Northern Cheese Haze Auto - First Grow

Firefly Seedling stage! Jiffy pellet was transplanted into a solo cup w/ my buffered coco (with drainage holes). Lights on 24/0 until the cotyledons opened up, at which point I started 18/6 lighting. LED placed about 12" up @ 40% power, per manufacture recommendation. Temps were higher than desired and humidity was low, placed bowls of cold water in the tent to try and fix that (not sure if it did anything). At some point I also purchased a small/cheap humidifier and placed it in the tent. Some combo of both those actions seemed to fix RH. A full strength nuterient mix was made and watered down to match the EC guide following the template here: https://www.cocoforcannabis.com/how-to-grow-cannabis-seedlings-in-coco-coir/

Firefly Week 2? Not exactly sure how a grow timeline aligns, 8/29/25 (the older of the two photos) is exactly 2 weeks after the germination was complete so seems like everything is lined up... Nerveless I'm backlogging a lot of this diary and will timestamp each photo for continuity sake. Plant has now been transplanted from the solo cup to its final home. 3gal fabric pot with buffered coco. At this point the plant is getting full strength nutrient solution about ~ 1000EC. Watering is twice daily using high frequency fertigation following the Coco For Cannabis guide, once at light on and once 10.5 hours after. My small humidifier in the tent is keeping the RH around 60%. Without the RH drops into the 30s. Still keeping bowls of water in the tent as well to keep the humidity up during this phase, particularly giving that the temps were in the higher range of what I think they were supposed to be. LED was increased to 60% per manufacture specifications.

Firefly Week 3! Wow, I did not expect this much growth so quickly! Needless to say I was checking the tent as often as I could because how excited I was about the growth. Two small fans were added this week for airflow, not oscillating but placed such that they would nicely move air around. (Not pictured is the one above giving a tiny little breeze to the leaves). Big thing of note for this week was I started the LST, Photos are the day before, day of (2x), and day after. Just using some garden tie and clothes pins attached to the pot. Still giving it full strength (1000ish EC) nutrient solution. At this point I was checking forums/guides/websites non-stop to figure out what in the world I'm doing... really had/have no clue if things were going good/bad at this point.

Firefly Week 4! Only photos I have from this week are in the beginning part of the week Nerveless even over just a couple days this plant has exploded! Not sure if this is typical or not but I'm enthusiasts as can be. However, major scare - when watering on 9/7/25 I noticed the main stem had broken off! I must have damaged it during LST the night before and only noticed the damage the next day. Guess this means I accidently topped my first grow. I had read a lot of warnings about topping an auto beforehand when doing my initial research so I really had no clue what would happen from here. Over the week it had seemed to recover and grow at the same rate it was before, if even a tad more. Not sure if I will quantify it as a positive or a negative thing when looking back, had me spooked at the least. Besides accidently topping the plant, rest of week was generic. Consistent LST (much more careful lol). Growth was steadily aggressive, same full strength (1000ish EC) nutrient solution 2x a day(+100-200 runoff EC typically), adjusted the light as the plant grew. RH+Temps in good windows.

Firefly Week 5! End of Veg? Preflower? Flower? Very eventful week. Throughout this week at ever watering the plant got a round of LST+Tucking. At this point I'm trying to maximize the amount of growth sites getting light exposure and also trying to keep the canopy relatively flat/level. Full strength nutrients per normal. About this point I was getting really worried about space, particularly giving the genetics of this plant tend to the larger side. Impulse purchased a net and on 9/17/25 the ScrOG net was installed and I did my best to use it to curate the canopy. ~placed about 8" from the top of the pot and besides that I just gave it my best go, not exactly sure if I did it right or not. Towards the end of this week pistols become pretty apparent on most of the plant! Some very light defoliation was done, just a couple of oversized fan leaves that weren't getting much light anyway. LED was set to 100% (and slightly raised) per manufacture specification towards the end of this week. Wouldn't be a first grow without a scare of the week. 😵 Last week we had an accidental topping, this week we have roots growing all outside the pot. On 9/16/25 I noticed the root growth out the bottom of the pot. My wildly unintelligent drain pan setup used bows to space the pot up and they collected runoff, leaving the roots with a nice bath of runoff water to grow into. Learning every week, this week I learned about air-pruning. Went ahead and cut these root growths off, purchased a 1$ Lowes runoff pan, and returned three bowls and a nice Pyrex dish back to the kitchen. About the same time of my root issue, within the next 2 days a good amount of leaves had slight yellow tips...

Firefly Week 6! Yep its flowering. For sure. Each week it surprises me with how fast it grows. Swapped to the "bloom" nutrient mix, at a slightly lower than full dosage (read somewhere that it made sense to do that, though it was getting full strength 7.5ml/gal of the Bloom by the end of this week). At this point the plant is wall to wall covering the tent and almost regretting going so aggressive on the LST/Tucking. RH% in the tent are now getting much higher than just last week, multiple nights where it peaks at 99%. Removing the humidifier was an easy fix to this (duh), though the RH stayed on the higher range of where I think it should be, but the temps also were a tad higher so at this stage I was unworried (still in the acceptable zone of the generic RH-Temp charts). Exhaust fan was bumped up from about 30% to 80% to also try and help, any higher and the box would pull enough negative pressure to really squeeze the walls in.

Firefly Week 7! Lots of growth and some unanswered questions. The biggest note of the week is the shear volume of plant. Fan leaves covered most of the air intake vent, very little light penetration through the canopy, and poor airflow underneath. Not sure if this was an optimal time or not to defoliate but I did a good bit regardless in the start of the week. Simply removing the leaves fully pressed up to the air-intake mesh had me removing a heaping handful. While scared to go too aggressive on the defoliation, I did want to at least make sure I had good airflow. Removed some large fan leaves below the scrog not getting light along with some in the canopy blocking colas. Despite removing what felt like 2-3x more than I should have given recommendations online, I still don't feel like I can visually tell much a difference in photos. If I noticed particularly good leaves to remove I did so, but besides that I tried to give the plant some time to recover after my initial burst of defoliation. I'm noticing plenty of growth sites that will produce sub-optimal bud, not sure if I'm willing to do anything about that right now, just want to make sure the plant makes it to harvest lol. Towards the end of this week, around 10/2/25, in addition to the yellowing tips of the leaves (which seem to have slowed/stopped but not gone away), brown edges started to appear, some light taco'ing, and some praying leaves. This week I was extra busy and didn't have a ton of time to pay attention to the little details, at some point though runoff EC was nearly +700 so I flushed with half strength solution for a couple watering cycles and then it returned to normal. Humidity still fell in the higher side, purchased a lower end de-humidifer and placed it in my room. While not perfect it keeps my room at 45-55% and the tent follows about 5-10% higher. Not sure if my issues are caused by any of the above, some folk said it could be light stress so at the end of the week I dropped the LED to 80%, its at the absolute top of the tent but is still at about the manufacture recommend distance away for flower+100%. Growth still seems to be going strong so I'm not too worried but now feeling slightly out of control not knowing the cause and/or solution. My carbon filter + exhaust fan are doing wonders to mitigate smell, if I stick my head in the box I can really get a solid smell of the plant. Outside the box, 0 smell. I put "normal" smell on the diary, without the carbon filter I would imagine my room would pretty notably smell like weed.