Hi there and welcome to the last grow report of the series!
If you’ve been following these, sorry for the time it’s been since the last report, we’ve been working hard on getting the Price and Strain comparison tool usable and on the (soon to come) crowdfunding campaign!
We want to get the V1 of the Communities Lobbying Platform up and running by September 🙂 

Let’s get back to the grow report though: this past month has been pretty full of events, we had time to harvest, dry and start curing the buds and even smoke a little since the last grow report!
In total we harvested about 250g of dried buds, pretty happy with it, but it’s not to say we didn’t make a bunch of mistakes along the way.
Let’s get into these last steps of our babies lives:


marijuana week 11 flowering stage

Grow room at the beginning of the Week



The Last Week – Harvesting Gradually

Since we had different strains in the front of the room, and couldn’t get well enough to into the back to be sure for the Big Buddha cheese plants we decided to harvest gradually over the course of about 10-15 days (started in previous grow reports).

Harvesting the Big Buddha Cheese Plant

We really had about 3 rounds of harvesting over the week with the BBC, first we cut a couple buds then went for the finish. 
As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words, so here’s a couple thousand words worth of bud harvesting :

Round 1 & 2

2 pruned buds ready to dry

Buds harvested at the beginning of the week


marijuana colas harvested before pruning

Colas harvested a day or 2 later – Before pruning


Cola harvested after pruning

Bud After Pruning


Here’s a quick picture during the middle of the week, these are all the first BBC buds and the Cheese plant drying. 
After this pic some of the buds were ready to get into the jars to start curing.

Curing enables the buds to continue drying slowly. It’s really important as it helps remove the moisture, affecting the potency of your plant. Check out our full article on curing



About 15 apex's drying in the dark

First Buds Drying in a Dark Area



Main Big Buddha Cheese Harvest

Let’s get to the real harvest for the BBC, took us about 4 hours to clean up all the buds and get them to dry. Takes a lot of time to get some nice, tasty, flowers in the end 


freshly harvested flower

Flower before pruning the leaves


Nicely pruned bud, all the leaves are removed and ready to dry

All leaves removed, ready to dry


light stress creating funny apex buds

Light Exposure during Night Hours created some funny looking Apex’s


Light Exposure during the Flowering stage

This is something we hadn’t really covered since I thought it was linked to the Calcium deficiency we had. After talking with a friend she shed some light on this.
See that picture above on the right? How the flowers are growing in separate ways instead of forming the usual, cone-like, flower? This is linked to the fact that light must have been leaking into the grow room at night, stressing the plant.

Let’s get back to the Harvest 🙂


Stack of 20 pruned apex's

Stack of harvested BBC Buds and Leaves


Stack of buds taller than lighter

Horizontal view of the stacked buds


15 big buddha cheese placed as a smiley face

Main BBC Harvest – 10 to 15 Colas ready to dry


Once all the buds were nicely pruned, we attached a string at the bottom of the stem in order to hang them up side down to dry for about 10 days (until the moment where, when folding the stem, it cracks, without breaking). 



Harvesting the Cheese Plant

Our Cheese plant really was a tree ^^ Appart from topping her about 2/3 weeks ago due to her height we harvested her at once, her trichomes were nice and milky, think it’s one of the ones we timed the best. 
Her’s what she looked like out of the grow room (as always, click on  the images to have the full view)

Fat cheese buds just before harvesting

Cheese before harvest


Cheese tree harvested before cutting the colas

Freshly Harvested Tree


8 Cheese colas ready to be pruned

Branches cut from the tree and ready to be pruned


thousands of trichomes on the bud

Whole bunch of nice, milky trichomes


about 10 pruned buds ready to get drying

Buds pruned and cleaned, ready to dry


sap still flowering through the center stem of the plant after harverst

The sap kept flowering for a couple days, showing that the roots were still active!

It’s really too bad she had stretched as much as she did, I really think that she could have produced much more buds if she wasn’t as close as she was to the bulb.
We def should have scrogged her like the others in order to reduce her main height. Good to know for next round ^^


Harvesting the Blue Thai Plant

This little one was pretty small, since the cheese stretched it basically hid half the plant for getting a direct source of light so we weren’t expecting much. 
Her smell is crazy though, full of spices.

2 Blue thai apex's before harvesting

Blue Thai plant freshly harvested


thai plant before pruning

Branches cut from the tree and ready to be pruned


little purple bud on the blue thai

Small Blue Thai bud with purplish color


freshly harvested blue thai plant

Each cola’s cut, ready to start pruning


blue thai ready to dry

Pruned and ready to dry

As you can see the flowers aren’t that dense around the stems which is unfortunate, letting that cheese plant stretch so much really did damage to the yield of this little one.. (and to the blue kush up next)


Harvesting the Blue Kush

The Blue Kush is a pretty beautiful plant, especially since we were able to get temp differences over 10°C between day and night hours, allowing the plant to get that purplish/blue color. Unfortunately, she also stretch hard due to the Cheese.. Competition for the light source doesn’t joke around ^^

As you’ll see in the images below, she really built up her stem size, producing only a few scares buds 🙁 
She really suffered a lot more from the heat than the Cheese plant

Last day of the blue kush in the tent, 3 purple colas

The Blue Kush’s last instants in the tent – You can see the heat stress on the Apex


View under the blue kush, the leaves are a beautiful blue/purplish color

Freshly harvested Blue Kush Cola wearing her Beautiful Purple dress


thousands of trichomes on bud

Focus on bud full of Trichomes


Blue Kush just harvested with purple and yellow leaves

The 3 Blue Kush Cola’s harvested. More leaf and stem than bud


All the leaves have been removed, the plant is ready to dry

Pruned and ready to dry


some of the Purple flowers on the Blue Kush Plant

Close up on some of the purple flowers

Between the stretch for light and the heat stress generated from being so close to the light this “little” one really didn’t produce a lot of buds, although she really was beautiful.
I don’t feel as bas as the Blue Thai since we’ve germinated 3 seeds of this one for the next round, we’ll get another crack at her 🙂 


Remaining Stems & Roots

Before we get to drying and curing of the buds, check out the nice stems and root systems these babies had developed

thick double stem on the big buddha cheese

V Stem used as base for SCROG


Big buddha Cheese with many branches due to scrog

2nd Scrogged Big Budha Cheese Plant


2 U shaped stems after training the plant

Blue Kush’s 3 Stems, done in early Scrog plant training


Main tap root as thick as a finger

Main tap root (yeah, same one that broke the seed shell ^^)


Hundreds of small air pruned roots

Naturally pruned roots at the base of the Air pot


Thousands of small root at the end of the medium

Root system developed when using an air pot

Aren’t the root systems awesome? Between the thick tap root and the thousands of mini roots, no wonder they kept producing sap even days after harvest. 

The Blue Kush had even grown so much into the fabric bag that it tore when we tried removing the soil, crazy ^^
Seeing this I definitely see why it’s an issue to be using plastic pots, and definitely won’t ever be using them again.


Drying and Curing the buds

Now that all our plants are harvested and pruned we’ve done about half the work, the most crucial steps of the whole process still lie ahead.. Drying and (especially) Curing your buds.

We did a whole article over here if you want all the details, here we’ll mostly just show you the pics of this round’s drying and curing, since we had a bit more than we could handle we had to get inventive ^^

About 30 Apex's drying in cupboard

Cheese and Big Buddha Cheese buds drying in cupboard


buds between sheets of paper to dry

Buds drying between sheets of paper in a cardboard box 

If you can, definitely avoid the cardboard box solution, the buds at the bottom may finish flattened due to the weight of the buds on top. If you must go for this, rotate regularly the layers of buds. 

The important here is to keep your buds in a dark and dry space. Personally I do this until your hear a little crack when bending the stem, at which point they go into some jars to start the curing process 🙂

Key points during the drying process:

  • Keep your buds in a dark area; Light will attack the trichomes
  • Keep the buds in a dry space.

weed buds done drying and ready to cure

Buds done drying – Ready to weight and cure


Nuggets being weighed

Blue Thai buds on the scale


big buddha cheese curing

3 of the Big Buddha Cheese jars

Now that your buds are in the jars the process is almost over! 
The flowers should still be pretty humid, so for the next 2 weeks you’ll want to open them at least a half hour a day. 
Once they start to be crispy, you can add a humidifying packet (~50% humidity) and open them every other day or so. 

Key points during the curing process:

  • While the buds are still humid, open the jars regularly.
  • Store in a dark area. Just as it’s true during the drying process, light will attack trichomes.
  • Regularly rotate the buds inside the jar. Since the ones on top will dry faster, you’ll want to even it out.
  • Curing can go from 2 weeks to 2 years, just like wine taste and smell will improve with time. 
    If you go for a long term cure, remember to add humidifying packets. if you don’t the buds will be so dry that they break like dust.


Before we wrap up this final grow report of the series we wanted to go over the main teachings that came to our mind while writing this piece, so here we go

Key Teachings of this Grow

  • You must nurture your soil
    We all agree that trashing your soil every other grow isn’t a long term solution. That said, plants suck out all nutrients from the soil and the nutrients that are given generally only contain NPK, whereas the plant actually needs over 20 macro and micro nutrients which got us thinking.. how do we get this working long term?
    After a bunch of research we found alfalfa and nettle manure which feeds the soil with all these nutrients. That discovered, we decided to plant a bunch out side and start making our own to regenerate our soil, we’ll keep you posted! 🙂
  • Thrips are a bitch
    Yeah, these suckers followed us since the end of last grow, throughout this one, and we still have signs in the next one. 
    If you have signs of these suckers, nuc’em!!!
  • Keeping a flat canopy is key
    If you’ve been following this grow you’ve seen that since the stretch our canopy is far from even, and as you saw, especially with the Blue Kush and Blue Thai, this had a very significant impact on the final yield of each plant.
  • Don’t wait too long to harvest!!
    By waiting too long the trichomes start to deteriorate too much and the THC&CBD levels actually go way down. I think we weren’t too far from that with the Big Buddha Cheese
  • Super Cropping seems to work very well


Alright folks that’s it for this one! 
Hope you enjoyed the last post of this series, see you soon with the first months worth of the our 3 Blue Kush’s and 1 Critical plants that are currently nearing the stretch 🙂 

Until next time,
be safe and grow easy


Hey there and welcome (back) to Free the Tree!
This week was pretty exciting, most of the trichomes have started to show, we decided to go ahead a cut down one of our Colas (way too early to do so), we started back building the buds aaaaand we finally got an image of a live, grown thrips (find pleasures in small things right ^^)

Let’s get into it


Trichomes turning milky

We’ve been watching the trichomes closely for the past couple weeks and they’ve been starting to get nice and milky, especially the ones on the side leaves.

You can see on the image on the right hand side that the trichomes are mostly milky with a couple still clear.
Since we’re looking for more of a upper effect we really want to harvest while the THC levels are at their highest, meaning when they’re all milky and have just started turning milky. Seems like harvest is coming up soon 😀

Important note: Something we discovered by the end of the week, but in order to measure readiness looking at the leaf trichomes isn’t reliable. You must look at the flower trichomes or the ones that are are the very small leaves sticking out of the buds.


leaf full of thrichomes that are starting to turn cloudy/milky


First Big Buddha Cheese Harvest

By the end of the week, after looking at many trichomes we decided to harvest a first cola.
We did this for two main reasons

  1. It seemed to be at that THC peak
  2. That cola was really pressuring the Blue Thai, which doesn’t have enough room and isn’t looking too great

Turns out, we really harvested her too early, as we said most of the trichomes are milky but there’s still many clear ones.
This bud definitely would have been much more massive if we had waited about 10 days before harvesting her… But at least we have a clear view of the development stage of the Big Buddha Cheese.



first cola harvested after 7 weeks of flowering

Harvested cola after pruning


clear, milky and amber trichomes on leaves

Clear and Milky Trichomes – Harvested too early



As you can see on the image on the right hand side some of the trichomes are still clear, we really cut this bud too early.. oh well it’ll be a soft taste of the rest of the BBC plant.


