420 Magazine's Official Girl Scout Cookies Comparative Grow By Emilya

[Azimuth]

I tend to think the 14 day period is sacrosanct, and lightly watering it in on the correct day is the best move here. What do you all think?

I'd agree. A very accomplished grower advises to water lightly around the edges if the plants go more than three days in between waterings until they need a proper watering. I'd suggest you follow her advice.

Ermmm, wait, now that I think about it, that was you.

Seriously though, most of us aren't qualified to give you advice on that one. Thanks for asking, though.

 

[Mdlroad]

Thanks RN! Yes indeed, and for several reasons. First, the floor is not level and there is a definite south eastern slope, so the table allows me to level things out so water settles evenly into the containers. Second, this forces me to keep the plants on the short side, and when the ceiling is only 6'6" tall, this is essential. Even a standard 7' tent will not fit in my grow rooms. Third, I like having a little bit of storage area in the grow room, and under the table is perfect and away from the direct light for important items, such as bags of @GeoFlora Nutrients. Lastly, my 63 year old father, who lives with us, can not easily get up from the floor if he comes up to water, sit with the plants or otherwise help out. The table brings things up to a workable height from the rolling office chair I have installed up there for him (and me) and it makes things a whole lot easier for everyone.

It works up there in the veg rooms to have them on tables, but in the larger bloom room where the plants tend to be much larger and heavier, we set them right on the floor in drip trays.

I feel old now

 

[Diatomacious]

Everyone should get one of these very reasonably priced tools for their gardens and I am wondering why I waited till now to get one.

So you could drool over this

 

[HashGirl]

Yes I can.
The trichomes are finishing up here at the end, developing faster than ever before in the grow. Bright light however, degrades those trichomes. I have found that after 36 hours in the dark, before the plant actually dies from lack of light, the trichomes will finish out very nicely. They will become much longer, sometimes twice as long, and thicker. The cured quality DEFINITELY goes way up. The point is that I let them finish out in the dark, without there ever being another bright light in their future. They are harvested in dim light, trimmed in room light and then put in the dark for drying and curing. Bright lights never get to degrade these now upgraded trichomes. This one simple trick GREATLY increases the potency, taste and weight of my buds and I have proven this over and over again with side by side tests. Everyone reading these words should try this and see for yourself.

Hi Emilya.

Does the dark period impact the colours of the trichomes? For example, I much prefer milky trichomes with hardly any amber. Does turning the lights out 36 hours before harvest affect their colour?

We will see what happens, but please notice that we are 3 days from Feeding day. That is going to set up an interesting question tomorrow when it is time to water. Do I feed early so as to get it in on a watering day, or do I give the next dose of @GeoFlora Nutrients VEG on the correct day by giving them a light early watering, or do I wait till the next watering, presumably 4 or 5 days from now to do the feed, being one or two days late? I tend to think the 14 day period is sacrosanct, and lightly watering it in on the correct day is the best move here. What do you all think?

I've been feeding on the actual day of the next feeding and watering it in with just a small amount of water if watering isn't on the schedule for the day.

So today, not wanting to chop on them again right at the moment and not having much else to do, I gave them a foliar application of the @Sierra Natural Science SNS 209 to keep working on eradicating the gnats. I got a new sprayer just for this job, and I love it! Everyone should get one of these very reasonably priced tools for their gardens and I am wondering why I waited till now to get one.

I've recently purchased monosilicic acid that is to be applied as a foliar spray. Since I've never applied a foliar spray before, could you please tell me your method?

 

[Emilya Green]

Hi Emilya.

Does the dark period impact the colours of the trichomes? For example, I much prefer milky trichomes with hardly any amber. Does turning the lights out 36 hours before harvest affect their colour?



I've been feeding on the actual day of the next feeding and watering it in with just a small amount of water if watering isn't on the schedule for the day.



I've recently purchased monosilicic acid that is to be applied as a foliar spray. Since I've never applied a foliar spray before, could you please tell me your method?

Hi @HashGirl ! #GirlPower!

Yes, the 36 hours works just the same as the same time would have in the light... the trichomes continue to ripen and more of them will turn amber... significantly more in the dark. I am not sure this is going to be the method of choice for you... but maybe if you started a few days earlier than you would normally harvest you could get less of the amber and still some of the thickening of the trichomes and getting longer and stronger. If you experiment, please let me know what you find out in this regard.

