I am currently on day 83 of my last grow and will drop seeds as soon as I get my second of three plants harvested so that I have room for the seedling accoutrements in the little 4x2 tent!

Although my little 4x2 tent still has 2/3 slots filled, I figured I have room to germinate seedling way over in the side so I dropped my seeds in water tonight at 8:20pm. I’m keeping it simple by just soaking them in RO BUDDIE water (one of my favourite investments ever!) in shot glasses overnight, then I put them pointy end down directly into the jiffy pot. Tomorrow morning I will be setting up my little “seedling corner” with my heated seedling mat and the jiffy pots inside grandmas old 2 quart Corning ware casserole dish! I will set the seedling mat temperature probe to 28C and hope that I once again have a 100% germination rate!

So I’ve got the heated seedling mat on my draining board in my tent now (on top of a piece of DiBond sign panel to make the area flat for it) and I have about a quarter inch of water in the bottom of the Corning ware, with 2 leftover pieces of “coroplast” to make a little dry island in the middle of the water. In the morning the jiffy pots will go on top of the coroplast and the seeds will go straight inside, pointy end down! Here’s a picture of my current situation, including my two final autos that just haven’t ambered up enough yet despite it being 90 long days (with 70 day autos!)

Well, finally at, you guessed it, 4:20 PM my seeds in water finally sank when tapped on! So downstairs I went, exacavated a little hole with a chopstick in the wet jiffy pellets and dropped the seeds in! I usually squeeze out quite a bit of water from the jiffy pellets before dropping the seed in (and I take a second to rip that goofy “fabric” up a bit as well so I can remove it during the first transplant into the solo cup) but then I sprinkle a few drops of RO water back on top to make it a little more moist again. Our first time ever germinating seedlings failed because my jiffy pots were way too wet (Everything sprouted, then stalled, then just rotted...), so now I’m properly paranoid about that happening again, especially when it’s Dutch Passion seeds that cost almost twice as much as my other seeds! At any rate, now the seeds are in their media, and the waiting game begins...time to rinse out the coco/perlite from my last “Honey Peach” grow to recycle for these guys solo cups!!

I will be participating in the solo cup challenge too, but I won’t be dropping that seed until September for sure...I am thinking about adapting MichaelangeloGrows idea of 24/7 vertigation by using 2 or 3 RainBird drip emitters that dribble a half a gallon of water per hour and recirculating it somehow...or not! Let’s see how busy I get before then...I have a few weeks yet to figure it all out. I’ll be back with pictures once we have confirmed sprout!

Leave it to Dutch Passion! Always strong genetics...so we have one up and one still sleeping.  I think I need a foam mat between my little DiBond sign panel i have underneath my seedling mat as the aluminum seems to be working a bunch of the heat away and at night the thermometer is having a hard time even holding 24C let alone 30C...notes for next time! Since this is a photo grow and not an auto grow I don’t feel like I’m racing against the clock this time at least...I just hope Dr Seedsman comes up quickly! 

also glad the Meringue came up first because I only got one of them as a freebie anyway and I couldn’t replant another if she failed! At any rate, we are the proud parents of another Stinkflower!! ;). Drinks are on us!

So, we finally had our first failed germination, but luckily it wasn't the single freebie Dutch Passion seed but the Dr Seedsman CBD seed, so last night I did the seed scuff with 240 grit (first time for that!) and dropped a new seed in water and an hour later it sunk, so into a fresh jiffy pot it went!  This morning I transplanted the healthy seedling into her solo cup and gave her her first vertigation with EC 400 water, and since I had fresh EC zero buffered coco ready to go, I just pre-plopped the re-seeded new one into her solo cup too...she wont have as warm a germination as the Meringue, but let's see what happens? Since I had my mixing tools out, I pre-mixed some EC 540 water for this evenings vertigation too.  I've never had a staggered start like this, and it will be a pain in the butt for the first 4 days or so (if she ever comes up at all!) so all in all it's a whole lot of "first time" stuff for our third grow ever!

wow...so excited, because finally overnight the second attempt at Dr Seedsman CBD seems to have begun to pop out of the jiffy pellet!

Let’s hope she doesn’t get stem rot before the end of the day, this is the week I’ve been having!  So finally, we have two “up” and I’m about to head off to a 4 day boys camping trip and my wife will be taking a care of the careful seedling watering while I’m gone...she’s the amazing photographer on our Instagram, but I’m the detail guy that dials things in as perfectly as possible. I’m just glad I didn’t have to attempt popping another seed before I leave and have that seed be a full 8 or 9 days behind!!

