Schmebulock grows Auto Colorado Cookies & Sam's Crack

Hi Everyone!

Schmebulock here, showcasing the start of my second attempt to grow.

My first grow was a freebie white widow seed and 3 Sage'N'Sour plants. I grew them in ocean's forest soil with GH nutes. The widow has finished and produced 3.5 oz dry and my Sage'n'sour plants are a couple weeks out from done. They had a staggered start.

Anyways, on to the new grow! Here's all the stats / numbers:

Seedling Stage:
Stats:

1. Strains - Banana Kush (x2) and Fruity Pebbles (x2)
2. Light - Single T5 to start for PAR < 100, 4-bulb T5 kit after for PAR > 100
3. PAR - 0 up to 250
   
4. Container - Rockwool to start, then 1Gal Airpots
5. Grow Medium - Canna Coco and Perlite #3 in a 50/50 mix
6. Tent - Cloner hood to start, then 2x2x5 tent
7. Nutes - RO Water to start, Canna coco nutes once in 1 Gal Airpots
8. Feeding method - Hand feed with solo cup

Journal:

1. Started seeds out in 1" rockwool cubes. I have found this to be the easiest method and it has resulted in 100% of seeds popped. You can buy a sheet of 1" grow cubes on amazon for cheap.
2. Soak the cubes in 70F temp RO Water, place them on a little saucer in a cupboard in the kitchen up high. Make sure no lights are on in the kitchen at night because it will cause stretching (you'll see in the pictures)
3. Give it a few days - let the cubes dry out just a bit before putting more water on them.
4. Once they popped, let's get them under a light! I placed them inside my cloning / seedling hood and put them under a single T5 to get them started.
5. Once the first serrated leaves are bigger than the cotyledons I transplanted them into coco. I used airpots this time around (on the first grow I used smart pots but hated that you can't cleanly recover the smartpot after the grow is done).
6. Placed them under my vivosun 4-bulb T5 fixture. Positioned the light so the little ones were getting about 100-150 PAR

Note: Banana Kush #1 was exposed to light through the cupboard (upper oven light was used as a night light) and stretched so long he collapsed overnight. I tried to salvage him but ended up popping a new BK seed to replace him (See below: )


Because of that there were only 3 in the tent at the start, with the replacement BK seed in the cloner hood.

Added a couple items like moving air (it's not oscillating, just blowing straight out the exhaust port) and sensor to keep an eye on temp/RH. Guess who's back? BK#1 in the bottom left corner:

I was rotating them on the riser they were sitting on, so BK#1 moved to back right:

One thing starting to stand out is BK#2's yellowish color - banana kush indeed!


At this point the 4-bulb T5 fixture gets moved down so the lights are now about 250

They have now gotten old enough for toppings - I took before and after pictures of each. I decided to do mainlining this time around and I think I will continue to do it going into future grows.

Mainlining basically means you're trying to turn the stem into an efficient nutrient delivery vessel. In my first grow I did a lot of LST and laying them over. This results in one side of the plant generating a ton of colas and stems but the nutrients aren't evenly sent to everything. This results in the main stems getting most of the nutes and all the little off chutes from the base of the stem are wimpy and result in popcorn buds.

So to get into it, you top the plant above the 3rd main set of leaves. I do NOT count the first serrated leaf set as they are usually 1 or 3 leaves and incomplete. See my example picture I made:


After you top the plant, in order to continue the mainline process you then need to delete every stem below stem #3. This includes the cotyledons and the first serrated leaves. Following pictures shows all 4 plants topped. It will look like this below:


Vegetation Stage:
Stats:

1. Strains - Banana Kush (x2) and Fruity Pebbles (x2)
2. Light - 315w CMH - Philips 4k bulb
3. PAR - ~400
4. Container - 3 Gallon Airpots
5. Grow Medium - Canna Coco and Perlite #3 in a 50/50 mix
6. Tent - 2.5'x2.5'x5' tent
7. Nutes - Canna A/B, Rhyzotonic, GH CaMg
8. Feeding method - 4 port manifold connected to 5 gallon bucket with air stone and water pump, running 5 minutes at 5pm and 5 minutes at 11pm

After topping/mainlining them I placed them into my 2x2 grow tent. This next picture was a day or two later, but you can see the 2 main colas are reacting well to the new lighting. The topping/mainlining didn't seem to slow these down for long.

 

The next step was letting them get some size to them before topping again, in order to create 4 main colas. Next time I might try 8 main colas but I only topped once in the previous grow group to create 2 main colas.

10/14


10/15
Topped to 4 main colas, mainlined to main stems only:


10/21 - letting them recover


10/22


10/23 - Ended up trimming off the fan leaves from the main colas that were pointing into each other in the middle. They were fighting for light so I deleted them, applying more light to the core of each plant.


10/24


10/25 - Water schedule now updated to 10 minutes per watering, no longer 5 due to size of plant.

 

Finishing up my previous grow still:

Flowering Stage (Week 8):
Stats:

1. Strains - Sage 'n' Sour (3)
2. Light - 315w CMH with Philips 3k bulb
3. PAR - 1000 (@trellis level) to 2500 (the taller colas)
   
4. Container - 10 Gallon Smart pots
5. Grow Medium - Ocean's forest & Perlite in a 70/30-ish mixture
6. Tent - 2x4x5
7. Nutes - General Hydroponics Go Box (Includes 3 part Flora series etc) feeding at half strength of recommended dosings.
8. Feeding method - Watering can at first, but solo cups due to their agility getting around the stems of the plants

They are winding down, just need another week or so for trich production and then a flush week to close them out:



The cola on the right is over 3 inches wide now!

 

@PAOLO1981 Thank you

i posted the current grow i'm wrapping up in comment 3

 

Thank you sir, I just included the things I would want to know if I was learning it new!

 

Love it man, I hope my mainline plants look as good as yours do, what a perfect canopy too!

 

Are those quantum boards? Are you really finding them to be superior? I went with 315w CMH because it seemed to be the new great thing kicking everyone's butts... and i'm light burning some of my colas lol