Barneys Farm LSD (lackadaisical)

I had a bit of a break after my first grow, but I eventually germinated a Barney's Farm LSD and started training it.  I wanted to grow the main stem horizontal, so that the branches would grow upwards and make the whole thing tidier to clone from.  I've been growing it on a sunny windowsill and it's a foot long.
 

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You can see in the pics that some of the leaves aren't great, and down the left side of the picture a few stems that have been stripped of leaves.  The history behind this is, I was growing the mother in a small pot, and because I was training it sideways I didn't appreciate how big it was.  It started showing signs of a nutrient deficiency so I repotted it, and although it didn't have a classic root-bound look, it was very packed.  Since repotting, I've also fed it with BioBizz 'Grow'.  Here's some 'before' pics.
 

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The symptoms were rust spots on leaves that started to lose their green colour, turning yellow and starting to brown and rot on the tips of the leaves.  It was spreading up the plant on the new leaves, and effecting some of the older, larger fan leaves further up the plant, but much of the rest is healthy looking.  From what I could gather this was mainly the signs of a potassium deficiency.  The BioBizz is quite beefy in the K department, and it doesn't seem to have gotten any worse since.
 

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I've been taking some clones from this plant, applying some rooting gel and popping them in little plastic cups.  You can see a couple of new ones here on the same windowsill.  These are nearly 7 days old, and not the first ones I've taken.  The very first two I took, I gave to my landlord.  One died, but apparently the other one's still growing slowly.  The next two I kept for myself.
 

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I noticed that they took a long time to root, even though this particular strain seems to be 'well known' for being a good cloner (not that my technique is optimal, lol).  After a couple of weeks they usually look healthy enough and I gently lift them out to find that there's no root growth at all.  Then, a week later, I see half a dozen white roots pushing against the inside of the cup, and it's gone from no roots to having roots 2 inches long!  Anyway, I've repotted those ones and moved them outside since the weather's been good.
One has a very long stem compared to the other, I was kinda doing an experiment because I read somewhere that more stem in the dirt = better rooting potential.  As you can see, no roots grew further up the step else I'd have bothered to re-pot it deeper.  However, that one has definitely taken off faster since.
 
My plan is to keep taking clones, and then as soon as they'er established then putting them in a flowering closet.  I tried LST/ScroG last time, but now I'm going to see what happens when I have a closet full of small plants rather than a couple of large ones.  I'm also going to stagger them by a couple of weeks, to see if I can get a continuous harvest thing going on for a few months, and also see how the clones respond to more or less vegetation time.
 
I've titled this diary as lackadaisical because the definition is "carelessly lazy", and that's what I am.  Even though I have a PhD and am quite capable of being careful and precise, keeping records and observations, I choose not to.  There is a financial aspect to that, in that I can't afford to spend even £20 on this more than I already have, but mainly it's a rejection of the idea that you need expensive lights or to build a homemade hydrobucket contraption.  My first two harvests had a yield-per-watt comparable to many HID systems, although obviously with only 180 watts or so I only got an ounce each off two plants.
 
So it's bulbs from B&Q, hanging in a cupboard, lined with reflective sheeting, held together with duct-tape, with clones growing in cheap multipurpose compost, all the way.  My only real concession is that I do have a nutrient system, but I don't use it religiously, and I have some rooting gel to help with the cloning.  Oh, and I have some litmus paper, but if my mother plant doesn't completely recover then I'm prepared to buy a soil pH meter.
 
Wow, that was a big load of backstory-bs, huh?  Well when I've got my closet sorted in the next few days, I'll post some pics of that and hopefully get my first clones under 12/12.

 

While the clones are still looking fine, the mother is deteriorating.  Before the leaves were developing brown pinpricks and then turning yellow, but now it's larger brown blotches that better resembles a calcium problem.  This makes sense, since magnesium and calcium are the first to get locked out at low pH, 
 
I watered it and checked the runoff with some litmus paper.  Not very specific, but enough to show that it's a bit low, in the 5-6 range.  My tap water is more like 6-7, so I have flushed it through with about 6 litres of water and that has raised the runoff a little.
 
I don't have any bicarb to adjust the pH up, but tomorrow I'm going to pick up some of that, and some epsom salts, and some de-ionized water.  Should be less than £5 total, and hopefully give me all I need to fix this problem.

