Setting the bar high with the first grow - 2x Zamaldelica, 1x Malawi

[mjlifestyle]

Greetings, fellow herb lovers

This thread follows a previous one, which I started in the grow journals section (https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=314689). I started that about 6 months ago, when I gave my first shot at growing, but unfortunately I had to cull the girls after only 3 weeks, when I had to move to another town and continuing with that grow was not an option at that time. Now I'm back at it again with a sort of restart, using the same equipment and same seeds. And this time around I thought of updating the progress here, in the Ace section, simply because I know there are a lot of people here that have knowledge about the particular strains I'll be attempting to grow.

My setup is fairly typical - 3x4x6' grow tent, with a 600W MH/HPS lamp with an air cooled reflector (separate ducting from the carbon filter), using coco+perlite as a grow medium, in 4 gallon pots.

I'll be growing 2 Zamaldelica and 1 Malawi from ACE, all feminized seeds. Currently they're just at the end of their 2nd week of veg and you can see them in the pic below. I started them in solo cups and transplanted directly into the big pots. I know it's not ideal, but I do have the time and dedication to tend after them daily, so I'm not worried about not being able to water them properly in the bigger pots etc.

I'll be attempting to do intensive mainlining with them all, like the total overly excited rookie that I am Currently all 3 girls just had their 5th node appear, so I'll give them a couple more days before topping and I'm sure there are a LOT of things you guys&gals can help me with when the time comes. For reference, I'll be using Nugbuckets' tutorial on mainlining.

That's it for the general intro for now. I'll be updating as things change. Happy everyone

 

[OlDirtyHuman]

Welcome, there's a lot to learn here and some great growers. Good luck with the current grow and keep posting.

 

[Baron Greenback]

Both varieties respond really well to mainlining, the only thing to watch out for is that they may well get massive. The Malawis in particular get huge.
Ph in coco seems to work best in the 5.8-6.1 range, coco behaves slightly differently than soil so the ph needs to be a little lower.
They do look really nice, a really good start. This all bodes well

 

[subrovka]

hey mj, nice plants you have there!

i experienced that malawis don´t like dry soil, it´s good to water them properly.
if you don´t overwater, your malawis will have a root ball the size of your pots in no time. ; )

..good growing my friend

 

[mjlifestyle]

Howdy you all, thanks for stopping by and for the tips and advices! It's a great place to be indeed, I've been reading and re-reading threads with tens of pages here in preparation for this, that's how I opted for ACE and these particular strains in the first place

And now onto some grow related (small) issue - I think my Malawi is displaying some Magnesium def symptoms. Zamaldelicas too, but way less. I've read that Mg def doesn't really show itself for real until the plants are at least 1 month old, but the plants are affected greatly by it, if the problem is not acted upon in time. So, in a typical 1st time grower manner, I've been watching the girls like a hawk, looking for any signs of early problems. And they do seem to be there - leaf serrations curling up, interveinal chlorosis (early), random small patches of slight discoloration on the middle and bottom leafs (light green turning yellow and even brown dots), stems kinda purple-ish. I know each individual symptom may point to something else (or nothing at all), but when they are all there.. You can see the symptoms in the red circles, but the pics don't really do justice, as the signs are more visible in reality.

So, in an yet again typical 1st grower manner (read: overreaction), today I decided to do some foliar feeding with an Epsom salt solution. From what I've read I should see the effects fairly quickly, so I guess I'll know soon enough if that's what the problem was. For full disclosure, I think this could've been related to pH too, as the runoff was at ~5.7 at my 2 weeks preventive flush. For reference, I'm using HESI Coco line of nutrients - I started with 1/4 dosage on day 4 and I'm at 1/2 dosage now, planning to go at 3/4 soon.

Will follow up with an update on this in a couple of days. As always, any advice is more than welcome!

Have a good one!

 

[mjlifestyle]

For some reason the pics don't show and I can't edit my post. So here they are.

 

[Baron Greenback]

That's some eagle eye there fella
They look fine to me (but then again, I've been the angel of death for seedlings, so what do I know?), ph could possibly be a touch higher.
I assume there's no heat stress or anything like that?

 

[mjlifestyle]

Don't think it's the temp, but I did raise the pH to 6 for my next few feedings. I don't have a thermometer atm, but the temp inside the tent is just slightly higher then my room temp. The MH lamp has an aircooled reflector with dedicated ducting, I have fresh cold(er) air constantly coming into the room the tent is in, plus a fan blowing on top of the plants and pushing that hotter air out of their way.

But I did raise the lights a bit, from about 8'' to 12'', just to be sure. Even if it's not heat stress, the plants could experience some light stress (or so I've read), especially being this young. I think the lights being so low is the reasons the girls are so stocky on Veg 15 (very short internodal distance, 1 inch at the most)

In other news.. happy 4/20 everyone and have fun with your grows!

 

[mjlifestyle]

The apparent magnesium def turned out to be a calcium def actually (or possibly both), something that I've learned happens a lot with coco. I don't have any CalMag at the moment, so I added some dolomite lime to the medium - sprinkled 3 tbs for each 4 gallon pot, and it looks like it fixed things, at least for now. The Malawi was affected visibly, but the symptoms stopped spreading after applying dolomite. The Zamaldelicas seems to be more resilient in this regard and showed basically no symptoms so far.

I've topped all 3 girls 5 days ago, prepping them for mainlining. So all growth removed below the 4th node (where I topped), except for an extra pair of leaves. I figure they could use the extra green, being so small.