Back Building the buds

After cutting that the BBC bud we started looking into different ways to improve yield during the last weeks and crossed the “Back Building” technique. After reading into it seemed to be pretty effective, tested by many people within the community so we figured let’s try it out ^^
Basically the idea is to remove the top tip of the flower. The way marijuana flowers response is to stop growing in height and start getting thicker and fatter. Here’s a good video we crossed that shows how to do it pretty well.

Hopefully it’ll get the buds much fatter 🙂 keep you updated in the next reports



Back building marijuana during flowering stage

Back Building marijuana flower


Top pistils cut off during the flowering stage

Top tip of the flower cut off



Thrips Thrips Thrips

While pruning the bud we harvested today we noticed one a couple thrips larvae and one adult thrips fall off.

Here’s two pictures of the adult thrips, if you want think you have a Thrips issue we’ve grouped everything together over here.



Thrips up close on paper

Front side of Thrips – Black streaks visible


Back side of adult thrips

Back side of adult Thrips – Looks whiter



Alright folks that’s it for this week.
Until next time, Be safe and grow easy!

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Read up on our Indoor Growing Tips!

Hey there and welcome (back) to Free the Tree!
So this is the first post of this new grow journal series, it’s going to be an exciting one 🙂 
Here’s what we got in store for this report:

Marijuana Strains: This time around we’re going to grow 4 different strains. Now generally this isn’t the best idea since flowering times and nutrient needs can, and generally are different.
So we made sure that the flowering times were all about the same and hopefully their nutrient needs will also be about the equal.
Here’s the four strains were going with this time around:

  • Blue Kush
  • Blue Thai
  • Big Buddha Cheese (cuttings)
  • Cheese

We should have some beautiful plants and pics for you by the flowering stage. 
Here’s the context of the grow:

Soil: Still using the a non-enriched medium
Types of pots: We’re doing a test on this one, we’re using Air Pots, Fiber Pots and regular pots. We decided to do a test between each to see what the renders of each are.
Lighting: 400W HPS for the vegetative stage, then we’ll switch to a Sodium light

Let’s get into the nitty gritty of this post, the germination of the seeds and the first days in the grow house


Germinating the marijuana seeds

We did a full “how-to” on germinating your marijuana seed a little while back so we won’t go back over each step in detail, don’t hesitate to go check it out if you need more info than what’s given here.

The tap root of each strain really didn’t come in the same time. The Blue Thai’s tap root broke the seed in less than 2 days, whereas the cheese plant took about 3 days.
Here’s a couple pictures of each step of seed germination, as always you can click on them to have a full view.

First day, the seeds have just been put in the wet paper towel

Seeds just set in wet paper tower


Next day, small tap root breaking the seed

Tap root breaking the shell


Blue Thai’s Huge Tap Root

As you can see, we waited a little long with the Blue Thai seed and it developed a huge tap root. To be honest it kind of scared us but it the end definitely not an issue 🙂 


Planting Germinated seeds

Once the tap root is a little over a centimeter long it’s time to get them into the soil, about 1cm down. 
Within a couple days you’ll see the sprout breaking the ground. As soon as that happens within 24 hours you’ll see it stand straight, get rid of the shell and fan out her first leaves to capture the light. It’s pretty beautiful to watch.
This time around we didn’t make the same mistake as last time when we left the light source too far away for the sprout, making the plant stretch for the light source.

Here’s these steps in image:

2 cm hole in soil in order to place the marijuana seed

About 2cm Hole for the Seed


Seed placed into the 2cm hole

Cannabis Seed in soil


First sprout breaking the ground

Blue Thai’s Huge Tap Root

Most of the seeds broke the ground within 2 days after planting them, although we did lose one Cheese and One Blue Kush seed that died in the soil… The cheese taproot had started to dry up within the paper towel, giving it little chance to develop within the ground. The Blue Kush one I think we mismanaged the watering of the soil, killing it within the ground. 

By this the time the last picture above was taken it had been exactly 7 days since we had placed the seed in the soil, closing the first week of this grow.

Until next time, be safe and grow easy!


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A question? Check out all our Indoor Growing Tips

So as I told you guys on the previous post, the sprouts got too tall for their own weight making them fall over.

Easy fix though, you just need to find something sturdy to support the main branch.
Try and avoid anything that would hide the light from it.

As you can see with the wet soil we’ve also given them water since then, here’s the mix we can them:

  • 4ml of Root Boost for 2L of water
  • Ph at 6.4

For the moment we’re just letting them grow, I try to give them as less ingredients as possible.

Apart from that there’ been some heat issues, getting up to 30°C in there, but they seem to be taking it alright..

Here’s a couple pictures for the time period:

The top heavy sprout supported by pieces of wood Top view of sprouts - Day 7

That’s all for this one folks! talk to you guys in a couple days

Mean while want to learn more about the sprouting stage?

Heyheyy everyone, it’s been awhile since the last little grow report! 
We’ve been real busy improving the strain comparison tool available (check it out!) as well as the citizen lobbying tool that will be deployed on free-the-tree.org, so some exciting times ahead, but it leaves little time to write about our babies ^^

In this grow report we’re going to cover the past month of the grow. The little ones have grown nicely, we’ve got different levels of development as well as different strains, it’s going to be one interesting flowering period with all their different needs.

We’ve also still been dealing with these pests which has delayed us starting the flowering period. The hesitation comes from the fact that we’re mainly dealing with fungus gnats and these suckers attack the root system. Once we start flowering we want the plants to be in good condition so that they can focus on bud growth, not survival… sooo decisions decisions.. Anyway, here’s what were going to cover today

Table of Content – Grow Report n°5

 

Big Buddha Cheese clones rooting

Last grow report we told you a friend brought us some clones of one of our faaavorite strains Big Buddha Cheese 😀
We had had a mother of this strain for awhile but she didn’t survive last year’s crazy heat (RIP) and we were all out..

The little clones started rooting nicely, although we had a freaking stink bug-type insect lay eggs (ty to Bannana_bin for helping ID it). The larvae seems to have fed on the foliage of the cuttings, killing the weakest clones..
Luckily we noticed quickly and were able save one individual. As you can see in the pics below, the bugs larvae is chillin (and feeding) on the leaf, leaving black scaring behind.

Stink bug adult on cuttings

Beetle type pest on BBC clone


larvae feeding on leaf

Pest larvae feeding on leaf


Rooting clone being transplanted into soil

BBC survivor planted into soil

That said, she’s now fighting the fungus gnat larvaes and pupas… If/when she survives all this, we will have one stroooong mother plant!




SexBud going through the vegetation stage

Now this little SexBud, by Female Seeds is growing real nicely although our humidity levels aren’t optimal at aaaall 🙂
We had just germinated her when we wrote the last grow report and look at her now. We haven’t given her any nutrients so far, although we’re going to start adding some NP in the next feed to prepare her for the stretch

Cotyledon freshly deployed, seed shells still visible

SexBud cotyledons freshly deployed


First stage leaves fully grown


Second stage of leaves grown and third coming in

Second stage leaves grown, third level coming in


SexBud just before being topped


Sexbud freshly topped and growing multiple auxiliary branches

Auxiliary branches growing in

We topped her before writing this piece and are still hesitating on on scrogging her or going for the same LST training as the laughing buddha (see below).
Until we decide we’re going to let her grow a little and then place her in the special little spot we got for her in the flowering tent. Just before the stretch we’ll decide if we place her on the smaller screen or not.
Can’t wait to see go through the cycles of the flowering period!


Fungus gnats persiste and signs of other pests

Once introducing the nematodes into the tent everything started getting much better, we really though we had jumped through this hoop..
Turns out, we had forgotten a pot in the room and a little female laid some eggs in there. We were gone for 10 days, when we got back found a couple individuals within the grow room soo… here we go again..

We also had the pleasure to discover a blackflie and spidermite nest within our outdoor “garden”… hopefully we will be able to manage them well enough out there, avoiding any indoor issue

Cannabis plants attacked by fungus gnats

Sticky traps deployed to catch adult fungus gnats


2 adult spidermites and eggs under leaf

2 spider mites (and a couple eggs) under strawberry leaf


lemon grass with thousands of blackflies feeding on it

Hundreds of blackflies feeding on lemongrass





Making some Laughing Buddha and Blue Thai cuttings

For these 2 strains we popped our only seeds and wanted to keep the strain around just in case so we decided to go ahead and clone them hehe

2 out of the 4 cuttings ready to start rooting

2 of the 4 cuttings made


4 cuttings in rooting container ready to start rooting

4 cuttings in air-proof container


clones started rooting

about 10 days later – 1 visible rooted plant, 3 pending (but still alive!)

At the time we’re writing the article one of the laughing buddha cuttings has grown a nice, strong, tap root. We’re about to set it into soil to let it grow. 
The 3 other cuttings are looking ok, we’re going to leave them a couple more days in the container to make sure they’ve rooted nicely before planting them in soil




Laughing Buddha – About to start the flowering stage

Last grow report we had just topped this little one in order to prepare her for a scrog. As you can see below, the had grown nicely since. We defoliated her a couple times in order to keep these 4 main auxiliary branches.

Since the blue thai is about ready to flower, and we have successfully cloned her we’re going to flower her like this, can’t wait to see the first pistils starting to appear 🙂

Freshly topped laughing buddha, first auxiliary branches growing in

Freshly topped, first auxiliary branches growing in


auxiliary branches tied down to give more light

4 branches growing in 


4 main branches in a diamond formation

4 auxiliary branches grown in, flowing time approaching


Blue Thaï ScrOG setup

Sooooo, if you’ve followed some of our previous grows, you know we’re pretty big fans of scrogging. 
The thing is, with the back to back pest issues we’ve been having for the past year it’s becoming problematic not to be able to take out the plants for inspection during the whole flowering period.

In order to get the best of both worlds we decided to make some individual scrog screens for 2 of our plants. We’re definitely loosing a bit of room, but we figured it’s not a real problem, it’ll allow each plant to have a little room to breath.

Installing the wiring within the frame

Frame of the net and first wires in


screens ready to have cannabis plants installed

2 scrog nets ready to use


Blue Thai freshly installed on the screen

If you want to check out how we made the scrog net we documented each step over here, total cost ~5 bucks 🙂
With the screen ready we started weaving the blue thai. Once she’s covered about 60% of the screen we will change the photo-period so start the flowering stage hehe




Transplanting 3 little ones

On this 4/20 this little ones were ready to be transplanted 🙂 The laughing buddha and critical + will be flowered pretty soon. Since we just topped the sexbud we’re going to leave her a bit longer in the vegetation tent.
Once her auxiliary branches have grown a bit more we’ll place her into the flowering tent so that she can stretch and start growing some nice buds hehe

laughing buddha, critical+ and sexbud chillin in the sun

Freshly topped, first auxiliary branches growing in


transplanting laughing buddha into fabric pot

4 branches growing in 


4 auxiliary branches grown in, flowing time approaching





Alright folks that all for this one! Hope you enjoyed it, I know we love sharing the growth of our babies as well as what we’re learning along the way 🙂 
Remember, if you want to share your experiences, knowledge, or anything, you’re more than welcome to! Just contact us through the form or via instagram

Until next time,
be safe and grow easy


Hey there and welcome (back) to our growing guide! This has been a turbulent session with these auto-flowering plants, it was our first time with these types, full of learnings! We’ve actually grouped it all together in an in-depth article if you want to know more.

