Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the time to check out my lengthy first post. 
These forums have been a huge help for me since I started growing this year, and I hope I can return the favor with all the information I'm going to share below.
I'll start by saying that I'm a total newb, this is my first grow, and it's been a disaster nearly every step of the way. Most of my experience up to now is in the form of what NOT to do on your first grow.
But before I go into all the things that went wrong, and what I've learned so far, I need to get straight to the heart of my problem because I need an answer, or at least an opinion, really fast. :
I'm in the 11th week of flowering two White Widows in a hydroponic "bubbleponics" setup, and I just discovered that seeds are developing in a large portion of my buds. Every bud I checked, in fact. Obviously I missed a male flower and it's managed to pollinate and germinate virtually all of my buds. *sigh*
Now, they are... or were... absolutely female until very recently. Definitely not hermaphrodites.
I found a few male flowers today, and they seem to be relatively new growth, so I suspect that I did something to stress the plant late in the flowering cycle (possibly the flushing), which caused it to grow some "emergency" male flowers to save itself (this is apparently not unheard of and, in a controlled environment, can be used as a method to feminize seeds). Germination had to have happened in the last week or so, based on the size of the seeds currently.
At the moment, they're very, very small... about the size of strawberry seeds, if not smaller, and they're buried deep inside the female flowers. I really had to work to dig them out (and boy were they sticky!) with tweezers and scissors from a swiss army knife.
So, I've narrowed down my options to pretty much only two choices at this point:
1) Continue to let them flower for another 4 to 6 weeks and allow the seeds to grow to maturity before harvesting, and obviously deal with really seedy weed. Oh, the nostalgia! haha
... or
2) Harvest immediately before the seeds can get any bigger, despite the new influx of trichome growth that hasn't become very cloudy yet.
I need to go into more detail here... around week 8 of flowering, they actually looked like they were about ready for harvest. I was seeing about 20% amber, and lots of milky trichomes. I even went as far as to apply a leeching solution for about 2 hours and then started flushing to prepare for harvest. However, I did a lot of reading about flushing around that time and decided that I don't want to be a flusher, so after about 2 days of straight RO water, I put about a 25% strength dose of nutrient solution back in and started feeding again.
Holy shit, this is what threw me for a loop: after I started lightly feeding again, the plants exploded with new flower growth. So naturally, I decided to hold off on harvesting until these new buds were ripe. That was about 2 weeks ago, and these things are STILL producing new flowers, albeit they're almost all seed pods now.
Regardless, they are absolutely covered in tons of NEW trichomes, more-so than there were when I thought they were ready to harvest around week 8. Yes, they're new and not quite milky yet, but those old amber trichomes from week 8 are still there and more amber now as well, so it's not like there aren't any mature/ripe trichomes on the plant.
I'm torn... what do you guys think I should do?
As promised, here are the details of my grow:
I'm setup in a SuperCloset Super Locker 2.0, totally enclosed stealth system. All the details of my grow system can be found on their site.
I have to say that while this closet/locker is a great idea in theory, in practice, there are quite a few flaws in the design... but I won't go into that here. Maybe in a follow-up post if anyone's interested in a review.
I'm using the 150-watt HPS that was included with the system, and it proved to be more than adequate as far as providing enough light for an excellent yield (even before the seeds started forming!)
I started with a batch of 10 White Widow seeds (non-feminized), and I germinated them from seed using only rockwool soaked in RO water for a few hours. They sprouted quickly, aside from 2 duds that didn't germinate, despite the fact that I didn't use a heating mat or a dome. I germinated them in the top chamber of the Super Locker, and it works very well to keep humidity levels high, so there's really not much need for a dome atop their smaller DWC "cloning" system (deep water culture only in the top chamber's hydro setup).
Jump ahead about 2 weeks, and I've got 8 good-looking seedlings. So far so good.
They stayed up top under 20 hours of light until roots began to show through the bottom of the rockwool cubes, and during that time, I gave them no nutrients, only straight RO water given to them manually every day or two to keep the rockwool consistently moist. I didn't even foliar feed to promote root growth... they did surprisingly well on their own.
