Letters from R'Lyeh

I was thinking the same recently; that it's fun to get 20 gallons of soil and grow a big, monster photoperiod. But there's something simple and damn easy about these autos. I feel like they can take a little more up-front maintenance to eek out every little bit, but once you're fully into flowering I feel like everything is pretty much on cruise control.

 

I just had to throw up a few pics of each individual plant. Excited with how they're all looking!

First off, the Tangiematic. She's really bulked up and is starting to throw off what appear to be some thicker foxtails - or maybe I'm just mistaking the lengthy clumps of calyxes for foxtails? The calyxes don't seem as swol as on the other 3 plants, or as frosty, but it's also a heavier sativa and I expect it to go for a little longer.


Next up, the Sour Crack. I don't feel like pictures do her real justice. First pic is looking slightly up the main stem with views of some of buds further down the cola which are just massive frosty clumps that make me drool. Second pic is the top of the main cola. Surprisingly trichomes are still mostly cloudy/clear with a very few amber showing up here and there. I will keep close watch on her though as I suspect she will be ready soon - hopefully by the end of the week!



Double Grape is really getting frosty on the buds - and something I haven't ever seen before - trichomes on some of the lateral stems! She hasn't filled out a ton, yet, but I expect she will soon. Most of the pistils have recently turned orange, which always scares me a little that she's saying she's done - but she's still drinking water the heaviest and I suspect she will put out a 2nd round of new pistils shortly and then bulk up even more. First pic is the main cola, 2nd pic is of a side branch about halfway down the plant.



And finally, the coup de grace, the 3BOGxDG. From this angle the main cola is just a fat top to a fat Christmas tree (from about 90 degrees to the side she seems more slender, but is still damn impressive). This plant has, by far, the most trichomes on the sugar leaves and the main leaves, of any plant in the tent. Some of the secondary leaves have trichomes up and down the petiole It's a little scary, tbh. Normally I would simply compost all fan leaves but I will likely include many of the fan leaves from these plants when I make bubble hash!


Now I will just go patiently smoke a bowl and try to not get too excited about the finish line coming up!

 

Day 79

I was lax last week about getting an update on Friday which is when I usually post as it's a full week from when I last updated. The pic below was snapped yesterday (Sunday) at day 79.



Man...I am getting impatient as these are SO CLOSE. I see the sour crack coming down in just the next few days, the others are still maturing. The 3BOGxDG looks like she should be done soon too, but she keeps pushing out a few new pistils here and there. Trichomes on her, and the Sour Crack, are aaaaalmost there - just a few clear left. The Tangie and Double Grape are about another 2-3 weeks out, I'm betting. We will see, though!

 

4x4

Back left is the double grape. She's definitely fattening up, but has been the slowest of the bunch. Wait till I take individual pics - the 3bogxdg in front left is the real fatty!

 

Welcome, Kent! Glad to have you along for the ride - you're coming in just at the end of my first autos grow, should have some great harvest pics coming in the next week or two!!!

 

This grow has been my most successful, and most fun, thus far. I'm enjoying autos and ended up buying a bunch more seeds from Mehpisto (more than I really needed but it'll keep me busy for the next few years lol) so I'm obviously in it for the long haul.

I have a bunch of things I've learned from this grow that I'll detail at a later date (sort of a debreif with this run).

Heat mats: I would say they were absolutely essential for me during the seedling stage to keep the soil temp up - I think that really helped with this grow. As for after seedling stage...I can't say for sure. I don't think they hurt anything, and I ended up unplugging them about 2 weeks ago because my humidity was just SO intense (70% with a dehumidifier and my fan running non-stop) so I figure that might help decrease humidity a bit. And at this point in the grow I'm not so worried about temps.

 

I'm not 100% sure what I'll be planting next, apart from it being a mix of sativas and indicas. I have a few to pick from:
Fastbuds: 6-shooter, amnesia haze (both sativas)
Mephisto: Cosmic Queen, Hubbabubbahaze, Super Orange Haze (all sativa doms); and Samsquanch OG (indica). The freebies I got from MG were all fairly indica heavy as well: Alien Berries (AVT x strawberry nuggets), Double Grape x Skywalker x Skywalker BX, and Strawberry nuggets x Forum stomper.

Figure I'll do 2 sativas and 2 indicas to keep the tent from getting out of control...

Edit: I HOPE I have enough to smoke between runs! My last grow was a photoperiod grow and I ended up with (I'm totally estimating) 12 oz between 2 plants. If I can get 2 oz per plant from my current auto grow I think I will be set as I'm not planning on taking time off between runs like I did with my last grow.

 

Ugh, you guys, I just can't tell if this is ready or not. I really want to say "yes she's ready" but every time I do that I end up waiting another 2 weeks lol.

