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Hey there and welcome to Free the Tree!
In this price we’ve grouped together all our previous Blue Kush, blue thai, Big Buddha Cheese & Cheese grow journals. This was one of the best grows we’ve had, much fun and full of lessons
Grow Context
Strain information
Week 1 | New round of Seed Germination
Week 2 | Sprouting Plants and Receiving Cutting
Week 3 | Fabric Pot Transplantation and Thrips return
Week 4 | Last Transplantation and Thrips Return
Week 5 | Starting ScrOG Plant Training and Slow Growth
Week 6 | Scrog, Doing Cuttings and Potassium Deficiency
Week 7 | End of Vegetation & Weaving Branches on the Screen
Week 10 | Final Pruning, Pistil growth and signs of Phosphorus deficiency
Week 11 | Phosphorus Deficiency and Bud Growth
Week 12 | Trichomes, Uneven Canopy and Beautiful Buds
Week 13 | Trichome and Bud growth, Calcium Deficiency, Thrips
Week 14 | Milky Trichomes, Harvesting First Bud and Back Building
Week 15 | Calcium Deficiency, Harvesting First Buds & Seed Germination
Week 16 | Purple Leaves, Massive amount of Trichomes and Flower development
Week 17 | First Cola Harvest, Blue Kush going Purple and Ripening Buds
Week 18 | Harvesting, Pruning, Drying and Curing our Weed Buds
Since we grew so many different strains during this grow, instead of placing the usual characteristics tables, you can directly select the ones you want to see compare their characteristics 🙂
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:
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
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.
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 🙂
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:
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.
This week was pretty cool, we received 4 beautiful Big Buddha Cheese cuttings, most our seeds broke the ground and we transplanted most our plants into air and fabric pots. Let’s get into it.
Within a couple days after planting the seedlings, the first plants started to sprout. As we started to say in the previous post, we weren’t going to make the same mistake as last time so we got these little guys straight into the grow room.
We installed a CoolTube since last grow so our heat issues are under control and not an issue anymore. Here’s a couple pictures of them breaking the ground
These 3 pictures were took within 24 hours, isn’t it crazy how quickly things happen at this point in time?
Down under the soil, their root system are starting to grow and conquer the space.
A friend of ours that lives in the state next door has been nurturing a BBC strain for a couple years, increasing its strength and Render.
Our first plant was a cutting from her, you can check out the couple articles we’ve done on that grow here, needless to say we’re really excited to get another crack at her 🙂
He had really we prepared them for us, although they did have a couple deficiencies going since we waited a little too long to get out there.
Here’s what they looked like during the first couple days (as always, click on the picture to get the full view)
After receiving these little ones we needed to give them a couple days to get recover from the stress of the transport and all, after which we will select 2, transplant to larger pots and defoliate them so that they quickly grow new and healthy leaves.
By the end of week 2 all our seedlings had sprouted apart from the two seeds that died (RIP).
We also decided to get 2 of our plants into our air pots right away. We also hesitated to transplant the BBC plants but decided to wait another day or two.
On the other hand, the Blue Thai (BT) and Cheese plants are really growing slowly, whereas the Blue Kush, that sprouted after the BT had already grown nice first leaves.
We’re not sure if it’s due to the fact that they’re in the Air pots while the BT is in regular pots, but that would seem logical.. We might have been better to wait a little before getting them in those pots. Check them out
Now like we said, that Blue Thai had actually broken the ground before the Blue Kush, see how much of a difference?? I really feel like it was an error to get them that quickly into the air pots that quickly.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.)
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.
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:
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.
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This week we finally got enough soil to transplant the Blue Kush plant which started showing some Phosphorous issues which got us a little worried.
Apart from that we also finally received the Neem Oil to start application on the plants and get rid of these nasty little Thrips; Let’s get into it.
We had definitely waited way too long to transplant this little one, the roots started coming out the bottom of the pot, the veins of the leaves were turning purple, safe for the underside…
She also had totally stopped growing which really had us worried. He’s some images, but before that check out our article on transplanting a weed plant if you want to know more.
So this was the first time it had ever happened to us, the plant had stopped growing, the veins and the bottom side of the leaves were turning purple.
Here’s a couple pics, as always you can click on them to get the full view.
We definitely waited waaaay to long to transplant this little one. The main reason why was that I didn’t have enough soil so really couldn’t..
As you can see with in those 2 first pictures the roots were definitely blocked and compressed, which easily explained why the plant had stopped growing and the Phosphorous issues.
Since the roots of the plant is her only way to get nutrients from the soil to the top of the plant, by having them so compressed there was no way she could develop well.