Except for the 1 seedling that I let dry out a bit too much before it was ready to transplant... it died.
Now I'm down to 7 seedlings, and so begins the series of huge embarrassing failures.
I transplanted them to the lower chamber one at a time as their roots began to show, and kept them on the same light cycle as the top chamber until they were all transplanted to the bottom under the HPS. I then switched the light cycle abruptly to 14 hours on, 10 hours off to influence gender. I'll go into more detail on that later.
In hindsight, it wasn't a good idea to change the light cycle so suddenly. I should have gradually adjusted the light cycle by about 30 minutes a day to avoid stressing the plant, but I lucked out and didn't cause any problems... yet.
I fed with half-strength nutrient solution right off the bat, and that seemed to be okay for the first 2 weeks or so. I bumped it up to full strength and nutrient-burned them, and it was from that point on, the leaves looked like shit. I scaled back on the nutrients a little, but the damage was already done, and things just got worse from there.
Jump ahead to a few weeks into vegetative growth, and things get really interesting. My girlfriend's parents decide they want to come visit and stay with us for a week! Obviously, my girlfriend and I freak out, as her parents would flip their lids if they found out we were growing pot, and we can't tell them they're not welcome to stay with us.
We brainstormed for weeks before they arrived about how we were going to keep it all hidden. My girlfriend was convinced that her father was going to be a snoop, and he may very well open the closet where the pad-locked locker's hiding and start asking questions. I know, we were probably being overly paranoid... in fact, I'm certain of it. I went as far as to buy a locking doorknob for the closet door to prevent anyone from taking a peek! haha. In hindsight, that probably raised more questions than a storage locker in a closet would have. But at least it keeps the cleaning lady out of there when she comes by.
Ultimately, we decided that if it was possible, we had to get the entire grow system out of the house for the week they were here. Putting it outside was out of the question because it was February at the time and too cold out, not to mention it'd be right out in the open for all to see. Couldn't put it in our detached laundry room either, as her parents intended to do laundry while they were with us.
And then the plot thickens. To get it out of the house temporarily, that would require us to break rule number 1 of growing: don't tell anyone.
I dropped the bomb on my best and most trusted friend that I was growing a few plants, and he was absolutely shocked... and then excited... and then jealous. lol
It actually didn't take much arm-twisting to get him to agree to babysit for a week. It only took an IOU for an 8th after harvest. I think he's going to regret that barter when he gets this seedy-ass weed! hehe
We packed up the whole locker, removed and placed a shopping bag over the growing tray/reservoir and the seedlings, and proceeded to transport the entire operation across town. All things considered, it's pretty damn cool that an entire grow system can be packed up into 1 locker and transported that easily.
Sooo, this was the longest week of my entire life! I wanted so badly to go by my friends place every day to check on them, but I was only able to stop by once that week, and thank God I did. I had inadvertently left the drainage valve open on the hydro system when we dropped it off, but it was circulating the solution back into the reservoir. The problem was, it dropped the pressure to the feeding spouts so they weren't spraying very far and the growing medium wasn't getting very much moisture. By the time I came across the problem, the roots on the side opposite the spouts had dried up and turned brown.
You couldn't tell anything was wrong by looking at the plants... they still seemed to be thriving, but I'm sure the root damage impacted their growth somewhat.
Amazingly, after fixing the problem, they bounced back super fast and by the time we picked up the whole system from my friends place at the end of the week, there was lots of new root growth and the plants had grown several inches! Still looking good, despite the obvious stress to the plant.
So the 7 seedlings are all back home now and things are going fairly smoothly again...
... until the leaves went from bad to worse. As they grew, they exhibited more and more signs of problems that I couldn't stay on top of. If you were to pick any one common problem that exhibits itself in marijuana leaves, I could probably find a spot on my plant to show you an example. The problems were across the board, and I couldn't even tell you exactly what all of them were.
I'm guessing: nutrient lock-out, nutrient-burn, improperly maintained Ph balance, overheating, and light burn. The only thing I didn't have was pests, thankfully.