During these couple days so many things happened, we started noticing some weird white marks on a couple leaves of our plants, had to prune some branches and pop-corn buds off and started seeing some nice bud growth getting started.

Before getting into it here’s some pics of the plant during these days, don’t hesitate to clic on them so see the full picture.

Day 36


Critical + 2.0 auto flowering 2 weeks into the flowering stage


Focus on the center buds of the weed plant


Fruit strain marijuana 2 weeks into the flowering stage


Day 37


Fruit strain early nitrogen deficiency


Fruit and Critical+ 2.0 starting to grow buds


Focus on Critical + 2.0 buds


Day 38


2 fruit strain weeds flowering


6 flowering marijuana plants


First signs of Spider mites infestation on our plants


Day 39


First step of one bud technique


Top view of our indoor culture


Focus on secondary buds of critical plant


Day 36 – White marks on leaves and pinching the stem

On day 36 two things really went down.

The first concerns pinching the stem of the plant where we are growing multiple side branches (bottom right one).  The objective of this is to reduce the amount of nutrients going to the Apex and redirect it to the side flowers.
It should also create a knot on the stem allowing the plant to store more nutrients. This is something that should be done during the flowering stage, but as we said in one of our previous posts these babies started their flowering stage a little early.

The second is that we started noticing some white marks on a couple leaves of one of our Critical+ 2.0 flowers. At that time we though it was some kind of deficiency, just couldn’t believe we had spider mites. We decided to see how would evolved over the next couple days before acting (worst thing to do ever!!); We should of just cut of those leaves right away..
If you want to now more on those little suckers and what they can do to your plant, check out our article on Spider Mites (aka the Tetranychidae Family)


Pinching the stem of Marijuana

As we said earlier, pinching the step of your cannabis plant will:

  • Reduce the nutrients brought from the roots to the area after the pinching area
  • Increase the nutrients brought to the rest of the plant
  • Create a knot allowing her to stop more nutrients
  • Should balance out the nutrient distribution on all branches or bud area’s

Here’s more on this

How to pinch the stem of Cannabis


  1. Identify where to pinch. This will depend on your goal.
  2. Place your index on one side of the stem and your them on the other
  3. Squeeze the stem until you fell/hear a clicking noise. You will know it when you feel it.

In our case we wanted to increase the amount of nutrients sent from the roots to the side branches, so we decided to pinch the stem just under the first level of buds.

This does not mean that the top of the plant won’t have any food, remember that plants produce their food through photosynthesis, what comes up from the roots are “just” extra nutrients. Furthermore, nutrients will continue to flow, just not as much.

In case you squeeze way too had and you’ve broken the outer layers of the plant place some tape around it until she fixes herself up.


Squeezing the step with thumb and index


Appearance of White Spots on the leaves

We started noticing that a couple leaves of one of our Critical + 2.0 plant started to have a couple little white marks grouped together on them.

You can see on the images on the right that each leaf has more or less marking on them.. Little did we know but that was the start of our infestation and the leaf with the most marking was the base leaf of it all.

At this point we didn’t really know what it was and thought it was some type of deficiency. As most first people first encountering spider mites.
In that spirit we at the next watering we decided to increase the amount of nutrients given, which didn’t hurt but didn’t help out for the infestation.

To make matters a little worst we also decided to lower humidity levels to about 45% since the flowering stage has begun. As we’ve covered in our guide, spider mites hate humidity and love hot dry weather (which we learned after hand..) so this made matters worst.

Spoiler alert: We were able to survive this but lost a good amount of leaf mass and spend a good amount of energy in management of the infestation. More on that in our next posts 😉 



Day 37 – Trimming Pop Corn Buds

Now that our plants have well entered the flowering stage we can identify the bud sites that we want to keep and those that need to go (aka pop corn buds)
This is also the “last” opportunity to cut branches that are not receiving direct light, thus taking energy produced by photosynthesis of other sections of the plant.

What are pop-corn buds?

Basically Pop-corn buds are those small buds growing low of at the middle of your stems.
These area’s will generally produce low quality buds while taking a lot of energy to produce. It is much better to remove these buds in order to keep the energy for the buds higher up on the stem.

The earlier you are able to identify and remove these pop corn buds the more energy your plant will place into your main buds.

You might need to repeat the procedure once or twice if your plant sprouts new bud area’s but this shouldn’t be the case.

What might happen though is that you notice that you’ve missed a couple further down the road, at which point you’ll have to make the call.
Are they going to produce anything worthy or are you getting a blunt or two out of it? In the second case, get her to go.
(if you’re far enough down the line get it drying, it’ll be an early, lower quality taste of your harvest)


Pop corn buds shown of fruit strain
Pop corn buds shown of Critical+ 2.0 strain


How to cut pop corn buds?

  1. Identify what branches to remove
  2. Take scissors or a cutter (optional but recommanded)
  3. Place your fingers or cutter at the base of the flower
  4. Pinch/Cut off the bud

As you can see this is pretty simple and very similar to removing branches off your marijuana plant. Be careful not to damage the outer layer of the branch or stem.

As you can see in the last picture, by doing this with your fingers the cut isn’t very clean, since a clean cut will heal faster, it’s better to use a blade or scissors in order to trim your marijuana plant.


Focus on a pop corn bud

Pinching the flower in order to remove it

Area where the pop corn bud used to be


Our trimming session included pop corn buds and a branch of one of our Critical branches.

Why would we cut off a full branch? It was being covered by a large leaf over head so it was either that leaf of the branch, normally it’s pretty straight forward, the leaf has got to go, but in this case we already had pruned too many top leaves so we decided to cut the branch itself.

Here’s some pictures of a plant right before and after a pruning session

Before Pruning Marijuana

Cannabis plant before its last pruning of the flowering stage


After Pruning Marijuana

Cannabis plant before its last pruning

As you can see a large amount of buds are gone and this is good! Instead of having a bunch of small buds the plant will be able to focus on the remaining flowers to make them big and beautiful.

Our pruning was pretty late, as you can see in the images of what we’ve removed the plants had already started producing trichomes, so we lost a good amount of energy.. although in this case I think it’s better late than never

Here’s some of what removed and a focus on what a early marijuana flower looks like. As always click on the image to view it fully

Full branch and flower being trimmed off


Removed popcorn buds


Close up on early marijuana flower and trichomes


Day 38 and 39 – Calm before the storm

After those 2 pretty active days, day 38 and 39 was pretty calm. We watered out plants with some more nutrients in order to see if the white marks was some type of deficiency (so wrong) and let the plants recover from the recent pruning.

Little did we know that while we though our plants were recovering from an attack they were also being infested by some nasty bugs… But that’s for the next post of our indoor grow journal.

Until then, be safe and grow easy!


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    Hey there and welcome (back) ! 🙂 
    This past week was a pretty eventful one, these little ones needed a good amount of attention, which we were happy to provide hehe

    As always, before we get into it, here’s a little overview of what we’re going to cover

    Grow Report 2 – Table of content

    Don’t hesitate to skip ahead if you want, for the others let’s get into the Laughing Buddha, she’s scaring us a baby bit


    Laughing Buddha – Early stretch & First leaves

    Growth of the first leaves

    If you’ve checked out last weeks grow report you’re aware that this little one had just broken ground and spread her cotyledons by the end of last week.

    Within 2 days she started growing her first leaves which is pretty awesome 🙂 really want her to get growing quickly so we can make some cuttings and flower them asaaaap


    two first leaves growing over the cotelydons

    Growth of first leaves


    Seedling stem stretching too much

    As you can see in the image on the right the stem of this little one is pretty long, showing that she’s not receiving enough light, thus reaching for it.

    This is really no optimal, appart from the fact that she’s focusing on vertical growth and not developing foliage (leaves) she will most likely be top heavy once those leaves do start to grow..
    This is something we’ve experienced a couple grows ago, and covered a previous grow report.
    It’s not the end of the world if she does get top heavy, we’ll give her a crouch until the stem gets strong enough to for her to stand.


    seedling stretching which en dangerous her capacity of standing upright

    Plant place closer to the light source to avoid any more stretching


    Growth of the second stage of leaves

    This little one is a fast grower, the first stage of leaves had hardly grown that she was already sprouting the second one. 

    She’s really looking good, still a bit worries about her balance, when we watered her she wasn’t holding up all that good.
    We’ve also added [a much needed] fan in there to get some wind blowing, which will make her develop the stem much more, as well as help dry up the soil after watering, avoiding these damn fungus gnats (getting to that next)


    laughing buddha growing second stage of leaves

    Second stage of leaves growing


    Critical+ Cuttings – Transplanting and Fungus gnats

    Transplanting the Critical+ plants

    Although it was a bit early to do so, we decided to go ahead and transplant the plant that’s going to stay in the vegetation tent as a mother.

    For the the 3 other ones we’re going to wait until they grow a bit more than transplant & flower them right away, can’t waiiiiiiiiiit 🙂


    Freshly transplanted plant into 2L pot

    Critical+ transplanted to a 2L fabric pot


    Dealing with fungus gnats

    After thrips and spidermites here we are dealing with fungus gnats… haven’t signed up for pests control school, but we’re getting close to being experts here -_-“

    We had been wondering why our little cuttings were growing so slowly and with unhealthy looking foliage; turns out, it’s linked to the fungus gnat larvae feeding on our babies roots..

    We’ll do a full “how to” deal with fungus gnats soon, but basically here’s how we’re dealing with them :

    • Sprayed the soil with a mix of Hydrogen peroxyde (1/4) and water (3/4). 
      This kills the larvae, but doesn’t deal with the eggs or adults
    • Manually hunted the visible adults
    • Set a fan out in order to dry the top soil (fungus gnats need humid soil)
    • Put down sticky traps for the adults. This doesn’t seem super effective atm, we’re going to lay out a glass with a little beer for them to drown in (follow a tip through instagram)

    Next we’re going to remove the top 3/4cm of soil in order to get any and all eggs out of there, and possibly buy some nematodes to get this soil living with healthy organisms. 
    Hopefully this is going to be the end of that..

     


    Signs of fungus gnats on the plant

    Fungus gnat damage visible on the foliage

    sticky traps laid out to kill adult individuals

    Fungus gnat damage visible on the foliage


    Makin’ some cannabutteeer

    We had been putting it off for awhile but finally got around to making some cannabutteeeer!
    Been saving up the trims of the past 5 grows so really exited to see what it’s going to turn our to be hehehe.

    We’re not going to detail all the steps here, if you’re trying to make some check out our recipe over here, that said here’s a couple pics just cause 😉 

    cannabis trims, butter and water set to heat

    Leaves&Butter chillin in water


    butter simmering for 5 hours

    Leaves&Butter chillin in water


    Separating liquid mix from leaves

    Straining the water&cannabutter mix from the leaves


    cannabutter mix ready to cool down

    Cannabutter&Water
    ready to cool down


    after 24hours in the fridge the butter is solid

    After 24 hours in the fridge,
    cannabutter is solid.


