WEEK 8 UPDATE
PART I — OVERVIEW
Shits been poppin' in the garden the past couple weeks, the first set of autos are deep into flower and getting closer and closer to harvest time. The Fastberry is getting NUTS and making my mouth water. I cannot WAIT to smoke that shit. It rained/stormed pretty hard for a couple days, and I couldn't handle the idea of letting her get wet so I built a temporary greenhouse in the driveway out of my defunct shade shelter. Turned out super good, and kept all three of my autos pretty damn dry.
I inherited a clone from one of my homies who works at a medical grow operation about a week ago. They got rid of all their 10 week'ers, and I was lucky enough to end up with a double diesel clone. She's been staying with the Sour Bubbly down the street for the time being, until I harvest one of my autos. She's lookin' pretty good, beefing up bit by bit. She won't have as much time to veg as ideally I'd like — I might have him start bringing her in after the sun clears in the evening to put under a CFL so she won't start flowering till I'm ready for her to. BUT she's a 10 week'er so that puts her flowering until deeper into the fall than I'd feel great about. Driveway greenhouse? Let her finish in the grow tent my fucking badass ladyfriend got me for my birthday? Haven't decided yet —we'll have to see how it goes!
The plan for R2 of Autos is now a Fast Buds Six-Shooter [Crystal Meth x Mexican Airlines] and a Mephisto SODK x Ripley OG. I've been collecting beans bit by bit over the past few weeks and will continue to for a little bit till I get a good stock on hand. Get ready for some of the strains I've got in the hopper, I'm pretty fuckin' excited.
Back to the new batch of soil. Last batch has been working pretty well, but I feel like there is room for some improvement. First off, I am trying a new base mix — EB Stone's 420 Mix. It was comparable price to the black gold organic [about 5 bucks cheaper a bag than Roots] and from the ingredients list sounds a lot better than Roots. It's loaded with microbes, which is perfect for the kind of gardening I do. Found it at Portland Nursery, which BTW, has all the amendments I use for my soil — DTE brand much cheaper than grow shops. They also have a bunch of stuff [bone, blood, feather, kelp meals, greensand, gypsum] in bulk bins which is even cheaper.
In addition to the new base soil, I watered the mix with molasses & Myco-Fusion Bio-Jolt 1.5 to kickstart colonization. I have heard nothing but good things about the whole Myco-Fusion line from Santiam Organics, and picked up the Green 150 and the Bio-Jolt to use for this next round, and will be picking up the Rhizo charge as well before anything gets transplanted. It totally blows my mind the difference in whats in the Green 150 compared to the Xtreme mycos I used in my first batch. It also looks and smells a lot funkier than the Xtreme, which was all white and smelled benign. I've used the Bio-Jolt twice so far on my existing plants, and its totally kicked shit into overdrive. The swiss cheese literally doubled growth speed overnight. I can't wait to see how it does with this new mix.
Random Weird Thing: One leaf on the SC is in full two-face mode. I am assuming this is a mutation, not a nutrient deficiency, but let me know if anybody think's otherwise.
Detailed Plant updates coming in parts II, III, & IV.