MrGreenJeans starts growing!

I think you’re both right. It’s probably a squash or gourd of some type, judging by how thick the leaves are.

I am most certainly in that beginner category, on my first grow, so it helps a ton :slight_smile: Thanks again!

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No worries, I knew a mr greenjeans on Growkind
A site from.out west that has gotten very sleepy these days.

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THREE WEEKS since germination:

Not much to report, so I’ll just share a group photo. They’re all content in their environment. I turned the light up a little, mid-way through the week. It’s set at about 40%. The intruder got plucked.


FOUR WEEKS since germination:

Another good week of growth, and another single group photo to show for it. I’m watering every other day, with nothing but distilled water. I replaced the paper identification tags with plastic (re-purposed from a grass seed bag), since the paper was getting funky.

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Good morning/afternoon my friend. Looking good,nice and healthy and clean. Hope you are having a great weekend and had an amazing week as well. :facepunch:t2:

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Looking good my friend.

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Good afternoon, Brother.

Yes, the girls are thriving. …Got some other things in the works too, which - despite the wait - should make for a pleasant surprise.

Thanks Buddy. …The vibrant growth these auto-flowers are displaying must be in their genes. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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FIVE WEEKS since germination:

At five weeks, the group photo shows all four are healthy plants. I raised the light a few inches, and turned it up to about 55% intensity.




PoundCake is starting to put out some buds. This is one of the plants that got an extra dose of fish emulsion down deep in its pot when the plants first went it. Its pot also has the extra air holes burned into its sides. Those might be contributing to its precociousness. …Or it might just be this particular plant’s nature. The #1 BessieCake got the same treatment, and it seems to be on par with the other two plants, in terms of sexual development.




SIX WEEKS since germination:

Mid-week, all four plants got a light top dressing of Dr. Earth Flower Girl watered in with a bit of cal-mag added to the distilled water they’ve been enjoying. The light got turned up a little too ~ to between 60% and 70% intensity. And the temperature got turned down a few degrees, from 75 to 73. Everybody seems to be happy. :hugs:

The stems on all four plants are nice and thick. The PoundCake has started to stretch.




The plant growing from the “mystery bean” has very nice structure.

…and some very large fan leaves.




I haven’t done any training on any of these plants. My plan is to just let the autos do their thing. There’s not a lot of room for the mystery plant to get very wide, but I’ll be looking for ways to provide it with as much light as I can make available. …Kind of depends on what its stablemates allow, since it’s three against one, in terms of dictating the light schedule. Odds are that the mystery bean is NOT auto-flowering.

The lighting is still on for 18 hours a day. Should I just keep it that way? Or make any adjustments as the autos go into flower?

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Those are all looking great brother. Nice and deep green, super healthy! Just pristine ! More great work as always, looking forward too seeing what these produce for you :facepunch:t2:

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Some observations for Week 7 from germination:

The PoundCake shows more inclination toward auto-flowering than the BessieCakes do. PoundCake is nearly two full weeks ahead of the BessieCakes in that regard. I’d like to get all of these plants to harvest around the same time, since my grow room serves double duty as my drying room. And I’d like to get them to harvest before the crop-wrecking heat and humidity descend on Central Virginia they way they inexorably do. These plants are in a race against the clock.

But the MysteryBean has a mind of its own. It just wants to grow, Grow, GROW. (That’s not surprising. I knew from the start that the Mystery Bean was not an auto-flower.) This plant goes through water much faster than the other three, and is starting to tower over them. Its petioles are as long as I’ve seen on weed, and its fan leaves are enormous. We may have a case of The Ugly Duckling syndrome here, where an outdoor-preferring giant has managed to take up roost in the hen house. Not that I’m complaining: I like BIG plants and I cannot lie. I just hope that it doesn’t run through all of the nutrients in the soil of a 3-gallon pot. Given room, this girl would have probably wanted to live in one of the 7-gallon fabric pots I usually use. My tiny grow space wouldn’t allow that this time around. …I also hope she doesn’t take too much longer to flower.

So I adjusted the light schedule. It went from 18:6 to 14:10, and then to 12:12 over a period of several days. I also turned down the heat, but just a couple degrees. And I did a light round of defoliation, mainly taking some lower fan leaves.

On to the photos:

Group shot:

PoundCake:

BessieCake #1:

BessieCake #2:

Mystery Bean:


8 Weeks since germination:

These things continue to grow like weeds! Happy weeds, at that. :smile:

I haven’t made any dramatic changes this week. I ~did~ cut down the corners of the foil roasting pans in which the pots are sitting, which allowed more room for me to spread the plants further apart. I also raised the light, since the Mystery Bean – and now also BessieCake #2 – have been stretching. And I fed everybody another top dressing of Dr. Earth Flower Girl.