 

So I actually took some quite drastic action today.  I experimented with adjusting the pH of a pint of water, and it doesn't take much to send it way up!  I also realised that I had some perlite left over from my last grow, I thought I had run out and just used straight compost for potting.  So I just went for it.  I tipped the plant out of the put, carefully removed as much of the compost from around the root ball as I could, and replanted it with a compost/perlite mix.  Then I fed it some medium-strength nutes that I'd adjusted the pH of to that it was more like 7 than 5.
 
Hopefully, that'll do it.  Today I saw one of the first clones I took which I'd given to my landlord, and it was looking fine (still in the plastic cup I'd handed it over in), so it's not a problem with the genetics and must just be that I'd locked out all the goodness in the soil.  Poor thing.
 
Right now the new growth at the top is till looking fine, but any new growth further down the stem is not happy at all.  I'll be keeping a close eye on it from now on.
 
According to my schedule, tomorrow is the day that I put my first 2 clones into the flowering closet.  I've seen people saying that this strain can start to flower pretty quickly, and I'm hoping that because they've all been having a natural daylight cycle rather than 18/6 or even 24/0, that they will adapt well to the 12/12 cycle and in 10 weeks I'll get some bud

 

4th August 2013, 9pm
 
Clones #1 and #2, being well established, have been put in the closet.  The lights are on a 12 hour timer, running overnight to keep the temperature down.
 
Currently the lights are 4x 23 watt CFL.  I've got more, but there's no need for them yet.
 
Hoping to harvest these sometime around 21st October.  Plan is #3 and #4 go in the closet in two weeks.

 

The mother's looking alright after the treatment.  It's still growing, and doesn't seem to have deteriorated any further.  Clones #1 and #2 are looking very happy, I do believe they've each grown a new pair of leaves each of the last few days.  
 
Clones #3 and #4 aren't rooted yet but are looking healthy enough, but #6 wasn't doing very well.  It had nearly an inch of stem in the soil and looked fine down there, but where the stem meets the soil it had become narrow and dark, as if pinched.  I don't have much hope for this one, but I pinched off the offending part and stuck the remaining stem into the soil again.  This has worked before with my Nordle clones, but I don't hold out too much hope for it.  I'm not sure yet if i'll replace it, or just let it slide if it doesn't make it. If the mother looks healthy then I'm due to take #7 and #8 from it this week, maybe I'll take a new #6 while I'm at it.

 

Here's a couple of pics of #1 and #2.  You can see #1 looks quite vigorous, but it was always longer-stemmed of the two.  #2 is short and stout right now, but it'll do fine.

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Next we have #3 and #4.  One of the leaves on #3 is showing a little damage from the mother, but it hasn't spread any further and this has been out for nearly a week so I'm happy enough.

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Then we have #5 and #6.  Again you can see some unhappy leaves on #5 from the troubles with the mother, but again it hasn't gotten any worse.  #6 is close to the ground because of the problem with the stem I mentioned.  We'll see.  It was looking a lot more limp just a few hours earlier, so cutting off the bad part of the stem has at least allowed it to absorb some moisture.

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Finally, here's a pic of probably the worst leaf on the mother.  Yellowing, blotchy, the tips going to rot, it's pretty bad.  You can see some perfectly good leaves in the background though.

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Time for an update.  The plants #1 & #2 have been in the closet for 2 weeks.  I noticed that the taller one started to throw out the first two little pistils almost right away, literally in less than a week I could see that this was going in to flowering mode.  The smaller one showed no change, but after about 9 days I started to see a faint sign that it was going the same way.
 
Then i didn't look at them for a couple of days... The taller one was growing vigorously and doubled in height but the smaller one was doing very little, then...
 

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You can see, #2 on the left has sprung up.  Obviously as #1 grew I had to raise the lights, so I presume it's had a sudden stretch up to the light even though it was only 5-6 inches higher.  I tried to get in and take a pic of the developing flowers, but it's not easy to get something in focus. Nevertheless, here's my attempt.

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You can just make out the growth at the nodes, and it's not branches.
 
 
According to my schedule, I was due to put clones #3 & #4 into the cupboard today, 2 weeks after the first ones.  Looking at them lately, I was pretty sure that none of the four clones on the windowsill were going to root at all.  I couldn't see anything happening so I did my usual impatient thing of gently lifting them out of the soil to find, aha, no roots.  Pop them back in, then 2-3 days later when I check them, voila! roots showing everywhere.  Actually the ones that were showing roots were #4 and #5, so I've potted them up and jiggled their assignment so that the next two plants to go in are called #3 and #4.
 
Here they are, freshly potted.

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Again, it's just multipurpose compost, something like 4 parts soil to 1 part vermiculite.
 
