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 😉

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Hey guys and welcome (back) to Free The Tree!
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!


Training Marijuana Plants for ScrOG

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 😉


2nd round of branch pruning to train for scrog


Training Weed for a Scrog Easily

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.


Plant 1 – Young Blue Kush Weed Plant

Blue Kush about 15 days old before starting the scrog training

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.




Step 1 – Pruning the Apex

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 😉




Step 2 – Let the 2 new Branches Grow

2 strong branches growing where apex was cut

After cutting the Apex you’re going to want to wait until each side branch has developed a new stage of leaves.




Step 3 – Prune Tip of the 2 new branches

2nd round of branch pruning to train for scrog

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.




Step 4 – Let the new sets of branches grow

new set of branches growing near the cut



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 😉


Slow Growth during the early Vegetative Stage

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.

Weed plant growing normally

Normal Growth – Blue Kush planted in small pot than transplanted to larger pots.


Slow Growth – Blue Thai and Cheese planted straight into the large pots.

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.

Bleu start just clipped to start scrog

Blue Thai – Apex just pruned for ScrOG preperation


Cheese plant still very small, developing the third stage of leaves

Cheese plant event smaller – 2nd stage of leaf growing


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.

Focus on 2 BBC plants about to start scrogging


Cheese, Blue Thai, Blue Kush during the vegetative stage

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 ^^

Alright Folks, that’s it for this one.
Until next time, 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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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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Hi There and welcome (back) to Free the Tree!
This past week we’ve seen some nice bud growth all around, although the BBC is still showing signs of Phosphorus deficiency… Hopefully we’ve added enough PK for them to be happy, and not too much for the others..
You can also see that Cheese plant was really getting too tall and close to the light source, which we can’t really raise much more than it is or else the Big Buddha Cheese and Blue Kush won’t have enough light.. So we decided to fold her Apex.

This is the first time we’ve done so many different strains at once and I think we went a little too far by having 5 different ones in there;
Furthermore, the BBC’s are mainly in re-used soil, maybe even dating back 4 grows, I think it may be totally out of nutrients and needs some time to recover..

Let’s get into it!


Phosphorus deficiency

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..


Leaves turning purple & black

Leaves turned purple/black


Nice Bud growth

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 🙂


Buddlets developing into nice buds


Big Buddha Cheese further along than the others


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!


Apex Too close to the Light

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


Leaves standing up showing the plant is too hot

Leaves going vertical


Folded apex during the flowering stage

Super Cropped Apex during the flowering stage


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.


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!
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.

Here’s what we’re cover in this grow report:

Let’s get started


Weaving the branches and Removing Leaves

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.

Grow room before training the plants

Before Weaving the Branches


After weaving the branches


Pile of leaves that were pruned

Leaves pruned in order to remove shading

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.


Potassium Deficiency Spreading

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.

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

Last Week’s Status of the leaves


Deficiency spreading on the leaf

Potassium deficiency spreading


Leaf totally consumed by deficiency

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.


2nd Try at doing Cuttings

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.

Jar in order to transport cuttings

Jar half filled with water


2 Blue Kush cuttings in the jar

Cuttings in the water


jar closed maintaining 100% humidity

Closed Jar half filled water – 100% Humidity environment

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..)


Picture Evolution of Week 7

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!

Half the plants passed the screen

Start of week 7


Half way through week 7, most plants reached the screen

Mid way through the week


Plants have fully covered the screen

End of the 7th Week


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!
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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Hey there and welcome (back) to Free the Tree!
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.


Blue Kush Phosphorous issues and Transplantation

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.

Blue Kush Phosphorous issues

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.


Signs of phosphorous issues on weed leaf

Leaf turning Purple – Signs of Phosphorous issues.


Main leaf Vein turning purple

Main vein turning Purple and stopped growth.


Weed plant starting to grow back

Growth starting back up after Transplantation.


Transplanting our Blue Kush

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..


Compressed roots starting to sick out of bottom pot holes

Roots starting to stick out of the bottom of the pot.


Compressed roots at the bottom of soil

Well developed root system of the Blue Kush


Half way through the blue kush transplantation

Well developed root system of the Blue Kush

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.


Thrips Treatment continuing

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.


Organic Neem Oil used to kill Thrips

Bottle of Organic Neem Oil

5 Plants at the end of 4th week


Alright guys that it’s 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 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!

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!

Miss a couple episodes? Here’s all our other Grow Reports

Read up on our Indoor Growing Tips!


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 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.


First Cannabis plants sprouting

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

Close up on first leaves breaking the soil


First leaves breaking the shell


Plant standing up and first leaves showing

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.


Big Buddha Cheese cuttings

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)

Cuttings in the grow room



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.


Air pots and last sprouts

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

Cheese plant just breaking the ground


Blue Thai growing first stage leaves


Blue Kush in the early Vegetative Stage

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.

Well folks that brings us to the end of week 2, see you guys next week 😉

Until then, be safe and grow easy!


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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!

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Hey there and welcome (back) to Free The Tree!
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 🙂

Here’s what we’re going to cover:


18/6 to 12/12 – Starting the Flowering Stage

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.


Using a light timer to change from 18/6 to 12/12

Mechanical Timer for Photo-period control


Week 1 of the Stretch – Strong Vegetative Growth

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


First day at 12 hour light cycle

Day 0 – Tonight the light will shut off earlier


Day 6 – Strong Growth, grow room is full


Plant training started with pinching and fmiing the taller colas

Day 7 – FMIing, Pruning and Pinching


On day 6 and 7 we decided to start pruning a whole bunch of branches and leaves (mainly branches).
Let’s get into why we did this


Pruning leaves and branches during 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)


Grow room too full

Day 6 – Before first round of branch pruning


about 15 colas removed from the 2 big Buddha cheese plants

Grow Room after pruning


all the leaves and branches pruned off the plants

About 10 branches removed


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.


Super Cropping the top colas

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

  1. Folding the cola reduces its height
  2. While she recovers growth will be slowed on that colas
  3. Once she recovers she’ll be able to store more nutrients within the stem.

We started writing a guide on super cropping : check it out if you have questions on super cropping weed.


Weed plant much taller than the others

Cheese plant before super cropping


apex folded and tied with string

Apex Folded  and tied horizontally 


Super cropped Apex

View of the Horizontal Apex


We repeated this process with every auxiliary branch that we decided to keep. She will be working at repairing these sections, making them more resilient.


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!
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!
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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