First Grow, Indoor+Outdoor Organic, Lots Of Questions

Hi! I'm new to growing marijuana and I've already learned so much from reading your posts here. So I hope you'll be interested in my really haphazard little project.
 
I'd never grown weed before last Spring, but when it became legal where I live (yeah!) and I happened upon a little clone when picking out some flower, well, I thought I'd try my hand at it. The kid in the shop warned me that it was best to have the soil and lights and everything ready, like you'd have food and a litter box if you were bringing home a cat. He had a point, but my curiosity prevailed. I brought home a Tangerine Haze.
 
I've gardened for decades, large gardens, with a variety of plants, all organic. So I have some background that has been helpful, and overall I've tried to pretend that it's just another variety of tomato.
 
So I up-potted her when we got home and put her in a sunny Southern window with a couple of small lights on behind her 24/7. She hung out in the window and seemed relatively happy.
 
For soil I just took some soil from my garden for the first repotting - amended annually. I have chickens, so it tends to have a good deal of Nitrogen. Once she was growing rapidly I put her into a 3 gallon pot and gave her the standard fertilizer mix that I give my tomatoes when I put my starts in the ground - a mix of Indonesian bat guano, blood meal, bone meal, eggshells, epsom salts and potash. 
 
I was much more interested in having a small, manageable plant since it was my first experiment, compared to a huge yield, so I decided to top her and take clones, then to flower her soon after. 
 
I flowered her outdoors in late Spring/early Summer by bringing her in after 12 hours of light and keeping her in a closet until it was dark, then putting her out again. She was definitely stressed by the mid-summer flowering, but I still got >1oz dried off a plant that was less than 2 ft tall at harvest. And it was amazing.
 
Now I'm flowering her clones, which grew up in the meantime, along with some other clones I picked up. This time I'm letting them flower naturally, which started when the days were about 14:30 - about a month ago. I was surprised that it was not closer to 12:00 based on what I'd read about indoor growing, but I guess the plants know. So, I've got a little more than a month for most to go.
 
This time it's a mix of Indica, Sativa and Hybrids - including a Hawaiian Haze which I plan to bring into the sun room when the nights get below freezing to finish her long flower. As with the first plant, I've kept them all in 3 gallon pots and I've trained many of them, so they have 2-12 main growth points each.
 
I've been surprised that all of the new trichomes already look cloudy when they appear.
 

Super Lemon Haze

Tangerine Haze 2.0

Tangerine Haze 2.0

Blueberry

Hawaiian Haze
 
It's especially interesting because the mother Tangerine Haze still had a bunch of clear trichomes at harvest - which seemed to be mostly going straight to amber. It may have been due to the fact that she was flowering outdoors in mid-summer? If anyone that understands the function of the clear-cloudy-amber trichomes has any ideas that would be really interesting to understand. I get that they have a lot of functions for the plant, but I wonder if they are more cloudy in the cold, or when sunlight diminishes. Anyway, I'll harvest them when they look ready otherwise and when they aren't growing so quickly!
 
All in all, it has been interesting. I was thinking they'd start flowering later than they did, so they may not have much trouble with the cold at all, but they are small and portable enough that they can come in to the sunroom if it gets below freezing.
 
I had one Tangerine Haze in a large (10g?) container which was tall and beautiful until the neighbor's cat got into it and broke off all but a few low branches. I found it in time to chase the cat off, and thought I'd try to take clones even though it was vigorously flowering. So, I have that little experiment going too. A quick search made me relieved to know that some of you do this intentionally, and have even given it a name totally appropriate to my scenario. So, I'm "monster cropping" too.
 
So, that's me and my little project. Unlike many I'm not worried about a huge yield. I want more variety and smaller, easier to manage plants. I don't want to invest in a lot of lights/reconfiguring closets. I'm a woman - I need the space for shoes. So I'm trying to use sunlight wherever possible, but I have the most recent clones under a bunch of 45w. photo lights.
 
So far I've spent about $100 in plants, and not much else that wasn't already a part of my garden setup. I don't know much about "nutes" or any of the commercial products people are using - I'm just trying my own method and so far it is working out ok. 

 

Yea, that cat took off more than a few branches - it cut my largest plant down to a couple inches high, and left another with only one branch. :-( Still, if the clones turn out ok it shouldn't be too bad. Delayed gratification.
 
I've got more than just one plant & most of them will be fine to finish outdoors - I wouldn't worry too much about even a decent freeze except that they're in pots, and I don't want the root system to get too cold. Not such a risk for plants that are still in the ground at the start of the cold, but maybe a big deal in pots if it gets below freezing. So I'm planning to bring them in only overnight and only when the temps get below 0c/32f. I do have a sativa, though, which is supposed to finish in early November, and she will definitely have to spend some days inside, though again the plan is to keep her closely in-sync with the sun's light, outside when possible and in the windowsill with supplemental lighting otherwise. I was planning to set up my big photo CFLs in the sunroom on a timer that syncs with sunrise/sunset. That should probably take her down to ~10:30 of daylight if she gets to 14 weeks. 
 