Yes, I am also going to feed on the day... I just watered this evening, and did not feed.

Foliar feeding is best done right before lights out, so that the bright lights dont end up burning spots in the leaves because the drops of liquid act like magnifying glasses, focusing the light. This is also when the stoma on the leaves open up, making it a natural time to feed through the leaves. Then I get in there and spray with a fine mist, trying to cover the top and bottom of each leaf.

 

[Emilya Green]

Veg, Day 46
Day 5 in the Wet/Dry cycle
Day 12 of the 2 week feed cycle
Day 1 of SNS foliar application

Today was a huge day in Emmies Gardens... First, we had a 12 oz dry weight harvest in the other room to deal with, and between 3 of us, that was a good 6 hours of work chopping, trimming, manicuring and then washing the buds in a 3 step process prior to hanging temporarily in our guest bathroom with a fan stirring the air to get rid of all of this water before sending them to the drying tent.

Then, these GSC girls acted like they had been neglected. Even though it is hard to see by just looking at the canopy, an amazing amount of growth has been happening each day. The trunks are all noticeably thicker than they were even a week ago, and starting to look like being able to support the huge bushes that they are becoming. The fight for dominance is not yet over either, and tonight I trimmed 64 growth tips around the room and turned them each into two growth tips. Each plant on average needed 6 cuts this evening, some more, and some less.

At the moment there are somewhere around 300 bud sites between these 11 plants, all getting ready to go into bloom in a couple of weeks. I have warned the crew that this next harvest is going to be an all hands on deck sort of event, but none of us have it really clear in our heads what harvesting 5 lbs of pot dry weight is going to look like other than it is going to be way awesome.

 

[Diatomacious]

Do you think having so many bud sites on indoor plants will affect the density and size of the buds effectively causing the buds to the larfier if that can be used as a word?

 

[Joshualuck]

Do you think having so many bud sites on indoor plants will affect the density and size of the buds effectively causing the buds to the larfier if that can be used as a word?

I'll let the plant grow out as natural as I could. I defoliated quite a bit however I left majority of the blood sites without trimming too many. I'm not too concerned about the size of the buds on this your plant considering a pollinated the whole plant. I want to get as many seeds as I can off this one in particular plant

 

[Emilya Green]

Do you think having so many bud sites on indoor plants will affect the density and size of the buds effectively causing the buds to the larfier if that can be used as a word?

Because there are so many bud sites on each plant, I do not expect the buds to become as large as they might have if they were not competing for the resources in a much less developed plant, but as long as I feed them what they need and give them the light and air they require, there is no need for the buds to end up being less dense or larfy. Lots and lots of hard, medium sized nugs is just fine with me. They say that there is a difference in quality between a plant grown naturally with only one kola and those trained to become bushes, and it makes sense that if the plant had only a set amount of resources that this would be the case. I have never grown a plant so bushy that it could not be supplied with the nutrients it needed and no matter what you did would show deficiency after deficiency. I will watch carefully for this as we continue on, making sure that the @GeoFlora Nutrients can keep up, but I really have no fear at this point that I would need to feed any extra... at worst, I think these plants will end up being water guzzling behemoths, taking extra water and needing lots of vertical support to hold all of this up. In the end, I personally should not be able to tell the difference in quality, because that is mostly determined by genetics. They will have huge needs and because the plants will be so large, even in 7g containers, I expect to be watering at least every other day and they will be sucking it down as fast as I can supply it. As long as I can keep supplying what they need without fail, and I trim out everything below the canopy before bloom, I don't anticipate getting any larf.

Also, mother nature is usually smarter than we are when it comes to things like this. There is only so much whack-a-mole you can do before the cuts stop producing two buds where there was one and we can see that the plant is self limiting as it starts throwing out alternating nodes, when it won't allow me to make it any bushier after a certain point. There are physical limits to what we can do here, and the plant is just not capable of creating a trunk so large that it could hold up and supply the needs to a plant that had let's say been vegged for 5 months and had allowed you to create 1000 buds... the plant naturally stops you from this sort of insanity and I think the best I have ever seen someone do, the plant had around 64 bud sites on it. That was insane, but I am only shooting for about half that size, and well within the capabilities of this mighty weed.

