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!


Don’t want to go just yet? Check out our other Indoor Growing Tips


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