I’m relieved to see that the Mystery Bean has finally started going into flower. She’s a laggard, but she seems to be content at this stage of the game.

On a different note, I hope everybody had a happy 4/20! I hope @HighTilliDie 's wedding celebration was joyful, and the candyfloss was a BIG hit!

I celebrated the occasion by starting a batch of tincture. Mrs. GreenJeans recently acquired an Instant Pot, so I considered using it to decarb the weed and infuse some MCT oil. That looks like a way to speed up the process and minimize odor. Also, my wife has been hoping for an easier way to ingest the tincture, since the alcohol-based stuff is – let’s face it – downright nasty to taste. :woozy_face: We have a friend who buys tincture that’s nearly colorless and is reportedly no great challenge to eat. That version is made with coconut oil, according to our friend.

But I don’t like that oil infusions are less efficient at extracting cannabinoids, and with the small batches of weed that I grow, every little bit matters. So I’m doing ~some~ with oil, and ~some~ with alcohol. …Still experimenting to see what we like best.

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Thanks for the tag and the kind words me and my wife appreciate it . I got the idea from @ReikoX and reading his posts. It turns out you can use the pre flavored sugar already for cotton candy and mix the green dragon (alcohol tincture) in the sugar. We did 1 cup sugar to 1 cup green dragon at 200 degrees in the oven until the alcohol was dissolved and we were left with a golden sand (Banana flavored sugar so it was already yellow) but it was dangerously strong in sugar form if you were just eating the sugar before turning it into cotton candy. You could taste the everclear burn in the back of your throat if you ate too much but the burn wasn’t there as much after being turned into the fluffy candy

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That’s such a novel approach to making tincture edible. Much respect for your ingenuity. Screen Shot 2024-04-21 at 5.32.44 PM

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9 Weeks since germination:

We’re getting an early dose of summer heat here in Central Virginia. Temperatures were predicted to top out near 90 degrees for several days in a row. So I bought a portable air conditioner and installed it with a duct that blows into the grow closet. I set the thermostat on this a/c unit to 72. Mrs. GreenJeans is now envious of the plants. (We keep the house around 77 in mid-summer, which is uncomfortably warm according to her. I could handle keeping it at 80, so 77 is a compromise.)

I wasn’t planning on this grow lasting beyond late May or early June, because I’m not willing to fight the heat. With luck, the autos will be done by then. Pound Cake was the first to go into flower, and she did so without prompting at 5 weeks since germination. The two Bessie Cakes wanted to stretch out a bit more before showing any bud sites, but they eventually caught on, showing bud sites by week six. I decided to help things along in week 7, because the Mystery Bean will take a bit longer. It’s looking more and more Sativa-leaning.

Anyway, here’s how they look at week 9 (roughly two weeks since the flip to 12:12):

Group shot:


Here’s a bud close-up of the early girl, PoundCake:


Bessie Cake #1 (whose soil had a dose of fish emulsion right from the start) has plenty of pistils popping:


Bessie Cake #2 is not far behind:


...And, bringing up the rear, the giraffe of the bunch, the Mystery Bean:


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10 Weeks since germination: (approximately three weeks into flower)

The tincture I made on 4/20 (two weeks ago) has been sitting on a dark shelf, its alcohol slowly evaporating off. I ended up combining the MCT oil and the Everclear into a single batch. So, what I ~think~ will happen is that as the alcohol evaporates, the cannabinoid resins will all be emulsified in the oil that’s left. …Which ought to be less caustic under the tongue than the pure alcohol-based version I made last year. It’ll probably still taste nasty. I may try adding some flavoring agent (concentrated peppermint, maybe) to make it more palatable.

My thinking is that since the alcohol is more efficient than the oil at extracting cannabinoids, this method will result in the best of both media: more potent medicine, but with a “softer” delivery. Time will tell.

Here you can see the alcohol on top, and the oil on the bottom.

Meanwhile, the plants are chugging along. They have been very thirsty, which I interpret as a good sign. The newly added air conditioner has come in handy for moderating temperatures. You’ll notice the ducting in several photos, below. …So much for keeping this a ~stealthy~ grow room!

Oh well… It’s a temporary solution. I don’t intend to have anything growing in there when summer comes. And my next crop will start in mid-August and run through late January, so a/c will not be needed.

