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!