MrGreenJeans starts growing!

[MrGreenJeans]

Hi Fellow Growers!

Long time lurker, just started my account a few days ago, and I’m jumping in with both feet! (I hope this is going into the right spot.) This first post will be an introduction to put a little more meat on the bone from my introduction in the community area. I’ll start with my grow room set-up:

My goal was to set up as stealthy and efficient a grow room as possible.

Step one was the installation of a super quiet (0.5 Sones), high-efficiency (20 watts) bathroom exhaust fan in the ceiling of a closet that leads from my home office to my attic. The fan moves 50 CFM, and is designed to run continuously, almost silently, for years on end. I can barely hear it running when the closet door is open; when the door is closed, it’s silent. The fan is wired to a light switch in my office, which also operates an overhead compact fluorescent in the closet. I installed a pull switch at the light fixture, so that can be turned on or off separately, should I need additional/temporary illumination.

The closet measures a little more than three feet deep, six foot wide, and 8 foot tall, so the fan (rated for a 45 sq. ft. bathroom) does a good job of bringing in fresh air. It flows directly out through a very short (~2’) length of 4" insulated drier vent through the attic, to a boxed off corner of the eaves, which in my home are vented to the outdoors. My yard is big enough, and my house is on a hill, and has 10’ ceilings downstairs. So, even though I live in suburbia, the delightful fragrance of fresh growing weed is ~usually~ difficult for my neighbors to detect. Visitors were oblivious to it last year, anyway.

Fresh (temperature/humidity conditioned) air comes into the grow room through an eight-inch vent I installed near floor-level, in the wall between my office and the closet. This vent also allows access for the 6’, heavy duty extension cord that connects the lights, fan, thermostat, and heater from an outlet in my office. The vent (and outlet) is hidden behind a file cabinet in my office. The interior of the vent is painted non-reflective black, and I slung a black stocking around it, where it enters the closet, to help keep light from escaping, and to keep out unwanted debris/pests. I also stapled a few strips of thick fabric along the bottom of the door, to block light from escaping into my office.

Because the “grow room” has a door that leads to my attic, I took extra measures to insulate it from temperature swings. I fit an insulating blanket from Harbor Freight in the staircase. It hangs from a hinged fencepost that opens and closes securely, to eliminate freezing or sweltering temperatures from reaching the interior door. It works great! (…Should have thought of that long ago, just for the savings on heating and air conditioning.) Space blankets line the walls and floor, primarily for reflecting light, but they may help stabilize the temperature too.

The “gear” in my grow room consists of the following:

A Viparspectra XS1500 (Amazon.com), along with a few “blurple” light strips, to help with root and bloom development. The Viparspectra is a full spectrum light, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to add a bit more blue and red spectrum – and my wife’s african violets haven’t missed 'em.

When the temperature drops, I use an Inkbird ITC306T thermostat outlet, for managing the smallest electric oil heater I could find – a “Comfort Zone CZ7007J” which offers three heat settings {500W, 700W, 1200W}. It kept the grow room in the upper 70s during the days, and in the low 60s at night, right through the cold of January.

I run an oscillating 10" fan on the low speed, and have it connected to a timer that turns it on and off throughout the day. For humidity management, I have a dehumidifier I can run from my office, but there seems to be no need to reduce humidity. I add humidity (during the winter) the old-school way: A wet towel draped over a converted metal shelf, fit into a basin partially filled with water, with the fan blowing over it. This simple device kept my growing/drying room at or below 60% humidity without the need for anything more complicated.

That’s it for now. Next post will be about the soil, seeds, and amendments I’m using. Please let me know if I’ve passed over anything you’d like to read more about.

Your friendly, closeted farmer,
MrGreenJeans

[FirstCavApache64]

Sounds like a great stealthy setup. Just keep an eye on the attic humidity as I’ve seen some folks have issues with mold up there when they vent into it from a tent or closet. Looking forward to seeing plants setup in there and best of luck with your next run.

