How to approach a new strain?

[infiniteJuan]

I've got a seed (feminized) on the way and I have very little info about how it grows. How do you approach growing a new strain if you have little to no prior information related to it? Do you just grow them the same as everything else, or do you make special considerations?

 

[Weaselcracker]

As a rough example, for growing in soilless in my case, I feed the pure sativas at about 3/4 or less the amount I feed the indicas. Other than that I approach them the same way pretty much. It's usually in flowering that things get a bit more tricky and fussy strains show themselves. I'm not a heavy feeder so throughout early to mid veg I give them only light feedings. Hopefully during that stage I get some clues as to what the plant is going to behave like, and I won't have burnt them in the process.

 

[infiniteJuan]

Thanks for the response, Weasel. What about training?

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[Weaselcracker]

For myself anyway I don't see much difference in training sativas and indicas in veg. Both of them I do pretty informally - just top or bend over once they start getting tall- and repeat till I have a bush worthy of dragging into the flowering room. Because of space limitations, if I'm going to scrog I usually put the scrog screen on the plant after I get it in the flowering room. This isn't the normal way of course but it works just fine. All the limbs can be rearranged and lashed down on to the screen. During flowering sativas and indicas handle a little differently. Sativa strains stretch a lot more, obviously, and for longer, but are easily tameable by constant tying down - with or without a screen. One thing about most sativas is they are more wimpy about high stress training like supercropping. That's often a good thing though because sometimes you really want them to slow down a little. Indica strains, especially heavy indicas like Kush strains, are more suitable for high stress training and defoliation.
I don't know if this answers your question.

The other thing about different strains is, obviously, they often want different feeding levels. In the easiest case scenario for me this means mixing up a strong batch of nutes for whatever plant gets the highest strength,feeding those plants, and watering the same mix down for the plants that like a lighter feed. More often it's more complicated than that because I have a bunch of different stages of flowering going on and some need more N than others, etc. Sometimes there is one plant that isn't happy at all with anything I give it and obviously needs some sort of 'special diet' or something. Those ones are generally don't continue in the grow because I don't have time for them. As usual- if you burn a plant by over feeding it something -things tend to get more complicated after that. Not only is the plant harder to read because it's a mess- but with burnt foliage and (unseen) burnt roots it's a little more vulnerable to getting burnt again. So when a strain goes sideways from some mistake it tends to keep going that way.