Howdy guys, i'm currently about 8 weeks into an outdoor grow in Australia. everything was running smoothly up until about a week ago. i noticed the plants leaves seemed weak and starting to droop. i read online that this could be caused by over-watering. i held back on watering for three days but some unexpected rain happened overnight and i couldn't move the plant into shelter. i have also just started adding fert weekly to the soil 3 weeks ago. not sure if this could be causing it but i will lay off the fert for a week or two. i checked my plant today the leave have become much more droppy and looked alot weaker. anything i can do to fix this? any help is very appreciated! cheers
lol shes amazing looking. HUGE sativa. im not even gonna read, it looks like a watering issue. dont fuck with any more fert till that plants in its next life cycle. post a pic up with the wings spread when you feed it
My plants seem happiest when they're 99% dried out get used to the weight of the container when it's soaked and lift it every day till its nice and light I usualy pop a little finger hole down the bottom and jam a finger in there to see if the soil is still wet at the bottom. Honestly the first pic looks like a nice healthy plant that needed watering and wilted. How often have you been watering?
I normally water every second day sometimes third depending on how hot it been and how long the suns been out. I do the finger dig of the soil trick to check if the soils dried out. Only water it enough the get the soil moist, not runny. The last 3 days have been pretty sucky weather with not a lot of sun so maybe that's got something to do with it. It usually looks fairly strong and healthy like below, which was only taken around a week ago Cheers for all the info
If it rains the best way to avoid over watering is to cover your plants with a clear plastic bag. This allows much needed light to come on but not the unwanted water. Most of the water is absorbed by the leaves. Covering them will help a fair amount
I noticed if I take pictures of my plants while in veg right before lights off they droop. Every two or three days might be too much and I never go by the top is dry because the bottom five inches could be solid mud my top three inches is dry and it still takes another three days for the bottom to dry out I'm sure shell bounce back. Usually when the soil pulls off the side of the bucket it's time to water mine.
Ive noticed the same thing on past grows....its like the plants know that its bedtime and they droop 5-10 minutes before the light go off. When the lights come on again, they are always perky and happy. As far as watering goes, the weight method is the best (and most empirical) way to determine when to water. Shoving fingers into the soil is far to subjective, does not account for dry pockets in soil, and can damage roots. Depending on your medium, there is usually a massive difference in weight between a wet and dry pot. To be absolutely sure you can keep a pot full of dry soil to compare with (the weight of the plant is pretty negligible compared to a 5 gallon pot with saturated soil. To be even more precise you can even use a cheap bathroom scale to weight your pots before and after a watering so as to k ow when it is fully dry and needs a watering. Just a couple tips that helped me to avoid over/under watering on my first grows Good luck!
Cheers for all the info guys, big help!! The plant has bounced back today after me watering it and some sun coming out. It's looking healthy and strong again cheers again