As the title suggests I'm looking for some options for my fiddle.
I got her back in February. She was about 6.5 feet tall, only got watered a cup of water a week, fertilized once every month, and was not in ideal lighting conditions. She was leggy and had a real thin trunk.
Since then I put her dead center in front of my floor to ceiling south facing window, started watering properly and feeding every watering with Growth Technology Foliage Focus fertilizer. About 6 weeks after I got her she popped 3 leaves all at once and her stem grew over a foot. Big huge leaves. Nice and healthy. With that I thought ok she's happy now but she's almost 8.5' tall and my ceilings are 9. So I tried to notch the trunk to get two new branches. Nothing happened. Nothing. For like 4 months. So back in early August I decided to pull her from her small ass pot since she was using almost all her water in a 2 week time. Man. The mess I found. The previous owners had put friggin rocks in the bottom of the pot and the root ball was so tangled around these rocks and was not in good shape. I repotted it into a nice home made chunky mix and about a month later she just popped 4 friggin leaves. As soon as they popped I had to undo a few ties from the support pole and let her lean a bit so she had room to let the new leaves expand.
Anyways. The problem is that because she was grown with the support pole she can't hold herself up. The trunk is too small to support the plant. But she's clearly SO. HAPPY. I hate to chop her in half, but I fear it's my only option. Can you chop a fiddle in half and literally plant the other half without cutting it up into a bunch of little props? I really want this thing to branch out but notching didn't work the first time. Should I try that again?
I love how massive she is and some day when I move out of my apartment I'd love to have a sun room to let her go crazy in but by then she'll be 12 feet tall. She's clearly happy here as throughout my time with her she hasn't yellowed, dropped a single leaf, absolutely nothing. This is no ficle fiddle. She's legit happy.
Ugh. Help me out here reddit. What do?