Here's what I think I did wrong:
I didn't start leeching or flushing my plants with a leeching solution or straight water until about 4 weeks into flowering. When I finally did leech for the first time, I removed a ton of built up salts that I monitored with an EC meter. After doing this, I noticed that my air diffuser was pumping out a LOT more bubbles than it had been before, so apparently I had a lot of build-up in there that was impeding performance. I wish I had done all of this so much sooner in the grow, and regularly. Next time around, I plan to leech/flush with Clearex every 2-3 weeks.
I also didn't monitor the Ph levels very often. Only after pre-mixing the nutrient solution, but not after it had been running through the system for a while. I didn't start monitoring this until about 4 weeks into flowering as well, and when I did finally check on it after the solution had been running through the system for a few days, I discovered that my nutrient solution was very acidic, in the 4.x Ph range. Since then, I check my Ph every day with a digital tester, and I found that my Ph was fluctuating by a full point every day, and dropping from 5.9 to the 4.9 range and lower. I've had to add Ph Up constantly to maintain proper Ph, and I know now that isn't good for the plant either. I have to assume the Ph problems were happening long before I noticed, and that surely contributed to the leaf damage as well.
So, on to my next monumental fuck-up.
After reading Jorge Cervantes book, 'Marijuana Horticulture - The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible', I was under the impression that before you induced flowering, you should continue to veg and WAIT for the pre-flowers to show on their own so you can determine the sex of the plant and remove the males before the bloom cycle. Jesus Christ, I hate Jorge's book now. It's so full of contradictory information, and missing key details like the necessity to induce flowering first and THEN look for pre-flowers when growing. If you wait and let it happen naturally, the plant will grow to its full height potential, and for my strain, that could be 6 or 7 feet tall! Bah.
So, I vegged for way too long, and when I finally figured out the RIGHT way to determine gender and induce flowering, it was way too late. I had the light as high as it could go, and they still grew into it after I started flowering.
What did I learn? You should induce flowering when the plant is roughly half the height you'd like it to be at full flower. That's a general rule of thumb, anyway.
Oh, you should also gradually switch your light cycle to 12/12 to induce flowering, not abruptly as I did yet again.
At this point, my grow had become a salvage operation. I had to chop about 12 inches from the tops of all the plants, and still bend them over drastically to get them just far enough away from the light to prevent burning. You can imagine how leggy they are now, standing several feet tall with mostly stem at the bottom and mostly leaves at the top. Looked pretty damn silly, really... especially bent over. And obviously, this caused more stress on the plant.
By the way, by bending the plants, I've learned that I inadvertently used a legitimate technique to enhance growth by exposing the stems and lower branch nodes to more direct light. I ended up getting several large colas per plant because of this. Noted for the next grow.
Despite all of this stress, there were no signs of male flowers throughout the entire grow cycle, vegging or flowering.
Shortly after I topped and bent them, I realized I didn't have nearly enough room for 7 plants in this small grow space, so I picked the biggest/healthiest two from a pack of 7 FEMALES, and chopped the rest. Yes, all 7 of them female! I may have screwed everything else up, but one thing I did get right was encouraging them all to become female during the seedling and early vegging stage, apparently.
Just to touch on influencing gender, I used the techniques I picked up from Jorge's book. I reduced the light cycle in early growth from 18 on/6 off to 14 on /10 off. I started these plants in January, so they were kept pretty cold as seedlings. And I also increased nitrogen levels in my early feedings. Seemed to be a winning combination, and I'm going to do it again on my next grow. I'm still really surprised I didn't get a single male, considering all the stress, which usually causes them to switch teams.
So, back to chopping the 5 that I had to remove from the grow. By the time I realized I didn't have room for them, their roots had grown into a massive root ball and became intertwined with all the other root balls. After chopping the plant off at the base of the stem, I still needed to get the roots out and I couldn't without damaging the roots of the 2 plants I wanted to keep. So I had to use scissors to cut the roots off the chopped plants by lifting them out of the solution a little and snipping them off at their thinnest point. That left a lot of dead/dying roots in there which probably contributed to the drastic changes in my Ph balance daily, among other problems.
