This was a brutal week. Brutal. The plants are extremely small for being three weeks old, and the worst of it is that I found two caterpillars on ALPHA. My grow tent is inside a storage shed attached to the house, but it's not entirely sealed off from the outside. This allows insects to get in and out. Unfortunately, my resident spiders haven't been keeping up with their conditions of their tenancy. I'm going to have to move the tent back into the garage. The garage is south facing, so I'm going to have to be vigilant about maintaining a reasonable temperature.
F@ck.
@Puffer_Bill, I have not moved the tent. I decided to tighten things up on the shed, and it seemed to help; however, I did find a couple more caterpillars. I'm out there every day, so I plan to just keep eyes on them. I don't want to stress the plants with a move at this point. They've been stressed enough. After the plants in the tent now are harvested I'm going to move the setup into the garage for more grows.
@Zollies_zn, Me too! And thanks for the encouragement.
I'm going to try a new variation on LST. It may turn out to be a couple variations. I'm going to take rabbit fencing and make a circular fence to put over the plant. It should give me at least sixteen vertical inches of wire all around the plant. I might be able to tease out a bit more height, but I'm not sure I'll need it. As they grow I'll either stake branches and main cola until they reach the side or tie them to the wire fence. The grows I've seen in the diaries here show robust branches on the plants. I should be able to reach in between some of the wire gaps to do maintenance (e.g., defoliation, watering, LST).