Mac N Jack Autopot

8/2 Day 22 from sprout. She looks super happy now and is loving life. I’ve kept up with hand watering each day from my reservoir, and maybe even as soon as tomorrow I’ll debate turning on the autopot. 8/3 Day 23 from sprout. After readjusting the reservoir to 5.9 pH I turned on the autopot system. No more hand watering which is nice. Last time I switched on the autopot like this I noticed some pH related burns on leaves, but I think I did a much better job this time getting everything more consistent since sprout. I don’t anticipate seeing any issues. I did trim off the branches at the first node. Personal preference for me as I always think that first node looks weaker than the others come flower. The plan right now is to let the plant establish a bit more, then top it so I leave 4 nodes. That gives me 8 tops, which then becomes 16 tops once I top all of them. After that selectively top anything that starts to get too far ahead of the pack, so somewhere in the 20s for amount of tops. As long as all that happens trim off almost all side branches (only leave the top most ones that fill in any gaps in the canopy), and fill out the tent with just tops. I’m projecting a bit here but that should make for a much more even canopy than what I’ve achieved in the past, while also cutting down on larf significantly. Lights currently at 250 PAR / 16.2 DLI. 8/4 Day 24 from sprout. Everything looks good and healthy, even though I just realized I was making a mistake. Being in flower these past 2 months I forget that little plants are sippers not guzzlers, and the water that leaves my reservoir can sit in the autopot for a good long while sometimes. This means the pH rises, so even though my res was at 5.9 the water that was still filled to the top in the autopot was at 6.3. I drained the water in the autopot and let it refill with res water so hopefully no harm comes of it. This has to be the only downside of the Autopot system, everything else other than pH is amazing. The idea is to have 1 res for 2 tents, and it’s a sound plan but I’ll have to be on top of dynamically adjusting pH to make two tents happy. Could get tricky. 8/6 Day 26 from sprout. I’ve been struggling a bit with pH and the autopots. Once the water fills the autopot, if it’s not absorbed relatively quickly the pH can start to rise. I’ve seen it as high 6.4 yesterday, and even after a hard correction to the res to around 5.7 today I STILL found the pH in the autopot rising up to 6.2. So for the moment I turned the autopot system off and will probably only turn it on to fill the pot when dry and then turn it right back off. This way I can control the pH better until the plant has grown up a bit more and empties the autopot more often. In other news, I topped her today leaving 4 nodes for growth and a good stump.