    Water poured out leaving the cannabutter ready for cooking! 🙂


    Blue Thai’s first cutting 

    Since we don’t want to flower our last blue thaï plant, we’ve decided to keep this one as a mother and flower some cuttings. Thing is… i’m not super super patient (workin on it ^^), and want to get her into the flowering tent asaaaaap.

    In that spirit, I looked for a nice little side branch big enough to make a cutting out of. 

    Blue thai mother plant vegetating

    Blue Thai mother plant


    small cutting rooting in water

    Blue Thai mother plant

    As you can see, we spotted one that was small, but not too small, and went for it. Hopefully, since it’s such a young sprout, it’ll still have a bunch of rooting hormones and will take quickly.

    In order to keep it in a nice, humid, environment we placed it in a glass of water and placed cellophane over it, with a couple whole.
    Water droplets quickly formed on the sides of the glass, showing that humidity levels are high. Hopefully she’s going to take!


    Alright folks that’s all for this week,
    Until next time, be safe and grow easy!

    P.S: if you want to keep in touch, come say hi on our insta 😉


    Hey there and welcome back for another update on our current marijuana plant.

    These little one’s now need a new home so it’s time to get them into a new pot. Now since we just watered we have to wait a day or two but it’s time. Let’s get into it.


    Day 22 – Growth during the vegetative stage

    Top view of the Critical+ 2.0 and Fruit plants

    So this is 2 days after watering the plants, the plants are pretty much chilling.
    The one on the top right is still drooping a little, but nothing serious. Here it seems like everything is on track, no deficiencies seem to be present, heat and humidity levels are good.

    One thing you can notice though is that the soil is starting to be dry (bottom right plant). After just 2 days since the watering, this is a strong sign that the roots have well invaded the ground and the transplantation of these marijuana plants should come soon.

    In our case, that’s the next day so let’s get to it.


    Day 24 – Transplanting the plants

    Before


    After

    So when you’re about to transplant you should be ready to be at it for at least 20 minutes per plant. Now obviously that depends on the size of your pots, but with all the different steps I think that’s a safe minimum.
    We documented all the details of transplanting your weed plant in a guide over here but here are the main details:

    • If you don’t transplant you will have root issues and you’re plant won’t be able to grow successfully.
    • The bigger the root system, the bigger the plant (and the buds).
    • You need to transplant your plant once the roots have invaded the soil.
    • Transplant between 2 waterings, when the soil isn’t too dry nor too humid.
    • Be careful, with auto-flowering seeds! They start to flower when the main root hits ground, don’t make the mistake we made and go straight for the 11L pots! Check out our guide ou auto-flowering plants if you want to know more
    • Expect stress signs the couple days following the transplantation.
    • Make sur you clean all the dirt off your leafs (don’t forget underneath!)
    • Water the new soil after the transplantation. This will push the roots to invade the new ground.

    This time around we only transplanted 4 out of our 6 plants, the reason why? I didn’t have enough pots… -_- Get everything you need before germination!

    Luckily 2 of the 6 plants were actually in bigger pots (since I didn’t have enough pots in germination time), so I had a couple days to get some (or that’s what I though, but getting ahead of myself here).

    Appart from that the transplantation was a bit of a struggle. The soil was a little too dry, and the roots were nicely stuck to the pots so a lot of tapping and bending the pot went on, but got all 4 of them out!
    Really the humidity level of the soil does it all, when its too dry it’s a fight. I probably spent 40 minutes just getting them out of their pots.

    After this, generally you want to water your plant right after transplanting them, in my case I waited the next day, which isn’t optimal, especially since the old soil was real dry.
    This is a little like a “what not to do guide”, and you’ll see in the upcoming days why I’m saying this…


    Day 25 – Watering after the transplantation

    using water sprayer to hydrate the soil


    First visible deficiencies after the transplantation

    So the day after the transplantation you can see the first deficiencies coming in.
    See on the right picture how the weed leaf is turning yellow. It started at the tip and is working itself inwards.
    Seems to me like Nitrogen deficiency, so I boosted a little the amount in this mix, adding about 2.5ml for 2L of water. Hopefully that will do the trick.

    These signs are showing up on all our plants unfortunately, but it’s also giving us the opportunity to cover nitrogen deficiency!

    Apart from that they seem to be enjoying their new home, although this watering was really needed.


    alright folks well that’s it for this one! See you guys in a few days.

    Until then, be safe and grow easy!


    Don’t want to go just yet?

    Check out the days of this little one’s life

    Check out our previous cultures

    Hey there and welcome (back) to Free The Tree!
    This 3rd week of the flowering stage was pretty calm, we did our final pruning, removing the Cola’s that needed to go, our Big Buddha’s started showing some strong phosphorus deficiency signs and those darn thrips won’t die.. So yeah, not all that calm but we’ve had worst ^^
    On a better note, the pistils have been growing like crazy, trichomes have been appearing all over the place and the smell.. oh they’re starting to smell up the room very nicely.
    Let’s get into it


    Pruning Marijuana during the Flowering Stage

    About a day after the the end of the stretch we decided to go for a last round of pruning on the Big Buddha Cheese plants.
    Since we scrogged them a massive amount of colas were present and most of them don’t cut it.

    “They don’t cut it” means that they either have a stem wayyyy to weak, the flower nodes are spaced out too much or they don’t have a direct access to light source.
    Either of these situations indicate that the cola will consume more energy than it can produce. This means that the cola won’t produce much AND take energy away from the other colas; For those reasons it’s best to let them go.


    Colas and leaves pruned during the flowering stage


    As you can see we didn’t prune that much this time around, but the colas we did remove are pretty long.

    Most the colas could have been kept but their placement wasn’t optimal and had no direct access to the light source.
    Since they were weaved on the screen we could of un-weaved them (carefully) so that they could reach the level of the canopy.
    It’s actually what we did with some of the them, but these one’s we’re just in the way or too short.


    Pistil growth and Buddlets appearing

    Now that we’re really into the flowering stage the plants have been focusing their development on the flowers, and it’s been pretty visible.
    Since the second week of the stretch trichomes have started to appear but they’re now growing much more and starting to form little budlets on the Apex of each plant.

    From now on their just going to grow grow grow until they form some nice and dense flowers ready to be consumed  🙂
    These next couple weeks are going to be really exciting, can’t wait ^^
    (if you want to be notified for the next posts clic on the little bell on the bottom left)


    first buddlets appearing on the apex of the plants

    Pistils forming buddlet on Apex


    Signs of Phosphorus deficiency on the Big Buddha Cheese

    Since the end of last week we’ve been seeing the leaves of the Big Buddha Cheese plants starting to become brown, curl down and the most impacted ones are actually turning a purple/blue color..



    It took us a little while to diagnose what was going on, but as soon as those leaves turned black we knew.. Our babies can get enough Phosphorus.
    Know we know that our pH levels have been between 6 and 7, meaning that the roots are able to extract it from the medium so that’s not the issue.

    In order to solve this next watering we definitely need to up the levels of Phosphorus. Hopefully the other strains won’t get into a nutrient burn situation.. that would be one headache to handle


    Couple Early Flowering Stage pictures

    Since this week was mainly marked by deficiencies and pruning we figured it would be good to finish on a positive note, that is some nice pictures of them during this stage of flower growth, as always click on the image to get a full view.

    pistils developing into flower

    Apex Pistils growing


    Big Buddha Cheese flowering

    Scrogged BBC flowering


    full grow room after 3 weeks into the flowering stage

    5 Strains flowering


    Alright folks that’s all for this week!
    Until next time, be safe and grow easy 😉

    Don’t want to go yet? Check out our other Grow Reports


    Check out all our Indoor Growing Tips

    Hi there and welcome (back) to our weekly grow reports!
    After just one small chill week the BBC started acting up again.. This time it’s calcium deficiency.. this really closes the matter for me, the soil is dead and we need to let it rest. Too add to this thrips are back and attacking the healthy plants & leaves :'(
    The only positive point to this is that we got some pretty cool pics of them but really they’re killing me.. Let’s get into it


    Trichome and Flower growth

    We decided to go ahead and start with the good news, the awesome trichome and bud growth, even with all these deficiencies 🙂
    FIY: click on the image to see the full view

    Mid way through flowering stage the buds are nice and full of trichomes

    Bud and leaves full of trichomes


    Close up on trichomes growing on marijuana flower

    Close up on trichomes growing on pistils


    Leaf covered in trichomes starting to be milky

    Close up on trichomes growing on pistils

    As you can see, 6 weeks into the flowering stage the plant has nicely developed flowers and the trichomes of nicely formed and some have started turning milky 🙂

    This means that cannabinoid production has started, especially THC hehe; now we’re no where near close to harvest, there at least 3 weeks left for the Big Buddha Cheese plants and most likely a little more for the Cheese, Blue Thai and Blue Kush.

    Within 2 weeks we’ll start flushing the Big Buddha Cheese so that in about 3/4 weeks we’ll be good to harvest her hehe


    The return of the Thrips

    Thrips, thrips, thriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiips, I’ve been infested with these suckers for now about 4 months, we thought we had dealt with them during the first month of this grow but they’ve returned for the past 2 weeks or so, and they’re busting my b***s to be fully honest.

    We changed around the fans to that the back of the room is windy so that hopefully they stay on the plants at the entrance of the room. Along with this we spend a little time every day spotting and killing them manually (I must say we’ve gotten pretty damn good at it), but every day there’s still some larvae’s and adults..

    We’re killing at least 10 larvae’s a day and a couple adults. We haven’t been able to get a picture of an adult thrips since they’re much, much quicker and at a certain point start to be able to fly also, and between a picture of killing it… well we’re killing those suckers ^^

    4 thrips larvae's moving on marijuana leaf

    Thrips larvae’s moving on leaf


    3 thrips feeding on marijuana leaf

    Larvae’s feeding on leaf


    Adult thrip close up and dead

    Dead adult thrip (really hard to get a good pic of a live one)

    We’ve got a sticky trap in there but it doesn’t seem to be very effective, even on the adults. We can’t use neem oil or spinosad since we’ve got flowers.. Even hesitating on black soap..
    We’ve been spraying the plants at night with some water to bother them as much as possible and pruning the most impacted leaves as the one above but it’s not enough to eradicate them..

    Tip: Don’t re-use your soil after being infested with Thrips!!!


    Calcium Deficiency

    Now that we were in the clear with the Phosphorus and Potassium deficiency it’s time for a strong case of Calcium Deficiency.
    This one really snuck up on us, we’d never been confronted to it and when you have good soil it’s not something that you should be seeing.
    In our case, as we’ve said in last weeks post, some of this soil have been re-used 3 times already, meaning that it’s all our of micro-nutrients.
    After this grow we’re going to replace all the soil and plant some nurturing plants in it so that it can recover.

    first signs of calcium deficiency

    First Signs of Calcium Deficiency


    leaf basically dead due to the calcium being extracted

    Severely affected leaf 


    massive foliage loss

    Calcium deficiency severely attacking the Big Buddha Cheese

    As you can see in that last image this went pretty quick. The first signs on clean leaves started showing up at the end of last week and it went so fast.
    As an emergency we sprayed the plants foliage with a Calcium enriched solution and in this weeks watering. Hopefully she’ll recover quickly but since Calcium is an immobile nutrient it’ll take about a week for it to get from the soil to the foliage.


