COCO COIR New grow - two "Critical" Autos

[FrankC]

I am in week three of my first grow (https://forum.growweedeasy.com/forum...t-when-planted), and thinking of starting another grow on the side.

I have two auto-flowering Critical seeds from Seed Supreme - they came as part of an assortment, and I used up the seeds of the other four strains, but have these 2 left over.

I'm not sure when I would use these Critical seeds, because it is a low potency strain (~13% THC), so I decided to use them in an "experiment" - seeing if I can grow them without using my tent setup, which is occupied for now by the other three plants (in early veg at this point).

I am germinating using the paper towel method, and then will plant the sprouted seeds in Rapid Rooters, sitting on 5" peat cups containing Coco Coir/perlite. They will be in an AC Infinity seedling dome with integrated lights, and I'll keep them in this setup as long as possible. Then I will transplant them into larger fabric pots, and try a mixed indoor/outdoor grow: moving them outdoors on warm, sunny days, and indoors if it rains or is too cold. The conditions won't be optimal, but I'll see how it goes.

When they start to flower, I'll move them into my tent, if it is available by then, or if not, play it by ear.

[FrankC]

4/5/24. Both seeds seemed to pop after 2 days on the wet paper towel:

However, the next night, I made the same stupid mistake that I've made before, letting the seeds get too hot - they had a seedling mat underneath, which was separated by 4 layers of bubble wrap as insulation, but the temp still got up to 88 degrees.

They didn't grow at all for the next 4 days, and I gave up hope, but left them in the Ziploc bag with wet paper towel.

And on 4/10/24, 7 days after starting germination, I found that the radicle of one of the two seeds had elongated:


On 4/10/24, I planted the seed with the long radicle in a Rapid Rooter, soaked in water (CalMag 2 ml/gal, pH 6.2), and placed the rapid rooter on top of some prepared coco/perlite, in a 5" Jiffy peat pot, inside a humidity dome.

In my first grow (currently at 27 days), I had issues with calcium deficiency, which may be due to not properly pre-treating the Coco coir. So this time, I'm using Coco that has been (1) rinsed in a colander to remove fine particles, and (2) buffered for 2 x 8 hrs in 5 ml/gallon CalMag, then rinsed in water. According to https://www.cocoforcannabis.com/how-...fer-coco-coir/, this prevents the calcium in the nute solution from being all bound up by the coco.

After 2 days, the seedling has popped!

[FrankC]

Question: When does the auto-flowering "clock" start ?

Since this seedling took 9 days to pop, from placing the seed on paper towel on 4/3 to emerging from the Rapid Rooter on 4/12, will it flower at an earlier stage of growth (smaller size) compared to a seed that completed germination in a couple of days?

[FrankC]

4/13/24 day 2. 8AM. The stem has elongated, but the cotyledons have not opened. Sprayed it with water every few hours to keep it moist. Temp ~73-75, RH ~80-85%.


By 12:15, the cotyledons have opened!