This plant did not have an easy life, I had a major issue when starting. The plant shot up right away, as normal, when it was about 4 foot tall, it started dying. I read up on it and the leaves could have been turning brown from not enough water, or too much water or not enough nutrients, or too much nutrients...
So, I went out and stuck my finger in the dirt to see if it's dry, and when I pulled my finger out, my hand was covered in ants. I moved the wood-chips away from the dirt to see billions of ants, billions. They had dug a hole in my root system and were probably eating the roots.
That day I put a good layer of
diatomaceous earth on the top, then mixed it into the first few inches of dirt and 2 days later all the ants were all dead (free fertilizer).
At this point, the main stalk was dead, I had to cut it, so now all I have are the side branches and they were a little bit stunted in their growth, but they did come back pretty well.
A few weeks later the leaves started turning brown again... I figured it was water, too much or too little, so I took a chance that a gallon or 2 a day wasn't enough. The plant is in a large pot (about 3' tall and 2.5' wide) with holes in the bottom so water can escape and worms & bugs can work their way up from the ground. So I started giving it 4 gallons every other day and it came to life. That's a lot of water for a potted plant. Even when it rains I still need to keep watering, I guess the leaves from the plant cause the water to drop outside the pot, so it doesn't get much water from rain. I'm going to set up a rain recovery system on our house next spring so I can use 100% rain water.
20+ years ago I grew indoors and there were times I cut the main stalk just to get better buds on the branches. Someone from Michigan State University was giving away clones of G-13 for years, so from around the late 80's through the 90's I had good weed thanks to those G-13 clones. I only grew from seeds one time, it was a sativa and it took up almost my whole grow space, the thing must have been like 7 feet (in my closet) tall while all my indaca's were around 3 feet tall. Because it was so tall, I had to train it, the plant went all the way around my garden with the indaca's in the middle.
We started with 4, lost 2 (Jack Herer) to male dangling parts
, just popped 2 more Magic Cookies Autos, with the chameleon GDP still hanging in there...Wild roller coaster ride this grow!
We just harvested the bottom buds, which were mostly cloudy, waiting for the amber to show up on the rest of the buds...
