This is my first grow and just wondering if anyone can tell me if my plant looks ok..i feel like she looks small for being so old. Ph'd soil and water, no nutes yet. The color is worring me as I feel like it should be a little darker at this point. Using 600 mph lights 40 inches away from the light. Strain is sour diesel. Any advice on getting the stem to thicken up a little bit? Thanks for any help
A fan creating a slight breeze in the room will help thicken the stem up some. If I were to guess I'd say that your seedling is drowning in that pot, aka too big of a pot for too small of a plant. Once a plant gets a nice sized root system started it can handle being in a much larger pot than it needs, but at this point in development, it's swimming its roots around exploring the pot instead of producing vertical growth. I'd still have my seedling in a 1" rockwool cube at that size.
i had her in a jiffy pellet to start her off but I hadn't moved her to my grow tent immediately and she was stretching a ton so i figured my best bet was to transport her to soil so the stem was covered and the stretching would stop when I put her in the tent. I have her in a 1 gallon air pot for now
Stretching is due to the light source being too far away, the plant believes it is in the shadow of some other plants and will try to grow taller so it can reach above the competition and get light. If you use CFL for seedlinds (which is fine, I run 2x20W 2700K) make sure they're positioned very close to the top of the seedlings, like 2 inches or so. As already mentioned the pot seems a bit large for a plant like this. It is possible to start a seed in a pot and leave it in the same pot for its entire lifetime given that the pot is large enough to support the plant in the end. However doing so requires that you only water part of the soil and not the entire soil. Currently your plant has roots in the center of the pot, there's no chance it has managed to stretch to the bottom and sides fully. The result of this is that the soil without roots in it remains wet for longer and it dries out from evaporation alone resulting in any nutrients in the water (assuming tap water) will to some degree build up in the soil over time as you water and it evaporates. Most people seem to transplant a few times so they can just water the entire pot everytime and not just a part of it. For a plant this size I would say something like 1/8 of a gallon would be the absolutely bare minimum pot size and 1/3 gallon would be more suitable as it can grow for another week or so in a pot of that size. Make sure the soil reaches a point where it's still moist in the center but nowhere near wet before you water again. At this stage I would suspect you can supply it something like 150ml of water every 2 days in a circle around the plant, increasing it over time as the plant get roots reaching further. Covering the stem in soil is fine, it will grow roots at some point, and it's a good way to "reverse stretching" if it has happened. I would keep an eye six or so tiny dots on one of the leaves. Possibly Magnesium, Calcium or Zinc def... As you mention it should be a deeper dark green, it seems it has problems producing enough chlorophyll and the tiny dots might be related to that. The dots might either spread and continue to be yellow, or they will mostly start to turn brown without spreading much at first. Let us know what happens as that will indicate what the issue might be. Do you use tap water or something else? And is the soil you use in any way fertilized? If not you probably need to add nutes about now. Here's a pic for comparison taken exactly 2 weeks after I subjected the seed to water, it is at roughly the same stage as your plant. The colour is slightly screwed in the picture due to HPS lighting.
Do you think that I should leave her in the gallon pot and let her roots explore? Or move her to something smaller for now? I use poland springs to water her, the chlorine levels in my tap water are too high. The soil I have her in is m3 michigan made mix- i was told that it has emough nutes (npk 15-33-38) to get her all the way to flowering, and once there replant her into a new batch of it, because all the nutrients would be used up. I freaked out a little bit because one of the tips of the leaves started turning brown, so I assumed it was either nute burn or light burn because of the strength of the bulb so i moved her further away and havent supplies any nutes. I'm just scared about giving too many nutes, i was considering also flushing the soil so some of the nutes wash out but i figured because she was so young not to.
You shouldn't buy Nestlé bottled water, watch the documentary "Bottled Life" and learn why. Buy something else and hope it's better! Just found this: https://www.nestle-watersna.com/asset-library/Documents/PS_ENG.pdf It seems it can be up to 7.9 pH which is too high, you want to aim for around 6,5. You can adjust it with a few drops of lemon juice or another "pH down" solution. It has an overall low amount of dissolved solids at 32 to 90, so that's a good base for adding nutrients. I don't know the soil you're using but if you were told it has enough fertilizer for the entire growth already in it then the soil is most likely way too strong for a plant of this size and too strong for cannabis. The best is to use very lightly fertilized soil or soil completely without, and add nutrients along the way. Alternatively you can grow in organic soil where nutrients come from decomposition over time and it mostly takes care of itself. It might be fair to assume that the problems are excess nutes and not deficiencies if the soil is heavily fertilized. Could be Phosphorous and Potassium excess, seems to somewhat match symptoms as those excesse can cause lockouts of other nutes somewhat matching the symptoms. If I were you I would grab a smaller pot at 1/3 gallon or so and transplant it from the larger one, you can probably do so without disturbing the roots since they probably haven't developed much and any rootmass + soil should be movable to a new small pot and fit nicely.