Topdecker's First Autoflower Grow

[Topdecker]

Time Elapsed: 4 weeks

One of the Gabagoo’s (A) was clearly a male and two days ago went to the mulch pile. So far, of the 8 regs planted (Gabagoo x 4 and Beast Mode x 4), 7 seem as though they might be female which is sort of crazy. I am not particularly experienced with determining the sex of plants, but the single male showed his junk 4 days ago now - I let him develop for a few days and then yanked him.

Anyhow, here is the current canopy:

Here is an under-canopy shot:

The tallest plant is now 15" tall and it packed on 10" of growth over the last week. The height of the plants range from 15" down 7.5" with the plants in the 1 gallon pots trending towards shorter which makes perfect sense. All of the bagged plants are at least 10" or 11" tall.

I did apply cal-mag early in the week and then later in the week they were fed some more Flower Fuel at 50% strength. So far no, none of the plants appear to have burned from the feeding.

The outdoor Pure Michigan… I am starting to regret taking the plant outdoors early. It has rained incessantly and I haven’t gotten him into the ground. The plant is now on the smaller side of the spectrum but it is now toughened-up to sun and wind. Putting the plant out early was experiment of sorts - one the Beast Modes is supposed to go out as well, but I decided to leave them under the lights for a long as possible.

In closing, I expect the accelerated growth to continue this week and hope to see a couple of plants start to flower. I will stay on it with water and nutrients while watching for any late developing males.

[Topdecker]

Time Elapsed: 5 weeks

We’re at the mid-point for several of the cultivars. The entire grow will probably got 12 weeks, but weeks 9 through 11 should be the big ones.

Anyhow, here is a group pic of those that remain:

Those in the 3 gallon cloth pots are 22-24" tall. Watering has been every 2 days, but I may have to switch to daily as they increase in size. The plants in the 2 gallon pots are around 18" and are not as wide either.

Here is a side-shot of a single plant:

And a close-up of the proto-buds:

There was 9" of growth this week and I am going to take a few days out of the feed cycle and feed them a bit more often since they should be able to use the extra nutes.

The experiment for this week was to do a light trim on one plant and see how it handled it. All of the other plants, I tucked leaves out of the way, but for Tropicana Cookies, I trimmed some of the lower fan leaves and stems that I thought would, at best, produce larf.

The results? She didn’t grow for two days. And when you are in a grow stage like this, it means that she fell behind and is now the shortest of the bagged plants. That’s one plant, one time, so I’ll do this again but for now I am going to stick with mild approaches and trim extremely lightly if at all.

[Topdecker]

Time Elapsed: 6 weeks

Mother’s day marked the end of 6 weeks of growing. The autos in 3 gallon containers are 26" to 31" in height and all of them have buds forming up nicely. So we had roughly 7" of growth and all of that ‘spare’ energy went into forming buds.
Sort of turning out like a sea of green grow. I am still tucking and rarely removing fan leaves.

In this coming week I am anticipating maybe 4 or 5 inches of growth while the buds expand a great deal. They should be dropping out of veg and going full flower.

[Distinct-Historian37]

Can’t wait to see those buds in full bloom, man!

[Topdecker]

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I am really looking forward to it as well!

[Topdecker]

Time elapsed: 7 weeks

It was a busy week in grow land! Amnesia Zkittlez showed signs of a magnesium deficiency, so everyone got a couple of doses of calmag which seems to have corrected the problem. AZ is still impacted, her color is better but there is no fixing the brown spots.

You can see a bit of the brown in this image, but I caught it, diagnosed it correctly, and as you can see it’s looking ok.

I also finally decided to trim most of the plants, thinning out the thin stems, lower leafy stuff, and generally getting them ready to roll across the nearing finish line. The plants are large enough now that they didn’t hiccup (much) and none of them seemed unhappy or sluggish.

