I use homemade compost most of the time on the bottom third but I turned my heap into the garden this spring so I used 1/2 cup of standard 10-10-10 and was a little too much for 5 gallon pots. Top two thirds straight mg organics and 1/2 cup of dolomite lime. Soil straight out of the bag is enough to get the plant to flower. They don’t require much during veg. Do yourself a favor and plant a seed in straight potting soil. Don’t add anything to it. This will give you a better picture of the soils abilities. You are making the same mistake we all have done. Killing them with kindness.
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I have a couple of those little small heaters like that. The best one that I like is a fan. I got them at Home Depot for about $20. I did have to take the red light out. But it just blows a nice little mild heat. And I like the oil heaters but it’s best to have a thermostat for it. They sell them on Amazon just hang it in the tent it’ll heat up and then cut off completely and then when it’s time to turn back on the heater come on it doesn’t just sit there and just run. It would be cool if they had a temperature gauge on them. I know it’s a thermostat, but what I’m talking about be able to set it at a certain temperature. I have a big one also but I don’t run it full power.
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@Hemp : My oil heater is on an inkbird thermostat. It puts out a nice even heat, and is very efficient. I just put in a humidifier to replace the “towel in a bucket” evaporative device, since the humidity was getting so low. The humidifier is a cheap, quiet, cool mist humidifier with a 4.5 liter capacity, good for 40 hours of runtime between fill-ups, when set to the low output position. It would be nice if the humidifier had a humistat, and could turn itself on an off. But no such luck. I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how it does…
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And the same to you, my friend. Your plants look killer! At 6.5 weeks into flower, you’re about a month ahead of where I’m at but they look great. I’m excited to see how they finish up and I appreciate your inputs and general care of them.
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At Week 19 (6 weeks into flower), Plant A continues to grow apace. The buds are filling out, but – on photo day, anyway, the leaves are looking rather droopy. Some show signs of being burned from over-feeding too. It’s not ideal, but not bad enough to interfere with photosynthesis.
Plant B is also growing lots of buds, but showing more severe burns from overfeeding.
At Week 20 (7 weeks into flower), both plants are showing more signs of stress. Yellowing leaves abound on both plants. On Plant B especially, a lot of the tips of sugar leaves are getting crispy.
…Still, the grow room smells good. Most of Plant A is healthy.
…and the buds are stacking up.
Plant B has taken the over-feeding harder. There are lots of crispy leaf ends…
On the other hand, the buds on B are really going to town! They’re getting noticeably heavier.
Week 21 (8 weeks into flower) and we see more of the same… Both plants are showing yellow, burned leaves. They’ve been drinking only distilled water for the past few weeks – no soup for YOU! 
The damaged leaves are still showing enough green that I’m not plucking them or trimming them yet. The buds are continuing to fill out, and the fragrance when I open the closet door is still sweet and dank.
You can see a little baby bush hiding in the bottom center of this group photo. I stuck a couple of trimmed lower branches off of plant B into a jar of distilled water to see if they would sprout roots. Low and behold, they did! So, after a few weeks under a low-intensity burple LED, they got moved into the grow room to fend for themselves.
Plant A’s biggest fan leaves took it on the chin (if fan leaves have chins 
). So she’s got some crispy tips to go along with her yellow blush.
In her weakened state, a pole helps support one of the branches made heavy with growing buds.
If this were Sesame Street, we might learn that B (for Plant B) stands for “bedraggled.” It’s odd the way half of the plant seems to be growing spears of buds without much in the way of fan leaves, and the other half looks more “normal.”
Lots of crispy leaf ends in this gal. But the buds are stacking up nicely, getting good and sticky, and smell delicious. She’s overdue for a good trimming though…
Between Week 21 and Week 22, Mrs. GreenJeans and I went away for the holidays. I left my grow room in the care of my sister. She has a ~mostly~ green thumb. A multitude of plants seem to thrive at her house, so I figured she could be trusted not to over- or underwater mine. She did fine. We came home from a long roadtrip, and were greeted by the welcoming scent of sweet, ripening cannabis.
These little gals were doing their darndest to contribute to the welcoming committee. They were cut from plant B when she was already in flower, so they are nubile. …But relatively odor free. They were recently promoted from off the floor to a perch beside the fan. Although they are out of direct (LED) “sunlight,” they’re getting some photons.
