Tent’s looking good, the poppy plants do too! Their flowers are so nice looking.

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Been pretty busy the last few weeks but have managed to keep the plants pretty happy and snagged a few photos on Friday night, which was day 23 since flip.
First, the full garden:


Mandarin Cookies V2:

Sour Diesel:

OG Kush:

Lemongrass:

Pineapple Chunk:

Grape Diamonds X Lilac Diesel:

Purple Sunset X Lilac Diesel:

The only one I didn’t get a photo of is the straight Lilac Diesel BX3 since the lights went out as I was taking photos :open_mouth:

They all look and smell pretty good to me, but as I said in some of the earlier posts I’m really still a weed noob even though I’ve grown the stuff a few times now. So I don’t have the most discerning eye, but I’ll just be happy if they finish up mold free and smoke decently well and get me high. One standout is the OG Kush, for some reason it’s already throwing orange pisitls. No idea what that means here or if its typical for the strain. It also is by far the funkiest smelling plant. Kind of on the borderline of unpleasant. Which I hope means it’s dank as shit and will get ya fucked up lol!

Cheers homies :sunglasses:

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I’m late to the party, but brought some popcorn!

:slight_smile: :popcorn:

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Howdy ho neighborinos, finally getting around to updating this thing! I’m not able to be off task as much at work anymore which was previously my prime grow journal update time haha.

Took some photos just before lights out today. Day 39 of flower. I confirmed all the flowering times of what I have in my tent and wrote down ballpark dates. The first of these to be done will be the Lemongrass, which HSC reports finishes in 50 days. That would be August 24 for me! I hope it really is done that quick, because I’m gonna run out of the last of my stash tomorrow. Will have to make a batch of AVB edibles and/or order some “hemp” online to carry me through. Life is too stressful for a T-break right now lol.

Anyway, here’s some photos:
Lemongrass. I’m not good at describing smells but it smells just kinda vaguely fruity and not all that lemony right now. Hope that changes after dry/cure because I could go for some lemon mmmmm.


I think this will be my champion yielder of the bunch. None of the other colas are even close to this thicc!

A few other shots including the OG Kush that I tried my hand at supercropping (is that the word?) when it was getting burned by the light. It worked way better than I thought for my first and second attempts! One thing I notice about this OG Kush compared to other plants I’ve grown is that it doesn’t put out as much frost. I’ve been enjoying reading the Cookies Hate thread and I definitely side with the folks who find the “frost for appearance’s sake” thing to be offputting. It’s about effects for me. If this shit didn’t get me high I wouldn’t smoke it!


Another exciting thing besides my soon-to-be harvest is that I repurposed a shitty closet in the basement as my new seedling starter area! I forgot to grab a pic just now, but it is glorious. Previously our gas meter took up most of that closet, but a few years ago they moved our meter outside and left us with this unused space. Never put anything in it…until now :smiling_imp:

Anyway, rock on bros and thanks as always for reading!

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Looking awesome man!

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Looks like it’s gonna be a pretty good harvest! :+1:

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Exciting things happening here in the basement lately! I got a new-to-me camera off Ebay that just arrived today. Nikon D3200 - I think these were considered kind of an entry level pro camera when they came out in 2012-ish. So this thing is no spring chicken, but so far it seems to work just fine. Plus it came with 3 lenses and a 64 GB memory card which I thought was a pretty sweet deal. Never used anything besides a basic point-and-shoot or phone camera so there’s gonna be a learning curve. Anyway, all the pics you see now were taken with the Nikon. I guess I have to resize these images since they’re about 8-10 MB on disk now damn. I know nothing about how to do image resizing properly so if the pictures look like shit that’s why. Lots to learn.