During the couple days following the transplantation she started showing signs of growth right away which definitely reassured us.
During this week we’ve been spraying the plants about 15 minutes before lights out every other day. The objective of this is to kill any survivors or newly hatched Thrips that could start the infestation back up.
Since the first treatment we’ve only seen 1 larvae on the plants so it seems to be working pretty good. Really hoping that this is the end of this infestation, but just to be sure we’ll be spraying neem oil every couple days for the next 10 days.
We grouped together all the info on how to kill Thrips over here if you want to know more.
This week is pretty weird. On one hand we’ve got 2 plants that are growing real quickly (the 2 BBC’s) and 2 plants growing reeeal slow (cheese and Blue Thai). We’re already trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with the different sizes in time in order to avoid issues during the flowering.
That said, in this post well go over the plant training that we did in order to prepare for the SCROG, as well as the reasons why these two little one’s have been growing slowly.
Let’s get into it!
Setting up your ScrOG is something you need to prepare for pretty early on in the life of your little one. I’m not saying that you can’t decide later on, but the best moment to start training your plant is at the 3rd stage of leaves.
Little pointer before we get into it, we won’t have the last step on the training since it takes a little more than a week to grow. The last step will be in our next post 😉
So we’re going to go through each step in order to train your Marijuana for a scrog.
As a reminder, these are the steps before setting up your screen. If you want to go to the screen set-up check out our ScrOG guide.
The first picture will show the plant just before we started to train her, after which we’ll get into each step.
You want to wait until the 3rd stage of leaves before doing anything. In the picture above we must wait a little before starting to train this one.
Once your plant has grown her 3rd stage you’re going to want to cut (prune) the top section of the plant with a pair of clean scissors or a blade.
As we show in the picture below, you’ll want to do this just above the knot, be careful not to damage the side branches that are forming!
In the next step you will be able to see what it the plant will look like without the Apex. If you’re worried about the fact that the Apex is supposed to be her strongest and best bud, don’t worry, you’ll get that bud x10 😉
After cutting the Apex you’re going to want to wait until each side branch has developed a new stage of leaves.
Now as you can see we waited a little too long to cut the tip of the side branches. Generally you’d want to cut it before the growth of the next stage in order to avoid any waste of energy. With that in mind, we’re still going to keep the 1st stage branches, in time we’ll prune the 2nd stage growths and that top leaf that’s shading the branch.
Once you reached this stage you’re going to wait a little until those 4 branches have grown enough to start training them. As you can see above, at this point in time they’re way to small to start doing so. We need to wait a couple days, so the second half of this section will be on the next post 😉
As we started saying in the beginning of the article, 2 out of the 3 plants originating from the germinated seeds have been growing really slowly, especially compared to the third.
After reading left and right, this is due to the fact that we planted them straight into the final pot, whereas the other plant was in a small pot before being transplanted into the final one.
We didn’t know this at first, but a weed plant in that it in a pot that’s too big for it will grow much slower since it’s focusing on root development. This means that the root system will be well developed, but there’s definitely some time lost.
Here’s a couple picture of the growth during this week.
Just with these 2 pictures you can easily see the huge difference. Keep in mind that these seeds germinated at about the same time! (couple days delay for the Cheese plant on the far right).
Crazy how big of a difference in growth there is no? Thankfully this week the 2 slower plants started getting there growing on, but they’ll never catch up the other plants.
As we said earlier, the reason for this is the fact that a marijuana plant that’s planted in a large pot will grow slower during the early vegetative stage.
On the upside, these plants won’t have any transplanting stress and once the root system is well developed they’ll get growing strongly.
As you can see in the two images above, by the end of the second week they had grown “a lot”. The Blue Thai had grown the 3rd level of leaves so we decided to cut the Apex on this one.
On her side, the Cheese is still hanging back. We decided to cut all new side branches in order for her to focus on vertical growth.
I’m not too sure what we’re going to do with her, if she catches up we might do a small scrog, or else we’ll just keep a couple side branches and work her more when we get into the re-vegetation cycle (spoiler ^^).
Before we let you go, here’s a couple last pictures of them at the end of week 5, as always click on them to see the full picture.
Hopefully these 2 little ones are going to get their grow on.. Next week we plant to make the cutting of the Blue Kush for a friend and place the screen, so they need to hurry up ^^
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.
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 🙂
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.
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 😉
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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:
Today we’re going to cover the last week of the vegetative stage 🙂 within a little more than 2 months we’ll have some nice flowers ready to be harvested hehe.
