Hi All! I've been on vacation for a week, and left my precious girls at home with hubby, who managed to drown most of them. Details on my grow journal. I wanted to scream and cry, but I bit my tongue and just thanked my hubby for getting up at 4 am every morning to tend to the plants.
Anyway, after the flood, I culled half of the plants that were the most damaged by sitting in swampy water for 7 days, and I trimmed the rotted roots, repotted in dry organic soil in 3 gallon pots lined with newspaper, and let them sit under fluoros for 3 days. Then I took the culled plants outside and decided to just let nature do its thing. At midnight, I gave them a foliar feed.
I let all the plants (the 11 good ones left and the culled 10) stay outside in the morning sun, then put the culled ones under the shade tent for the afternoon hours. Still, the temps are about 100% outside now, so I'm not really expecting any of the culled plants to live much longer, but who knows? One is a Sativa, and it looks pretty good.
Have any of you galz ever done any forced flowering outdoors?
I still have such a gut horrible feeling about intentionally killing 11 female plants. What absolutely rotten luck that every one of the 21 plants ended up being females. Figured if there was a way to force flower the culled plants that are now living outside full-time, before they get any bigger in veg state, I might be able to salvage a bit of them.
I know some people have forced flowering outdoors by putting black thick garbage bags over the plants for 12 hours each night, or by painting a large paper bag for light opaqueness, but not sure it will work here in this heat.
Still, they are the rejects, so what can it hurt to experiment?
Meanwhile, the 11 healthiest girls will be kept in veg state a few more weeks until they are fleshed out again. I will keep taking them out in the morning sun though, as long as I can keep the roots cool and use the shade cloth generously.
What a frustration! My girls were all so healthy and bushy, not at all leggy, and to come home to find them smelling like a sewer, dropping leaves all over the place--was a heartbreaker, for sure.
Trip was also a bust--planned to attend the Million Marijuana March in San Francisco, but it rained nonstop.
This experimental indoor-outdoor desert grow has been a real learning experience for me--perhaps the best thing that could happen for my first grow. I made most every mistake possible, yet still, those girls thrive. Even the worst of the drowned plants are now perking up outside.
I figure if I can make it through this grow, I'll be MUCH better prepared next grow, and will do it much better. Even if I get no harvest this time, I'll have invested a lot of time in learning, and that's always a worthwhile thing, right?
Happy Mothers Day to all the moms here in the female growers forum! And a very special Mothers day greeting to all the mother plants, too!