Sheesh, so many things went wrong, it's hard to remember all of them in my current mental state. *wink wink*
It got too hot in the locker with the door closed as summer rolled around, and I had to start leaving the door open during the day to keep it between 76-81 F.
What did I learn here? I should have scheduled the light to turn on at night when it's cooler instead of during the day. Next time. (I'm actually going to buy an LED light for my next grow to address the heat problem, but that's a story for another post.
So now I'm around week 8... and despite all the problems, my baby's managed to produce an impressive yield, and I was so happy about salvaging what I did and excited about potentially coming away with a decent harvest.
And then I went and left the door to the closet open one night after the light went out, and exposed it to light from my office for several hours during its dark cycle before I caught it and closed the locker. I really hate myself for this, as I'm becoming more and more convinced that's what caused it to suddenly sprout a few male flowers.
Thinking back, I know I moved the colas around recently to try to get them positioned under the light evenly, undoubtedly stirring up the male pollen and spreading it around the whole closet. I know now that I should have used a net or trellis to keep the colas spread apart evenly and uniformly, because moving them around a lot damages the trichomes, and in my case it helped to spread the pollen of a male flower around the locker, which may have otherwise only pollinated a few buds instead of the whole plant if it had been left alone.
I had also bought a second fan almost identical to the one that was included with the locker a few weeks before this and had it sitting at the bottom of the locker to circulate air and try to keep the whole chamber cooler. I didn't have it pointed directly at the plants, just at the rear wall, but I also suspect this played a big part in pollinating so many of my buds by blowing the pollen up and into the top colas.
Wow, it's 4:20am and I'm still writing this. Smoke break!
I'm sure I glazed over a few things and left out some important details, but I'll follow up as they come to mind.
I'll also post some pics tomorrow after the lights come back on.
Thanks in advance for any input or advice you have on making my next grow go much more smoothly. You guys rock.
These forums have been a huge help for me since I started growing this year, and I hope I can return the favor with all the information I'm going to share below.I'll start by saying that I'm a total newb, this is my first grow, and it's been a disaster nearly every step of the way. Most of my experience up to now is in the form of what NOT to do on your first grow.
But before I go into all the things that went wrong, and what I've learned so far, I need to get straight to the heart of my problem because I need an answer, or at least an opinion, really fast. :
I'm in the 11th week of flowering two White Widows in a hydroponic "bubbleponics" setup, and I just discovered that seeds are developing in a large portion of my buds. Every bud I checked, in fact. Obviously I missed a male flower and it's managed to pollinate and germinate virtually all of my buds. *sigh*
Now, they are... or were... absolutely female until very recently. Definitely not hermaphrodites.
I found a few male flowers today, and they seem to be relatively new growth, so I suspect that I did something to stress the plant late in the flowering cycle (possibly the flushing), which caused it to grow some "emergency" male flowers to save itself (this is apparently not unheard of and, in a controlled environment, can be used as a method to feminize seeds). Germination had to have happened in the last week or so, based on the size of the seeds currently.
At the moment, they're very, very small... about the size of strawberry seeds, if not smaller, and they're buried deep inside the female flowers. I really had to work to dig them out (and boy were they sticky!) with tweezers and scissors from a swiss army knife.
So, I've narrowed down my options to pretty much only two choices at this point:
1) Continue to let them flower for another 4 to 6 weeks and allow the seeds to grow to maturity before harvesting, and obviously deal with really seedy weed. Oh, the nostalgia! haha
... or
2) Harvest immediately before the seeds can get any bigger, despite the new influx of trichome growth that hasn't become very cloudy yet.
I need to go into more detail here... around week 8 of flowering, they actually looked like they were about ready for harvest. I was seeing about 20% amber, and lots of milky trichomes. I even went as far as to apply a leeching solution for about 2 hours and then started flushing to prepare for harvest. However, I did a lot of reading about flushing around that time and decided that I don't want to be a flusher, so after about 2 days of straight RO water, I put about a 25% strength dose of nutrient solution back in and started feeding again.