These last weeks have been pretty full of events, between the Potassium deficiency, branch weaving and finally our 2nd attempt to do some cuttings off our Blue Kush.
During the vegetation station you’re going to need keep weaving the branches along the screen.
You’ll notice that some leaves are creating shade over some auxiliary branches. As long as the branch in question can handle it, remove the leaf in question.
Here’s our pruning run, as always click on the image to see the full version.
Don’t hesitate on those branches, but do be careful not to brake any. If you do snap a branch use Duck Tape to repair it.
You might also think that removing those branches is counter productive, but exposing those auxiliary branches to will push them to develop as a main cola’s. Do be careful not to remove too many leaves though, you want to leave enough for each branch to do enough photosynthesis.
So this week the potassium deficiencies kept on spreading across the two largest plants.
We we’re actually expecting that it would keep spreading this week since we’re the bio grow range of products.
These products are “long term release” nutrients which means that they take about 7 days to release into the soil, meaning that the plant can’t get access to those nutrients for 7 days after introducing it to the soil.
Thankfully the deficiency stopped spreading to new leaves quickly so we only lost the couple leaves that were impacted at first.
As we bring forward in our guide, the only way to fix this is to add Potassium (K) the next time you water your plants.
If you’ve been following, about 2 weeks ago we tried doing some cuttings of the Blue Kush for one of our friends. Unfortunately that one died because we weren’t able to keep 100% humidity so she started sweating. Once that has started it’s basically over.
This time around our friend is transporting them as soon as we cut the branches.
We’ve covered in depth how to transport in our cuttings guide which we’ll link to further below but here’s some pictures of the process.
Once the Cuttings are in the water and the jar is closed they’re ready to get going.
The quicker you get home and get them into the block of rock-wool the better the chance they’ll survive! (Don’t take risks driving though, better they don’t survive than you lose your life..)
Before we go, here’s a couple pics of the grow room during the week. Next week we’re going to change the photo-periods in order to get the flowering stage going!
This week we finally started the Stretch 🙂 The Potassium deficiencies we were seeing totally stopped spreading which means they now have sufficient levels so we’re good to go!!
On the top picture you can see that out canopy is far from being even which isn’t great, we’re planning to do some FMIing and pruning during the stretch to get that all evened out 🙂
In order to get the flowering stage going we need to change the photo-period from 18 hours of light to 12 hours, triggering the wanted change in behavior.
All we’re doing by changing the light cycle is imitating nature, where by the end of the summer the number of daylight hours start being as close as the number of night hours.
The most important thing here is to make sure that they’re in full darkness during the night hours, irregular lights may produce hermaphrodites, which no-one wants (except for seeds)
The days after you change the light period you’ll see your plants starting to grow strongly. By the end of the first week some pistils should also start appearing.
Over just 7 days they’ve all grown a whole lot but I think the most impressive is the Cheese plant, she’s doubled in size which is pretty cool since she was the smallest plant.
It might just be a visual thing though, since she only has 1 main coals whereas the others have multiple.
Here’s a couple pictures of the stretch
Since there was such a strong growth during this first week we decided to go for a round of pruning on the 2 Big Buddha Cheese plants.
These 2 gals have produced just to many side branches. If we had kept them this way we would have a bunch of small buds instead of a nice and strong ones. In order to avoid this we’ve removed all the small branches that didn’t show potential.
Whether it’s because they had no direct access to light, better looking branches next to them had more potential or the bud sites were too far apart, they’re gone, without going overboard of course.
Here’s a couple pics (as always click on them for the full view)
There’s another reason for this pruning we didn’t mention above and this is the room around the Colas.
If you’re colas don’t have enough room around them they will basically race each other to the light source. This will make some lengthy and weak stems, which won’t be able to transport many nutrients, thus producing smaller buds.
You want the leaves of your different plants to overlap or touch as less as possible.
As you may have noticed our Big Buddha Cheese plants are much, much bigger as the others and some of those cola’s are way taller than the others, which is an issues for the light balance..
In order to keep our canopy as even as possible we’ve decided to super crop the top Colas. This has 3 advantages
We started writing a guide on super cropping : check it out if you have questions on super cropping weed.
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!
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.
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!
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
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 🙂
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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If you read last weeks post you’ve seen that we’ve been dealing with phosphorus deficiency issue showing up so at your last watering we pumped up the amount of PK in the solution.
Since then we haven’t seen new leaves being affected by this deficiency which is a good sign, hopefully it’s the last one of this grow..
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.
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.
Although we’ve been seeing these deficiencies, over the past weeks the buds have been nicely developing, especially on the Big Buddha Cheese.