The seedling closet I alluded to earlier is doing well. I popped some stuff I’m excited about. I’ll write more about them later but you can kind of see on the plant labels. Some of these lil’ buddies are slow to get going. Like the cotyledons don’t wanna unfold completely. I’ve ended up manhandling those ones quite a bit and don’t seem to have killed them yet. If anybody here has any good “pro tips” for seedlings like this I’m all ears! A couple of pics:


The 2x4 is coming along. I’ve already taken a couple branches because I ran out of weed :scream_cat: - one from the Lemongrass, one from Pineapple Chunk, and one from the OG Kush. I can confirm that the Lemongrass taken at day 42-ish does get me high out of the vape lol. I actually kind of like it after having only very old weed from a 2021 harvest up until now. Really looking forward to having some properly dried/cured fresh bud soon!

Here’s the Lemongrass. THICC. Please don’t mold on me! Just gotta make it to Thursday. HSC says 50 days, and I need some weed, so I will be chopping on day 50 even if it would benefit from going longer.

Getting some nice pink coloring on this Lilac Diesel cross. This plant was my most vigorous during veg and is still doing well, though I think it got surpassed vigor-wise by the Lemongrass and OG Kush during flower. But those were also in bigger pots so it’s not a good comparison. Either way, I didn’t take any clones and don’t plan to mess with reveg anyway, so it’s moot. I have more beans of all of these.

I’ve got other pics but this update already got too long winded so I’ll leave it there for now. Gonna vape some delicious barely-dried, uncured Pineapple Chunk tonight. Maybe I’ll pop in with an update if it’s real good shit haha.

Cheers! :beers:

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Looking great man, mold can definitely be a factor in these small areas, keep that air circulation high and humidity low :slight_smile: I have been back seat watching since the first post, happy to see you got some flower to smoke albeit a bit early, but hey it works, its what its all for! Stay high :innocent:

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I use the same camera for work lol. It works just fine and there are macro lenses galore to choose from if you want some dope Trike shiots.

Drops of water a couple times a day applied to the stubborn seedlings can help loosen helmet head or the inner casing sticking things together. I have killed too many seedlings to mention by manhandling ha.

Watch that humidity this time of year in the MW!

Best of luck on the upcoming harvest😎

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I use this, works great :slight_smile:

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@Varuna thanks for that photo resizer! I love it. @PatioMat thanks for the seedling advice. They’re doing pretty well now.

This morning Lemongrass got the chop!


I was and still am stoked, but that got tempered a little bit when I found a few mold/budrot spots. I jinxed it! I don’t know when it showed up since I haven’t really been inspecting these plants very closely this whole time. But we’ve been having our muggiest/hottest weather of the summer the past few days which can’t have helped. The tent is cramped and I’m guessing the nugs that had mold were the ones that spent a lot of time smushed up against the side of the tent because most of the rest of the plant looks good as far as I can tell. I’ll be checking even more closely later. I didn’t take any pics of the mold because who wants to see that? But I don’t think it was too severe. I only had it one other time in my previous grow over 2 years ago and it was way more obvious then. This time I needed to bust out a flashlight to see it. Anyway, I ended up trashing the moldy parts and throwing the rest of the nugs in the freezer for future edible use. Dumb idea? IDK.

Final mold thoughts - I think there are some growers who would trash the whole crop at this point. I will not be doing that. My thinking is, we seem to hold cannabis to an incredibly high standard as far as mold goes. I get that if it’s intended to be smoked we don’t want ourselves/others smoking mold. Totally on board with that. But the spores are everywhere anyway right? I feel like if I can’t see obvious mold on the parts I’m consuming, then it’s probably no worse for me than the food I eat and other dust I inhale each and every day. I mean, people smoke cigs for decades which for all we know get mold or mildew on the leaves, then sprayed and/or irradiated with all sorts of toxic shit, and many of these people die of something else first. IDK, just rambling, but I guess what I’m saying is I don’t wanna overreact to this. Is botrytis worse than your average indoor ambient mold?

Anyway, if you read all that now you know my personal opinion on botrytis which may be completely wrong. But there it is. Still gonna get quite a yield off this lady even after discarding those parts.

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In tight spaces I defoliate like crazy, hell I defoliate more than alot of other people do, I do what I have to keep that humidity down.