[Hemp]

Good luck to your growing. Wish you the best.

[George]

Seems you’ve got everything under control , willing to follow the next episodes from your endeavour …

[MrGreenJeans]

Thanks for a word to the wise! So far, so good (with regard to the potential for mold). My grows are small enough that I don’t think they’ll be putting out a lot of humidity.

[TopShelfTrees1]

Welcome my friend, very cool stealth setup and very in depth explanation I love it! You sir shall fit right in over here.

[MrGreenJeans]

Years ago, I built a few raised garden beds in our yard for my wife to nurture her green thumb. She grows mostly vegetables and herbs for her salads; tomatoes for our neighborhood’s thieving bastard squirrels; and an occasional melon or two for the deer who manage to traverse the gauntlet of traffic surrounding our corner of suburbia. I grew up tending to my family’s gardens, and worked on a neighbor’s farm as my first paying job (at $.50/hr.). So I have an affinity for the soil. But our gardens are/were HER hobby.

We have been composting kitchen scraps to periodically improve the soil. The composted materials ~used to go~ into the gardens each year. My wife’s interests have shifted over time, at least partially in capitulation to the marauding wildlife. So our vegetable gardens have recently gone fallow. The composting, however, has continued. I put it to good use.

Because some of our landscaping uses rocks for decorative beds, we (i.e. She) managed, over years of collecting soil from other spots around the yard, to add a bunch of river rocks into the composter. As a result, the compost was chunkier than ideal for my purposes. I strained it through a sharp wire grate that I salvaged from the bottom of a brick barbeque I had dismantled on the property long ago. In addition to getting rid of the rocks, this sieve allowed me to mush what was left of the rotting orange rinds, coffee grounds, banana peels, salad greens and eggshells into a fine, dark, granular slurry.

Some of that nutrient-rich goodness got mixed in with a few 5-gallon buckets of organic potting soil, perlite, and worm castings. And some was brewed into tea. I used a few square yards of coarse burlap, doubled over, to hold the compost, and soaked it in another five-gallon bucket with the distilled water I had been collecting from my dehumidifier. Soak, steep, press, and repeat. I didn’t go through anything as elaborate as creating a bubbler for it, but I ~think~ it was worth the effort I put into it.

I ended up making about seven gallons of tea, which I stored – appropriately enough – in the empty ready-to-drink, zero-calorie green tea gallon jugs that were accumulating in my garage. (I go through that stuff like water!)

At this point, I was ready to start a few seeds. I used the “wet paper towel” method to germinate one each of the “ZKittles CBD” and “Venom” feminized photoperiod seeds I had purchased from Homegrown Cannabis Co (Kyle Kushman’s company). That purchase transaction was smooth as butter, and I’d heartily recommend Homegrown Cannabis Co to anyone looking to purchase seeds. Both seeds popped and grew taproots ready for planting within a few days. I put them each into a Solo cup, and placed the cups in a warm spot on a bookshelf in my office. …And waited.

(Notice: Sorry for the lack of photos with this post. I wasn’t keeping a grow journal with my first grow. These first few posts will serve more as backstory for what’s to come. Next post will have more photos. And I’ll do a better job of ducumenting the current grow - I promise!)

[imstinky]

I’ll pull up a bean bag chair and watch this. Hope the smoke doesn’t bother you

[MrGreenJeans]

Fire one up, brother!

[George]

Yeap, literature is entertaining and descriptive but we enjoy pics , willing to see them grow …

[G-paS]

Good start @MrGreenJeans

[MrGreenJeans]

We’re going into warp speed for a few months now, since what I’ve been writing about so far took place last year ('22). I didn’t bother documenting the seedlings, or even the vegetative growth. Suffice it to say the seedlings started out pretty leggy at first, since I didn’t put them under my grow light from the start. I had them on a shelf in my office, under a regular old incandescent bulb. But aside from having long and narrow stems, they were healthy.