    Alright folks that’s it for this one!
    Before we leave you here’s a coupe pictures of the plants this week 🙂


    Super cropped cheese strain flowering

    Super Cropped Cheese plant growing nice flowers


    Bottom part of blue thai flowering

    Bottom section of Blue Thai developing beds


    Big Buddha Cheese flowering while having a deficiency

    Big Buddha Cheese a bit ahead in development


    Until next time,
    Be safe and grow easy!

    Don’t want to go yet? Check out our other Grow Reports

    Check out all our Indoor Growing Tips

    Welcome back to our Critical+ 2.0 auto-flowering and Fruit auto-flowering series!
    If you haven’t been following up here’s a little recap.

    A little over a month ago we germinated 7 marijuana seeds, 2 Critical+ 2.0 auto-flowering and 5 Fruit auto-flowering. Unfortunately one of those fruit seeds didn’t take so we were left with 6 babies.

    During the early vegetative stage we had couple issues with the balance of our sprouts and early stem with about 2/3 of our plants.

    After that the flowering stage got going waaaaay too early because the main root hit resistance.. Yeahwhat makes the an auto flowering plant go into the flowering stage is the root system… something we didn’t know and learned with this one! We’ve covered all that in our guide on auto flowering seeds if you want to know more.

    So here we are, after the first days of the stretch, and you’re going to see that she’s totally changing, welcome to the teenage years!


    Day 32 – Auto-flowering seeds entering the stretch

    Focus on the best Fruit strain weed of the 6


    Global view of the 6 plants entering the stretch


    Showing How to prune the leaf off marijuana


    So during day 33 we started cutting (pruning) some branches and leaves. Normally you do this during the vegetative stage, but since we kind of got blind sided we’re doing this know.

    We’re also having many deficiency issues as you can see with the colors of most of our plants.. Although it seems like the decision of lifting the lights about 15cm (5.9inch) did some good to them. Here’s a couple pictures of the leaves showing issues. We’ve got hypothesis’s on why it’s happening but still not sure… One we figure it out we’ll Update this section to let you know! (If you have an idea share in the comment section!)





    Spotting deficiencies during the stretch

    So our suspicion here is Light burn. We hadn’t lifted our light yet since we put them in the grow room, it was about 20cm over head which isn’t that close, but they had been used to a light source that was further up so who knows it’s possible.

    I know you might be telling yourself “that’s Nitrogen deficiency”. There are 2 things that go against that hypothesis:

    1. I’ve given them plenty, some of the plants with these deficiencies are actually also showing signs of nutrient burn
    2. The dead leafs aren’t falling of very easily, you have to pinch or cut them off to remove them from the stalk.

    Now that second point is actually the one that hinted me off the most. Why? Because Nitrogen deficiency and light burn globally have the same signs, apart from 2 things. One of them being that with ND the dying leafs will just fall off, whereas with light burn they are hard to remove.

    The only this that has me still hesitating is the fact that these signs are coming from the bottom of the plant, where normally light burn starts on top (second difference). But, these are also the main leaves receiving light, so it’s not totally crazy to think this.

    In the pictures I didn’t show the next steps, but the leaf becomes all brown and dead, after which you need to pinch it or clip it off. This way to remove it is pretty unusual for a dead part of the plant.

    Anyway, we brought the light up, hope it will do the trick.. they’re already not that big, loosing leaf mass is the last thing we want during the flowering stage.

    This is a bit paradoxal with what I just said, but we’ve also been pruning some of our plants.

    The one’s with the most deficiencies we’re cutting off all the side branches and pop corn buds, on the others removing the leafs in order to give direct light access to the branches below.


    Pruning the marijuana leafs during the stretch

    Focus on Critical+ 2.0 before pruning


    Showing How to prune the leaf off marijuana


    Focus on Critical+ 2.0 after pruning


    We’re going to go over the pruning (or cutting) of marijuana leafs and branches in 3 steps:

    • How choose the leafs or branches you’re going to prune
    • How to prune your marijuana plant
    • What are we aiming for in this culture

    In this example we’re taking a leaf as an example, but it’s basically the same thing with branches.

    How to decide what to prune off your plant

    During the stretch you really want to minimise extensive growth. The taller the plant, the more energy it takes to get the nutrients for the soil to the colas, as well as the “food” created by photosynthesis.

    Keeping this in mind, if the branches you decided to keep don’t have direct sunlight due to a leaf making shade you need to cut that leaf. If you think it’s too risky because you don’t have enough leaf mass than cut that branch (or wait a little if you’re still in the vegetative stage).

    Again, normally this is something best done during the vegetative stage since you can most likely recover, but we don’t really have a chance here.

    Now that you’ve identified what you want to cut off, let’s look at how to do so.

    How to prune your marijuana plant

    1. Identify the leafs or branches you want to remove
    2. Pinch at the intersection between the leaf or branch and the stalk of the plant. You can also decide to use a pair of scissors or clippers.
      Whatever you use make sure you don’t damage the outer skin of the main stalk.
    3. Clip the branche off

    In the case where the branch doesn’t cut straight off and the other skin of the main stem is still attached, cut it as close as the stem as possible. Try to damage it as less as possible.

    The days following this you will see the other sections of the plants grow more, the energy previously used at this spot have been reallocated!


    Identifying which leaf to cut of the plant

    Showing How to prune the leaf off marijuana

    Bottom of the leaf that was pinched off the plant

    What are we aiming for in this culture

    With 2 or 3 of our plants we’re decided to go for a one bud situation. The plants we picked only had 1 pair of small side branches and are the weakest ones. This will enable them to focus the energy they do have on their core flowers.

    With the other flowers we decided to keep the main bottom branches, hoping that they will also produce a good amount of buds. We’ve remove all the “popcorn buds” or branches not receiving any direct light, hoping the cola buds will finish out to be nice and dense.

    This means that on half the plants we had to mainly cut branches off, keeping the leaves for photosynthesis. On the other half we cut mainly leaves so that the main branches can have access to a direct source of light.

    Globally we’re already aware that our harvest won’t be too crazy, this early flowering kind of screwed us.. But it’s alright, we learned something and could share it with you guys!


    Day 33 – Nothing special to report

    On this day nothing special really happened, so we’re going to share some pice with you guys!


    Day 34 – Changing to a Sodium Bulb

    So we’ve entered the flowering stage for a couple days now and decided to change the light bulb so the sodium based one. The main difference between both is the light spectrum they emit. The vegetative light is more of a white/blue light whereas the Sodium based one if is more in a orange/infra red spectrum.

    I’ve been reading around that during the stretch it can be good to keep the white light in order to reduce the spacing between the nodes, but honestly I don’t feel like doing more testing with these one’s, one yield isn’t going to be crazy, we’ll keep that test for the next run around!

    Here’s a couple pics after the light change

    P.S: remember to unplug your light before hand! I shocked myself, it hurts believe me!





    I don’t know if you guess which one’s we’ve decided to go for a one bud or not off these pics, we’ll let you know in the next article!

    We’re also going to go for another round or pruning, but for the flowers this time. We want the energy of the plants to focus on the main flowers on the top colas, not the one’s further down the stem that have little chance to make anything worth it.

    Until next time, be safe and grow easy!


    Check out our previous articles on our Critical+ 2.0 and Fruit Marijuana Strains

    Hey there ! 
    Wish we were writing this post on a happier subject… But for the past couple months we’ve been battling a spidermite invasion, and what a battle it’s been ! 

    The infestation started in our little garden, on our tomatoes to be specific, but with time these suckers spread… Outside they got to our a bunch of our plants and while we were busy raising money for citizen lobbying tool these suckers got to our flowering tent…
    Let’s go over this whole o’deal together 😉
    Excuse us for not having the best quality pics available on this post, our camera broke and we haven’t been able to replace it yet


    The first signs of Spider Mites…

    As you’re most likely aware, spidermites reveal their presence by leaving little white spots on the leaves. If you’re seeing this, ACT NOW, the earlier you start fighting back the infestation the better your chances are.

    On our end when we noticed we had just gotten back from vacation so the infestation was already massive. 
    The image below shows a couple leaves totally infested. The plant was over 4 feet tall, just imagine how many individuals were on there..


    Every red dot… is an adult spidermite 



    Our first strike – Black Soap & Neem oil Combo

    Since we already had dealt with a thrips invasion during our previous grow (yeah, we’re not lucky), we already had black soap and neem oil around.
    These 2 ingredients work just as well as on Spidermites as they do on thrips, on paper. As we cover in our guide on how to deal with spidermites, the importance here is coverage, coverage, coverage.



    Our neem oil & Black soap mix ready we started spraying all the infested plants, making sure to cover as much the top of the leaves and their backside, where the mites lay all their eggs.


    The spidermites strike back, viciously 

    After applying the mix all over the plants, twice, leaving a couple day intervals we had to leave for a couple days again.
    When we came back these suckers had come back too, and with a vengeance! Honestly I think there were thousands of them on just this one tomatoes plant.


    click on the image to get the full view, and again every red dot is an adult spidermite…


    At this point it started really impacting the development of the plant with some sections totally dying out (the ongoing drought didn’t help out).
    The fruit bearing sections went from 12 flowers to 2/3 per ramification, new growth slowed crazily and older sections started dying out.

    Clearly, these pest don’t hesitate to suck the live out their host, literally.


    Nature does things well… Investing in Predators

    The Neem oil and Black soap mix is effective against the adult mites but I’m not so sure about their eggs, and since they can lay up to 20 of them a day, the adults are really just the visible part of the iceberg.

    That’s where investing in a predator is useful, in our case we’re talking about the Phytoseiulus Persimilis, which feeds exclusively on spidermites and their eggs ! 


    Predators that eat spidermites and their eggs


    The number of individuals you want to get will depend on the size of your infestation, on our end with 500 we clearly under did it since we had about 6 infested plants by the time they got here.

    As we point our in-depth article on spidermites, linked above, applying a round of neem oil & black soap mix a day before introducing the predators. 
    In doing so you will reduce the number of pests drastically, and then the predators will swoop in to finish the rest of the adults and eggs that are still around.


    Not enough predators, the mites spread to the Cannabis plants

    By now it’s been over 2 months since the first signs of the pest and they started infesting the flowering plant mid-way through the flowering phase.
    The worst part, we were in the middle of the crowdfunding campaign with United4Earth so let’s just say that we weren’t the most attentive to our babies at that moment…
    The mites had fully infested our Blue Kush by the time we even realized they were around.


    First white marks appearing on cannabis leaves


    As you can imagine, we were unhappy of this discovery, to say the least. Here we were, back preparing a mix and ordering some predators, again… 
    Since we were in the flowering phase we just used the Neem oil the first time, as ingesting it can get you sick, so we didn’t want it all over the buds we were going to smoke.


    A very weak harvest..

    Every couple days we kept spraying the foliage, but there was so much damage done that we decided to go ahead and harvest, clean the room before placing the rooted clones into the flowering tent.


    Critical + Apex bud freshly harvested and pruned




    Blue Kush and Critical buds drying

    2 plants drying – Super small harvest


    Just as we saw with the tomatoes, since the plants were battling for survival, the amount of flowers produced was severely impacted. We haven’t weighed it out yet but i’m thinking it lost us at least 50% of the harvest..

    Hopefully our in-depth clean of the grow room got rid of the last suckers, but just in case we still have that batch of predators that should be arriving soon. We will introduce them in the grow room regardless so that they can go hunt for eggs.
    We don’t wand to get a surprise in a couple months when the ones laying around start hatching. 