For me personally concerning mold, since I am solely using the flowers, and if the contamination is small, I cut all affected parts and about 2" around the area taking care to not disturb the spores, discard and hang the rest as usual. I then take my camera app with the flash permanently on, zooming in on suspect areas. I do this everyday while drying, even on plants I do not think will have mold, gotta be vigilant. With that said, one should always take caution when inhaling molds especially botrytis, its nothing to mess around with especially if you have a weakened immune system, I have thrown out entire plants before on the err of caution, just use your best judgement. Might wanna make an isopropyl alcohol solution and spray down that side of the tent very well too…

Oh and that photoresizer.exe I find it works best for this site if you rename it to ‘PhotoResizeK1000’ FYI :slight_smile:

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Howdy folks! Got some decent photos yesterday.

From the top, we have

  • Sour Diesel…looking pretty good to me. Looking sort of foxtail-y which doesn’t bother me much. This plant is still looking really healthy with just minor burnt tips but almost all other leaves looking very healthy.
  • Purple Sunset X Lilac Diesel. This one’s getting a pretty colorful fade on some of the fan leaves and both of the main colas have a distinct pink hue. It’s pretty cool! It has a very strong grapefruit smell that I love. I sampled an early nug off a lower branch and love it so far, so I might actually try to reveg this because it was so easy to grow and I love the grapefruit.
  • Pineapple Chunk. This plant is kind of a runt but I’ve had two vape bowls of an early harvested branch tonight and I’m pretty high lol. So it’s got some good ass potency which I also love to have in my life. Since this one was kind of a runt I don’t think I’ll try to reveg but I will definitely pop the other two seeds I have soon.
  • Zoomed out shot of the right side of the tent. The behemoth there is the OG Kush. It’s by far my least frosty plant. It does leave an almost greasy feeling on the hands so I think I know what people mean with that description now. It’s got a nice smell to it and has been very vigorous but I’m not sure I’d grow it again. You can also see the Mandarin Cookies V2 and the Lilac Diesel in the background as well.
  • A better shot of the Purple Sunset X LD I described above. I looked at the trichs with a loupe on this plant and on the buds they’re maybe 5% amber but on one of these leaves it’s like 80% you can see in the photo. I guess the leaf trichs probably mature faster…I think I read that somewhere. Ethos says this should be between 56-63 days. Today is 56, so I might harvest this one soon.

Overall I’m feeling good to be back in the green again and I’m really enjoying these premature buds! They’re way more potent than my old stash I was using up before this. And the smells are so much stronger too. I’d forgotten! Pretty soon I’ll have like a 2 year stash of weed, and then I’m gonna just keep growing lmao. It’s fun and I want to grow a little bit of everything and also have some favorites to go back to. Anyway I’m high and rambling good night everyone!

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Hello there! I’m back from a little hiatus. I didn’t stop growing, but I ended up taking a 7 week consumption break for reasons of marital harmony, essentially. I stayed away from OG for that time because I think it would’ve made me more bitter about having to put down the weed…just didn’t really wanna be reminded of it. Anyway, I’ve been back on the green for a few weeks now but haven’t had my shit together enough to update this log! By now I probably should’ve started another flower run, but we are heading out of town for a week coming up and I figured it would be best to leave the plants in veg until we’re back from that. I don’t have anyone I trust to take care of them while we’re gone. I mean, my family could do it, but they still don’t know about this little hobby of mine and I’d like to keep it that way for the time being. I mean, it’s legal here in MN now, but they’ve always been a little weird about it. That D.A.R.E. propaganda runs pretty deep lmao. For instance, my mom thinks her good friend’s currently-estranged son is the way he is partly due to weed consumption. I’m like, no mom, weed doesn’t make you stop speaking to your parents. Constantly bugging your son about getting a “real job” or going to grad school and all that shit is what does it. ANYWAY enough of that…

Here’s most of the harvest! This is honestly at least a year’s supply for me.