I moved them into the grow room after a couple of days, and continued to water them with a mister every so often - depending on how moist/heavy the soil felt. …All was good. They grew into healthy, vibrant green plants. I transplanted them into quart-sized containers at the appropriate time, and then into 7-gallon fabric pots. I was growing only two plants, so I wanted them to both be as big and bushy as space would allow. I clipped them at their fourth node, and clipped again as they continued to spread out. I used wires drilled into the handles of clothespins to hold down stems, with the clothespins anchored around the rims of the pots.

I screwed together a scrog net sized to ~just barely~ fit my closet, using wooden table legs, a few 1" x 4" planks, screw hooks, and some trellis netting I bought off Amazon. I wanted to maintain access to the attic, and the door to the attic opens outward. So the net is approximately 30" x 40". It’s big enough to fit two plants comfortably, or three or four in a squeeze. …But I think I’d have a tough time reaching deep enough into the undergrowth to water more than a couple of plants.

I watered using the tea sometimes, and using distilled water other times - a good soaking every two or three days, allowing the plants to show me when they got thirsty. But I rarely – maybe two or three times – watered to the point where the pots would seep. I didn’t keep a journal; just played it by ear. I drilled some holes in the cap of one of the tea jugs, and simply reused that cap throughout the grow, placing it on whichever jug was next in the lineup. The only amendment I added during vegetation was an occasional top dressing of worm castings. That, and a few fractions of “Jobes” fertilizer spikes.

I did do some foliar feeding with the tea, but mostly watered the soil. I wasn’t measuring PH, or light intensity, or anything other than temperature and humidity.

The soil, it turned out, was “living soil,” but maybe not in the way the pros describe it. I suppose it had some mycorrhizal fungi and other tiny organisms. But it also had larger organisms, including a batch of gnats and a batch of other bugs that looked like fireflys. I hung a strip of flypaper, which collected the gnats as they hatched. The other bugs would greet me when I opened the door. They’d be sitting on the ceiling, or come fluttering out into my office. Fortunately, they were pretty slow, and easy to kill with a fly swatter. I didn’t keep a death count, but I’d guesstimate that I killed nearly two dozen of 'em over the course of a couple weeks. I never saw any eggs or mold or anything like that on the plants themselves.

I had started this grow in mid-August. By mid-October, I flipped them to flower. And this is when I began to keep a photographic record.

I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. On the left is the Venom. On the right is the Zkittles.

Week 0 - Flipped to flower:

Week 1 - Little nubs appearing:

Week 2 - Well Hello there!

Week 3 - Starting to get pretty fragrant in here.

Week 4 - Uh oh… Venom is not looking happy!

Tune in next time for (channeling Paul Harvey) The Rest of The Story!

[MrGreenJeans]

When I flipped these plants to flower, I started slowly adjusting their watering and feeding regimen. I was dousing the pots with a watered down version of compost tea every third day. By the third week, I had added a thin top dressing of Dr Earth “Flower Girl Organic Bud & Bloom Booster.” I also started adding an overflowing teaspoon of Grandma’s unsulphured molasses to the gallon watering jugs. I wanted these plants to get thick and sweet, and sticky!

One of them (the Zkittles) took to this treatment like a duck to water. The other… not so much.

My guess is that it was just too much, too soon for the Venom plant. Its foliage had been a lighter, more “lime” green than the ZKittles almost from the start. But the difference became more pronounced when the plants went into flower. …And much more pronounced around the third week.

I had been periodically removing fan leaves from the bottom stems, usually just a few leaves at a time, to minimize shock and allow the plants ample recovery time. I also tucked or trimmed leaves that were casting shadows on what might otherwise become productive bud sites. I don’t think I went overboard with my training or trimming.

If I had the chance to do it over, though, I would have attempted to give the Venom some intensive care. In hindsight, I probably should have removed that pot from the grow room, taken it to the bathtub, and run a bunch of room temperature tapwater through it until it was soaked and rinsed, through and through. A thorough douching! …Let the water drain, and – once it had stopped dripping – brought it back into the grow room to dry out. Then maybe add a little bit of calcium and magnesium to the water it was being fed.

