Well, this strain is surely flowering for a long time, it's still stretching. I wonder if it will stop stretching and start fattening the buds this week...
Anyhow, one of the reasons why I don't defoliate much is because the plant does that by itself. When the lower leaves receive almost no light (because all the light is blocked by the thick growing canopy) they start to send their nutrients to the top. When they are donez they just fall off on their own. You see, leaves are like solar panels AND nutrient reserves!
Just make sure this process is slow and the leaves that receive light are still very healthy and green. If many leaves are falling or if they fall really fast you gotta make sure is not a deficiency or nutrient lockout!
...
Again just water your plant with bloom formula (and a bit of calmag) to an EC that allows you to maintain the plant heathly and the runoff not to high (in my case 1mS/cm). Remember to alternate nutrients and pHd tap water.
That's pretty much all left to do from here to harvest.
Obviously if you see something wrong try to correct it.
Day 66 update.
I dropped something on my plant. It bended one branch very badly and severed some leaves and a bud :(
Well, accidents happen. Luckily cannabis is a very very resilient plant, one might be surprised at how much this plants can take.
Anyhow, taped everything together loosely, pulled the most bent branches upwards with a thread and I will wait for it to heal...
If everything goes well, this branches should be even stronger than the others. Let's hope that's my fate!
Update day 69. Although I have been feeding with 1.0 mS/cm once, then pHd water then feed again, the run off from today measured 3.0 mS/cm ! It's climbing still. I flushed again, until the runoff was at 1.5 mS/cm.
I think I understand what happened, my theory is that the plant needs a lot more water now, but not as many more nutrients. So it takes the 2.5 daily liters of water, but it might only eat the nutrients in 1lt of water, so the rest stays on the roots and accumulates, raising the EC of the soil. So far, by checking EC on the soil once every week or two I have avoided nutrient toxicity and lockout.
I think there are two options, either lowering the concentration of nutrients I feed it (so 2.5 lts a day will contain less dissolved nutrients), or spacing out the feedings with more intermediate waterings of plain water.
I think I am going to go with the former, next week I will try feeding an EC of 0.8 mS/cm on 3L then tap water and so on from next week on. I prefer to underfeed than to overfeed, which is what I recommend for other boobs, it's better to have some yield than to risk killing the plant. We will get better with time...