Holy shit, this is what threw me for a loop: after I started lightly feeding again, the plants exploded with new flower growth. So naturally, I decided to hold off on harvesting until these new buds were ripe. That was about 2 weeks ago, and these things are STILL producing new flowers, albeit they're almost all seed pods now.
Regardless, they are absolutely covered in tons of NEW trichomes, more-so than there were when I thought they were ready to harvest around week 8. Yes, they're new and not quite milky yet, but those old amber trichomes from week 8 are still there and more amber now as well, so it's not like there aren't any mature/ripe trichomes on the plant.
I'm torn... what do you guys think I should do?
As promised, here are the details of my grow:
I'm setup in a SuperCloset Super Locker 2.0, totally enclosed stealth system. All the details of my grow system can be found on their site.
I have to say that while this closet/locker is a great idea in theory, in practice, there are quite a few flaws in the design... but I won't go into that here. Maybe in a follow-up post if anyone's interested in a review.
I'm using the 150-watt HPS that was included with the system, and it proved to be more than adequate as far as providing enough light for an excellent yield (even before the seeds started forming!)
I started with a batch of 10 White Widow seeds (non-feminized), and I germinated them from seed using only rockwool soaked in RO water for a few hours. They sprouted quickly, aside from 2 duds that didn't germinate, despite the fact that I didn't use a heating mat or a dome. I germinated them in the top chamber of the Super Locker, and it works very well to keep humidity levels high, so there's really not much need for a dome atop their smaller DWC "cloning" system (deep water culture only in the top chamber's hydro setup).
Jump ahead about 2 weeks, and I've got 8 good-looking seedlings. So far so good.
They stayed up top under 20 hours of light until roots began to show through the bottom of the rockwool cubes, and during that time, I gave them no nutrients, only straight RO water given to them manually every day or two to keep the rockwool consistently moist. I didn't even foliar feed to promote root growth... they did surprisingly well on their own.
Except for the 1 seedling that I let dry out a bit too much before it was ready to transplant... it died.
Now I'm down to 7 seedlings, and so begins the series of huge embarrassing failures.I transplanted them to the lower chamber one at a time as their roots began to show, and kept them on the same light cycle as the top chamber until they were all transplanted to the bottom under the HPS. I then switched the light cycle abruptly to 14 hours on, 10 hours off to influence gender. I'll go into more detail on that later.
In hindsight, it wasn't a good idea to change the light cycle so suddenly. I should have gradually adjusted the light cycle by about 30 minutes a day to avoid stressing the plant, but I lucked out and didn't cause any problems... yet.
I fed with half-strength nutrient solution right off the bat, and that seemed to be okay for the first 2 weeks or so. I bumped it up to full strength and nutrient-burned them, and it was from that point on, the leaves looked like shit.
I scaled back on the nutrients a little, but the damage was already done, and things just got worse from there.Jump ahead to a few weeks into vegetative growth, and things get really interesting. My girlfriend's parents decide they want to come visit and stay with us for a week! Obviously, my girlfriend and I freak out, as her parents would flip their lids if they found out we were growing pot, and we can't tell them they're not welcome to stay with us.
We brainstormed for weeks before they arrived about how we were going to keep it all hidden. My girlfriend was convinced that her father was going to be a snoop, and he may very well open the closet where the pad-locked locker's hiding and start asking questions. I know, we were probably being overly paranoid... in fact, I'm certain of it. I went as far as to buy a locking doorknob for the closet door to prevent anyone from taking a peek! haha. In hindsight, that probably raised more questions than a storage locker in a closet would have.
But at least it keeps the cleaning lady out of there when she comes by.Ultimately, we decided that if it was possible, we had to get the entire grow system out of the house for the week they were here. Putting it outside was out of the question because it was February at the time and too cold out, not to mention it'd be right out in the open for all to see. Couldn't put it in our detached laundry room either, as her parents intended to do laundry while they were with us.