    That’s it for this one ! Hopefully this will be our last post regarding spidermites (and thrips)

    We’ve decided to start posting an article every friday from now on, so until next week,
    Be safe and grow easy!


    Going through all these balance issues with 2 of our plants we decided to do a quick piece on balance issues with marijuana plants during the early vegetative stage. Hopefully this will help some of you that have the same issue, or to avoid having it in the first place.
    Here’s what we’re going to cover:

    Why does Marijuana get balance issues

    Generally a plant gets a balance problem when the direction of the light source pushes it to grow in an un-natural fashion. Either too fast, or at an angle that it cannot sustain in the long run.
    This can be generated by:

    • A light source to far from it’s Apex: The plant will grow so tall the stem won’t be able to hold the weight of the top anymore.
    • A light source too far to the side. Try to keep your light source as centered as possible to all your plants. If you can’t then get it a little closer (without giving them light burn)

    In our case, during its very early growth the light we used was too far from them and not strong enough.
    The 2 earliest sprouts just grew straight up to get as much light as they needed.
    Once they we’re tall enough they started growing leaf mass, but its weak stem cannot hold all that weight, and after a little growth the plant falls over.

    Now, plants are pretty well built, she will adapt in order to face the light source, but we will all agree that a horizontal stem isn’t the most optimal for a plant. You can see this right here on the picture. Found her like that one day, she had fallin over and stayed that way a couple hours so she adapted, facing up.

    Lets get to how to avoid these situations early on, and then how to fix it.



    Horizontale view of the marijuana's balance issues


    How to avoid balance issues during the early vegetative stage

    As we said earlier, the Cannabis plant will have issues with balance if the light source isn’t strong enough or not aligned with the plant. Here are our tips to avoid these issues all together:

    • If you don’t have your sprouts in your grow room during the first 2/3 days after sprouting, keep the light source about 15/20cm (6 inch.) over the apex of the plants
    • Get your plants in the grow house tops 3 days after breaking ground or if the sprouts are over 5cm (1.5inch.) high
    • Keep your light source aligned with the top of your plants. If your using desk lights, add a second light source

    Just by getting your plants into your grow room quickly you can avoid any issues, here’s an example between 2 of our plant that had the same conditions, except one of them spent much more time out of the grow house after breaking the ground than the other.

    On the left you will see the one that broke ground earlier, the one on the right broke ground about 2 days later.

    Day 2 – I need light!!

    Days 2 - stretching for light source

    You can see the she’s been focusing on growing high in order to reach for the light source. You’d think this is cool to get a nice big plant, but at this point it’s not really what you want, you want leaf mass.


    Day 0 – Hello World!

    Plant just breaking ground

    This little one’s just coming out of the ground and discovering the world. Her 5 sisters have been out for a while now, this is really the late bloomer of the batch.


    Day 4 – All the light I need, lets get some leaf

    Growing 1st main leafs, seems to hold up

    By day 4 of this early bloomers life they were in the grow house. This one is the first that broke and the tallest out of them all.
    Growing in height got her late in leaf production, which isn’t really the best thing here, especially that these are auto-flowering seeds so there’s no control over the length of the vegetative stage


    Day 2 – Ah in the grow house with some nice lighting

    Plenty of light, starting to grow first main leafs

    The entry into the grow house was on day 2 for this one, you can see that appart from a little burn to the new leafs due to the change in lighting being so abrupt. I should of eased her into the new environment by doing a 12 hours in/12 hours out of the grow house during the first days.

    Apart from that it’s all going great for this little one


    Day 8 – Top heavy and falling over

    The entry into the grow house was on day 2 for this one, you can see that appart from a little burn to the new leafs due to the change in lighting being so abrupt. I should of eased her into the new environment by doing a 12 hours in/12 hours out of the grow house during the first days.

    Apart from that it’s all going great for this little one


    Day 6 – Chillin’ and growing leaf mass

    Growing the second stage of leafs

    The entry into the grow house was on day 2 for this one, you can see that appart from a little burn to the new leafs due to the change in lighting being so abrupt. I should of eased her into the new environment by doing a 12 hours in/12 hours out of the grow house during the first days.

    Apart from that it’s all going great for this little one


    Day 10 – Starting to stabilise and growing

    2 stake method allowing plant to grow stronger

    By the 10th day you can see that she’s pretty much stabilise, although she still can hold up on her own.

    Soon enough she’ll be holding up just fine, although all of this will have used up some energy!


    Day 8 – Growing 3rd stage of leafs

    growing 3rd stage of leafs

    You can see that by day 8 this plant almost looks like the one from day 10, why’s this? She didn’t have to waste any energy on growing up vertically, so she’s shorter but already has a strong source of energy to get her growth going!
    I’ve got a feeling this one will be the diamond of the batch


    Day 14 – Tall and now Balanced

    tall and spaced out plant, finally balancing out

    By Day 14, the plant had finally gotten strong enough to hold on their own. I’m still leaving the stakes in just in case but I’m going to get them out of there real soon.

    I’ve got the fan blowing on them for the past couple days which got the stem to start strengthening which is a good sign


    Day 12 – Short but growing strong

    Plant did not grow tall but tight nots and strong

    This one’s just nice, she’s short, with some very tight knots which is a good sign to get a nice and dense plant. She’s short but her stem is already nice and strong, much wider than her sisters. The 3rd stage of leafs is already growing! Kind of confirming the idea that this will be the nicest one of the batch (don’t want to jinx it though ^^)


    As you can see, just a difference within the first 2 days of growth you can have a strong impact on the early days of the vegetative stage, so it’s important to be careful as soon as you get your seeds going.

    Lets get into how to fixe balance issues


    How to fix Marijuana balance issues

    Here you have 2 objectives:

    1. Keep the stem as straight as possible
    2. Get the stem stronger so that it can hold itself up

    Let’s go over the ways to accomplish these objectives


    Keeping the Marijuana stem upright

    1. Get a long piece of wood, it should be at least the height of your stem, if not a little longer
    2. Get the stem into the ground near the base.
      careful not to brake any roots!
    3. Get the stem to lean onto the wooden stake, allowing her to stand upright
    4. If need be, get a second stake on the other side of the stem in order to hold her up.
      Don’t hesitate to use the leafs to balance the plant out
    5. Get your fan to blow just over the top of the Apex, so that it’s moving a little, this will get your stem to strengthen.
      If you can’t because your plant keeps falling, wait until it’s a bit stronger to do this



    6 day old plant holding with stakes


    Week old plant holding up with 2 stakes


    vegetative stage balance issues


    Alright that’s it for this one folks, we’ll be posting about day 15 to 20 of these Critical + 2.0 and fruit babies in the upcoming days,

    Until then, be safe and grow easy!

    Hey there and welcome our weekly grow report!
    Here we are in the 5th week of the flowering stage and it hasn’t been much of a smooth road ^^
    That said, these babies are still looking pretty nicely, their smell is getting stronger and stronger and seeping into the rest of the house.

    This week was actually a pretty smooth one and we were able to get some preeeetty awesome pics hehe, lets get into it 😉


    Trichomes fully formed

    We’ve bee keeping a pretty regular eye on the trichomes all over the different plants and we’re pleased to see that they’re now globally all fully formed, still mostly clear no the THC production hasn’t started yet but things are looking nice 🙂
    Here’s a couple pics, as always you can click on them to see the full version

    Marijuana flower with trichomes all over the pistils and leaves

    Flower full of trichomes


    close up on pistil and trichomes

    Close up on Pistils and flower trichomes


    Close up on fully developed clear trichomes

    Close up on Pistils and flower trichomes

    Aren’t these little things just beautiful? 🙂 In the picture all the way to the right you can see there full form and color, stem and the clear balled tip; those little guys will be full of THC soon enough hehe


    Uneven Canopy

    We’ve been saying over the past couple grow reports that a couple of our buds were too tall, especially the Cheese and, consequentially, the Blue Kush; We finally got some pics that really illustrate this disparity!

    Very bid size difference between different strains

    Huge Size difference


    2 Plants much taller than the rest of the canopy


    Big Buddha cheese side pretty even

    Big Buddha Cheese side is pretty even

    Now keep in mind that cheese plant has been supercropped, she’s actually much taller than the Blue Thai next to her.

    You can also see the Apex of the Blue Thai is suffering, looking all flat. I think it’s too hot for her so close to the hood so we decided to lift the right hand side of the hood as well as get the extraction hose near her in order to extract the heat right there.
    Hopefully this will solve the issue..


    Weed Buds developing nicely

    This week the flowers have grown well, especially the Big Buddha Cheese.
    As you can see in the images below Blue Thai is still between the buddlets to the flower, while the Big Buddha cheese is further along with long buds.

    Blue Thai flowering

    2 Blue Thai Buds developing


    Big Buddha Cheese bud week 5 of flowering

    Big Buddha Cheese flowers and trichomes growing


    Main Apex of BBC developing well

    Main Big Buddha Cheese full of flowers

    I think we’ll need to need to start flushing the Big Buddha Cheese a while before the other plants, which isn’t ideal since we’ve installed an automatic watering system.. We’re going to have to personalize it and set up switches in order to water the BBC separately.

    Alright folks that’s all for this one!
    Until next time, be safe and grow easy 😉

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    Hey there and welcome (back) to Free the Tree!
    This week the flowering stage has officially started with the appearance of the first pistils 🙂
    These 5 plants really grew a lot during the stretch, especially the Cheese and the Blue Kush (bottom middle and right) so we’re fighting an un-event canopy.. Apart from that they’re just beautiful!

    Let’s go through the main events of the week, if you want to skip straight to a section here’s what we’re going to cover:


    End of Vegetative Growth

    During this second week of the stretch we kept seeing strong growth across the board but, as we said in the intro, especially on the Cheese and Blue Kush strain.
    Since the start of the stretch all the plants grew at least half their size except the Blue Thai. She’s a bit more shy which is a little bit of an issue canopy wise.

    Here’s a couple pics of their evolution this week, as always click on them to see the full version.

    Start of the second week, super cropping just done

    Start of the Second week – Room left in some area’s of the grow room
    (Super Cropping just done)


    End of the stretch approaching, vertical growth still continuing

    Mid way through week 2 – Grow Room is full


    Stretch ended first pistils started showing

    End of the Stretch – Vegetative growth has ended and first pistils are showing.

    Just in one week it’s pretty crazy how much they’ve grown no? And compared to where the beginning of last week it’s even crazier! I love this plant haha

    From now on they’re going to focus on developing those nice flowers that we love so much, some exciting weeks are ahead of us!


    Results of Super Cropping

    Last week and at the beginning of this one, we super cropped a bunch of the colas that were too tall.
    There were 2 objectives for this, the first evening out the canopy, the second was so strengthen the stems and creating knots so the plant can store more nutrients within the stems.
    Here’s how the Cheese plant reacted to it

    apex folded and tied with string

    Cheese plant super-cropped


    String holding stem removed a couple days later


    couple days later stem straight and knot formed

    Colas standing back up – Knot starting to be visible

    During the time that the main stem was super cropped the side branches grew massively, we pinched them a little so that they would strengthen also. I feel like this plant is going to give a niiice yield 🙂


    Automatic Watering

    We haven’t mentioned this in our previous posts but for the past month or so we’ve been watering our plants with our home made drip system and honestly it’s been wonderful!
    It takes about 5 minutes to prepare the mix and then the the drip system waters the plant. We’ve been serving about 13L of water over about 6 hours of time. No water loss and the medium is well irrigated, the plant’s have been loving it! and honestly, so have I.