Admittedly, that would have been quite a shock. Maybe too much for an ailing plant to withstand.(?) But it would have been better than giving up on it altogether, which is what I did. Worth a shot, anyway… I simply wrote it off as a goner, and stopped watering it.

Live and learn.

I realize there’s no way of knowing the best course of action without an accurate diagnosis of the problem. (A PH meter would have probably come in handy.) But what say you, more experienced growers? What would you have done differently, in my situation?

In the next installment, I’ll cover what has become of the plant that survived and thrived. Thanks for reading! Now, on to the photos:

Week 5: Urghhh…

Week 6: …More room in the closet, at least (finding the silver lining to this cloud)

Week 7: Filling out, bit by bit (bud by bud)

Week 8: Yummy smells!

Week 9: Getting closer…

Week 10: Almost done!

Week 11: Time to get CHOPPING!

…and hang to dry:

[MrGreenJeans]

Here’s one little anecdote I forgot to include in the last installment: Pot leaves make pretty ornaments.

My social circle includes many artists. So, as the growing plants were generating those big, beautiful fan leaves that had to be trimmed away anyway, I contributed some of the prettiest ones to a trusted artist friend who works in multiple media. They left a good impression on some pottery. “Pot pottery,” I guess you could call it.

…Picking up where we left off:

I let the stems/buds hang in my closet grow room for two-and-a-half weeks, keeping the humidity at 60% and the temperature at 60 degrees. I was very lucky with how steady those variables stayed throughout the process. My little electric/oil heater and old-school “humidifier” were easily up to the task.

I had started these seeds in mid/late August, flipped to flower in mid/late October, and chopped the surviving plant in mid January. Where I live, the summer heat and humidity are probably the toughest factors for an indoor grower to contend with. I don’t want my little closet grow room to dictate how the thermostat is set for the entire house. But I don’t have any way to air condition ~just~ that closet either. So I have to grow during mild or cold weather, since it’s easier to add heat than it is to remove it.

After the buds were dry, I finished trimming them, and moved them into 1 qt. Mason jars. I had enough to fill three jars 75% of the way full. I let the weed cure for another six weeks in the jars, opening them periodically, shaking and spinning them to circulate air, keeping the jars in the cool and dark.

Once the weed was cured, I put a 62% RH Boveda pack into each jar, and used a MityVac (also used for bleeding hydraulic lines on my cars) to suck the air out while holding each lid in place with one of those silicon-ring-gasketed plastic caps sold for food storage. Nothing fancy, but it worked great!

My plan was to amass a collection of vacuum-sealed jars of bud, and to make some tincture for long-term storage. The buds would get smoked, or gifted, eventually. And the tincture would come in handy for aches and pains. …Not for me, because I’m holding off until I can safely consume again, once I have left the workforce. But I have friends and family who are retired and aching from arthritis, and others who are already partying, unconcerned about being tested by their employers.

For tincture, I made a batch of Green Dragon. Everclear is not sold in my state, so I made a point of visiting a liquor store while on a visit to New York. There’s a fast way to make Green Dragon (freeze the weed and the alcohol so the tricomes become brittle and separate more easily from the other plant material) and a long, drawn out way (just keep soaking the weed in the alcohol, shaking it occasionally, but allowing TIME to take its toll). I used both, temperature and time, since I was in no rush.

I baked a few ounces of weed and a ~maybe~ ten ounces of Everclear. I wasn’t measuring, since there are so many other variables involved. It didn’t make sense to get too caught up in details.

I was a little concerned about stinking up the house during decarboxylation. Fortunately, the early-April weather was fair enough that I could open the windows. So, although it was rather smelly, it wasn’t overwhelming. Since I hadn’t ever paid much attention to the accuracy of my oven’s thermostat, I purchased a separate oven thermometer to make sure the temperature settled in and stayed at 240 degrees Fahrenheit. The timing of the bake-off was purely coincidence.

