Girl Scout Cookies Fem-Auto FastBuds #1

ZAuto This is the first week of my Fast Buds - Girl Scout Cookies. She's a feminized autoflower, and from what I've seen she should be quite awesome to grow!

ZAuto She did pretty well in this week, and looks like I should be ready to do some LST next week - I decided I'm going to avoid topping for this grow. Topping isn't normally recommended for autoflowers, and while I did for my previous grow, it sounds like these genetics move just a bit too fast. But I do have a 2 more of these seeds, and the next one of those will be starting in a few weeks. I'll try top that one.

ZAuto I'm an asshole... I topped it cause I got bored from the lock down! I also think I went a bit heavy on the nutrients so I'll give it a quick flush before putting some nutrients in again on Sunday...

ZAuto When I did the LST, I accidentally gave her a bit of a supercrop as well. But she's handling it well so far and is growing along. She just needs her nutrients for the week, and I'm sure she'll be much bigger by Sunday

ZAuto The plant started to suffer a bit around here - and it took me a while to work out what was going wrong. I'm updating this 3 weeks after the photo was taken, so I can say with hindsight that the buckets were letting in too much light, which stunted the root growth which in turn lead to nutrient deficiencies as the plant wasn't able to absorb enough of what I was feeding her. Heads up, the next 3 weeks of updates are kinda sad! But a good learning point for any DWC growers who make the same mistake I did. Make sure your buckets are light proof, and also be careful of light entering the bucket via the air hose!

ZAuto This is carrying on with the light leak in the bucket issue that leads to the nutrient deficiency, but at this point, I was convinced that the problem was mostly about the roots not being long enough, so I tried to lower the water level and encourage the plant to extend the roots lower down... I was pretty wrong!

ZAuto Only during this week did I realise what the issue was with the light leaking into the bucket and stunting the roots. My country is on lockdown, so it's impossible to get to the hardware store to buy things to help fix up my setup so I had to make do with a patch job for now - but I ran some experiments with dropping my phone (while recording video) into a spare bucket and put that inside the tent to see how much light was getting in... I put the buckets inside other buckets so there are two layers, and I wrapped the top part in foil to help protect that part. I also wrapped foil around the air hose to help prevent some light getting in. I also upgraded to a Mars TS-1000, which probably doesn't help the light problem. But I have some more tricks up my sleeves for this weekend involving black plastic bags to help keep light out. As well as some extra nutrients to supplement the GHE Flora series.

ZAuto Got a Mars Hydro TS-1000, things are looking better since I started blocking light into the bucket - the roots are looking better too. But they're still far behind and I'm just going to have to do better on the next grow with what I've learnt! I also got a few new nutrients that I can add as supplements - so quite excited about that.