Aside from the plants being one week more mature, the only other noteworthy thing this week is that I switched the light cycle again. It has been running 12:12 since Week 7 (three weeks ago). But, this week, thanks to helpful suggestions from @Indicana_Jones and @Foreigner, I changed the ~on~ start time from an 11 am to 7 pm. Running the light at night ought to make battling the heat a little easier. …Wish I’d thought of that earlier, but I didn’t expect to be dealing with hot weather so soon.

Anyway, on to the photos:

The Pound Cake is getting frosty:


BessieCake #1:


BessieCake #2:


Mystery Bean:


With these four plants, my grow closet is at MAXIMUM capacity.
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Looking good Mr.

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Nice grow, man!

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Leaves standing at attention! You keep em happy over there for sure. Nice plants!

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Mystery bean is a bean pole. Very cool. Plants are looking great!

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11 weeks since germination (4 since the flip to 12:12), and these ladies are getting STINKY (in a good way)!

The early bird (PoundCake) smells woodsy, like incense and pepper. I haven’t gotten a really distinct whiff of either of the BessieCakes, but they’re both getting funky. …Maybe something along the lines of cat piss or garlic. They just smell a lot like spicy WEED. :slight_smile: And the Mystery Bean is starting to smell rather sweet and fruity. It’s not as strong as the others yet, but it does have its own unique aroma.

I stuck a post beside the Mystery Bean, since she was starting to lean over. There’s not enough room in this grow closet for slackers; everybody must remain at attention in order for all of them to get their quota of light. My choice of supports (a hollow metal flag pole) might have been a bit cruel to the plant’s roots. I heard/felt a lot of limbs being cut as it went in. …More on this later.

Managing humidity has been an issue. The ambient temperature has moderated. It’s more spring-like, so the air conditioner is not getting much use. But we’ve had lots of rain. I’ve been leaving the exhaust fan running most of the time, which has helped keep the humidity below 60% for the most part. I’ll turn the fan off for a little while, when I’m home, just to give the motor a rest. The highest I’ve seen was a spike to 63%. So, I’m not too worried about it.

Everybody got a top dressing mid-week, which included a combination of Dr. Earth Flower Girl (Bloom fertilizers), some earthworm castings, and regular old healthy organic soil with compost and perlite mixed in. I watered it in with a helping of cal-mag added to the distilled water.

PoundCake:

BessieCake #1

BessieCake #2:

Mystery Bean (now staked to a pole):

The top of Mystery Bean:

Group Photo:


At 12 weeks since germination (5 since flip), I’ve taken to scoping on the PoundCake’s tricomes to see how much longer she needs to go. Recall that the PoundCake (an auto-flower) went into bloom after only 5 weeks in vegetation. So she got an earlier start than the other two auto-flowers (the BessieCakes), which eventually started to blossom on their own maybe a week and a half later. I use a cheap jeweler’s loupe with built-in LED lighting to look at the tricomes. It’s not great – certainly no good for taking photos – but it’s good enough to see how cloudy or amber the the heads are becoming. Anyway, the PoundCake has a few ~partly~ cloudy tricomes, but most are still clear. No ambers yet.

The big news is that a few of the largest fan leaves on the Mystery Bean started looking bedraggled. They were becoming variegated, with lighter green mottling. I initially diagnosed it as a deficiency of calcium and/or magnesium, based on how those leaves looked. But it seemed odd to me that the affected leaves would be the big fan leaves. (I’ve read that calcium deficiency affects new leaves still coming in. The newer leaves all look healthy.) In any case, I added some cal-mag to the water shared with all plants.

It also occurred to me that the mottling of a few of the largest fan leaves may a result of the damage caused by cutting into the roots with that flag pole. There was a whole lot of crunching going on as I pressed that pole into the soil right beside the base of the plant. :thinking: So, that may have set the big leaves into motion, giving themselves up to support the newer growth while the roots took time to recover from the trauma inflicted when they were cut by the sharp metal pole.

None of the other plants have had any complaints, anyway. So, on to the photos.

PoundCake side:

PoundCake bud:

BessieCake #1 (the one that’s shorter)

BessieCake #1 bud:

BessieCake #2 (the one that’s taller)

BessieCake #2 bud:

Mystery Bean:

Mystery Bean Bud:

Several of these gals are headed for the home stretch. I’ll keep you all apprised. :man_farmer:

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Beautiful work. Man mystery bean really went north. Curious about pound cake. She looks extra frosty.

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Great thread MrGreenJeans!!
I went through it top to bottom, this evening.
You doing awesome work with your garden.
Always feel free to hit me, if you have any questions of how I do a thing.
Take care!! webe

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