    15L container providing water flow to drippers

    Water and Nutrients flowing into the grow room


    drip irrigation system automatically and slowly watering the plant

    Drips slowly irrigating the soil


    With this system in place, I don’t have to choose between taking the time to water them well (about 2hours) or quickly water them to be able to get back to business or whatever. We’ve done the later many times in our previous grows and you can definitely tell on the plant when the soil isn’t well irrigated.

    It’s a win-win, I save time and the plants get a nicely watered and nutrient full soil on a regular basis.


    Changing to the Sodium Bulb

    I think this time around we waited a little too long to change from the Metal Halid bulb.
    This time around we changed it the last day of the stretch, which might explain why we haven’t seen any pistils until now.. Next time we’ll definitely get it in there at the beginning of the second week of the stretch in order to avoid over-vegetating our plants.


    Metal Halid vs High Pressure Bulb

    Changing from HP to HPS bulb


    High Pressure Sodium bulb installed in an Air Cooled Hood



    First Pistils appear

    We’re finally in business! About 2 weeks after changing the photoperiods to 12/12 the bud sites have clearly showed up 🙂 How exiting!
    This time around it really took them a while to grow, which I know for a fact isn’t normal for the Big Buddha Cheese and the Blue Thai. I really think it’s linked to the change in light, since the redder HPS light pushes the plant to flower.

    Here’s a couple pics of these first signs of the flowers


    first pistils growing at the apex of plant

    First Apex pistils growing


    Bud sites starting to appear at the end of stretch

    First pistils of another colas appearing


    Alright folks that’s all for this one!
    Until next time, be safe and grow easy 😉

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    Hi there and welcome to this weeks grow report!
    This week was pretty chill, trichomes and flowers keep developing, the Blue Kush started showing her beautiful blue/purple colors and the smell is oh so beautiful, I wish there was a way you could smell them.

    We’re still hunting Thrips, adults and larvae’s, on a daily basis. At the end of this round we’re cleaning everything with Clorox and changing all our soil. Those suckers are so persistent once the plants get big it’s horrible.


    Trichomes growing like crazy

    For the past couple weeks trichomes have been growing but during this week this ramped up strongly.
    As you can see in the images the buds are covered with them, especially on the Blue Kush flower.

    Clear and Milky Trichomes on Cheese strain pistils

    Cheese Strain Clear & Milky Trichomes


    blue kush leaves covered with trichomes

    Kush covered with trichomes


    Clear trichomes all over blue kush

    Clear trichomes all over the pistils



    Blue Kush Leaves turning Blue/Purple

    The Blue Kush, from Dinafem, can turn a blue/purplish color during the flowering stage if there’s 10°C difference between day and night temperatures, and this time we have them! 🙂

    As you can see in the image on the right the fan leaves have started to turn purple little by little. I really can’t wait for her to fully develop her purple dress.


    Leaves Turning Purple


    All Strain Buds Fattening Strongly

    We started saying this last week, but just like the trichomes the growth of the buds has really rapped up strongly.
    Whether it’s the Cheese buds thickening strongly or the Big Buddha Cheese buds, the buds have probably taken about 10% in size since last week!

    Buds of the topped cheese plant getting huge

    Cheese buds fattening up


    At least 30 cm long bud

    Largest Big Buddha Cheese bud over 30cm long


    BBC pistils making flower bigger and bigger

    BBC pistils growing making the Bud bigger and bigger


    On the other had, the Blue Thai’s buds are really small. Looking at the trichomes, since they’re all still fully clear, the plant seems far from ready to be harvested to there’s hope for them to increase strongly… We’re not really counting on it but fingers crossed.

    That said, as you can see in the image on the right hand side, they’re covered in trichomes. We’re really hoping these buds are going to get much bigger than they are currently.


    small bud but covered in trichomes


    First set of leaves growing on Seedlings

    As we said in last weeks post we planted 4 seeds for our next round and honestly they’ve been growing pretty nicely. We set them in a little corner under a light, with 2 pieces of paper on each side acting as reflectors.

    As you can see the plants seem to be liking it pretty well, the first set of leaves have grown and the second stage is coming in 🙂

    Thanks to this we’ll have saved about 3 weeks of early vegetative stage.


    4 seedlings growing the first set of leaves

    Next round of Seedling Growing


    Alright folks that’s it for this week.
    Until next time, Be safe and grow easy!

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    Hey there and welcome (back) to Free The Tree!
    Today we’re going to go over the 3rd week of our current culture. The two main things that happened this week is the fact that we transplanted our 2 Big Buddha Cheese plants into fabric pots and… Thrips started showing their faces again!
    We had the issue during our previous culture and hadn’t seen their faces in over a month.. Really though we had dealt with all those suckers.
    We’ve already done a couple articles on Thrips so we won’t go in depth about it but here’s a couple links if you want to know more about them.



    Transplanting the Big Buddha Cheese Cuttings into Fabric Pots

    You may have noticed that in our previous report we placed our Cheese and Blue Thai strains in Air Pots. With these 2 Big Buddha’s and the 1 Blue Kush remaining we decided to go for fabric pots, allowing us to test out the differences between each and maybe determine which is best. We’ll see in a couple weeks of one or the other performs best.

    On the transplantation side, we already did a full guide on Marijuana Transplantation this way if you want to know more, here we’ll just share a couple pictures of the process.

    Making room in the soil in order to place the BBC plant

    BBC before transplantation


    Big buddha cheese successfully transplanted

    BBC in its new soil


    BBC with just one leaf left after strong curing session

    Cured plant after transplantation

    As you can see we decided to cure the plant as soon as we transplanted her and we didn’t go easy on them.
    The reason behind this is that all her previous leaf mass was damaged due to stresses on travel. Bear in mind that these were branches not that long ago.

    The objective of this cure is for her to grow a nice, new, leaf coverage that will allow her to photosynthesis the light in the optimally.
    Here’s a before/after curing our other plant

    marijuana plant before pruning the leaves

    BBC before curing


    marijuana plant after pruning the leaves

    BBC after curing

    Now you might be thinking “they’re crazy, those plants don’t have enough leaf mass”, especially for that first one. You’d be surprised how well marijuana (aka weed) adapts are grows, here’s a couple pictures just days after the transplantation (as always, click on the picture to get a full view)

    Just recently transplanted, couple leaves starting to grow

    2 days after transplanting


    5 days later new stage of leaf coming in

    5 days after transplant
    (leaves are wet)


    strong leaf mass has grown back in a week

    7 days after transplant

    You see? in just a week both plants grew back enough leaf mass to get back to growing, some new branches are starting to come out, they’re going to be perfect for our scrog! 🙂

    Sidenote: The droopyness of the Blue Kush (bottom left) are the first signs are the roots being blocked, this is what happens when you wait too long to transplant.)


    Thrips are back!

    During this week we also got a pretty nice come back of Thrips, we killed at least 15 larva’s by hand and removed the Apex of the most infected plant.. Thankfully we’re going for a scrog so it was necessary anyway.
    Our preferred option to deal with Thrips is by using Neem Oil since it’s totally natural and easy to use. 

    2 young thrips on marijuana

    2 thrips larva’s on leaf


    Sprout sprayed with neem oil solution

    Neem Oil sprayed on Marijuana plant

    Since we didn’t have any on hand we had to wait a little week in order to receive it my mail. While waiting for it here’s what we did in order to prevent spreading:

    1. Increase the humidity and drop the temps: As we’ve covered in our other articles linked above, Thrips like warm and dry weather.
      We kept the grow room at at least 50% Humidity and tops 23°C
    2. Get it windy: They also like still environments so we got our fans pointing of the leaves of our plants.
    3. Hunt: We decided not to wait, as soon as we’d spot a Thrips larva we’d kill it.
      Every time it’s one less eating up your plant and laying eggs.
    4. Spray your plants with warm water. About 15 minutes before lights out we’d spray warm water all over (and under) our plants.

    These steps won’t get rid of all the Thrips but it’ll definitely slow down their spreading and the damages done to your plants.

    Once we received the Neem Oil we’d repeat step 4 but adding the Oil in the water. This was done 3 days in a row, then we waited a couple days and re-sprayed the plants.
    Haven’t seen more signs of those nasty suckers since.


    Alright folks that it for week 3! 
    See you guys for next weeks update, until then be safe and grow easy!


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    Check out our Babies! Every week there’s a new grow report 😉

    Hey there and welcome (back) to Free The Tree!
    We’ve now arrived at the final post of this grow, it was short but intense! But don’t worry we’ve already got 5 seeds that have germinated and 4 Big Buddha Cheese clones going, next series is going to be even better 🙂

    But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, today we’re going to cover the harvest and curing of our 2 Fruit Auto flowering Marijuana plants, the 2 others aren’t ready yet.
    As you will see, the 2 we’re about to cut are are super small, but the 2 one buds are looking ok considering, especially one of them. Regardless, as soon as those autoflowering plants started flowering on their own we knew that this would be a small one;

    Let’s get into it!

    Day 59 – Holding back on harvesting

    By now we had been observing the trichomes every day or two for the past 7 days or so, the two plants on the left were entering their 3rd and last cycle of browning pistils and most of the trichomes were milky. Furthermore they had been in a Nitrogen deficiency state for awhile now, so we new those buds were going to be super light, but suuuper tasty.
    So really at this point they were ready to be harvested, but so small that we wanted to give them as many more days as possible to fatten..

    The two one bud plants (on the right) were no where near ready, many trichomes were still clear, they had little or no signs of Nitrogen deficiency and they hadn’t even entered the 2nd round of browning pistils. We figured we had at least a week left on those two.

    Here’s a couple of pics of these babies at this stage, as always you can click on them to see the full screen version.

    4 Fruit Strain plants at the end of the flowering stage


    One of the 2 One Buds


    One of the 2 not One Buddig
    (remember on day 51 we cut the side branches)

    Now to show you with more detail what we meant when we said that the one buds still had white pistils and the other 2 plants were entering the 3rd phase of browning pistils here’s 2 close-ups on one of each

    Mostly white pistils on the buds


    Marijuana Pistils have started to become brown


    Day 61 – Harvesting and curing the 2 first plants

    By this time we started seeing some trichomes starting to turn and golden/brownish color, which is a sign that the THC levels are reducing and the CBD is rising. Depending on the type of plant and what you want as a high you might want to wait more, but since this is a Hybrid we don’t want her indica side to come out too much, it’s chop chop time.

    Close up on 2 fruit strains ready to be harvested

    Fruit ready to be harvested


    One Bud marijuana so heavy it leans sideways

    One Bud leaning under bud weight


    One of the 2 not One Budding
    (remember on day 51 we cut the side branches)

    As you can see once out of the grow room her colors finally show on camera 🙂 Her strong nitrogen deficiency is a sign that her taste should be great, and those purple hints on the top of the buds just make her sexy haha.

    We also placed a little picture of our one bud in the middle. As you can see her root system and stem aren’t strong enough to hold the weight of the bud. We had to strap her up a little in order to help her stand up straight.

    Getting back to the harvest, now that the plants are cut we need to get to curing them, we covered that with more detail in our previous article so we won’t go in detail on how to do so, but here are some picture (don’t expect the fattest buds..)

    Close up on fruit bud with purple colors on the flowers and leaves

    Purple bud


    Fruit plant before curing


    2 Fruit plants after curing

    Crazy how much size they lose before and after curing them no?! Now it’s time to get them to dry for about 10 days.

