No worries, I love to see what other people are doing, especially when they are experimenting! I find those square 5.5-6" pots are one of my favorite sizes-great for things like squeezing a few males into a 2x2. Mothers get too big and beefy in them if you are trying to keep them small, but you can grow a tree in one in coco during flower too. The only non air pots I buy are 3" and 5.5".
Straight organic IS HARD in small pots! Totally agree, you need a nice big root ball full of bacteria and fungi to process it right. The "organic" csl formula I came up with maintained plants in 4" pots under t5s just adequately. I thought it would fall short during the stretch phase. But instead, the CSL plant looks incredible. I'll get some side by sides next to the maxi plant tonight-I meant to do that the other day, but it looks even better now. This is the first time I transplanted into a bigger pot right when switching to 12/12. I checked the roots last night and they have fully rooted the bigger pots. I've always given a week or so between transplanting and flipping, but I think I like this new way better-the plants have looked super vigorous and happy since I flipped and upped the light.
It has been a few days since I increased the light, so I'll bump it up again tonight, either turn it up another notch or lower the light a bit. I had more males than expected, but my friend who is growing some of the same strains had mostly females, so we're trading again. I wanted to show the 3 FDM strains I started with, so I grabbed a female ESB from him-mine were males and I just wanted a single female ESB just to get an idea if I want to dedicate a full grow to that strain. I have a pack of Nigerian Sunshine on the way from Swami so I'm super excited to see how the two strains compare.
I'll show you guys what I'm going with for the rest of the grow in the next update! So, just as a reminder, these C99 seeds are from the 1998 release from Bros Grimm, and are F4s. I noticed that the females are pretty consistent looking in veg (they are healthy, vigorous, lovely plants) and I've been comparing the leaves to some of the other C99 grow journals ongoing right now and the leaves on the FDM plants are much thinner than the new Bros Grimm C99 plants, I'm curious how similar the smoke is.
Also, I ended up with a male totally unlike the rest, it's super fast growing, tall, with narrow leaves and long internodes. It also reeks in veg, just reeks of citrus, so I'm keeping it, I can't wait to collect some leaves from it once it really gets going for some test bowls.