Nug shot of the Mandarin Cookies V2:

Here’s my quick and dirty reviews of each strain. Keep in mind I’m not an experienced smoker/grower at all. Before I started growing the only known strain I ever smoked was some LSD pre-rolls I bought from a dispensary in CO in 2018. I don’t know if that was Barney’s LSD or something else (I believe there’s a BOG version as well) but either way I have very little background with this stuff. Here we go:

Mandarin Cookies V2 (Ethos): This was my second time growing this one. Very dense nugs late in flower. I had to improvise with cord to hold it up for the last 2 weeks. The smell definitely has a baked goods thing going on and there’s a hint of fruit/citrus but not a ton TBH. I’ve only vaped it a few times but the potency is good (2 bowls on the Arizer Solo 2 gets me decently baked) and I enjoy it. I still have 2 seeds left and will probably grow it again at some point. Zero mold issues despite the relatively big dense nugs, which sadly was not the case for everything in the tent.
Purple Sunset X Lilac Diesel BX3 (Ethos): Speaking of mold issues, this one ended up having some mold which I didn’t discover until it had been drying for a few days. Not great vigilance on my part, but as alluded to earlier in the thread I’m not gonna get super stressed about mold. The biggest threat to my lungs is the various daycare plagues my daughter brings home :wink: . This one was super vigorous in veg and made insta-worthy pink nugs. Right before harvest it had this awesome sharp grapefruit scent that I loved. The tester nugs were awesome. Unfortunately as it dried/cured this weird other flavor started coming out that I would honestly describe as poultry-like if that makes any sense. Kind of like you’re making stock out of a picked-over chicken carcass or whatever. Not very appealing honestly. It doesn’t come though in the vape much luckily, and potency wise I think this edges out the MCV2, so I like it for that reason.
Pineapple Chunk (Barneys): This is my favorite of the bunch and I will definitely grow it again. I know Barneys doesn’t get a ton of love here but I’ve liked everything I’ve grown from them. The only thing this plant didn’t have was vigor/yield, which for me is by far the least important aspect. It’s got this really nice citrusy nose with some funk in there as well, and it’s definitely the most potent plant I’ve grown. One bowl gets me pretty baked! Still have 2 fem seeds which will get grown again for sure.
Lilac Diesel BX3 (Ethos): This one has a nice herbal thing going on along with lemon cleaner. Not a ton of diesel in there except when you stick your nose in the grinder. Somewhere in the middle potency wise. Not in a rush to grow it again.
Grape Diamonds X Lilac Diesel BX3 (Ethos): I do think I get a little bit of grape, but besides that it’s very similar to the straight Lilac Diesel with quite a bit of lemon cleaner in there. Similar potency as well. Kind of meh TBH.
Lemongrass (HSC): This was the other plant that molded on me. This was also very vigorous in veg and throughout. Big yielder. Nice lemony, gassy, herbal scent. Second in potency behind the Pineapple Chunk. Funny thing is that this one molded despite being tagged as “mold resistant” by HSC. I mostly blame myself for not managing airflow/humidity super well in late flower though. I’ll be growing it again. Just remembered I did find an immature seed in this one the other day. Again, I blame myself. It got pretty hot and humid in late flower. Dang weather/lack of central air :angry: . Got some more HSC stuff in veg now and they are doing well.
Sour Diesel (NASC white label): Easy plant to grow, zero mold issues, good smells in the tent, but now I know what people mean by HAY SMELL. Just absolute hay in the jar. It’s better after grinding it up (maybe you can catch a sour hint in there…not much gas though) but still not great. Fortunately the hay doesn’t come through much in the vape. Won’t be growing again…if I go after SD again I’ll fork over the dinero for a legit breeder version or maybe even a cut who knows.
OG Kush (NASC white label): This plant had what I’m pretty sure were nanners late in flower. Maybe that’s what pollinated my Lemongrass…I don’t remember if they were right next to each other or not. Either way, this plant was a waste of space. Big yield, but the potency is basically nonexistent. All my other stuff, one bowl will give me either a nice buzz or mild stone. One bowl of this does nothing. I’m not even sure it’s worth putting into edibles.

Sorry that post got so long. I will try to update on current plants soon. Slow day at work haha. Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

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