GANJI'S GROW JOURNAL -- Day 187

The Sweet Tooth clone mother is all but dead now. Only one tiny green shoot left. Talked to the grower who supplied the seed and discovered that this particular variety is auto-flowering. It can’t be kept in vegetation indefinitely. Would have be nice to know that before I started cloning. Guess I’ll have to start from seed every time, which means I’ll have to pollinate a plant or two sometime in the near future. This is becoming more and more common with indoor varieties. Artificial growing and breeding conditions are causing subtle genetic anomalies such as auto-flowering to creep into the strain. Auto-flowering simply means that the plant is genetically hard wired to begin blooming at a certain point during growth regardless of the environmental conditions. This makes it almost impossible to maintain the plant in a vegetative state and clone from it. Ganji’s NL#9 clone mother seems to be doing fine. He may want to consider cross breeding the two strains to produce a Sweet Tooth hybrid that could be cloned. –MAX

Several of the clones have taken root and are starting to grow. It seems to take forever for them to get started though. The potted clones are doing excellent and will be ready to flower soon. The flowering plants continue to yellow and are now beginning to droop over. The yellowing is affecting the leaves at the top which are starting to brown and die at their tips. I think I over fertilized when I added the blooming formula. Going to flush the containers and try to leach away the excess. Took the time this week to inspect all the plants with the magnifying glass for any signs of infestation and found none. Just a bunch of white spiders that have no interest in the plants but must be feeding on something.

Balancing the cutting’s need for moisture with its need for oxygen can be difficult when cloning directly into soil. If the soil is too wet, the cutting starves for oxygen. If it’s too dry, the plant dries up and dies. Ganji’s doing better than before, but his current cloning method is taking a long time to produce clones.

The symptoms he describes on the flowering plants definitely indicate over-fertilization. You’ll recall the addition of chemical fertilizer to the flowering plants is a new thing in the garden. Ganji hasn’t been supplementing until this crop. His soil mix must be rich enough to feed the plants alone. The addition of the chemical fertilizer must have pushed the soil chemistry out of whack. Leaching the soil will stop the yellowing and the plants will recover to some degree, but the damage is done. This is a great illustration of how more is not always better, and it proves that the old saying is true… "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!" –MAX

Also decided to get organized this week and set up a garden schedule so I can keep track of what needs to be done and when. It’s pretty simple. Just a weekly checklist of tasks to perform, some get done every visit to the garden, others are scheduled for certain days of each week. Some various maintenance tasks are also scheduled to remind me when I need to replace bulbs and such. Hung the checklist next to a calendar to keep track of harvest and rotation.

Setting up a perpetual harvest spreads the work out and maximizes efficiency, but it’s almost impossible to keep track of everything without some kind of scheduling. Since several plants are in many different stages of growth at the same time, there’s more to keep track of on a weekly basis. It’s also a good idea to keep track of routine maintenance procedures such as changing the bulbs and filters to make sure it gets done in a timely fashion. Note: Ganji was kind enough to send along a copy of his garden schedule. Check it out. –MAX

Click here for the printable Garden Schedule.