I did some outdoor transplanting and ended up putting Gabagoo outdoors. Why? Well, the plant was taller and wider than Beast Mode and BM had originally been slated to go out. Since this is a space game with a small tent, I put Gabagoo outside. Also, Gabagoo is the only plant that hasn’t flowered. If she is late, it isn’t a problem.

As it stands now, Beast Mode is 17.5 inches tall. She’s grown 1.5 inches over the last 2 days, so maybe it will make it to 20-21 inches. I checked in with Carty and he said it had a smaller pheno which is cool because I really wanted a 2’ or smaller auto.

Just because Beast Mode is small, it doesn’t mean she’s not going to provide:

Jammy Dodgers and GG#4 are both really going off too. These two currently have the most impressive bud growth. Here is Jammy:

None of the plants look close to being done to me. Not many orange hairs, they are still growing upwards, and it will be at least 2 more weeks before anything might even possibly be nearing ready.

The tallest plant is Strawberry Cough at 35" and it is finally slowing down having only grown 4" this week. Because she’s spent more energy growing, her buds aren’t yet looking like much. Zamnesia’s info card says that it has a 10-11 week grow cycle and I think that it will take every bit of 4 weeks for it to fill out properly.

I will edit this later and add a group shot. For some reason the one that I too failed to write to the memory chip.

[Carty]

Love to see a grow turn around like this… are you smiling now dude. hehe.
Autos are freaky plants and amaze me almost every grow with what they do, some very late in their game. Wanna get them to get bigger. Flip your lights to 12/12 for 2wks. I truly believe what this does is activate the photo period lying dormant within the plant and activates that big stretch a wee bit. then back to 18/6.

I’ve run Autos on 12/12 thru the entire grow with great results…

They ALWAYS need a dark cycle… some Auto growers think that because it’s an auto, 24hrs of light makes for a bigger plant… not the way it works. dark cycles are needed also, it’s when they create a lot of their goodness like oils…

Rock on bro… things are looking pretty good you ask me…

[Topdecker]

Time Elapsed: 8 weeks

This week was pretty laid back. I rotate the plants around the tent once a week. I also spin the pots about mid-week with the idea being to make sure that they get a more even amount of light overall.

Here is a group shot:

Strawberry Cough is over 37" tall - so she is almost completely done with growing. All of the other plants are 31" to 32" in height except for GG#4 who parked it at 28" a couple of weeks ago. And Gabagoo who has also pretty much stopped growing just a bit shy of 18".

So if they weren’t growing, they had to be flowering, right? Right! They keep thickening up the bud density. Here are some bud shots.

Strawberry Cough:

GG#4

Tropical Cookies:

Jammy Dodgers:

Amnesia Zkittlez:

Beast Mode:

The only plant with a lot of orange showing is Beast Mode and, to much lesser degree, GG#4. I suspect that they’ll be the first and second plants harvested, but they’ve got awhile. The other plants are not even close to harvest - I would guess at least 3 weeks on them.

I read somewhere that it does zero good to feed plants within the last 2 weeks of harvest. Most folks stop and then flush their plants. I am not sure how they works out with autos, so I guess I need to do a bit of research.

[Topdecker]

Time Elapsed: 9 weeks

It was another fairly effortless week, with me doing some fairly minor trimming primarily on leaves that were already starting to fall off. As per usual, I rotated the plants and eventually changed their positions within the tent in an attempt to make sure that all sides see an even amount of light.

I will try to keep the same photo order as last week. Here is the group shot:

Strawberry Cough is now over 38" tall and clear is about done with growth. I am not sure that she’ll make it to 39" which is fine. There has been no real change in any of the other cultivars.

