I guess it was inevitable that sooner or later, something would happen.

A few days after my last post, I was about to put my four Blue Dream plants into flowering. Well, it’s been a little over three weeks since then, so you’d assume by this point I’d have some nice looking bud shots to show you, right?

Well, I don’t…

Three weeks in, and my plants don’t even have the hint of bud formation yet. Part of me thought that maybe my plants were just late bloomers. Maybe I had a light leak somewhere that I was missing. As it turns out, rather unsurprisingly, it was human error.

I’ve been avoiding opening up the tent while the plants are in the dark, because plants are supposed to have 12 hours of uninterrupted darkness while flowering. Well today, I took a peek in shortly after returning home from work, and noticed that the blue lights on my Kind LED XL1000 were ON. Not good.

While my plants were in veg, the light was running from 6am to 10pm, so they had their 18 hours of light. When I switched them to flower, I set the new schedule to 6am-6pm.

However, we’re now in Summer, and it’s starting to get pretty hot here in California. Shortly after putting the plants into flower, I noticed that my tent was starting to run pretty hot. A friend suggested that in order to try to keep it cooler in the tent, I should run my lights overnight intead of during the day. A pretty smart idea, and one I hadnt thought of. So I reset my schedule to 8pm-8am.

Apparently, since I changed the timers a few times, I missed something. I managed to get two out of the three spectrums timed correctly, but somehow I screwed up the blue spectrum. So instead of the plants getting 12 consequitive hours of darkness, for the past few weeks they’ve been getting about an hour of total darkness, 11 hours of just blue light, and 12 hours of the full spectrum.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure yet. I am seriously hoping that I haven’t done any real damage. I suppose if nothing else, it means that my plants have gotten about an extra three weeks of veg time. Maybe my yield will suffer? Thankfully I’m not too incredibly worried about pulling as much weight as possible from this grow. This was really supposed to be a learning experience more than anything.

Well, I’ve certainly learned something.

I’ve learned that I can’t be trusted with even the simplest of tasks.

Starting today, assuming I haven’t screwed up something else, the plants should actually start getting 12 hours of total darkness. So in a few weeks, I should have some bud formation to share. Until then, I will keep an eye on everything and make sure it’s all going to plan.

Wish me luck! I’m going to need it.