The mother plant has been saved and started growing healthily again.  You can see it on my windowsill, being held down by a piece of twine weighted with a small potted cactus.  It looks quite sparse because a lot of the leaves lower down the stems turned bad, but I can assure you that it has sprung back to life this week.  

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Actually I was due to take some more clones, #7 & #8, so I took some of these long stems and potted them up, here

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What I've done with these ones is top them as well, so I can try a new training technique which I will discuss later, if they take.
 
And for completeness, here's the newly renamed #5 & #6, still waiting to show that they've rooted.

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My plants are all quite short or warped because of what I'm doing, so I'm not sure about the freaky-factor, but I would say this was a short but stretchy pheno, and it started to flower very strongly when it went in the closet, within 3-4 days.  The smell isn't very strong, yet, but I'm only 3 weeks in.  The last one I grew, a CBD Nordle, had a nice smell of garlic chives...
 
It's coming along pretty nicely.  I'll get some more pics later today.

 

The Bank Holiday gives us a slight delay in my weekly reports, but here we are.
 
The state of play is this:
 - #1 and #2 are starting their 4th week in the closet
 - #2 and #4 are starting their 2nd week in the closet
 - #5 and #6 are rooting on the windowsill
 - #7 and #8 are also on the window, and are a bit of an experiment
 
Let's look at our first two.

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Here they are, you can see #1 in front is a lot bushier than #2 in the background.  They both started off pretty small, but that small amount of branching that #1 had over #2 has really made a difference.  If you take a look at the two of them more closely
 

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You can see #1 (left) has half a dozen flowers spread around this pic, and there's foliage that is obscuring more from the camera.  In contrast, #2 (right) is basically only one stem with a flower at each node all the way down.
 
Here's a nice 'bud' shot from the top of #1

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In with these are two other small clones, #3 and #4.  As you can see (below) they are very small, and it's clear that these are both going to go the same way as #2 i.e. tall and bare.

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That's alright though, this is a process about learning. What I'm probably going to do with these plants is remove the flowers from the lower half of the plants, as there will be little point in letting them develop.  Since #3 & #4 are so alike, perhaps I'll prune one and leave the other as an experiment.
 
Moving to the window, we have clones #5 and #6, the former of which has established some proper roots.

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These two are technically due to go in a weeks' time, but I am going to hold them back to grow a little more, possibly i will pinch them out tonight, to get some more bushy growth.  We'll really see how much difference just a little bit of gardening can make.
 
For completeness, here are clones #7 and #8, as well as ome cuttings that are just surviving in a little pot because I didn't have anything proper for them, but didn't want to throw them away, about 5 days ago.

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Why?  Why not?  See the evidence above, the windowsill plants are just fine.  If you paid any attention, you would see that the clones that I've taken from the mother are rooting by the window, where they get a reasonable amount of free natural light.  Then, when they're settled, I move them into a grow closet.  My latest pic of the flowering plants is by a different window, because I moved them to get a decent shot.
 
I agree, you wouldn't do any good by growing a plant on a windowsill for any length of time, but it's a fine, low-stress environment for my fresh cuttings.
 
Secondly, what I'm trying to do is grow many small plants in a conveyor-belt system.  I don't want to veg my plants for very long, so the window is fine as a holding environment.
 
It's all very well saying "that never works", but do you really know?  I know exactly what I'm doing; I am deliberately experimenting in order to build up my own experience.  It doesn't matter if I fail because it's a learning experience not about getting the most weed.  And for the record, my last two grows pulled more than 270g per kWatt which is as efficient as many HID grows.  Not bad for something that never works,

 

Here we are again, a little early this time, but only by a day.  So what's happening?
 
Everything is good.  Clone #1 suddenly developed a bunch of yellowing fan leaves, which I believe is because I have been neglecting the N component of the nutrients, and although they're not growing anymore they still need nitrogen to maintain the leaves.  I fed them, and it's not gotten any worse considering they had gone from fine to WTF overnight.  Let's take a look.
 

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Here we have #1 and #2, respectively.  You can see #1 is kind of bushy, compared to #2 at least, and the leaves are a lighter green colour.  They are flowering nicely, here's some closeups
 

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^^ top colas​

 

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^^ lower bud shots (plus some frosting )​

 
Now if you remember, also in this cupboard are clones #3 and #4.  They were pretty small to start with, 2 weeks ago they were 2 inches tall.  Take a look at them now.

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That's what we call stretch!  You can see they are starting to flower, but compared to #1&2 they have been much slower.  I put this down to the fact that #1&2 were much more mature and settled in their pots when they were put in the closet, for example clone #1 was showing this stage of development after only 4-5 days.
 
