Well, it happened. Yesterday while I was bending branches and doing some low stress training on the plants, the Northern Lights had a bit of an accident.
I was bending down the stalk to strengthen it as she prepares to go into veg and then flower, and then the stalk just snapped clean off. This may end up not being the end of her life though.
I was planning on mainlining the two other plants in the tent eventually because they are photo periods and I can give them time to recover prior to flower, but since the Northern Lights is an auto flower, I am not entirely sure how she will recover. I have mainlined my autos before, but with this grow, I was planning on letting her grow as tall as she could. I am hoping that she will not have any problems recovering from this, but it's all up in the air how she will do from here.
She is extremely short now. The good thing with all of this is that all of her energy will be focused on the branches that are left. So if the branches continue to grow and the leaves grow out, she could end up having some pretty massive buds on her remaining branches. So I guess we will just wait and see what she does over the next couple weeks. I will definitely need to be more careful while bending branches to prevent this from happening again.
The GDP is doing great. She has some fat leaves that are just soaking up the light and feeding her. It won't take long before she is pretty massive and trying to take up as much space in the tent as possible.
I am hoping that her branches begin to stretch soon so that I can start working on them. One of the things that sucks about using the fabric pots is that I don't have tie down points for the branches like I do on the airpots.
She has really been thickening up her stalk over the last few days. I have been bending it and squeezing it to break the cell walls down some and force nutrients into it. Doing that also hardens and strengthens the stalk to be able to support the weight of everything.
My OG Kush is looking great as well. I am really looking forward to this plant. I have heard great things about this strain and it is exciting to grow a more sativa dominant strain.
Other than the busted plant, everything in the tent is doing great. I am really hoping that breaking the Northern Lights ends up helping her in the long run. Cannabis is a pretty forgiving plant and trials like this can make it stronger in the end. I just hope that her being an autoflower doesn't mean she is going to get too stressed from this.