Her flowering cycle seems to be shorter than the 3 other plants, we might finish by harvesting her a couple weeks earlier 🙂
You can clearly see that the BBC is further along the road than her cousins in the room, her buds are looking sooo nice and their full of trichomes, really can’t wait to smoke up.
The smell has also been getting pretty intense, the whole room smells strongly, and when I open the grow room an even stronger odor is released, smelling beautifully sweat. It’s a real pleasure to see these little ones grow!
Our cheese plant is the only one we didn’t weave on the screen since it was so small, at first. Now she’s way too tall messing up our whole canopy, make the Blue Kush stretch and is covering up the light of the blue Thai.
On top of all that she’s now way too close to the cooling hood and the Apex is starting to cook, really not an idea situation
Since we didn’t want to up the hood even more, making it too far for all the other lights, we decided to super crop the apex. Don’t really know what it’s going to give out, we’ve read left and right and there really all opinions about supercropping during the flowering stage.
Since it was divided we decided to go ahead and try it out. This little one will have been super cropped twice during this grow
I think that this will make her produce fatter buds lower within the stem and the top bud might be a little smaller and with less THC density, but… at least it won’t be all burnt up.
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 😉
We’ve been 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
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
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!
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..
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.
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.
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
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
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
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 ^^
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!!!
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.
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 🙂
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Post-edit: Trichomes on leaves are not to be taken into account when timing the harvest! Focus on the bud trichomes
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
While manicuring 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.
Alright folks that’s it for this week.
Until next time, Be safe and grow easy!
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
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..
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
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
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
The end is near 🙂 This week was pretty cool, we harvested our first Big Buddha Cheese bud, the Blue Kush started to put her purple dress on, and globally the buds are getting preeeetty close to being ready for harvest.
Let’s get into it
Since the Big Buddha plants are pretty far back it’s been hard for us to monitor the trichome situation. We’ve cut off little sections of the flowers to look at is closer, but to be honest it’s hard to get a full picture and we can’t do it too often.
As much as we’ve seen the trichomes were milky all around with some amber ones coming in, in order to get our mind set we cut down the bud closest to the Blue Kush. Best case scenario, it’s perfect timing and we go for a full harvest, worst case it’s a little early but our Blue Kush has more room to breath and the Thrips can’t move around as easy. Basically, win win ^^
Nice bud isn’t it? 🙂 But as you can see in the trichomes it’s still a little early to go ahead with a full harvest, a lot of the trichomes are still clear. We’ll go ahead and wait a couple more days before harvesting all the other BBC Cola’s
Since we have a known problem with Thrips during this grow we decided to go ahead and shake the bud to see if any thrips would fall, and fall they did..
We probably killed 4/5 adults and a bunch of larvae’s crawling around. I really hope they won’t damage the buds while drying.
During this week the Blue Kush totally transformed, I really didn’t think it would go this fast. At the beginning of the week the first leaves started to show purplish colors and just a couple days later there she was with a (near) total purple foliage, a beauty.
Here’s some pictures of the evolution, as always click on them to get the full view
A couple of our buds were falling over due to the weight of their own flowers. The main problem with this is that the leaves aren’t getting the maximum amount of light and she’s leaning over onto her neighbor. We had to get a little crafty in order to get her back and standing by tying a (very) lose knot on the leaf stem.
It’s important not to tie it tight, we need the plant to be able to pass the sugars back down for use ^^
A couple of our buds were falling over due to the weight of their own flowers. The main problem with this is that the leaves aren’t getting the maximum amount of light and she’s leaning over onto her neighbor. We had to get a little crafty in order to get her back and standing by tying a (very) lose knot on the leaf stem.
It’s important not to tie it tight, we need the plant to be able to pass the sugars back down for use ^^
Be aware, the picture need to be seen with weed available around you haha.
On a more serious note, by the end of the week these buds have gotten unbelievably nice, the smell is overwhelming, we’re constantly wearing a “marijuana perfume” on our clothes, it’s crazy. Can’t wait to taste these babies 😀
Aren’t they beauties? I really which I could pass on the smell to you, it’s mind-blowing haha. We’ve had to take strong counter-measures since our neighbors were getting the smell all the way to their houses. I think it’s the cheese’s stanky smell that is to taking and pungent.
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:
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).
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 :
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.
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
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 🙂
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).
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.
Here’s what she looked like out of the grow room (as always, click on the images to have the full view)
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 ^^
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.
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)
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
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 🙂
Before we get to drying and curing of the buds, check out the nice stems and root systems these babies had developed
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.
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 ^^
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 🙂
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
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
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