On the window we had another two clones getting ready to go, #5 & #6.  Well, I've potted these up now, and according to the original plan they were supposed to go in the closet tomorrow.  I've decided to give them at least another week to grow, so that they develop more like #1 than #2-4.

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And finally we have clones #7 and #8.  These were cuttings that I had topped, and although they were looking a bit droopy, both have shown some growth of the shoots.  They are slowly but surely developing.

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Yo!  It's that time again.  According to my schedule we're on week 6, and that's half-way to my first harvest!  Maybe more than half way, I was a bit conservative with my timings.
 
If you've been following this thread, you'll know that I'm growing clones in batches of two.  Let's start with #1 and #2, my oldest clones, which are 6 weeks into flowering.
 
Top bud shots, #1 & #2 (#1 is with flash to show up the trichomes)

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And here's a side view, #1 & #2 (#2 with the flash this time)

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Sweet, huh?  Still early days, but coming along.
 
Now those plants are in the flowering closet with the next pair, #3 and #4.  These are two weeks younger, and actually they took a while longer to show their flowers as well.  But they're coming along.
 
Top bud shots, #3 & #4

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And here they are from the side.  Much less developed than their older sisters, but you can see flowers at each node.

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I know, I know, they're skinny, but before you flame my grow, these are all part of an experiment.  If you look back, these things were less than 2 inches tall when they went in the closet.  Hmm, interesting....
 
Take a look at this!  A side shot of all four.

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All the same height!  Except #4 which is half an inch shorter, but still!  It's interesting how, even though they were all different heights when they went in, they all ended up the same.
 
Now, what is going on with my other clones.  I was on some kind of 2-week schedule, right?  So where's #5 and #6?  Here they are!

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Settled into their new pots, growing nicely, and I topped them as well.  I want to see some more growth from the lower nodes before I flower them, but I think it'll only be one more week.  Maybe two.  I seem to have marked two weeks on my schedule, so I guess that's the new plan.
 
And there's more!  I mentioned the other week that #7 and #8 were a project.  Here they are.

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Not the greatest pic, but the point is there are two growing tips out of these things.  I'm going to LST them in opposite directions, then top each one and LST those as well, giving me four main colas, hopefully.  More on that in the coming weeks.
 
What's next?  Here's the mother.  Spot the weirdness...

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Huh?  What's that tiny pot doing there?  WTF?
I read somewhere that one way to make a super clone is to scrape off the outer later of the stem, smother it in rooting gel, and plonk it in some soil.  Then it's still fed from the main plant, but it can grow it's own roots as well, then you can chop it off.  Sweet!  I'll give it a go, why not!
 
Just to finish up there are some random clones.  Just... because.

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Yes, i know, that's three clones in one tiny pot.  Like i said, just because.  One of the ones in the proper cup has a brown bit of stem, so I'm probably going to have to perform surgery on that.  Usually i just chop it off and stick it back in the dirt, works 3 out of 4 times!
 
Thanks for sticking with me.

 

Just a quick post with some bud shots.  Flowers really.  They're pretty sticky! and when I touch them, my fingers kinda smell like pineapple, whereas my last grow smelled much more like chives.
 
But I'm sure these look a bit weird.  Not bad, just... do these pistils look a bit freaky?  Or is it just me?  Maybe I've lost perspective.
 
EDIT
I take it back, looking at some other pics has reminded me it looks pretty usual, I think I'm just too used to seeing close-up pics of plants that are much further along.  But I swear the pistils on my last grow were much more feathery, so it's probably a genetic thing.

 

Just checked my flowering plants, and clone #1 has a couple of orange pistils on each of its flowers.  A sign that things are moving along
 
My original plan had been to harvest around 21st October, which was allowing for a generous bit of adjustment time plus 70 days.  On reflection, considering the flowering time for this strain of about 60-65 days, and it threw out the first pistils within only a couple of days, my revised harvest date is sometimes around 7th October.
 
Four weeks, slightly less.  Woo-hoo!

 

This clone was vegged for about... No time! Maybe a week, after it rooted which took a while. That's why it looks so skinny. I've got like 8 more in veg, plus a mother that's nearly two feet. I wouldn't exactly call it a plan, but it is all intentional

Looks like yours is a hydro grow? Another reason why yours looks so lush. Watch out, LSD is really stretchy! Way more than other indica-dominant plants i've grown before. Although I think there is a shorter pheno as well, it's not a very stable genetic strain.

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Wait, yours looks way more sativa than mine! Like I said, multiple phenotypes

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