And then the plot thickens. To get it out of the house temporarily, that would require us to break rule number 1 of growing: don't tell anyone.
I dropped the bomb on my best and most trusted friend that I was growing a few plants, and he was absolutely shocked... and then excited... and then jealous. lol
It actually didn't take much arm-twisting to get him to agree to babysit for a week. It only took an IOU for an 8th after harvest. I think he's going to regret that barter when he gets this seedy-ass weed! hehe
We packed up the whole locker, removed and placed a shopping bag over the growing tray/reservoir and the seedlings, and proceeded to transport the entire operation across town. All things considered, it's pretty damn cool that an entire grow system can be packed up into 1 locker and transported that easily.
Sooo, this was the longest week of my entire life! I wanted so badly to go by my friends place every day to check on them, but I was only able to stop by once that week, and thank God I did. I had inadvertently left the drainage valve open on the hydro system when we dropped it off, but it was circulating the solution back into the reservoir. The problem was, it dropped the pressure to the feeding spouts so they weren't spraying very far and the growing medium wasn't getting very much moisture. By the time I came across the problem, the roots on the side opposite the spouts had dried up and turned brown.
You couldn't tell anything was wrong by looking at the plants... they still seemed to be thriving, but I'm sure the root damage impacted their growth somewhat.Amazingly, after fixing the problem, they bounced back super fast and by the time we picked up the whole system from my friends place at the end of the week, there was lots of new root growth and the plants had grown several inches! Still looking good, despite the obvious stress to the plant.
So the 7 seedlings are all back home now and things are going fairly smoothly again...
... until the leaves went from bad to worse. As they grew, they exhibited more and more signs of problems that I couldn't stay on top of. If you were to pick any one common problem that exhibits itself in marijuana leaves, I could probably find a spot on my plant to show you an example.
The problems were across the board, and I couldn't even tell you exactly what all of them were.I'm guessing: nutrient lock-out, nutrient-burn, improperly maintained Ph balance, overheating, and light burn. The only thing I didn't have was pests, thankfully.
Here's what I think I did wrong:
I didn't start leeching or flushing my plants with a leeching solution or straight water until about 4 weeks into flowering. When I finally did leech for the first time, I removed a ton of built up salts that I monitored with an EC meter. After doing this, I noticed that my air diffuser was pumping out a LOT more bubbles than it had been before, so apparently I had a lot of build-up in there that was impeding performance. I wish I had done all of this so much sooner in the grow, and regularly. Next time around, I plan to leech/flush with Clearex every 2-3 weeks.
I also didn't monitor the Ph levels very often. Only after pre-mixing the nutrient solution, but not after it had been running through the system for a while. I didn't start monitoring this until about 4 weeks into flowering as well, and when I did finally check on it after the solution had been running through the system for a few days, I discovered that my nutrient solution was very acidic, in the 4.x Ph range. Since then, I check my Ph every day with a digital tester, and I found that my Ph was fluctuating by a full point every day, and dropping from 5.9 to the 4.9 range and lower. I've had to add Ph Up constantly to maintain proper Ph, and I know now that isn't good for the plant either. I have to assume the Ph problems were happening long before I noticed, and that surely contributed to the leaf damage as well.
So, on to my next monumental fuck-up.
After reading Jorge Cervantes book, 'Marijuana Horticulture - The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible', I was under the impression that before you induced flowering, you should continue to veg and WAIT for the pre-flowers to show on their own so you can determine the sex of the plant and remove the males before the bloom cycle. Jesus Christ, I hate Jorge's book now. It's so full of contradictory information, and missing key details like the necessity to induce flowering first and THEN look for pre-flowers when growing. If you wait and let it happen naturally, the plant will grow to its full height potential, and for my strain, that could be 6 or 7 feet tall! Bah.
So, I vegged for way too long, and when I finally figured out the RIGHT way to determine gender and induce flowering, it was way too late. I had the light as high as it could go, and they still grew into it after I started flowering.
