My outdoor urban gorilla

So here I will chronicle my urban gorilla grow, a lot will be retroactive, as I was waiting to actually post this until I could get some pics. I wanted them to be somewhat established out in their final home as well. I wont be anal about comments, feel free, just remember, I am less experienced at outdoor growing, most of my experience is from indoor. This year though I am not in a good spot to grow a big indoor crop, so I decided to try my hand outdoors in mother nature. I actually have 2 grows going, one is 200 miles away on private property, I will add some of that in here too as I get some pics next week. The one I will show here is about 6 weeks behind that one, but this one is all mine, the other is shared. So my next post I will be adding retro info on my grow, I hope everyone enjoys, I sure am enjoying this grow, they are really a lot of work though carting all the stuff in.

yea man-cant beat the great sun and the sweet mother nature.post some pics man.


keep it up....and roll it up

So these seeds arrived on May 29th and I immediately took them into my mother room to put them in rapid rooters. The strain is Swiss Cheese from Nirvana, it was inexpensive and I didn't have anything suitable for northern outdoor growing, and I had not cloned the other ones from 200 miles away so if I was going to do this I needed something fast and cheap was good too. They sprouted roots very fast, some within 36 hours and all within about 60 hours. I soon planted them in 18 oz cups, I didn't have my camera here at this point so no baby pics sorry. The mix I used for seedlings was some old sunshine mix I had laying around, good air water balance on this stuff so its a nice seedling mix. They were only under 80 watts of flouro lighting for their start, but this is suitable for seedlings.

At about 2 weeks of age I started to bring these outside of my house to spend time in the real sunshine. Part of this was to harden and part was to get faster growth, they started to get a little branching from this, and I started to notice some genetic variation, mainly on one which I will show when I post my pics in a bit. I was targeting early July for their planting at my spot, this would prove to be quite a bit of work.

I purchased my 5 gallon pails and used a hacksaw to make diamond shaped drainage holes on bottom / side. There would be a total of 7 plants of unknown sex planted in these but now I had to get them to my spot without getting any attention, because as I said this is a semi urban / suburban area.
I scouted by foot for every angle into my spot and found a place I could drive my pails and dump them than walk them in the rest of the way under the radar. I stashed these well ahead of time and started prepairing my soil, getting the soil in was going to be more of a pain in the ass. I used a simple mix of peat moss, compost and potting soil, I pre mixed this knowing exactly how much per pail I would need and put each pail worth in a heavy duty lawn bag, than slipped this into a paper grocery sack surrounded by the little plastic grocery sack for easy carrying. Each night I carried 2 up to my spot and hid them by my pails I already had there. This was pretty heavy carrying 1 mile let me tell ya.

Last day of June was time to plant, I do all my work under the cover of deep night 3-5 AM. My plants at this time were too large to just bag up and walk em in so I decided I would get a bit risky on this maneuver, I would drive em close and park (theres always some risk) than walk em in from there in a box.
This went very well, as nobody was around anywhere. I than started my planting about 4 AM, knowing I was heavy on peat moss I pre mixed lime measured out in 7 sandwich baggies to balance my ph up a bit, and I also had some greensand mixed in pre measured for ease when I planted. So they were all planted on the early morning of July 1st, and watered well as I also carted 7 2 liter bottles of water over ahead of time. I set them in the shade for the 1st day and a half before moving to their more wide open spot. This spot is awesome as they are in full view of the sun as it moves east to west, getting sun for 10-12 hours per day. On the early morning of July 4th I gave them their 1st feeding of fish emulsion 5-1-1 mixed in the same 2 liter bottles, they really responded to this and started shooting up.

I let them alone for a few days soon after the 4th and I was shocked to see how much they had grown in just a short time, its been a dry summer, I mean really dry and I have had to cart up water 2 times not counting the feeding bottles and the ones I used to transplant. So a lot of work as I said, but I feel really good about this spot. My next posting will be pics I took this morning July 18th at about 5:30 AM.

Ok here is the pics I took this morning. The first 2 are the biggest most bushy one, the 3rd is a smaller one that sits right next to the 1st one. The 4th pic shows a bit of a genetic variation, note the very large leaf, the 5th pic is the stalk of the 1st plant shown, not too bad for 6 weeks. 6th pic is a side view of the large leaf one and the last 2 are of the surrounding area, pond and and a similar area to the place I actually have these at but not the actual spot. thats it for now, I will update this periodocally and add some pics of the other grow thats a bit older than these of the northern lights.

Sorry I should have rotated those 2, I will do better next time. And remember, I did say urban / suburban, we arent talking about the middle of NY City, but I am only a few mins drive from metro downtown, im private about where I am from though.