This diary is for my third and final indoor tent.
In this 3x3 tent, I have a 2x2x1.5ft fabric raised garden bed. I just completed my first grow with it, and I’m satisfied with the results of the raised bed and my soil mix.
I’m documenting this grow post-harvest, to show what I was able to achieve, and the challenges I faced.
For this first time using a raised bed, and a new soil recipe I’ve tweaked, I decided to do pretty much everything differently than I normally do, starting with the first CBD-dominant cultivar I ever grew: Purplematic CBD, by Royal Queen Seeds, an autoflowering variety.
I did have another CBD variety growing in the bed too, but it was a runt, and couldn’t deal with some of the stress that I caused her, so was up-rooted shortly after flowering began with the primary plant.
To start things off, I prepared my new soil recipe, and filled the raised bed, with a few inches from the top remaining. The bed itself holds about 45 gallons, so about 40 or so.
Because we’re doing everything different this round, I decided it would be a good idea to first sow a bunch of legumes (cover crops), to loosen up the soil and add some beneficial organisms. 4 days later, things were out of control:
While transplanting from the starter plugs, I mowed it down (painfully with scissors):
And then I transplanted the two seedlings:
The cover crop was growing too fast, close to 1ft tall per day. So I decided to try something else new. I layed out a few inches of pea gravel over the top to try to kill it. Its primary purpose was to loosen up the soil with their root nodules, so killing it seemed okay to me:
Well, that worked partially, but for the next couple of weeks I was pulling out legumes by hand until none were left. I didn’t need weeds overshadowing my cannabis in the matter of 24 hours.
At the end of week two, I noticed that I was over-watering them a bit. I was all new to this raised bed, and didn’t think I was, but the leaves were telling me so:
And the symptoms continued into week 3, with the first couple of nodes’ leaves sagging to the ground most of the time:
After giving her a drought for 3 days to get the roots stretching, I watered her with a mycorrhizal fungi solution to strengthen that growth process.
By week 4, she was looking a bit better, and I decided to try yet another new thing for me: I built a ScrOG net and installed it:
I placed it very low, only an inch or two from the bed, because I could see stigmas forming and expected a stretch. She is an autoflowering cultivar, after all.
I was right, and she started to grow above the net by the next day, so I wove her apical stem, bending it at a near 90 degree angle, into the net, along with some other branches as they reached the top.
Unfortunately, I made a horrible mistake that affected the duration of this grow. I took my eye off of her for a day, and her apical stem decided to grow nearly a foot overnight. Bending it again would have meant snapping it, so I decided to just let it grow upward, and wove the rest of her into the net.
By the end of week 5, she had flowers forming, and a very tall main cola:
Week 6:
Week 7 is where the real trouble started. We had a big heat wave in the triple digits (F), and my lung room’s heavy duty equipment was struggling to keep things under control. This, in combination with her main cola dominating in height and being too close to the light, caused her leaves to turn yellow from heat stress:
But with some purple starting to poke through:
A friend of mine who grew this strain also experienced yellowing later in flower, under much cooler temperatures and away from the light, but his developed much deeper purples over the yellow.
For the next two weeks, temperatures just wouldn’t go down, and my lung room with 2 large A/C’s running, was 80-85F at times, even hotter in the tent. So, things got worse.
By week 8, we were starting to see senescence already, on the yellow leathery leaves:
As well as some stigmas starting to change color:
Week 9:
When week 10 came by, I didn’t notice much of any more bud formation. She was already the largest autoflower I ever grew, and I knew it’d be a decent harvest, so I chopped her early. This is mostly because it was now starting to cool off with lots of rain, and the humidity was now through the roof instead of temperature. I was struggling to keep it under 60% in late flower. I’ve had my fair share of PM and bud rot, and didn’t want that again, so I figured it was better to chop early, especially since she wasn’t growing much anymore. She had some amber trichomes with mostly cloudy, so maybe she was done. Who knows, as not all cannabis will have all of their stigmas change color, or get very dense colas.
Right before the chop, she looked like this:
And finally, hung to dry:
After 8 days of drying, at about 72F/55% (which was extremely hard to achieve with the weather we were having), we had just the right level of dryness to begin the trim.
A small sample of the resulting bud:
At the end of the day, we were left with 145g (over 5oz) of dried and trimmed flower. It went into my curing jars, and has been there for about half a week now. I don’t sample any of my cannabis until 4-6 weeks of curing, so no smoke report yet.
This was by far the largest return I got off of a single autoflowering plant (indoor). The buds smell incredibly citrusy. Actually, I forgot to mention, but she smelled incredibly citrusy 2 weeks before she even began flowering – that’s how strong-smelling this cultivar is.
I’m very happy with the result, all things considered.
In the coming days I will be starting a new plant in this tent/raised bed. Until then, thanks for stopping by!