What did I learn? You should induce flowering when the plant is roughly half the height you'd like it to be at full flower. That's a general rule of thumb, anyway.
Oh, you should also gradually switch your light cycle to 12/12 to induce flowering, not abruptly as I did yet again.
At this point, my grow had become a salvage operation. I had to chop about 12 inches from the tops of all the plants, and still bend them over drastically to get them just far enough away from the light to prevent burning. You can imagine how leggy they are now, standing several feet tall with mostly stem at the bottom and mostly leaves at the top. Looked pretty damn silly, really... especially bent over. And obviously, this caused more stress on the plant.
By the way, by bending the plants, I've learned that I inadvertently used a legitimate technique to enhance growth by exposing the stems and lower branch nodes to more direct light. I ended up getting several large colas per plant because of this. Noted for the next grow.
Despite all of this stress, there were no signs of male flowers throughout the entire grow cycle, vegging or flowering.
Shortly after I topped and bent them, I realized I didn't have nearly enough room for 7 plants in this small grow space, so I picked the biggest/healthiest two from a pack of 7 FEMALES, and chopped the rest. Yes, all 7 of them female! I may have screwed everything else up, but one thing I did get right was encouraging them all to become female during the seedling and early vegging stage, apparently.
Just to touch on influencing gender, I used the techniques I picked up from Jorge's book. I reduced the light cycle in early growth from 18 on/6 off to 14 on /10 off. I started these plants in January, so they were kept pretty cold as seedlings. And I also increased nitrogen levels in my early feedings. Seemed to be a winning combination, and I'm going to do it again on my next grow. I'm still really surprised I didn't get a single male, considering all the stress, which usually causes them to switch teams.
So, back to chopping the 5 that I had to remove from the grow. By the time I realized I didn't have room for them, their roots had grown into a massive root ball and became intertwined with all the other root balls. After chopping the plant off at the base of the stem, I still needed to get the roots out and I couldn't without damaging the roots of the 2 plants I wanted to keep. So I had to use scissors to cut the roots off the chopped plants by lifting them out of the solution a little and snipping them off at their thinnest point. That left a lot of dead/dying roots in there which probably contributed to the drastic changes in my Ph balance daily, among other problems.
Sheesh, so many things went wrong, it's hard to remember all of them in my current mental state. *wink wink*
It got too hot in the locker with the door closed as summer rolled around, and I had to start leaving the door open during the day to keep it between 76-81 F.
What did I learn here? I should have scheduled the light to turn on at night when it's cooler instead of during the day. Next time. (I'm actually going to buy an LED light for my next grow to address the heat problem, but that's a story for another post.
So now I'm around week 8... and despite all the problems, my baby's managed to produce an impressive yield, and I was so happy about salvaging what I did and excited about potentially coming away with a decent harvest.
And then I went and left the door to the closet open one night after the light went out, and exposed it to light from my office for several hours during its dark cycle before I caught it and closed the locker. I really hate myself for this, as I'm becoming more and more convinced that's what caused it to suddenly sprout a few male flowers.
Thinking back, I know I moved the colas around recently to try to get them positioned under the light evenly, undoubtedly stirring up the male pollen and spreading it around the whole closet. I know now that I should have used a net or trellis to keep the colas spread apart evenly and uniformly, because moving them around a lot damages the trichomes, and in my case it helped to spread the pollen of a male flower around the locker, which may have otherwise only pollinated a few buds instead of the whole plant if it had been left alone.
I had also bought a second fan almost identical to the one that was included with the locker a few weeks before this and had it sitting at the bottom of the locker to circulate air and try to keep the whole chamber cooler. I didn't have it pointed directly at the plants, just at the rear wall, but I also suspect this played a big part in pollinating so many of my buds by blowing the pollen up and into the top colas.
Wow, it's 4:20am and I'm still writing this. Smoke break!
I'm sure I glazed over a few things and left out some important details, but I'll follow up as they come to mind.
I'll also post some pics tomorrow after the lights come back on.
Thanks in advance for any input or advice you have on making my next grow go much more smoothly. You guys rock.