When it was done (40 minutes later), I put the pan of decarboxylated weed out in the garage to off-gas. That helped to minimize the stink indoors.

The oldest of my brothers-in-law is also the most crippled with pain. He has been retired for many years, after suffering an accident at work. He would be my guinea pig. He’s pretty straight laced. He rarely drinks - gave it up, at least in part for health reasons. He never got high. He used to take a lot of ibuprofen for pain management, but had to give that up because it was damaging his liver.

So I gave him a bottle of tincture for his birthday. I told him what it is, and he took it in stride. …Didn’t freak out about the EVIL WEED. He had no idea I was growing it, or that I had ever used it. It was a topic we had simply never broached. …Although his wife - my sister - and I used to get high together when we were young.

Over the next few months, I opened the Mason jars to give several jelly-jar-sized gifts of bud, and joints, and bowls, to other friends and family. I bought a pipe like one that was taken away from me by Security when I walked, stoned into a zombie-like state of disregard, into a VanHalen concert, back in the '70s. I also bought a nice bong, and fashioned a “kit” to store my gear. My new collection of paraphernalia hasn’t gotten much use yet, but it has come in handy a few times for my wife and our guests.

…Back to my guinea pig brother-in-law: Turns out, he DID freak out. Not about the EVIL WEED, but about the results he got when he took a dose of it. When I first gave him the tincture, I told him it was alcohol based, and that he should put a few drops under his tongue, and wait to see how it affects him before deciding whether to take more. I also told him the alcohol may burn, but he could reduce the alcohol but increase the potency of the tincture by allowing more of the alcohol to evaporate off.

He ended up putting the tincture in a cupboard with the cap off the bottle. By the time he decided to give it a try several weeks later, the amount that had evaporated was substantial. He had a few errands to run, and was out driving when, he says, his hands started to feel like balloons. …And his arms were floating. And his eyes and throat were burning dry. And everything turned swirly. And he wanted to go to sleep. He chose the WRONG TIME to try a new drug! But he confirmed for me that the tincture is potent.

My wife has also used the tincture. In fact, it came in very handy this summer, when she was battling a flair up of nerve damage in her neck/shoulder. She wiped out on a Segway years ago, and it comes back to haunt her periodically. It’s hell to get old!

Next time, I’ll get caught up with the current grow. Started in summer, despite the heat and humidity. 'Cause I couldn’t wait to get back at it!

[MrGreenJeans]

I’ve got some catching up to do.

After processing my first harvest, I planned on holding off until August before starting another round. I didn’t want my plants to have to struggle for survival in the mid-summer Virginia heat and humidity. But the growbug had bitten, and I was eager to get back into it.

While trimming the first batch, I found several seeds that appeared to be healthy and mature. I set them aside for future endeavors. Being only vaguely acquainted with how heredity works for plants, I figured I might give them a chance at growing outdoors. I had nothing to lose, since they were “freebies.” If they were tough enough to grow on their own – or with minimal care and attention, anyway – they deserved a chance. My wife and I live in the suburbs, but we’ve got enough potted flowers, herbs and vegetables scattered around the yard that I thought, half-heartedly, these little cannabis plants might be sufficiently camouflaged to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

It was early June when I placed three of the free beans into a wet paper towel between two plates, and set them in a drawer in my office. Two days later, every one of them had sprouted a tail. (I didn’t take any photos. This was before I joined OverGrow, so there was no point in documenting a grow.) I put them into soil in Solo cups, and fitted the cups with some discarded transparent plastic packaging for humidity domes. Up they came!

The seedlings each sprouted a couple pairs of leaves, and I placed them under the small burple grow lights that my wife uses for her indoor gardening. They seemed to be thriving.

Several weeks passed, and as these tender little plants grew large enough that they were ready to be up-potted, I realized I had better find them a better home. I couldn’t bring myself to toss them outdoors. I knew they would only get bigger, and smellier, and we don’t have a fenced-in area where they could grow to their full potential. So I gave them away to country-dwelling friends and family members.

