Well crap, darn, damn, dang, shoot, etc etc. One of my girls isnt!
So this brings up the question of how to handle this kind of thing - culling an unwanted male - in a hydro setup where you have several plants with their roots all mixed together in the same container, or in my case a root chamber. As you can see in the pics above from last week, the roots of all three babies are already starting to intertwine. Its even worse now.
The problem is how to avoid leaving dead roots to rot in the chamber, and/or how to separate one set of roots you dont want from roots you want to keep without doing harm.
Ive run into similar situations in the past where I either wanted to harvest one plant before another was ready, or in one case where one plant got mold in the buds and needed to be cut back. In those earlier situations, the roots were even more entangled as they were more mature and much larger root masses.
What I did back then was cut back the plant I wanted to get rid of - but - not all the way. I left some stem and a few large leaves so the plant and the roots wouldn't die. In both of those cases it worked just fine, but the roots only had to stay alive for a short time - a couple of weeks or so.
This time Im going to need to keep those male roots alive for six to 8 weeks. It will be interesting to see if this works that long.
So I cut the bad boy back severely, but left as many leaves as I could. I expect it will put out some new starters, so Im going to have to keep a close eye on it in case it tries to grow some more balls.
So this brings up the question of how to handle this kind of thing - culling an unwanted male - in a hydro setup where you have several plants with their roots all mixed together in the same container, or in my case a root chamber. As you can see in the pics above from last week, the roots of all three babies are already starting to intertwine. Its even worse now.
The problem is how to avoid leaving dead roots to rot in the chamber, and/or how to separate one set of roots you dont want from roots you want to keep without doing harm.
Ive run into similar situations in the past where I either wanted to harvest one plant before another was ready, or in one case where one plant got mold in the buds and needed to be cut back. In those earlier situations, the roots were even more entangled as they were more mature and much larger root masses.
What I did back then was cut back the plant I wanted to get rid of - but - not all the way. I left some stem and a few large leaves so the plant and the roots wouldn't die. In both of those cases it worked just fine, but the roots only had to stay alive for a short time - a couple of weeks or so.
This time Im going to need to keep those male roots alive for six to 8 weeks. It will be interesting to see if this works that long.
So I cut the bad boy back severely, but left as many leaves as I could. I expect it will put out some new starters, so Im going to have to keep a close eye on it in case it tries to grow some more balls.
That plant is quite odd for a cucumber. It started super slow. It quadripled the root mass in 5 days, but that's all. The plant itself is growing super slow. That was the case when it was in the dwc. The rest of his kin are already fruiting. 