    [su_quote]Reminder: As we said in our previous article, don’t throw out your stems and leaves, you can reuse them for many things, from Hash with the leaves to Tea with the branches; (how to make hash over here) [/su_quote]


    Day 63 – Nitrogen Deficiency kicking in

    In just 2 days the Nitrogen deficiency had started to advance, the bottom leaves started drying and were almost ready to fall off and the symptoms started spreading further up the plant.

    Here’s a couple pictures of the 2 last plants of this cycle

    2 plants soon ready to be harvested

    Nitrogen deficiency spreading upward


    Close up on marijuana flower

    Close up on bud on the right


    Main leaves almost all eaten up by nitrogen deficiency

    2nd plant about a week short of harvest


    Day 68 – Harvest and Curing the last plants

    By now the nitrogen deficiency had advanced well, the pistils had started to brown for their 3rd time and the trichomes were all nice and milky, time harvest these last babies! Here’s what they looked like

    One bud fruit strain cannabis harves

    Plant 1


    nice plant freshly harvested and ready to cure

    Plant 2

    As always, after this we got to get curing, here’s a couple more picture

    2nd plant about a week short of harvest


    Top of the Apex bud

    Close up on bud on the right


    Cured fruit strain plants

    Plant 1 and 2 after curing

    Now that we’ve cured them we got to get them drying. As we’ve said in the previous post, we just tie them upside down either in the grow room or in a cupboard. Since we’ve already started germinating new seeds this time they’re going in the cupboard!

    Here’s what the 4 plants look like in there, you’ll be able to see right away the different in size and in color. The color difference is due to the fact that the 2 smaller plants are now in their 8th day of drying. Actually a little of the size difference is also linked to this, since while drying they loose in mass.

    Different stages of drying marijuana buds

    Fruit Plants drying in cupboard


    scissors after curing the plants

    Scissor full of resin and pistils


    leftover leaves from the harvest

    Leaves ready to go into the freezer for later use (home made hash soon!)


    Well that’s it for this one guys, next time we’ll cover the germination of the Blue Thai, Blue Kush and the Cheese seeds, can’t wait 🙂

    Until then, be safe and grow easy!

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    Hi there and welcome to the 8th week of the flowering stage!
    Sorry for being late posting the grow reports, we’ve been working hard on getting the Strain&Seed comparison tool up and running 🙂 We’re still working on the styling and getting many more stores, strains and characteristics but soon enough it’ll be awesome ^^

    I’m getting off topic here, this past week a lot has been going on in the grow room. The smell is just crazy (my neighbors started to complain…), the buds are getting thicker and thicker, just looking beautiful. We’ll also get into the topping of Cheese plant and harvest a BBC bud.
    On the negative aspects, we’re still manually hunting thrips manually, which is oh so fun… and the Calcium deficiency is still spreading a little, which was expected.

    This week we also decided to germinated 4 seeds for the next batch. Their seedling stage will overlap with the flowering stage of our other buds allowing us to save about 3 weeks time.
    Next round we’ll be growing 3 Blue Kush’s and 1 Critical + plant

    Here’s some links if you want to skip straight to a section:


    Calcium Deficiency still Spreading

    We’ve been treating the plant for a little under 10 weeks now and as you can see on the image on the right, the deficiency is still spreading.

    Since Calcium is an immobile nutrient it depends on the plants transpiration is order to move around. Within the next couple days the spreading should stop.
    This deficiency definitely gave the plant a hard hit leaf mass wise..


    Brown spots showing up on the leaves


    Topping the Cheese’s Apex Bud

    If you’ve been following this grow then you’re aware that our cheese plant’s stretch was pretty massive and we’ve had to deal with a very un-even canopy ever since.

    Although we had super-cropped the Apex, the plant was still was still waaaay to tall and shading the two on each side, and now that the trichomes are starting to be nice we decided to go ahead and top the Apex.
    It could of definitely grown more, and denser, but now all the buds underneath have direct access to light AND she isn’t shading as much the Blue Kush and the Blue Thai


    Apex Flower of cheese

    Cheese before being Topped


    After cutting Apex bud of cheese plant

    Cheese after being Topped


    Cheese bud harvest and pruned, ready to dry

    Nugget harvest and Pruned, ready to be dried & cured


    I won’t lie, it did kind of hurt to chop down this bud, especially since the Apex generally’s the best bud on the plant ^^
    It’ll give us an early taste of this cheese, although it isn’t ready.. Here’s what her trichomes looked like


    milky trichomes under the miroscope

    Mostly Milky Trichomes of the Cheese Strain


    milky trichomes of the Cheese cannabis strain

    Trichomes under the Scope



    Harvesting the First Big Buddha Cheese Bud

    Our 2 big buddha cheese plants are really massive and it’s difficult for us to really be able to see the trichomes. Normally within 55-60 days of flowering she’s ready and were nearing the 60th day now.
    With all the deficiencies they’ve had we’re pretty sure that they’re no where near ready but we still decided to go ahead and harvest a bud.

    We chose one that’s near the Blue Thaï, compressing her and not giving much room to breath. This move will at least have the benefit of giving a little more room for her.


    Big Buddha Cheese 8th week of flowering stage


    8th week Harvested bud

    Small BBC Flower harvested


    BBC trichomes on the pistils

    Trichomes all over the Pistils


    Trichomes on the leaves of marijuana

    Trichomes on the leaves


    Buds Fattening Up

    During the past couple weeks the buds have been getting fatter and fatter, the pistils keep growing, the smell is getting extremely strong and really they’re looking awesome 🙂

    Looking at the small bud further up as well as the others, I think that we’re about 2 weeks out in order to harvest the Cheese and the Big Buddha Cheese and maybe a week more for the Blue Kush and Thai. With this in mind we’ve decided to start flushing the plants little by little.
    For the next watering or two we’ll reduce the amount of nutrients (except for the Calcium), then just give them pure water (still keeping the molasses though)

    Here’s a couple picture of them at the end of the week


    Cheese flower thickening up

    Cheese Buds fattening after topping


    Big Buddha cheese colas doubled in size

    Horizontal view of Big Buddha Cheese multiple Cola’s


    Close up on big buddha cheese flower

    Close up on BBC flower developing


    Germinating the Next Seeds

    Since there’s about 2/3 weeks left in the flowering stage of the current grow we decided to go ahead and start the germination of next round in order to save some time.
    Since plants don’t need that much light during the seedling stage, we’ll keep them under a side light for the first couple weeks, until we harvest this round.


    Seeds germinating in paper towel

    Kush and Critical Seeds Germinating


    4 seeds with tap root breaking out of the shell

    Tap root breaking the seed shell


    Germinated seeds planted in organic pot

    4 Germinated Seeds planted into medium


    We decided to germinate 3 Blue Kush’s and 1 Critical+.
    We’re going to do a quick round with those, do a LST and try to get some little fat bonsai’s for that round 🙂


    Alright folks that’s it for this week.
    Until next time, Be safe and grow easy!

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    Read up on our Indoor Growing Tips!


    Hey there and welcome (back) to Free The Tree!
    This week was pretty full of events, possibly too much to cover in just one post.
    We kept on training our smaller plants for the ScrOG, did a cutting on the Blue Kush for a friend, started implementing automatic watering solutions and installed the Screen to start weaving the branches!

    While all this was going on, our BBC’s started showing signs of Potassium deficiency and these darn Thrips keep on coming back.. pretty intense for just a week no? 
    Let’s get into it, but before that here’s some links if you want to go straight to the section that interests you.

    Keep in mind that we won’t go into each section in depth, but we will link to our articles where we do cover these subjects in depth if you want to know more, let’s get started!


     ScrOG Plant Training

    If you went over last weeks post then you’re aware that we’ve been training couple of our plants to scrog. Since we’re going through the process we figure it would be good to share the plant training stages. 
    So here we are, this week we will cover over the last steps of the training 🙂



    Plant Training Continues

    new set of branches growing near the cut

    As a reminder, at this point we had just recently cut the tip of the 2 new branches. Doing this increases the energy sent to the 2 side branches growing at the spot where the knot is.

    We decided to stop here, but you can keep of cutting the tops at each new stage for her to keep dividing and producing more side branches.




    Step 5 – Wait until the branches reach the screen

    Once you’ve decided that you have enough branches you’re going to have to wait for them to grow up and reach the screen in order to start weaving the branches.
    You should try and pass the branches and leaves through the screen as soon as she can reach, this will push her to grow faster 😉




    Step 6 – Weave the branches on the Screen.

    branches weaved on the screen

    After a couple days your plant will have grown enough and will start passing through the screen. At this moment you’re going to want to start guiding the branches over and under the screen.
    This will allow the plant to develop some more branches that will grow vertically, increasing even more your final yield.



    Installing the Screen for the SCROG

    Although half our plants aren’t really tall enough to weave, the Big Buddha Cheese plants so far ahead that we need to get them scrogging;
    The main issue being the height difference between the plants, if we hadn’t done this, by the end of the stretch we would have to choose between light burn on the BBC’s of not enough light penetration for our other plants.. Hard decision.

    To avoid this we started to weave the plants on the screen, and clipped any branches that are growing too high up. 

    We went in depth on attaching the screen over here if you want to get the step by step process.

    top view of Screen set up for scrog

    Screen attached in the grow room


    top branches and leaves passing over the screen

    Screen lowered to Apex level


    View under the screen



    First signs of Potassium Deficiency

    During this week one of our Big Buddha Cheeses plants started showing the first signs of Potassium Deficiency which isn’t cool. 
    We wanted to get the flowering stage started within a week, but since Potassium is one of the Nutrients that push the plant to flower, we must solve this deficiency before doing so.

    We did a full guide on potassium deficiency, linked below, but basically in order to solve this issue you need to increase the amount of potassium given to the plant during the next waterings.


    leaf with brown spots coming in, first signs of a Potassium deficiency


    Making a Cutting from the Blue Kush

    I don’t know if you’ve noticed in the previous posts, but we had kept a strong side branch the whole time without ever mentioning why. 
    The reason behind this is that we want to make a cutting from it for a friend so that he can have one of these beauties also.

    We’ll just put a couple pics of this cutting here, but check out our article on doing cuttings if you want to know more

    View of all tools needed to do a cutting

    Tools needed to make a cutting


    scissors used to remove the branch from the tree

    Removing the branch for the plant


    Cutting growing its roots in the grow room

    Cutting growing in the tent

    Unfortunately this cutting didn’t take, we couldn’t keep the humidity level high enough for her, so she started sweating and died.
    Once the plant reaches the screen we’ll prune the top of one of two branches in order to give it another run.


    Automating the watering of Marijuana

    Automating our watering system is really something we’ve been thinking about for a long time since it’s so time consuming. On top of that, this time around we’re using much bigger pots than before, meaning even more time to water… And honestly, we just didn’t have the time anymore to do it well.
    We tested different techniques, that we’ve grouped together over here.

    We’ll only show you our final setup that is now fully functional, saving us a looot of time

    Water connected and secured to the container

    Watering mix in the container 


    Separation of the water flow to the plants

    Water line entering the room 


    Full set up of drip irrigation system

    Drip System watering the plants

    On top of saving time, this type of system actually waters your plant much more efficiently. Since the water flows much slower it irrigates the soil by capillarity, spreading much better across the medium. 
    This means 2 things:

    1. The roots receive more water
    2. You use less water at each watering (no need for the 20% run-off



    Alright folks that’s all for this one!
    Until next time, be safe and grow easy 😉

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    Check out all our Indoor Growing Tips