Two months later, one of them is growing big and bushy outdoors in the Adirondacks, under the care of a green-thumbed sister-in-law. Another died of neglect when its caretaker went on vacation. And the third one, as far as I know, is still growing under the care of one of my wife’s colleagues. …Which brings us ~almost~ up to date.

NOW, FINALLY, we get to the current grow.

I have had great luck with germination. All of the seeds I’ve ever started have germinated. I store my seeds in sealed plastic bags, along with a single 5-gram silica gel dessicant pouch, in an air-tight aluminum canister kept in the fresh veggies drawer of our refrigerator. The order I placed last year with Kyle Kushmann’s Homegrown Cannabis Co. arrived with a bonus: A few feminized photoperiod seeds of his famous Strawberry Cough. Those were what I started five weeks ago.

I started them the same way as all the other seeds I’ve grown, and will let the photos tell the story from there.

Week 1 - both seedlings off to a good start:

Week 2, plant A:

Week 2, plant B:

Week 3, plant A:

Week 3, plant B:

Week 4, plant A:

Week 4, plant B:

Week 5, plant A:

Week 5, plant B:

Week 5, comparison of A and B together:

Still Week 5, but re-potted into 1-gal. pots:

The soil, lighting and watering/feeding has been the same for both of them, but poor little Plant B is having a rough go of it. I’m hoping the move to a bigger pot might help it pull through. I did change the soil up a bit on the up-pot, by adding more mycorrhizae (Organic Bio-tone Starter Plus) around the root zone, and adding some fresh Coco-Loco (Fox Farms) into the mix.

For the first few weeks, I was spritzing the soil every few days with a solution of distilled water with a little bit of Alaska Fish Fertilizer (5.1.1) and a little bit of Bloom City Cal-Mag (2.0.0) supplement mixed in. I gave them a foliar feeding of that same solution each week. Around week three, I added a top dressing of the Bio-tome to both cups, and washed it down with a dose of compost tea.

For the last week, I’ve fed/watered them with my compost tea, which – I’ve learned – is probably not nearly as aerobically active as ~real~ compost tea needs to be. Mine is more like distilled water run a few times through a burlap sack full of compost. I suppose it got some nutrients along the way, but it’s not nearly as nutritive to the plant-helping microbes as it would be if I had actually BREWED it for a couple of days with an air pump.

Well, that brings us up to speed. Any advice is welcome. Thanks for reading!

[ReikoX]

Compost extracts (what you did) still work amazing in the garden. You still get the nutrition and some of the biology. I prefer compost extracts for the ease of use.

[MrGreenJeans]

It seems the only time there’s interesting news to report during the vegetative state is when problems occur. If we’re lucky, the plants get bigger, send out more leaves, more stalks, yada yada yada. In other words, no news is good news.

I’ve been lucky. My plants seem to be doing fine. There’s still a big size difference between Plant A and Plant B, but they’re both still growing.

The news, for this installment, has to do with a change of plans. Now that I’ve got a few more seeds to work with (many thanks to @Going2fast and @Heliosphear), I’ve decided to plant more than two seeds at a time for future grows. All of the seeds I have attempted to grow, so far, have germinated. I live in a state that allows me to have up to four plants in flower simultaneously. So I might as well plant four seeds!

To that end, I’ve also decided to add a carbon filter. The plants I’m growing currently are not very fragrant. Although they smell good when I open the closet door, there’s certainly no odor detectable outdoors. But that may change. So I bought some carbon filter replacement (“Cut-to-Fit Carbon Pad 16 x 48 inches for Air Filter Charcoal Sheet fits Range Hoods Furnace Filters removes Odor VOC”), and a strip of metal grate from Lowes, made for keeping crap from accumulating in gutters.

