Weed Grow Diaries

It is a White Widow × Alien Lights OG hybrid.

This grow was started on March 17th 2021 and ended late in June when I finally chopped all of the plants down. It took approximately 3 months from seed to get to the point of chopping and drying. It is currently July 7th 2021 and it is getting trimmed and ready for curing. The curing will last 2-4 weeks. 

Photo of one of the plants on April 11th, 2021. I thought the leaves looked cool.

The grow started with 5 autoflower seeds. All seeds were planted in about 10 inch diameter fabric pots in a mix of coco coir (a soil less, hydroponic medium) and worm castings. Throughout their time with me they were fed Fox Farms Grow Big and closer to flowering they were also fed Fox Farms Tiger Bloom. A couple times they were also fed Fox Farms Big Bloom. They were never repotted and only trained with amateur low stress training aka I was bending the branches with garden wire to give more light to lower bud sites during flowering given the fact that these are autos and don't have as much time to recover from topping (cutting the top of the plant early on) and other training. I made the mistake of training somewhat late. Start training as soon as you have 3 good nodes. 

The seeds were successful in 10 inch fabric pots with no extra humidity assistance. My state is very warm so I needed no assistance in heat either. They were simply watered lightly once a day. The most important part of this grow was that the light was very close to the pots so that the seedlings would not stretch out to the light and topple over from the weight of the leaves. Keep the light close for the first couple weeks and slowly move it back to encourage height growth during early vegetative stages and then usually somewhere during this early time is a good chance to start training the plants as mentioned earlier. 

I fed them everyday or every other day depending on if I felt like mixing or not. There are actual mixing schedules you should follow especially with hydroponic mediums. I underfed them like crazy and paid for it. They grew a lot smaller and also at some point they crisped up from underwatering! Some people feed their plants 2-3 times a day at specific times of the day. Don't be me. I've started the task of building an automatic watering system to prevent negative consequences of my laziness (and will post about this system in more detail later). Despite my underwatering and underfeeding, I yielded significantly more than an ounce but have not formally weighed it because I lost my weigh!

At some point around the end, the underwatering took place and my plants crisped up on me. Some of them were salvageable but I made the decision to trim up the upper bud sites of the two plants that seemed to be taking it the hardest. 

For harvesting, invest in a 100x microscope for your phone/computer or 40x to 100x jewelers loupe. This way you can see the trichomes on your plant. You want them to be between mostly cloudy with a little amber. However, it's ultimately up to you as this may change the way the weed affects you! Experiment with harvesting at different times and see what you like. 

A pic of some of the trichomes of one of the buds of my plants! Mostly clear so I waited this out a little more.

A pic of the weed when I finally decided to harvest.

These pics are before the underwatering tragedy.

For the drying process, I made a mistake and wet trimmed the initial top harvest instead of dry trimming. Essentially, I trimmed before drying which caused the weed to dry too fast and it got a bit brown. The cure saved it a bit and it is more than smokeable. However, I dried the rest of the harvest whole (just cut the plant down and dried whole branches with the leaves and all) and had a much better end product. The weed was tossed into quart jars with some room at the top and cheap hygrometers. The jars will be burped once a day for about a week or so and left in a dark place for the next 3-4 weeks. 

In a large grow tent, I'm running a 6 inch vivosun set. It comes with metal tubing, a fan, and a carbon filter. I believe I spent around $60-80 on it, but I can't remember.

Are they necessary? Yes if you care about your house, clothing, items, etc. not reeking of weed especially during flowering.

You can see my set-up is simply the fan sucking everything through the carbon filter and then the tubing pushes the purified air out. Some people also have the air pushed into an additional air purifier or they have the tubing go outside of their house in order to reduce the chances of the smell in their home. I recommend having a back-up filter in your home in case your filter breaks.

Below you can see I've sealed them with this weird electrical duct tape. I've done the same with the tubing. You can also see I've hung them up using zip ties and the black tie that came with the set I bought.

EDIT: Negative space in your tent (i.e the fan sucking in) is a good thing. That means it's working. You can also check and see if the air is getting pushed out of the tubing by placing your hand next to the opening of the tube and seeing if you can feel the air. If you have to stick your hand inside the tubing to feel it then you know you put your tubing and the filter on the wrong sides of the fan.

Happy growing!