@Gato420 I was serious, but that WAS funny. 🤣

@frogslayer would you agree that if you satisfy all of the plants growing needs, your chances of getting good phenotypical expression go up?

I hope all the seeds I’ve bought are good genetics. I guess we’ll see! 🤣

@frogslayer I agree that genetics make the lions share of the end result, but we want to provide the best environment for those genetics.

@frogslayer yes, in a practical sense breeding something in captivity does very often yield undesirable traits. However, the vast majority of seeds are grown into plants that are then consumed. There are some areas in which seeds from breeders have been reintroduced back into the wild, and that’s awful! However, in many of those places there are Fields with 30 to 40,000 plants. And the genetics room of breeder are always going to be weaker than ones from outside especially after many successive generations, right? So I think the damage is hopefully going to be limited. But either way, that’s why I collect Landry streams. I hope to do this with fish ones too. I used to breed a fish called the endler’s live bearer. It’s a subspecies of boceliid you know like the common guppy? Well, unfortunately Peru polluted the shit out of the one River we ever found them in. They all died. Those of us who still had pure specimens with lineage all the way back to Dr endler donated fish once the river was cleaned up in order for it to be restocked. So, I get the concern there. However, we have some talented people working in this industry and in our community. People who really understand what they’re doing, far better than I do and I’ve done genetics type work for a living. I think the danger of that is minimal, and if you buy seeds from a reputable seed bank you don’t need to go on a big wink about genetics because it’s quality. If I get beans from greenhouse Seed Company, do you think those beans are ever going to be bad? I certainly hope not. But that’s why they have a germination guarantee.

@frogslayer damn speech to text. That should have been “Landrace Strains” not Landry streams. 🤦‍♀️

@Casadelwhacko sure, but there are both some common generalities, which I think I now have the most basic of understandings of at this point, but then there are the things that people try, and sometimes it works.

I don’t even know where to start. I know Fox Farms has like a gajllion different bottles. I bought the basic three, and that was a struggle. So I decided to go with growdots because I was already mostly learning from the DGC on YouTube at first. I found them the most relatable. They didn’t get into the drama that people like pigoens420 will get into sometimes. They concentrated on a good, simple message on the topic of growing every show. So, I felt like these were people like me, people I could relate to. And they clearly have it all together because they also have really good production values for the videos they are producing. And finally about the 10th time I heard @scottyreal say that it was all you need for nutrition for an entire grow, it clicked. I’m a seriously busy IT chick at Meta, and work takes up way more of my time than it used to, since they laid off 20,000 people. And my commute to work is over an hour most days. At least I get to work from home two days a week. So, a solution like growdots is absolutely perfect for me. I can (hopefully) take that particular problem off the board.

And that gave me an idea! A: identify all the variables in a grow at the physical room level, then pick from existing engineering styles, pick the ones I think I can do with my limited time, and zero help because my family is super judgy to me about it. They know I’m a Vet. They know I have C-PTSD. They know that cannabis is proven to be an effective treatment for people like me. They have their own traumas and those matter more to them, which I think is entirely fair. So I don’t ask for anything from them anymore.

So, this is how I arrived at the idea that the best solution for me would be to get the entire system from one vendor. I searched. I shopped around. This wasn’t the least expensive option for me, but it was the only one that ticked all the boxes I knew about when it was time to pull the trigger. So I went with GrowDots, Recharge, Real Buckets, a light I selected from Amazon that I thought was good, a 4×4 tent, etc. and got to work!

I’m about 4 months, 5 months in, and so far, I’ve managed to kill about a dozen seeds outright, which hurt because while I’ve come to learn that Greenhouse Seed Co is actually quite an affordably priced product compared to a lot of other places I’ve found since, I still managed to kill all of my Dark Phoenix seeds, and a few others that I have since replaced.

Then I got 4 out of 5 to germinate, one of which was a random bag seed (🤣), and 2 more Dark Phoenix seeds from the second pack I ordered after killing the first ones, and of those first 4, 2 are still alive, and both of the Dark Phoenix plants are still with us!

So then I moved on to worrying about Veg! I won’t bore you with the details, I am so high that this turned into my life story, sorry about that. Anyway, all 4 plants made it, despite the insect issue I had, nutrient burn, and every other mistake I could make, and did, and now I’m about a week and a few days into Flower.

So. I think I am doing about as well as could be expected for a first grow. I’ve switched the lights into 12/12 for Flower, and I’ve changed the one bottle out for the other since I’ve changed from Veg to Flower. I’m just trying to make it across the finish line with something I can at least be proud of in that, I grew it. I managed to find a wonderful community of people, here, on YouTube, Discord, the Web, Reddit, etc. All of which has gotten me this far. Thanks to you and everyone else here especially. Pretty sure without the help of everyone here in particular, I’d have given up long ago and just accepted that I would have to smoke shitty Illinois dispensary weed for the rest of my life.

Lastly, I’m sorry that this was so long. I’m too high to write a shorter one. 🤣

With apologies to Samuel Clemens,

GuppyGirl