First Grow with Mephisto Autos

My good friend convinced me that trimming and training are paramount, so I've started with slowly defoliating the Creme de la Chems to try and get to lollipop status. They're just starting to flower, so I figured I could get away with a more aggressive approach. Because I failed to train these girls early, I'm stuck dealing with a little rain forest. What I've tried to do is trace each flower topped stalk up from the base, and trim away from the bottom up. 1/3 of the way up per day. I've now got a thick canopy, and I've been trying to just use leaf tucking and manual manipulation every few hours in order to keep the different height flowering sites in direct light. These ladies have really been thriving, and it's been such a joy to watch them grow! I like having two plants in one net pot letting them grow wild, but I think in my next grow I'll keep it to one per pot and train better from the start. As for the Super Orange Haze ... not as good. I attempted to pull the main branch over to train her to some empty space, but I was too aggressive and ended up popping her head off :(. First grow, first disaster. I took the head and stripped her/coated in clonex and pushed her into some potting soil just to see what would happen. There hasn't been enough foliage to really make me want to do any trimming, I've just tried to tie the stalks off to train them apart. I'm really sad about my mistake decapitation, but she seems to be doing well still. She's probably week 2 of flower based on others' journals. I changed the water midway through the week (which is when the videos were taken). I drained most of the water out, but roots prevented me from getting the last few gallons. When I refilled the res with RO, I measured the PPM at around 200. I have to assume that remaining nutrient was completely unbalanced leftovers, so feeding will have to just have to be experimental. My approach has been to give around 1:1 Gro vs Bloom and Micro every 2-3 days when I refill with RO. I want to build my PPM up to 1000, but slowly so that I can detect if I hit a ceiling first. It's hard to measure how much food is in the water based on PPM. CalMag is what drives it mostly, so I've been using CalMag as a sort of measuring stick. I keep the CalMag pegged to the Bloom food, but I know it's only good for initial dosing. I can't assume the plants are eating CalMag in the same proportion as anything else :(. If anyone has a line on cheap lab testing ... hit me up. I'd love to be able to test a few hundred samples at a time for NPK and trace so that I can tell (even if post facto) what was going on.