Heres our other seedling...Meringue!

I’m lowering the lights a tad today to eliminated some stretching. I had to raise them because I have 2 autos still finishing in the tent and I found that 20 hours a day of hard light at the end seems to cause a lot of foxtailing, but I’m pulling Strawberry Cheesecake today and maybe Charlottes Angel as well so I can devote the entire area to seedling care.

so it’s been super busy with my business suddenly (September first hit like a freight train!) and after a little 4 day camping trip into the Rockies last week I finally have a moderate update. 

I left for the camping trip Thursday morning the 27th of August and I wasn’t sure the re-do of Dr Seedsman CBD was going to make it...but while I was gone my wife dialed back the watering and allowed the roots to dry out a tad and she came roaring back to life! Since I was at least a week ahead with Meringue I just kept coasting both seedlings on the “week one” nutrient water (too lazy to mix up too different concoctions) and it seemed to work well enough, and dialing in my light level with the AP-881E lux meter (the one Shane from MIGRO calibrated to his PAR meter) suddenly the Meringue just took off! Again being lazy and busy with other life, we didn’t want to transplant from solo cups at two different times so we let meringue sit in the solo cup 4 or 5 days longer than expected, and while she threw some roots out of the holes, she was happy enough when she finally got transplanted into the #1 Airpot (along with her sister Dr Seedsman who is a little premature for the bigger pot, but Sunday was literally the only time we could get them both potted up). So here we sit, two plants out of the domes, into the humidified tent sitting at 25c on the nose and 67% humidity and finally drinking “week two” vertigation fluid! I’m still not auto watering, just using the 100ml syringe grieving them roughly 150ml in the morning and the same in the evening. They are starting to show a tad of nitrogen deficiency so I think I’ll sour the water a bit below 6.1 and give them a taste of 5.9 later today. One thing interesting for us having our first photo period run, we don’t feel like every second counts like with autos so if we are a little early or a little late we know that we can always catch up in veg and flip it when WE want to instead of when the plant wants to! Our last run manifolding autos we had 2 smashing successes but 1 (the “63 day”  Honey Peach) stunted a bit and she only managed 82 grams on her 8 colas (vs 101g with LST)...but the last runs Strawberry Cheesecake will get trimmed and weighed today and I’m sure I’m way over that 100g per plant benchmark I hit last time...I’ll update that later today when I weigh it in! That’s the difference though between a “63 day” and a “70+” day auto I figure. So excited to mainline these photos! Such a prettier happier plant that way, and I can’t wait to pull a huge harvest from a plant that actually takes up some  serious space!!

Here’s the before and after...before is actually from Thursday and we only did the transplant on Sunday!

So it’s been the busiest month business wise since February and literally 6 months of work has come in the last three weeks so I apologize for being so terrible at updating, but today started like this!

So, on to more important business, in the tent! I topped my Meringue last week and am still patiently waiting on the fourth node to erupt, but I got a bit worried about the stalks getting fat so this morning I went and supercropped her, put a little grafting tape around the pinch point and staked her down with some big custom bent lawn staples we had laying around.

Her tent mate, the Dr Seedsman CBD is about a week behind due to an initial failed germination but she has 5 solid nodes now and the sixth is started to push through already so hopefully in topping tonight or tomorrow morning?

I am so happy I purchased the AP-881D Liz meter from Amazon that Shane at MIGRO calibrated to PAR! I’m able to adjust my light up and down and dim it appropriately to maintain the same light level at the canopy tops while controlling heat! It’s been warm a few days and the tent got up to 28c so I dimmed the lights and lowered them and kept the light level at 25,000lux (550 PAR) and my temps dropped back to 25C/77f!! This meter is only $30 and it’s a GODSEND! Take the LUX and multiply by .022 for a 3500k LED light or by .023 for a 3000K LED light to get PAR values, accurate until you hit 1000PAR. 

So with 2 weeks to go til the flip, we are proceeding well, will transplant to #5 airpots this weekend (a bit late for Meringue, a bit early for Dr Seedsman) and I’ll try to update a little more often!!

one more note, my mother in law gave us some AMAZING 1 gallon pickle jars from the late seventies! Since our day job is making decals and stickers and signs, we dressed up the lids (covering up family names from church in the eighties or dates like 7/10/82) and now we have the sexiest jars ever, and burping 2 jars beats burping 8 jars!!! 

(we are waiting on Amazon to deliver the fine point permanent sharpies to write the jarring date on to the labels!)

grower love one and all!!