The group photo was taken after both plants got their dead ends trimmed. This is at Week 22 (9 weeks into flower).
Here’s what plant A looked like BEFORE the trim:
…And here’s plant A after trimming:
Plant B BEFORE…
So, as you can see, quite a bit of carnage. 
That weird trait in plant B where one side of the plant is producing spears of buds and the other half is producing buds among fan leaves is more clearly evident in that second to last photo. I ended up adding a stake to help support the drooping side of spears.
This brings us up to date at Week 23 (10 weeks into flower). These gals are pretty close to the finish line at this point. I check trichomes with a jeweler’s loupe, and don’t see any ambers yet. I’m planning to cut them down when I see ~maybe~ 10% amber, hopefully well distributed through both plants. I’d rather take these a little early than a little too late.
They smell more fruity than peppery now – maybe something like fruit loops or some other sweetened cereal. I wouldn’t call it “strawberry,” as the strain’s name suggests. But it is definitely something sweet.
Group shot:
Plant A:
Plant B (leafy/buddy split even more prominent):
The closeups (from a camera phone):
Sample Bud from A:
Sample Bud from B:
I will be doing a fair bit of wet trimming when these come down (maybe some time this week). Once I get rid of the crusty leaves that resulted from an overdose of bloom fertilizers at three or four weeks into flower 
… And assuming I’m able to regulate humidity successfully as they hang to dry… Then after a final trim and a good, long cure, these should offer a satisfying high. Strawberry Cough is reportedly a very good smoke. (I hope my over-feeding hasn’t screwed them up too badly.)
I’ll keep you apprised. Thanks for reading!
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Chop Chop! After nearly 24 weeks (11 weeks into flower), the deed is done.
All things considered, I think this run will turn out fine. As expected, I did do a lot of wet trimming to eliminate brown leaf ends. Both plants put out a decent amount of buds. I don’t weigh them, but I’d guess there will be enough to fill ~maybe~ five or six quart jars.
They’re both plenty resinous. The whole house now smells like freshly harvested cannabis. 
Plant B started off as the runt, but eventually caught up and got a promotion; it was moved into a full-sized pot after reaching its stride. If the fragrance of the buds is an accurate indication, this one may be closer to the phenotype for Strawberry Cough that Kyle Cushman developed and has been keeping as a clone. (Both of these plants were grown from seed.) During the wet trim, the scent of the buds on Plant B ranged from sweet – sometimes something like butterscotch, sometimes grape candy, sometimes licorice – to pepper or cloves. Maybe the sweetness becomes more strawberry-like with age…
Plant A turned out more skunky. Its buds smelled like burned rubber, garlic, and skunk. Both were pretty loud compared to the ZKittles I harvested last year. The buds are not as big, but they smell like they’re packing more of a punch. Time will tell.
Here’s the goods:
Twenty six branches are now hanging to dry, after my grow room was converted to a drying room. That shelf folds up against the wall when it’s a grow room, and down into place for drying – sort of like a murphy bed.
The exhaust fan is on full time, and I’ve added a small humdifier. I tried the humidifier at the “low” setting, which got the room up to abut 45% humidity. So I’ve got it running on “medium” now.
The soil will go into the composter to be reinvigorated. A post-mortem look at the roots shows that Plant B’s roots were better developed than those from plant A. (Either that, or I was just more meticulous when shaking the soil out of B’s roots. 
I may have left some of A’s roots in the planter.) The stems were both generally the same size.
Plant A’s roots:
Plant B’s roots:
I will provide a smoke report on these …eventually… My wife will be the guinea pig, since I’m still abstaining.
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Nicely done @MrGreenJeans ! Skunk/burnt rubber you say! Yes my kinda bud! Can’t wait to hear what the wife thinks…. I don’t know how u abstain with all that fresh dank 
awesome!
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Thanks Brother!
It’s VERY tempting.
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Haha no doubt! You must have some serious willpower! Me however…… very very little
SMOKE REPORT:
I ended up bottling this batch a little sooner than I had initially intended. We’ll be hosting houseguests for the next week, and I wanted to get the highly aromatic task of final trimming done before they arrive. That’s a compromise I’m willing to make in order to avoid having to deal with my mother-in-law’s inquiries about the smell, and why I’m spending so much time alone.