 

[Diatomacious]

at worst, I think these plants will end up being water guzzling behemoths, taking extra water and needing lots of vertical support to hold all of this up

I feel ya, your in for a treat with the watering can.

You just got me to thinking about it with your 300 bud site post.

 

[Emilya Green]

Veg, Day 48
Day 2 in the Wet/Dry cycle
Day 14 of the 2 week feed cycle
Day 3 of the SNS foliar application

Today was feeding day, so each plant got 1/3 cup of @GeoFlora Nutrients VEG and it was watered in with water treated with 8ml/gal of @Sierra Natural Science SNS 209. The plants were back to rapid growth mode and they were all using water like crazy. If today they had not gotten water because of the feeding, they would have needed it tomorrow, showing us again a 3 day wet/dry cycle. They seem to have also liked the foliar application of the SNS 3 nights ago, so we will repeat that tomorrow night, applying the SNS via this path about every 4 days. It will take a little bit for the SNS to kick in, but already I can see that the bugs are not building in numbers... they are slowly decreasing.

The thing that most struck me today upon arriving in the room was the sudden jump in vertical height. You can compare pictures from just a few days ago to the one today, and by looking at the 420 bling around the room you can see the sudden jump in height. I actually had to raise the light in Veg Room #1 since our tallest plant was now about 4 inches away from the light, and I could also tell that the Mother room was not quite keeping up, so the @Mars Hydro SP-3000 was turned up a little more in intensity.

We will see how they do using this water. I suspect that some of them will be approaching a 2 day watering cycle on this round and most will be at 3 days. That will show me that we are about 1 watering away from transplant. Tomorrow will be the 4th day since the foliar application of SNS 209, so tomorrow they will get another spraying since the product calls for applications every 3 or 4 days for 21 days.

Here are a couple of individual plants from a side view so you can see how dramatically these plants are opening up

I hope everyone has a great weekend coming up and for those of us here in the USA, please have a safe and happy Independence Day! I will be working from home for a couple of hours tomorrow and then I am off for a 5 day weekend which I will officially start by driving into the city to get 45 gallons of Fox Farm Ocean Forest. Once I get all of that soil lugged up to the attic grow rooms, I will be ready for the upcoming uppotting.

 

[HashGirl]

Good morning, Emilya.

As always, your garden looks wonderful. I believe you mentioned using tomato cages for support at some point. When you do the uppot, is that when you'll start using them? We've purchased some smaller tomato cages for this purpose as well and I'm interested in seeing how you use them.

#GirlPower

 

[Emilya Green]

Good morning, Emilya.

As always, your garden looks wonderful. I believe you mentioned using tomato cages for support at some point. When you do the uppot, is that when you'll start using them? We've purchased some smaller tomato cages for this purpose as well and I'm interested in seeing how you use them.

#GirlPower

Yes, I will be starting to use the cages once I get into the 7g containers. You have to shop around a bit to get them for under $10 apiece, but there are multiple brands and deals out there.

I like this system here, because it will allow me to build the cage right around the existing plant instead of having to somehow fit the plant into it or it over the plant. I can also build them as tall or as short as I need, so that I don't have to waste an entire cage assembly on a plant that doesn't need it.

This is also one of those one time purchases to get all the cages you need for your size grows, and then barring disaster, you can use them over and over again, forever.

 

[HashGirl]

I was considering this set for the ease of placing them as needed:

 

[Emilya Green]

Veg, Day 49
Day 1 in the Wet/Dry cycle
Day 1 of the 2 week feed cycle
Day 4 of the SNS foliar application

Last night I went upstairs to do my chores, take my pictures and intended to do my update, but a couple of test bowls of Dosido shared with a very sexy lady after I came back downstairs totally distracted me. So... here is Friday's update, on Saturday morning.