I have a question about pH - do you guys every measure runoff pH in coco? From what I've read, it's actually more counterproductive to do so and you should only worry about the pH of feeding mix. And now my medium also has some dolomite mixed in, which acts as a pH buffer, so is there any point in doing it? I've flushed the plants with pH water (2x pot size), but no matter what pH the water has going in (even under 5), the runoff was always in the 6.2-6.4 range.

Here they are, 5 days after topping (3 weeks of veg so far):

 

[Tangwena]

My advise is check the ph going in and forget about the run off, coco is simple if you use coco specific nutes.
Tangwena

 

[mjlifestyle]

Thanks for the advice, Tangwena. I'm using the HESI Coco line of nutes, so it should be easy indeed. Easier said than done though, as it's the case with most first time growers

Cheers!

 

[mjlifestyle]

Hello, everyone!

I have a question about the flowering stretch for these two sativas and I'd appreciate if someone can shed some light on this, especially if you've grown it and did some training with them.

How much stretching did you experience after you put a Zamaldelica or Malawi under 12/12? I only have about 50 inches (130 cm) between the top of the pots and the reflector's glass. Leaving 10'' of those aside for spacing between top colas and light, I'm left with about 40 inches of available growth space.

Currently the girls are on Day 38 of veg and the tallest of them all is the Malawi, at about 5 inches above the pot. All of the girls have dropped their panties and are showing sex, so I'm planning to switch them to 12/12 in about 2 weeks time (I wanna give them some time for the 8 "main stems" to really develop). Between now and then, I imagine they're gonna grow some more, especially since there won't be any topping from this point on. And I've read I should expect at least a doubling in size during the flowering stretch. Hence my question...

Here are the girls, just so there's some pics along with the question

Cheers and thanks!

 

[Mephorius]

Hey mj,

I'm currently running some Zamaldelicas in late flowering and the stretch can be different from pheno to pheno.
So some plants will stay smaller while others can get huge. But overall its very manageable

 

[bandit60001]

I rand a single malawi fem and ended up with a 10wk pheno. Flowered around 12-16 inches left me with a 30-36in plant at the end. Figure about 2-300% stretch

 

[mjlifestyle]

Thanks for the input, guys. I'll keep an eye on them, I plan to set up some support structure for each one, I guess I can LST them around it, in case they wanna shoot through the roof.

Good luck with your grows!

 

[mjlifestyle]

Hello, you mad grow addicts

Just a small update on my grow - the mainlining job is pretty much complete and they all have 8 future colas that are now pushing up nicely. And since I'm kinda limited by space, I thought of being proactive a bit and I just supercropped them, pinching and bending every single one of those 24 "main" stems. Since this is my first grow, this was my first attempt at supercropping too, and I gotta admit I was kinda nervous in the beginning. The first stem took me literally 2 minutes to bend

Anyways, I managed to bend them all without actually snapping open any, so.. "great success", I guess. Those support structures are just for show atm, as I didn't want to do any LST right away, to avoid breaking something. I plan on doing one more session of supercropping during the flowering stretch, so in about 10 days or so.

And since I just noticed that today is exactly one month since my first post in this journal, I thought I'd put side by side how they looked one month ago and how they look now @ veg 45 (although they are kinda sad with all their stems bent over). I'm amazed of what you can do with this plant and how it behaves. And I'm sure genetics plays a BIG role here, so hats off, ACE! And I kid you not, I could stay in that tent for hours, literally, just watching them and moving one leaf here, one stem there and so on I have the feeling a lot of you know what I'm talking about..

Cheers, everyone!

 

[timmur]

Hey mj, good luck on this grow! It's really looking good so far! I'm watching those malawi with particular interest because I'm just getting set to run 9 fem malwai and am also going to mainline them.

I wouldn't worry about stretch too much. Dubi has said that they stretch 1.5x to 2.5x from seed and a bit less from clone. If you poke around in my thread I posted this link outlining things you can do to control stretch. If you're using MH your stretch should be on the lower end of the range assuming you continue to use it during the early flower stage (lots of blue spectrum). Anyway, I'm subbing this thread to see how things go for you!

 

[mjlifestyle]

Thanks a lot for the info and the tips, timmur, much appreciated! I was gonna keep the MH bulb for 2 weeks into flowering, I looked around for some info about the topic, but I'll definitely check that page about reducing stretch, looks like a lot of good info.

In the pic above, the Malawi is the one in the middle and she's the most robust of them all - those two branches at the bottom are thicker than my index finger. They all reacted very well to the multiple toppings, even when I topped extremely early - the third (and last) time I topped them I did it when they just had the topping node appear.. I mean on some stems I could barely see the growth shoots, that's how early I had to top (forced by circumstances, had to leave town for over a week).

Just checked your thread, briefly for now.. Man, that's a whole different level... And mainlining 9 Malawis with that setup, jfc I'll be following that for sure, you're set for one insane grow...

 

[corky1968]

With pure Sativas the number one thing that will regulate height is the size of the pot.

Check out the link in my signature called HOW TO MANAGE SATIVAS INDOORS for more information on that.

Good Luck with your plant training.

 

[mjlifestyle]

Thanks corky, but I already read that post of yours a few days back Unfortunately I can't apply that method to my grow now, since I've been vegging them for 45 days now (20/4) and they are in their final pots already (4 gal). Maybe with my next grow.. but considering I only grow for personal use, that won't happen for at least a year, if this one goes semi-decent.

Cheers!