A friend once visited and I allowed him to be in my indoor garden unsupervised for 30 minutes. To my horror during this time he had defoliated/lolipopped half of my plants. I chewed him out but it did provide a side by side test and the non-foliated plants produced much larger floral clusters - colas. IMO the defoliation practice is 100 percent myth.
Continue to amend and aerate soil.
I am at the beginning stages of my first ever no till, home made dirt grow, and I researched the bejeezus out of it before I made the commitment.hmmm, how do I aerate the soil going forward?
Aside from giving it time to "fully" dry out in between waterings?
How would you suggest I continue amending?
For now I was planning to give them plain water and in 2 weeks or so (with about 3-4 weeks of flower left) I was going to give them an ACT with EWC, molasses, kelp and krill meal and topdress some potash.
Any other/further suggestions?
Otherwise next topdress was going to be a mix of the base nutrients (kelp, krill meal, neem cake, epsom salt and some rock dusts) after harvest to prepare for next round, water that in and let the cover crops and worms do their thing for a week or so before planting the next plants.
IF I plant a next round. The workload of so many plants in "small" containers is killing me ... I went that route mainly for pheno hunting purposes but it is just so much damn work.
Am strongly considering (as I have in the past) to get a few 15 gal or larger pots/beds in there and reduce the plant count to 6 plants or so. Just need to find a way to arrange the beds so I can reach everything during flower...
@MM
I will see what this round brings but I take your feedback to heart and tend to agree.
As it stands I am considering to stop defoliating after veg. But in veg it has done good work for me because along with topping and training, it helps me shape the plants.
The plants currently have also grown a bit wild as I became ill during late veg/early flower and had to stop training them, just couldn't do it with the fever n all.
Basically they were heavily trained in the 1gal pots and then left to grow/flower unsupervised in the 5 gal pots. Going forward (if I stick with the 5 gals), I would continue training them for a week or two in the 5 gal pots before flipping them.
I will take a pic of the G13xSkunk #5 I have going that turned out "perfect" with regards to shape. Has that "grail" structure to it. Basically what I tried to achieve overall in terms of plant structure but only the one plant grew into that shape even after I had to stop training.
Overall, like I said before, it looks good to me. Especially before the defoliation I was very happy with how things were going, the canopy, for the first time, was like 80-90% filled in, there were very few empty spots where the light reached the soil.
If I could have a do-over, I would leave it like that and only take off stuff from the bottom.
Maybe that will be enough in the future to get rid of some of the unwanted popcorn/larf bud and direct more energy towards the bigger buds further up the plant?
Or is that also a myth?
I just always looked at the lower nodes while trimming and though "man, that's not even worth bothering with, even if I make bubble hash or butter out of it ... Would much larger have a couple bigger buds up top and use the trim/sugar leafs for concentrates".
So I tried this method.
Eyy that's actually a good solution to the issues I would face with larger pots/beds!
I totally forgot about rolling boards!
Looked into them when I set everything up but scratched them as I would need too many for the 5 gal pots and they were quite pricey, even if I DIY them.
But if swapped to 15gal or larger, I wouldn't need 20 of them bad boys anymore but could probably do with half that or sth.
Will definitely consider that again!
The problem for me is that I mounted the light (630w CMH) in the middle of the room. By all accounts it is absolutely enough for it. If I would want to use large beds/pots, and still be able to work the plants, I always thought I would need 2 315w CMH fixtures to hang one on each side of the room so I can walk in the middle.
But with rolling boards I could just move the plants to the side walls to work them and put them back in the middle under the light when done. Problem solved.
Probably would also have some extra space I could use to flower clones for sexing and could stop always vegging the extra few weeks until they throw preflowers (that's how I currently sex them, having great results so far).
Will definitely consider!
Regarding the container size for no till and living soil:
There is lots of conflicting info out there, lots of arguments, too.
I also researched the hell out of the topic beforehand and was told it can be and has been done in containers as small as 3 gallons...
I figured with 5 I am still on the low end of the spectrum but not at the very edge. It was the smallest size I felt comfortable to try it out (because my main goal was/is pheno hunting, I aimed for as small as possible for max seeds to hunt through).
From my experience I would say 5gal is definitely doable but I wouldn't try it in 3 gal and would definitely expect things to be a lot less work intensive and smoother in larger pots/beds.
Glad I could remind you.
One thing I did learn as a roadie, wheels are our friends.
The other thing I learned is there are people out there who can consume an alarmingly large amount of hard drugs and still behave somewhat coherently.
I have different memories of the HA's.Ya, know what you mean. In a previous life I put on concerts/dances with Hells Angels. It went smooth as silk down the raging river.