Marketing for the carbon filter material says it is 1" thick, but that’s a lie. I’ve got it doubled up in the portion attached to the inside of my fan’s decorative cover (with gaffer’s tape sealing all edges), and two layers combined measures a little less than an inch. I fit another doubled up layer inside the fan’s housing, pressed up against the grate and held in place when the decorative cover is re-installed. From outward appearances, the fan looks exactly the same as it did before I added the filter. But judging by the sound of it, it’s working harder. I’ll probably remove the layers pressed against the grate, since I’d rather keep the fan working in good order than stress it out trying to remove every last molecule of scent.

The previous installment left off at week 5, with the first up-potting into 1-gallon pots. The plants took to their new homes without issue, so a few days later I topped Plant A. Plant B was too scrawny for any training.

Plant A took the topping in stride, and has been cruising along. Plant B is growing too, but is still comparatively puny. They’ve both been getting fed with the compost tea. It is now Week 8, and I’ll let the photos speak for themselves:

Week 6 group:

Week 6 Plant A:

Week 6 Plant B:

Week 7 group:

Week 7 Plant A:

Week 7 Plant B:

Week 8 group:

Week 8 Plant A:

Week 8 Plant B:

I up-potted them to a 7-gallon fabric pot for Plant A and a 4-gallon plastic pot for Plant B. This was their final up-potting.

The pot for the bigger plant got more amendments added to its soil, including more mycorrhizae, Coco-Loco, Alaska Fish Fertilizer, and some molasses. The pot for Plant B got very little additional fertilizer. Both were watered in with straight distilled water.

[Rogue]

@MrGreenJeans

But judging by the sound of it, it’s working harder.

Check on how hot the fan gets after a long period of running, better double check than losing your house to a fire. It’s just a natural odor, not worth the risk!

Thank you for your meticulous updates, a joy to read and no doubt useful to plenty of current and future generations of cultivators!

[MrGreenJeans]

Thanks for the encouragement.

I did end up removing half of the filter materials, so now the fan is drawing through two thin layers rather than four. It sounds more like it did before, and ~should~ be trouble free. But I will check on it after running for a while. Definitely better to let a little “fragrance” slip out than to create problems holding it in. (That’s what I tell my wife, anyway. )

[MrGreenJeans]

Week 11, and no news is still good news.

Both plants are enjoying their bigger pots. Plant A (the one that was more hearty) initially had a bad reaction to its soil amendments. The leaves on a few branches were yellowing toward their ends. I think the extra dose of fish guts mixed into the soil when I up-potted turned the soil for Plant A a bit too basic. …That, in combination with the cooler night-time temperatures in my grow room, with the onset of Autumn.

As a reminder, both of these plants are Strawberry Cough. Accordion to Kyle Cushman, “The Strawberry Cough feminized plant thrives in warm temperatures. Ensure that you’re in a tropical and hot climate if you wish to grow the plant outside. Ideal temperatures fall between 80–85°F during the day and 70–75°F at night.”

The grow closet was seeing mostly 80s over 70s for the first few months. But I set up my small oil heater and InkBird thermostat/timer when the outdoor temperatures at night started getting into the low 50s. The thermostat is currently set at 67 degrees at night, and 77 during the day, and the plants seem happy with that. I may experiment with warmer temperatures to see if that makes any difference.

Plant B (the runt) has really taken off! I hope I don’t come to regret putting it in a slightly smaller (4 gallon, plastic) pot than the 7 gallon fabric pots I would normally use. I intend to let these veg for at least another few weeks. I like BIG plants!

This is a sativa-dominant hybrid (80:20). Plant A was topped at week 5, and I have just (at week 11) spread its two top nodes, using clothespins and bendable insulated wire. …Pretty lackadaisical training compared to what I imposed on the indica-dominant Zkittles. I did a modest fim to Plant B, and only minimal defoliation to the bottom of both plants.

Anyway… On to the photos:

Week 9 Group:

Week 9, Plant A:

Week 9, Plant B:

Week 10 Group:

Week 10, Plant A:

Week 10, Plant B:

Week 11, Group:

Week 11, Plant A:

Week 11, Plant B:

Thanks for reading!