Indoor Happy noob's first grow. Come and join me!

Scirzo

Aligning strange emanations
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Hi folks at AFN! I'm all new and was posting my introduction on that forum, when I realized that what I was doing after a few posts was posting a grow journal. And then I thought I'd better stop over there and start one here, right? As it should be.

This is my setup.
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There's a carbon filter at the top, above the lamp. The lamp is a 144W LED by a company called Horticoled. It has a separate switch for flowering stage.
The floor you're looking at is 58x58 cm. I won't convert everything from the metric system, but it's about 23"x23".
This will be my first grow ever. I'm a noob. My plants are currently in their 10th week. I will take you on a trip to how I got there and beyond. Come and join me!
 
On the 10th of February this year I used a great instruction by Santacabrera for autoflowers from Reddit. I filled up two 11 liter pots with a mix of Canna Terra Professional and perlite (30-40%), flushed them with pH 6.5 water until they were fully saturated, let them leak for quite a while after which I put them in their little closet with the lamp switched on at about 45cm from the soil.
The next day I got two of my @FastBuds seeds, Girl Scout Cookies autoflowers and put them in their little cradles and covered them both with plastic wrap. On the 15th of February I made these pictures after removing the foil:
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I was quite happy. I had reached the first Milestone: germination.
Now, I had completely saturated the pots a day before I planted the seeds. So there was no need for quite some time to water them.
I had decided on watering by weight. For those who are wondering: cannabis loves it in soil when there's between 25-50% saturation. Since a liter of water weighs a kilo, this means a maximum of 25-50% of the weight of a pot may be the result of the water in that pot. The fully saturated pot, the day before seeding, weighed 8 kilos. This means the pot should weigh a minimum of 25% of that and a maximum of 50% of that. So between 2 and 4 kilos. So I knew then, that watering when they went below 3 kilos would be best. And if I sticked to a maximum of 1 liter, I would always be okay.
At 10 days:
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Oh, the one with the more slender leaves fell over twice in the meantime. She's doing fine.
 
I gave them a first bit of nutrients when they were 13 days old:
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I use Canna Terra Vega and gave them 2,5ml/liter.
 
Just a few pictures at 17 days old. Staying quite low, I feel.
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But low is what I want.
 
At 24 days the difference between the two plants is clearly visible from this angle:
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The lady on the left was the one that fell over twice as a seedling. I'm fairly sure that's had a huge influence on this difference. That being said, it seems to me that these are two different phenotypes as well. I am a noob, but I read up. A lot.
 
The next day, upon closer inspection I noticed this:
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Flowering starting.
 
Up until this point I had been checking them once daily and just gave water when needed, gradually upping the dose of nutrients. The fact that the first flowering had started was a milestone again! :vibe:
But after the party, it was business as usual: continue to check daily if water with nutrients was needed.
 
Then on day 31 I realized that they were growing at such a rate that I wouldn't have enough height. They at least double in size and that would mean they would almost certainly hit the lamp at some point. A minimum distance of 30 centimeters is advised. That means my plants should not get higher than about 40-50 cm. At this moment, at about 4.5 weeks, one of them was already 31cm. This is fairly small, but double that and it will be too high. So I decided to do something that I initially was afraid to do. I used my own version of LST. I call it that, because I started too late and was way too soft. It should be done with care, yes, but not so much care that you don't reach your goals. If there's one thing I have learned it is to trust my instincts and just do it, because these are very resilient plants, especially when they're healthy. I was too careful, but managed to get the central cola down a bit.
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I let them recover for a few days and got rewarded.
 
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