This is the story on how I started my first outdoor grow, and what I had to do and overcome to get my desired yield.
So I was scrolling my phone high as a kite one night in April last year, and I stumbled upon an instagram post showing how people grow one plant from a small cup and later plant it in their backyards as a single guerrila grow experiment.
A light bulb went off over my head.
It gave me an idea, and I thought maybe I should try growing the plant I'm smoking instead of spending money on other peoples stuff, right? I researched a couple of things on Google and it turned out to be simpler than I thought.
Needless to say, a decision was made and one single seed from a 80$ high grade weed sack was planted.
I planted the seed 1/2 inch deep into the soil and placed the cup next to the window, watered it, and let it sit in the sun.
It popped out three days later showing first sign of life, and that got me really excited.
So I placed it under a 65 watt cfl desk light (because thats all I had), and left it on a 18/6 light scheduele.
That's 18 hours of daylight and 6 hours of darkness.
Two and a half weeks in, the fifth pair of leaves popped out, and the roots were already showing in the plastic cup.
Warmer days had come and the temperature outside was about 30 degrees C / 86 F (mind you I live in central Balkan). If I didn't transplant soon I knew It would get rootbound and I would miss out on a critical growing period. So I had to find the perfect spot soon.
Since cannabis needs at least six hours of direct sunlight in order to grow properly, searching for the spot that would be sunny all day long was a challenging task.
I had really noisey neighbours and couldn't risk being seen or caught.
Then I found the perfect solution.
Google Earth!
What!?
Yes, Google Earth.
I knew there had to be some hidden sunny patch in the near by woods, some promised little utopia for my plant to flourish hidden away from other dangerous weed hungry stoners, noisey neighbours and cops.
And there sure was!
I did some scouting, and found the perfect place in the forest hidden amongst overgrown grass and bushes, and that was it!
It's colours really shined out in the sun. Leaves we're streched out and pointed to the sky, and that's when I really felt like this might just happen.
In a few months I would be smoking my own ganja!
Ohhh my eyes watered a bit.
Anyway, the picture above really looked promising, and I was ready to deal with everything for this to work out.
You can see the progress, there's a two week difference in between these photos, being that the first picture was taken at exactly two months of vegetative growth.
At the end of July, older leaves started suddenly turning dark green with newer smaller leaves having a bright green look, since I didn't add any fertilizers, I figured it was probably a deficiency of some sort, or overwatering maybe?
July was a great month for it and really prepared the plant for the upcoming flowering period.
But not everything went so smoothly.
At the beggining of August leaves started showing discolouration and I knew for sure that it was some sort of deficiency.
And I was right.
So I looked up cannabis deficiencies on Google, and It turned out to be a lack of Phosphorus in the soil that was causing the early symptoms shown on the leaves.
My grow is supposed to be 100% organic, and I didn't want to add any chemical fertilizers whatsoever.
I sat and thought about it for a moment. What is a natural, organic way of adding Phosphorus to the soil?
You, might have guessed it!
Urine.
Sounds silly taking a piss on your own plants to fertilize them, but that's exactly what people actually do.
R. Kelly style.
You see, when we eat food, our kidneys filter out excess nutrients that our body is unable to use, and these nutrients are then expelled from the body in our urine. Our urine contains significant levels of nitrogen, as well as phosphorous.
I mixed everything in a 1 gallon bottle, added water so it wouldn't be too strong or cause any burns and applied it to the soil. A week later the leaves we're lush and green.
So there you have it, problem solved!
I will make part 2 soon, where I will tell you what I learned during the flowering stage and explain what I did to increase the final yield.