DownShift's Northern Lights Hempy Bucket Attempt

Hello, and welcome to my grow journal!

This plant is a feminized Nirvana Northern Lights.

Lighting is 4x 23 watt CFLs with 2700k spectrum. (I know 6500 is better for veg but I'm broke.)

This plant has been growing for quite a while now, and has gone through a LOT of problems.

When they say that Northern Lights is a tough, difficult to kill strain, they are not kidding


After months and months of research, I finally decided to try my hand at growing. I germinated this seed, and on Dec. 23rd it finally sprouted! I had started this in some shitty soil I bought at a local nursery, but after about 2 weeks, and no growth beyond the seedling stage to speak of, I transplanted it to a Hempy bucket thinking that the soil was the problem.

Here is my plant on Jan. 11th a couple days after transplanting to hempy:



Poor little girl!

She's almost 3 weeks old and hardly hanging on.

In the next few days she makes some great progress and starts to really show signs of improvement:

Jan. 13th:

Jan. 15th:



Jan 19th:




Everything was looking good at this point, and I stopped taking daily pictures thinking that I was on easy street at this point...

I was using fox farm grow big nutrients for soil.

It turns out that you want to use nutes for hydro with a Hempy bucket so somewhere in there I bought GH floragrow to use as my grow nutes. I am still going to use the foxfarm micro and flower nutes because they are for soil or hydro.

 

At this point in the grow, I had no PH testing equipment, and had no idea what the PH even was. But everything was going great so who cares right?

Here's when things started to really go downhill. My plant started yellowing from the bottom up. Then the tips of the lower leaves started to turn brown. I looked all over the sick plant stickies and thought that the thing it looked closest to was over-watering. So I decided to start watering it less. (by design, you can't possibly over-water a hempy bucket, but I didn't get that at the time.)

Here is my plant at rock bottom: this was taken on Feb. 16th



another from the 16th:



You can see that it's in really rough shape, and the growth has been stunted since day one. The plant is 54 days old in those pictures!!!

The plant is really under-watered.

Around this point I got some PH testing equipment (just the drops and the vial.) Turns out that my PH was around 7.5 to 8!!!

The problem since day one has been PH lockout! That explains the yellowing leaves, brown dying tips, and stunted growth.

I started trying to lower the PH with lemon juice, and then vinegar, all to no avail. I would get the PH down a bit only to have it go right back up in a few hours. Finally, I bit the bullet and bought some GH PH down. After messing with the lemon juice and vinegar for a couple weeks the PH down really made a huge difference.

Here is my plant after only a few days of finally getting the PH right. (taken Feb 28th)



Here it is in the kitchen sink to give you an idea of the size(28th):



Here it is in it's ghetto little growbox with homemade light fixture(28th):

 

So as of about yesterday (march 2nd) I started to notice some yellowing starting at the center of the tops and working it's way out.

Here's my plant on the 2nd:



closeup:



After doing some research It looked to be an Iron deficiency. The most common cause for Iron deficiency: a PH that is 6.5 or above!

Sooooo..... I checked my PH and it's still about 5.8 in the bottle. I then had the brilliant idea to check the runoff (not really, I asked on here and someone told me to) and it's about 6.5 to 7. DAMNIT!!! these PH problems are still plaguing me!!!

So I lowered the PH of my nutes to about 5, and now the runoff is about 6, so we'll see. This was just today that I did this, so no progress yet.

Here it is today:



You can't see the color that good in this pic as it's still under the grow lighting, but I can assure you the middle of each top is every bit as yellow as it was yesterday. It did seem to grow a tiny bit since yesterday though!!!

Well, this brings you up to the present. Wish me luck!!! You'd think that I'm trying to kill this poor little girl, but hopefully I'll make it through to my first harvest!

 

Hell yeah BooMY, nice grow. I'm shooting to hopefully get an Oz out of my box, so your grow is definitely inspiring!

 

Well, I woke up this morning and checked it out and things are looking way better!



Here's a close up



You can see that the yellowing is really starting to lessen. I think I must have been right that it was an iron deficiency caused by my PH being too high.

 

update:

She's looking waaay better.



closeup:

 

Question:

since I have a pretty small space, I really want to grow this plant as big as I can in there and maximize my yield.

My space is 18" by 12" by 24"

Being my first grow, I don't really have too good of a feel for how much it is going to stretch once I switch it to flowering. I've been guessing that the plant will roughly double in size since it's predominately Indica, but I'm just not sure.

Do you guys think I should switch it to flower yet or should I veg it for a bit more to maximize my yield?

here is a pic of my box with the light in the all the way up position to give you a better Idea of the space I'm working with:

 

That's what i'm thinkin too. I wanna get the most out of it, but I don't want to get greedy. well, not too greedy anyways.

 

Hell yeah Panda, nice grow man. That thing's gonna give you a lot of bud!

 

Well, she's looking healthier than ever!

 

Yeah, I'm excited man! I can't wait to see it start to flower! I really didn't want to switch it to flower when it was still unhealthy 'cause I think that would really effect my yield negatively.

I think I'm going to flip it to 12/12 sometime this week. Probably in about 3 or 4 days. She's got female pre-flowers coming out of just about every node so I think she just as anxious as I am for the flip!!!

 

Thanks! Your hempy grow is looking great!

I'm already so close to flower that I think I'm just going to stick with what I got. But thanks for the tip though, I'll definitely pick those up for the next round!

 

I've been kicking around that idea but I just haven't decided yet. I'm still trying to figure out where I would put it while this one finishes flowering. I want to stay pretty stealth, so I'm trying to figure out where I could hide a box for mothers/clones!

 

Here she is as of this morning