This is the Sour Crack at day 81. Shes about 22-23" tall.



If I were just judging on the way the buds look, I'd say it's harvest time. But the trichomes - I still am seeing clear. But I'm also seeing more and more amber trichomes (or amber trichome stems where the top is missing). I am seeing more evenly cloudy trichomes than I did 4 days ago. The below are from top, middle, and bottom but in no particular order and I don't recall where each one was taken.






Honestly guys, I'm just tempted to take her down tonight or tomorrow. I say tomorrow as my RH is FINALLY coming down a little bit with a cold front that moved in and I'm finally getting below 60% - IIRC lower RH tends to move them to ripen a bit faster.

 

See, that's what I think, too! Other pics some of the trichs are like semi-cloudy, which is throwing me off.

Good question about the light - this was taken with my grow lights on, and the light on my scope but dialed back to like 25% power. I have a jeweler's loupe with a UV light - I'll take a gander a little later tonight with that, and use the scope light at a higher power, to see if I can get any different views on things.

 

HARVEST DAY!!! I went ahead and made the choice to chop after looking at trichomes using ONLY the light from my probe, and those turned up to full, to get a better sense of how things looked. In retrospect I may have been able to wait a few more days, but several plants were putting out foxtails, not pulling water from the SIPS, and I figured we were basically there. I figure this is all a learning experience, anyway! I'm putting in a lot of details, mainly for my own edification and to look back on for future grows. Heck, maybe this will even help someone else out!

So, here's the photo shoot after I denuded them of big fan leaves:

Sour Crack day 82. Coming in at 22" tall. She is a chunky monkey. Buds are medium sized but look just dense AF. They remind me of grape clusters with how they've grown. The side branches aren't very long, but they're packed top to bottom for the most part.



3BOGxDG day 82. Coming in at 24.5" She kept pushing out new pistils on the very tops of buds, indiscriminately, and was starting to foxtail in various places. Honestly the structure she had was best described as fractal foxtails. Unique growth pattern compared to anything else I've ever grown! She's fluffy...she looks fat, but it's not super-dense growth. Having said that, branches are full, top to bottom, with buds.


I like in these trichome pics how the ring of LED lights in my probe are reflected off the trichome heads!


Tangiematic Day 83. Coming in at 27" This is her best side; the backside is essentially missing most of the branches from the "heater incident" - they got cooked, so I chopped em. She (And the double grape) finished up differently from the Sour Crack and 3BOGxDG - those two put on weight quickly, then finished slowly. The Tangie and DG slowly grew flowers, then fattened up real fast at the end.


Foxtails were really starting to stack up, and I figured it was time based on this, the trichomes, and her not drinking for about a day. I haven't ever had a plant foxtail this much before. It's not as obvious from this angle but there were a few places on the crown where they were just going to start growing even more than they had.



Double Grape Day 83. Coming in at 33.5" she's the tallest of the bunch, and has the longest branches. Not as dense buds as the others, but probably frostier than all the others! I maybe could have let her go a few more days to a week, but as with the others all the signs were pointing to her being finished or close enough.


She's the only one of the plants that really started to put on any "fall" colors.


Trichomes looked mostly cloudy.


Here's everything hanging! This is my first try at whole-plant hanging. I have my ventilation system set up to vent for 1 minute every 45 minutes, and this is keeping humidity around 70% plus or minus. I'll adjust this as needed to keep RH between 60% and 70%. If I can I'd like to try for a really long dry to get as much of the chlorophyll break down as I can - I'm noticing a difference from my last grow in how long the plants hung and the harshness of the smoke (shorter/faster dry = harsher).


One thing I noticed as I was trimming off fan leaves was that I could have really done a much better job of managing LST into flower. Once they stretched, I basically stopped LST because I couldn't be bothered to pull the plants out of the tent to manage them better. I'll do this more next round as the inside and bottom buds are really larfy, even if they are basically tons of swollen bracts and frosty...they just seem really fluffy. Learning from this, I think that I need to make sure I'm pulling the branches out from the middle even more than I was. Using the tomato cages differently next time will help with that. I think my cages were too tall, and I didn't use the rings to pull the branches down enough - instead I somehow managed to do the opposite with the (stoned at the time) intention being the branches were better supported. I also think my plants may not have been big enough to really warrant tomato cages.

I anticipate my end weights won't be that impressive, and I have identified a few things that I bet contributed to this. I'll detail those in a future post as a debrief. I also kept the trimmed fan leaves, many of which were frosty along the petiole and into the leaf, and made some bubble hash with it last night. Not sure if I did it "right" using fresh trim (Frenchie Cannoli does) as the end result was really green, but it was an experiment and I'm trying to make sure I use as much of my plants as I can.

Thanks for reading along, friends! I know I am verbose...but it helps me think through things.