I'm closing in on 5 weeks of flowering today, and the forecast looks good for the next 10 days, so hopefully any disruption of their light patterns should be kept to a minimum. Thanks for your help!

 

 
Thanks! It's hard not to try my hand at it with it being legal - so awesome to think that I could call the cops if someone broke into my yard, etc. and there's no worry about hiding anything. It's still kind of hard to believe. I agree on the CO growers unite thread too - so fantastic to be able to trade plants/seeds like I can with tomatoes, squash, etc.
 
I've been checking out your grow thread - really fantastic!

 

Here are a couple of pictures of the first girl (poor thing). Flowering her outdoors in mid-summer (bringing her in after 12 hours light) was definitely kind of cruel, but the result was nothing to complain about.
 
This is her about half way through flowering. Her leaves yellowed and fell off so that at the end she was almost entirely bare - heat stress I suspect.
 

 

 
and a few weeks later
 

 

 
 
She got some spider mites on her few remaining leaves in the last couple of weeks, and I didn't want to spray her down at that point, so I rubbed them off the leaves with insecticidal soap where I saw them to keep them at bay. 
 
I didn't get pictures of the harvest unfortunately, but that was fantastic.

 

Here's the current plants about a month ago, when I first noticed that they'd started flowering. The days were 14.5 hours long then, so I was surprised that they went into flower so soon. I'd been playing around with training them but hoped they'd have some more time to grow. They were all still in 1 gal pots when they started flowering. I up-potted them immediately, which didn't seem to set them back at all.
 

 
This is my Hawaiian Haze. I read that it grows aggressively and branches a lot, so I topped it twice (the main node first, then the nodes that came out to replace that, then started training her into a big wagon wheel. I forced flowering on this one starting Aug 1, since she's a 14 week flowering variety, but even so that puts her harvest at the start of Nov.
 

 
This is my Super Lemon Haze, also topped twice and trained, but this one is kind of a double candelabra. 
 
 
 
 

 

And, here are the girls today.
 
Tangerine Haze:
 

 
Formerly almost 3 ft tall, but topped by the neighbor cat. She's sending up some nice new growth, but I still hate that cat.
 

 
Hawaiian Haze:
 

 
My wagon-wheel training from the top
 

 
and the side view (though it's hard to fit the whole plant in!)
 

 
The SLH candelabra is sending up candles like crazy along it's whole length
 

 
And Blueberry is showing some lovely fall colors. I've read that her leaves will turn deep purple and red!

 

And finally, the nursery.
 
These are the big clones taken when I topped the plants:
 

 
And some victims of the cat attack, which I hope will hang on and root out:
 

 

 

 
I've done my cloning pretty simply, with materials on hand. I use seed starter in small gardening containers and get it fully saturated, make a hole for the clone and add rooting hormone (powder), cut the stem under water with sterilized shears at a diagonal, and place in the soil, pressing the soil against the stem. I usually put a defoliated node or two underground if I can, but I've had good luck with even small pairs of leaves.
 

 

Yea, I was not sure when to expect the plants to flower - I'd read so much about indoor growing that I figured it would be close to when they were getting 12 hours of darkness/12 hours of light, so I was thinking that they'd still be a ways away from flowering then. They started flowering at 14.5 hours light/9.5 hours darkness. Actually it was 14.25/9.75 looking back at the chart. I don't know why I should have been surprised, since it still isn't to 12/12 and we've already had our first (light) frost. Obviously the rules are good for convenience and consistency indoors, but in nature they have other ideas.

 

 
I think that makes a lot of sense indoors. When I started this experiment I didn't really understand all the differences between outdoor and indoor growing entirely - it's really interesting. Anyhow, I'm not too worried about the dreaded hermaphrodites, since the light should be consistently decreasing for them until harvest. But, I'm definitely watching for balls just in case. Actually, I'm more worried about hemp farmers than hermies, : http://www.thecannabist.co/2014/08/22/colorado-hemp-field-spotlights-industry-struggles-aspirations/18407/

 

I was reading last night about companion planting for marijuana, since I plan to put a few indicas into my main garden plot next year and came across some advice on using comfrey as a fertilizer/mulch and making tea from it... I had no idea. I had to move after the floods last year and only got to my current house this Spring, so the garden is a bit of a work in progress - the house came with 2 huge comfrey plants that I've largely ignored since I hadn't had time to read about them.
 
It turns out that they're supposed to be particularly good for flowering and budding plants since their leaves are high in nitrogen but especially potassium and trace minerals. Comfrey has a long tap root that allows it to access minerals that normal plants can't, and conveniently stores those in its huge leaves which can be cut up and used as mulch or made into tea. If I'd been planning this out, like I will be next time, I'd have prepared tea for them, but it takes a few weeks to prepare, and I only have 4+weeks left on some of the plants. So, we'll see if the mulch helps them. In theory it should break down really quickly, but this is my first time trying this.
 
Anyone else here into companion planting? Does borage improve the quality of the flowers like it improves tomatoes? Chamomile also seems interesting, along with a lot of culinary herbs for pest control.