gardening

It sounds like your friend had an autoflower, where the plant doesn't rely on day/night cycle length and begins flowering sooner based on age. The terracotta pot won't impact it much unless it was too small. I always plant in 3 or 5 gallon fabric pots, transplanting once the plant solidly roots in a 1 quart container.

You'll want photoperiod strains instead of autoflowers if you're growing outside with the seasons. I'd string up some support nets around the plants and train them in the vegetative state so you get lots of branches before it flowers.

my understanding of the selected-for-commercial-production strains is that you take the clone baby (a cutting from a mother plant that has taken root in your potted media) and give it 24-7 light to focus it on purely vegetative growth. when you're at the size you want, you switch to 12h on 12h off to switch to the reproductive cycle. when there's no male plant around, this makes the female plants to put more and more of their energy into developing those huge sticky buds trying to find the pollen in the air.

depending on your situation, you can save on energy costs by supplementing existing sunlight to hit your target hours (rather than running lights during the day like a fewl). a lot of profitable commercial cannabis growers are secretive about their [completely wasteful and unimpressive] methods--because they think knowing how to profitably grow one extremely high value plant makes them brilliant mad scientists i guess--so you can just look up production manuals for mums (aka chrysanthemums, ball guides are pretty cool) in terms of lighting recommendations, equipment, etc. mums also have a photoperiod sensitivity that is similarly manipulated by growers (they interrupt the night cycle with a 4 hour "day" in the middle) to keep their young mums in vegetative growth until the desired form / size is achieved, then they give them longer nights to induce blooms/flowering.

it's the same principal.

also, when you get to the budding phase, there's probably something similar to pinching/trimming going on to focus the plant into fewer, larger buds the way that similar cultivation is done with promoting nice big flower heads by deadheading flowers or in fruit trees how some growers will reduce the number of blooms by knocking some off to get fewer but larger fruits.

Hella late to the party but I lived on a farm for a bit so I know a lil about cannabis. Note that my experience comes from grow ops with huge plants and not personal hobby use so im going off of that, and my memory is kinda shitty so bare with me.

First off, cannabis grows very similarly to tomatoes. They are dramatic like tomatoes when they need to be watered, get pruned like tomatoes, and i believe they thrive off of similar fertilizers.

Could be possible that the dude was gifted an indoor plant. Indoor plants, from my recollection, are much smaller, leggy, and only give off tiny buds but you have more control over growing conditions and i think they tend to be more potent? I think you harvest sooner than outdoor, too. Like we would MAYBE get a pound or two off a plant if not less. Iirc, indoors only really grow to around 4 feet, if that even. Also different strains have pretty distinct characteristics, i could have it backwards but sativas tend to put off fewer, smaller buds and are leggier than indica. This goes for indoor and outdoor. I'm thinking that having an indoor plant grown outdoors just wont work as well because of unpredictable lighting, temps, humidity, etc. Beyond this i never fucked with the indoor grow so i dont know much more than that.

If it was indeed an outdoor plant, it is way too early to be harvesting at that age. Outdoor clones (not seeds) are matured in a greenhouse til they are like 3-5 feet, then transplanted into air pots outside around May. Air pots allow for good drainage and airflow. They aren't harvested until around october, or when the first rains come. Again, this might vary due to the size of the plant, i figure a healthy hobby plant will get up to 4-5 feet.

Healthy plants start with super rich, healthy soil. Dont skimp on this, buy soil from a specialized grow shop, Or a local nursery that focuses on organic practices. Miracle Gro soil from home depot aint gonna cut it. You should be able to find shops like this fairly easily in california or the PNW.

You want to prune regularly, trimming off any sucker leaves on the inside of the canopy because those will siphon energy away from the buds and will inhibit airflow. You mostly just want an outer canopy, keeping the largest leaves to soak up the sun. Don't overdo it, though

These plants are dramatic/expressive as fuck. They only need to be watered when they tell you they need it. You can tell because their leaves will start to point up to the sky when they're dehydrated, then droop. When they are reaching up or starting to droop, thats when you water. Give em a good long soak til water starts running out of the airpot. They also need direct, all day sunlight.

For fertilizer we made a compost tea and used a bunch of organic stuff, i remember a fertilizer mix that we made using fish bone meal, but i dont remember the rest of the ingredients. I do believe that was a key ingredient, though. If you wanna get real nerdy, look up biodynamic cannabis growing. Some of it is out there and woo-woo, but a lot of it is really great advice for growing healthy plants.

Also, if youre going to be growing ground level, someone WILL hop your fence to come and top your plant or strip it once it starts to get really fragrant. Get motion sensor lights or something lol.

Happy growing! I dont even smoke weed really but i miss caring for them so much. They are really fun and special plants with a lot of personality

Also, dont be gentle with them they aren't roses, once third or fourth time it gets side leads/branches top it , cut it off . , use things like string tape or nets to force it to grow sideways. Prune heavily (freeze trimmings and make hash of it or edibles) in blooming minimal of leafs to sustain it , so as much energy as possible goes to flowers. They like the abuse :) and don't grow several in same pot . They will just fight each other's