That, plus I’ve had a hard time keeping the humidity near my target of 60%. It has fluctuated quite a bit, from as low as 28% (when I left the humidifier off and the exhaust fan running) to as high as 78% (when I experimented with leaving the humidifier on and the exhaust fan off). For the most part, I’ve had both running at the same time. But even with the humidifier cranked as high as it goes, the exhuast fan was sucking away the moisture. On average, the relative humidity stayed in the mid 40s. So the plants were drying a little quicker than ideal. They hung for only 8 days. But they felt and smelled ready for the next step. So, on Sunday morning, I set about trimming and bottling them.
Once the dry trimming was done, I scraped the resin from my scissors and my sticky fingertips, and asked my wife if she wanted to test it. She agreed to have at it, so I put it into the bowl of my bong. There was very little material; it was just a few flakes, the size of a crumpled ant. So I was amazed at how much smoke it generated. She inhaled a thick and billowing column of it, and – true to the strain’s name (Strawberry Cough) – immediately commenced to coughing. I capped the bowl and the mouth of the bong with my hands, holding what was left inside, since she was unable to inhale all of it.
I showed her the cloud still swirling in the bong, and told her it wasn’t done yet. So she stepped up to the plate and took another massive hit as I torched the little blob of goo. Once again, she coughed out a thick, dense cloud of smoke before I even had a chance to lift the bowl. I took a look at what was left. …Still going. So, once again, I capped the bong to capture the remaining smoke.
She was a little less eager to go a third round so quickly. But it was probably only a minute later when she did her darndest to finish off the glowing ember. She got ~most~ of it, leaving only a residual haze floating in the bong’s neck. I was curious whether there was anything strawberry-tasting about it, so I sucked that down, myself.
Nothing about it reminded me of strawberries, but it was peppery. It didn’t look like much, but it expanded to fill my lungs. And a few minutes later, I realized it was also VERY potent.
When I first indulged in weed, the summer between 10th and 11th grades (in the '70s), it took me a few smoking sessions before I actually got high. I haven’t gotten high for more than 40 years, so I figured my brain wouldn’t even register the tiny amount of THC in that little wisp of leftover smoke. There was hardly anything to it! But, maaannnnnnn… That smoke was the BOMB!
Early on, my wife reported visual distortions, seeing speed trails behind objects as they entered into and then left her field of vision. Not much later, she wanted to lie down and take a nap despite having a full day’s agenda (preparing for our houseguests’ arrival). She laid down but said she didn’t sleep. Instead, she said her mind conjured a pastiche of people and events from the past and the future; just random snippets of unrelated thoughts, like a bunch of movies from different eras and different genres spliced together.
As she was resting, I set about trying to do most of what was on my to-do list. I was moderately impaired; definitely too stoned to drive, but able to tackle the chores I had set out for myself – despite ocassionally forgetting what I was doing, talking to myself a lot, and making way too many trips up and down the stairs or out into the garage for things I would normally consolidate into a single trip.
Two or three hours passed, and my wife got up. I told her the reason she was dragging was because she hadn’t been outdoors yet. It was a cold but cloudless, windless day. I had been doing a combination of indoor and outdoor chores, and was feeling invigorated by the warmth of the sun. So I convinced her to come out for a walk. We were both still tripping, and enjoyed the conversation combined with a little bit of exercise.
Any way, to make a long story only slightly shorter (sorry for rambling), we were high for most of the day. Assuming this weed cures to a finish that’s anywhere near as potent as that little chunk of resin, it’ll be very popular. I only netted three quart jars, each as full as can be. But they ought to last quite a while. I’m still abstaining, but once I get back in the game, I may be able to get high from of a small fraction of a toke. 
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Holy heck @MrGreenJeans did i read that correctly and you caught a contact high off that scissor hash?
Man ive been smoking everyday multiple times a day for years. Sometimes i forget how powerful marijuana can be. Some strains get me all weirded and wound up almost like the oncoming of a bad trip but never have i felt like i was actually tripping.
40 year break youre going to be shooting for the moon when you take your first hit after 40 years.
Edit: i totally missed the part where u said there was a bit left in the bong neck that you cleared out
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Yep! 