Here are some close-ups of the growing flowers. First up, Strawberry Cough (Zamnesia) who is quickly catching up to her peers:

Here is GG#4 (Zamnesia) and it is closer to harvest than most:

Tropical Cookies (Fast Buds) still has a way to go:

Here is Jammy Dodgers (Mephisto) which is my tent’s frost champion:

Amnesia Zkittlez (Fast Buds) has been a little more finicky than her sisters, but she’s coming on strong now:

And finally, we’ve got Beast Mode. I misnamed her last week and have edited last week’s post to correct it. She’s small and I expect less than half an ounce from her, but that is ok.

This is shaping up like it will consume most of June in order to finish up the plants. Amnesia Zkittlez, Strawberry Cough, and Tropical Cookies don’t even have any orange pistils yet.

I am not complaining, but by now I am getting eager to sample each plant’s gifts.

[argyle]

Following your grow, your plants look amazing.

[Topdecker]

Time Elapsed: 10 weeks

Ok, we’re rounding into the home stretch! I plan on harvesting 2 of the ladies this coming week (GG#4 and Jammy Dodgers) and I cut down the short but fast Beast Mode a few days ago. The remaining 3 plants were given what will be their final feeding and I’m letting them go another 2 weeks or so (probably longer for Strawberry Cough).

How does Beast Mode look for productivity? She was 17.5" tall and I am expecting 4/10th of an ounce. She did fine for her size, but as previously mentioned, my plants were all of the smaller phenotype and it’s just luck of the draw. I enjoyed growing her and hope her nugs smoke well.

Here is the group shot of those that remain:

That is GG#4 in the front left corner. Jammy Dodgers is the in front right corner. They are placed for easy access since they’ll be harvested. Dead center is occupied by Strawberry Cough and if you look, you will note that this girl is laden with buds.

The back left corner is occupied by Tropicana Cookies. And the back right corner is the home of Amnesia Zkittlez.

Here is the bud shot for GG#4:

Then Tropicana Cookies:

Almost 39" tall and the slowest of the group is Strawberry Cough:

The frosty Jammy Dodgers:

And finally we have Amnesia Zkiittlez:

I hope to trim Beast Mode down and weigh her output next Saturday. I will say that lightly trimming away the easy to access leaves resulted in some residue that was both sticky and greasy/oily. I’ve encountered sticky or tacky resin, but this is the first plant that I’ve had that seems to be a bit oily.

Also, there is a chance that I may not be able to post week 11 results - or maybe it will be a more quickly done version. We’ll see how the week pans out.

[Topdecker]

Thanks for the kind comment, argyle!

[Jpaul]

Very happy looking plants you’ve got going here! That Tropicana is purty…be very interested to hear the smoke reports as you work through these. I’m confident almost every bit of all of it will be worthwhile smoke

[Topdecker]

I will make every effort to provide a smoke report. I know that flavor and effects are purely subjective, but it is still useful info.

[Sintax]

Man that Tropicana cookies is crazy beautiful. Trop cherry is my fav.

[Bert]

Righteous buds!

[Topdecker]

Today I did a bad thing to GG#4

She’s no longer clothed in leaves and clearly was hiding a lot of nugs. Tomorrow I will finish by trimming some of the smaller leaves and then she’ll get chopped.

Any guesses on what her dry weight will be? (The plant is 28" from the top of the soil to the tip of her main cola.)

[rasterman]

@Topdecker

Any guesses on what her dry weight will be?

No, but it definitely looks like a very nice yield!

[Topdecker]

The deed is done, GG#4 has been chopped and hung to dry. GG#4’s wet weight was .58lb or 9.28oz. I figure it will dry and cut down to 2oz to 2.25oz.

[Topdecker]

Jammy Dodger’s got the treatment today - I spent part of my lunch hour stripping away her sugar leaves so that only stalks and flower remain.

Jammy is crazy sticky. I mean, like you are an 8 year old building a model with testors glue running down between your fingers kind of sticky. I was working on big leaves, mostly, but anything close to the buds were like contact paper. I will absolutely be wearing disposable gloves when I finish her up tomorrow - assuming that I feel up to it after a regular appointment at the nearby VA hospital.