GrowLikeMyFro
Member
Hey fellow growers. I am hoping someone can give me some guidance or reassurance here. My question is simple. Have my plants slowed in growth and flowering or is everything normal given the following info? I am currently doing my first ever indoor grow with Nirvana Blue Mystic Autoflower. I am 28 days in, using 3 separate space buckets with one plant in each bucket. Each bucket is equipped with four 24w CFL bulbs running 18/6. The plants are currently about 16" tall. I germed them in damp paper towels, then moved to small paper cups. At day 14 I transplanted them to the space buckets, which have about 2 gallons of Fox Farm Ocean Forest soil in them each (next time I won't transplant, I will just plant directly to the 5 gallon space bucket to avoid stress/shock since they are AFs, but they seemed to do fine after the transplant). Each bucket is equipped with an automatic drip irrigation line, which I have been tinkering with to get it right (targeting 20% runoff per watering). As of now, they get watered automatically every 42 hours (4x per week) with teh pump pulling from a single shared 5 gallon reservoir. The top inch or two of soil is dry when they get watered, but again, I am still tinkering a bit with the frequency and volume of water per watering. I have not used any nutes yet as I have consistently read that Fox Farm Ocean Forest has plenty of nutes to sustain the plant for up to 4 weeks (some people even say as long as 7 weeks). However, as you can see from my pics, they have started to flower. But since they started flowering last week (about day 21), they have really stopped growing. This is where my question is. Is that normal? Do the flowers/buds grow and fill in slowly for this strain? Or is there something I should be concerned about? pH is 6.8 in the water reservoir (have not had a chance to measure the runoff yet). Ambient temp in the room is ~74F, but I am sure the temp inside the buckets is hotter. Each bucket does have two 2" small 12v pc fans just above the soil level...one for intake and one for exhaust. They run 24 hours. But I don't have a temperature probe to measure the temp up top by the lights, which is most certainly hotter than the 74F ambient room temp, I just don't know how much hotter. Because the growth seemed to really slow once they started flowering, I went ahead and ordered the Fox Farm trio of nutes and they will be arriving today. My plan is to use only 1/4 strength of the Tiger Bloom nute starting tonight, since I think the veg state is done for me. I really want to take it easy here on the nutes, as that is common knowledge, but does anyone think lack of nutes is why the initial bud growth is so slow? I.E. Has the plant eaten through all the nutrients in the original soil and is asking for more now? My other concerns which may be affecting growth rate of the flowers are:
1) air temp in the buckets (so just today I cracked the lid on each space bucket to allow some air to escape from the top)....albeit at the expense of some light leakage.
2) root ball not having enough space? again, I used about 2 gallons of soil for each grow.
3) not enough water? (maybe, because I still haven't gotten it to 20% runoff, but I do get some runoff, so I think I am fine there). It's certainly not being overwatered.
4) ph too high at 6.8? I think the Tiger Bloom nutes will lower this quite a bit, so I want to be careful as to not go too low before adding the tiger bloom to my reservoir tonight.
At first I thought the advertised "5-7 weeks flowering period" by Nirvana meant that the flowers start in week 5 and finish in week 7. But, based on some reading I have done elsewhere, I am now thinking that is a TIME PERIOD. I.E. it takes the flowers 5 to 7 weeks to go from the start of flowering to harvest. Which in hindsight makes more sense...duh. If so, then I am less worried about my system right now. But as I head into week 5, I was just concerned since the buds don't seem to be adding much weight very quickly, whereas the plants were growing like gang busters during the first few weeks.
Thanks very much in advance for any thoughts anyone has.
1) air temp in the buckets (so just today I cracked the lid on each space bucket to allow some air to escape from the top)....albeit at the expense of some light leakage.
2) root ball not having enough space? again, I used about 2 gallons of soil for each grow.
3) not enough water? (maybe, because I still haven't gotten it to 20% runoff, but I do get some runoff, so I think I am fine there). It's certainly not being overwatered.
4) ph too high at 6.8? I think the Tiger Bloom nutes will lower this quite a bit, so I want to be careful as to not go too low before adding the tiger bloom to my reservoir tonight.
At first I thought the advertised "5-7 weeks flowering period" by Nirvana meant that the flowers start in week 5 and finish in week 7. But, based on some reading I have done elsewhere, I am now thinking that is a TIME PERIOD. I.E. it takes the flowers 5 to 7 weeks to go from the start of flowering to harvest. Which in hindsight makes more sense...duh. If so, then I am less worried about my system right now. But as I head into week 5, I was just concerned since the buds don't seem to be adding much weight very quickly, whereas the plants were growing like gang busters during the first few weeks.
Thanks very much in advance for any thoughts anyone has.