Not a lot happened yesterday though... it was one of those in-between days right after watering when there really isn't much to do. Everyone looked very happy with their leaves all pointed at the lights, making it clear that we were back to rapid growth and water usage again. The plans are to have the crew arrive on the 5th for some festivities, some BBQ and an uppotting party. I have taken advantage of a 15% discount for purchases over $100 at the hydro store for the holiday weekend, and I have 5 large bags of Ocean Forest that will supply us with the 48 gallons of new soil we will need for that project. Upon uppotting the plants will no longer fit in the veg rooms so we will temporarily turn the bloom room into an extended veg room for a couple of weeks while the plants grow into the new containers.

The one thing that had to happen last night was the next foliar application of the @Sierra Natural Science SNS 209, and with my new pump up sprayer, this took all of 5 minutes. I have got to say that after using the SNS 209 for a week or so, the grow room smells very nice. The bugs don't like it though... and still the numbers appear to be diminishing a little bit each day. Soon, every bite the bugs take will taste like SNS, and they will stop enjoying eating my plants.

No additional whack-a-mole chops were made last night but I did spot a few that I will make today just to keep the girls in check... we can't let up now or they will try to get very tall, and we can't have that. Here are last nights pictures:

 

[HashGirl]

No additional whack-a-mole chops were made last night but I did spot a few that I will make today just to keep the girls in check... we can't let up now or they will try to get very tall, and we can't have that. Here are last nights pictures:

Just out of curiosity, how tall are your plants now?

 

[Emilya Green]

Just out of curiosity, how tall are your plants now?

Most are around 18" I would guess, and I will officially measure them for you this evening. If that is true, then there is one that is at the 2 foot level right now... but that one is an anomaly.

 

[Emilya Green]

Most are around 18" I would guess, and I will officially measure them for you this evening. If that is true, then there is one that is at the 2 foot level right now... but that one is an anomaly.

I made a good guess, but I had measured it against my elbow a few days back, so I was pretty sure... the canopy is an average of 18 inches above the top of the soil. Here is my Dad giving us the official measurement with his old man large number tape measure. The first one above ground, in the back center of the second picture, is topping in at 22 inches.

 

[Emilya Green]

Veg, Day 51
Day 3 in the Wet/Dry cycle
Day 3 of the 2 week feed cycle
Day 2 of the SNS foliar application

Tomorrow is going to be transplanting day even though I am breaking my own rules and not waiting until the plants get to a 1 day wet/dry cycle. Even though I would like to wait, and in a perfect world I would have, but I am running out of vertical space in the veg side of the operation. It is time to move the operation to the bigger room. The crew is coming over tomorrow for the uppotting party and steaks, and some of the first sampling of Dosido and Wedding Cake, so this will be the last pictures from the veg rooms for this grow.

The plants absolutely love being squirted with @Sierra Natural Science SNS 209! This is what greeted me today when I went up to check on them... they seem to be very happy with life at the moment.

There are no deficiencies to be seen, so even at this crazy size, the @GeoFlora Nutrients VEG is keeping up well, and the @DYNOMYCO must be doing an amazing job building that fungal network to work along with the roots. These are not just fast growing plants, but they are also exceedingly strong. Because I have been using such a high stress training method on these plants, they have been very slow to show sex, and even now at just past 7 weeks, only about half of them are showing pistils. More have starting coming in during the last few days, and I would bet that shortly after uppotting them, they will all declare. If these were photoperiod regular plants, I would not be uppotting those that are not showing, but I have no fear of doing so this time with these @Weed Seeds Express seeds. If it turns out that we have a boy scout hiding in here (and I do suspect our very tall one for now) he will be easily spotted and summarily executed for identifying as a female for so long.

Here I have a small trick to show you. Remember me saying that I was putting the tall one in a corner where it wouldn't get as much light, to slow it down a bit? Well, it worked... on one side. Now that side in the dark has slowed down and the other side got tall. So this time, her short side has been turned toward the light, and the tall side is now in the relative dark. Rotating these plants daily really makes a difference. John Lennon said it best, "the love you get is equal to the love you give." Working with these plants even a little bit each day by rotating them in place or around the table, really can make a huge difference.

Several times I have used a 420 Magazine bumper sticker on the wall to show you the relative height of these plants day to day. We have now covered that sticker... its time to put a second one on the wall a bit higher!

Happy Independence Day! ,

 

[Mark Gordan Smith]

And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.