It was just a little more than a contact high. I finished off what was left in the chamber. I figure she took nearly three quarters of that last hit, and left me some leftovers. I’m going to have to start slowly when I get back at it.
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Definitely gonna have to take it slow lol.
In highschool i just got off probation and i took a piece of bud out of my gpops drawer and it was like a 0.25 or less. I rolled a spider leg joint and smoked half of it and when i went back to class i was mentally hanging on for dear life. Lol i felt like i couldnt breath and shit i was so stoned. Then some chick smelled it on me and was like come on lets go smoke and i was like nah im good and she wouldnt stop asking so i tried to give her the half of spider leg and when she seen it she goes wtf is that theres nothing there im good and rolled out lol
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Cue Cheech and Chong from the second scene in Up In Smoke, when Cheech is fumbling around in his pocket for joint.
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The last two years, I’ve grown only from late summer through early winter, because the temperature and humidity in my grow room are easier to manage during that time of year. I live in an area that gets very hot and humid during the depths of summer, and I’m not willing to fight Mother Nature tooth and nail. I can heat my grow room pretty easily, but keeping it cool presents more of a problem.
This year, I’m getting an earlier start. The temperature and humidity are mild enough from late winter through early summer that I think I can manage to get a crop of auto-flowers through to harvest.
I received a flip of Pound Cake and a flip of Bessie Cake, both auto-flower regulars, from @Going2fast last summer. Two of each, along with one randomly-selected “mystery seed” from @Reznfingeez33, went into the incubator last Sunday.
I use the paper towel method to germinate seeds. To date, every seed I’ve ever attempted to grow has sprouted a taproot using this method. Because I keep the house in the 60s during winter, the germinating seeds need a little extra warmth. They get that from an old router, which I plug in and lay on its side in a desk drawer. On top of that, a layer of foam insulation (to keep the bottom plate from getting too hot), and a sandwich of two plates with wet paper towels and seeds soaking inside. I leave the drawer open a few inches to let out the extra heat.
Two days later:
The straggler (whose taproot is barely starting to poke free of the seed casing in the photo above) is one of the Pound Cakes. Everybody else got put into a 3-gallon container of soil that had been pre-heated to 74 degrees in the grow room. The straggler got an extra day or two in the incubator, and was put into soil mid-week. It now shares a pot with the mystery bean. The straggler hadn’t made much progress on taproot development, even with the extra time in the incubator. So that one may not survive. But they’re all in the soil now.
I’m doing a few small experiments: Two of the pots (the ones containing #1 of each strain) have speed holes burned in around their sides, in an attempt to provide more oxygen. I got that idea from one of our fellow OGers, who uses Solo cups riddled with holes. (Sorry, but I wasn’t taking notes to keep track of who that was.) These “holy” pots also contain a layer of Alaska Fish Fertilizer (5.1.1) two thirds of the way down, where the pots with the #2s do not.
Other than that, the soil is a lot like what I’ve been using: Organic potting soil amended with compost, perlite, some FoxFarms Coco Loco, worm castings and a dose of organic Bio-tone Starter Plus sprinkled in around where the seeds went it.
By the end of the week, everybody but the straggler had poked his or her head above ground. This is my first time (in the modern era) growing regular seeds. Judging by the vigor of Bessie Cake #1, I won’t be surprised if that one is a male. It was above ground only two days after hitting the soil (four days from dry seed to green sprout)!
My light is set at about 15% power, for a nice, stress-free approximation of an early spring day. ...A day that lasts for 18 hours, with a temperature ranging between 73 and 75 degrees, and humidity at a relatively dry 34% (despite the fact that we've had rain for most of this week), hence the humidity domes.
Wish me luck!
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Very cool! I find that method to be ideal as well, it just works. Perfectly! Good luck , you’ve got this for sure! Looking forward to the fun
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Awesome can’t wait to see how these turn out. Good luck green jeans 
sitting on the dock with a comfy chair and a Fresca in hand 
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Very cool my friend and a well thought out start. But you are misinformed. All of my autos are ladies. I’ve never done regulars. Sorry for the mixup.
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BETTER YET! 
More buds to enjoy!
Today marks the 1 week anniversary of these seeds getting wet. The #2 Pound Cake – which is sharing her pot with the Mystery Bean – still hasn’t reared her head above soil.
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