Time to start thinking about the re-set after the next crop. I think i figured out the best way to be for me to continue. Inspired by @Mr.Sparkle’s efforts to keep plants small, but backwards true to my Soviet upbringing, I am going to try and grow as big of a single plant as possible in my 4’4"-square tent.
It’s an impossible pain in the ass to maintain the plants under scrog that are 4’ away from the only tent access wall. It will be easier with only one plant.
I want to keep scrogging to maximize utilization of light.
Flowering a single plant will free up the plant count to experiment with other things (I wish to stick to our 19 plants). 9 in flower and 9 in veg eat that up quickly.
I can focus my efforts on one plant only, and not deal with runts in the room… hopefully?
Want to try something different
Document my mistakes and successes to help anybody with a plant limit produce as much as possible from a 1K tent.
My most recent experience in this tent is here:
The plant I will flower in late January will come from here:
Wish me luck. I’ll post updates as they come.
Also going to try to figure out automatic watering, maybe some further on-the-cheap climate controls, and other little things.
I also just got surprised with a sample of nutrients at my local hydro store. They come from the land down under! I have not been able to find any grow reports or peer reviews of them - have you heard of these by chance?
With a wife and a kid and a dog and a job and an old house and an overgrown yard and two aging cars and a couple motorbikes and love of beer, sometimes LITFA is the only thing left in me to give by the end of the day…
Northern Lights was half of my first grow and is my go to when I need to sleep or relax.
I have a couple of questions about your drawing, but first - I love the “giant fucking cola typ.”!!
So, are you doing flood/drain AND drain to waste in a 15 gal pot of soil or hydroton or? Im having trouble seeing how that particular combination of techniques is going to work out
The height of the scrog screen above the flood tray seems hi to me - unless you need the extra room below for something in particular? Or is that 19 3/4" just the total of the height of the pot plus 10" or so?
I agree about the depth of the tent being a lot of trouble. My tent is only 28" front to back, but it sits on a table a few inches back from the front edge. I end up having about 36" to reach the back of the tent. Even just 3ft is almost impossible to work on plants along the back wall, so 4 ft would be that much worse.
No matter how many plants you have, I dont think I would try to fill a 4 ft space front to back. I would just fill the front half or a little more so you can reach those colas in the back.
Thanks for a thoughtful response, the design is not set in stone (except for giant fucking colas, those are mandatory )
The flood tray is there just for drainage because I have it; I can be sloppy with watering and have everything drain. So it will be one big fabric coco pot for all I tents and purposes.
The distance of around 20" was derived by exclusion of other hard limits - wanted certain distances from lights and limited by space from below - but if I can make the plant bushier I will certainly try to keep it lower, and have some room on the distance from the light.
Design will be getting updated for sure. I do have the option of framing in my space over the summer but I really want to figure out what I like and dont like with tents before framing happens. I agree that perhaps 4’ depth is too much either way, but I gotta try it once to be sure
If you have grown Northern Lights before you probably dont need this info, but here it is anyway. I dont charge much for consulting
Here are a few pics from my first grow. This is 4 plants in 10 gal fabric pots under scrog. The lights are LED with a max power of 320 watts or about 43 watts/sq ft. The tent is about 7.4 sq ft (28x38x48 inside). The left two plants are the Northern Lights. The right two are Critical CBD.
I know you’re using HPS vs my LED’s, so Im not sure how useful this will be to you, but I had aprox 26" max space between the bottom of the LED fixture and the scrog screen. That was with the light right against the fan up top. It turned out to be enough space for how tall my colas grew.
I kept wondering why the colas in the back on both plants grew taller than the colas in front. It was like all the colas went from shorter to taller on a fairly even slope from front to back, but the rear most ones were all a good bit taller. I finally decided it had to be because I couldnt reach the rear areas to do as much LST training, so the rear stems didnt get tucked under the scrog as often and so they grew taller. Some of them even fell over and I didnt notice it for days. You can see some string I had to run to support the taller stems in back. I had to do some late super cropping too.
The only real problem with the taller colas is that is makes getting even light levels on all of them impossible. The taller ones tended to light burn much sooner than the front ones, so I had to keep the light higher than I could have if the canopy were more even/level. Thats not all bad. If they had been shorter, I would not have been able to see them very well to keep track, do trimming, etc.
Anyway, the point I almost forgot I was trying to make is that I had about 26" max distance between the scrog screen and the bottom of my LED lights. You have an extra 7" or so to work with, but I have no clue how close you can safely get your light to the colas without burning. Just a point of reference for you
I was tempted to ask you if you have dug down to see what color the roots are. But then I thought that, if it was me, I might not want to know - ignorance is bliss and all that. But - then I decided, screw that ignorance crap. I would almost certainly be digging holes in the soil three times a day, or trying to figure out how to get a cam under the soil, just to see whats up with the roots!!
Hahaha yes curiosity killed the cat as they say. To which Carl Sagan I think famously replied “Good thing we are not cats”. I did not dig down, but during transplant I kinda poked and did see nice, white, algae-free roots.
Also worthy of mention that algae is how gone from the top layer of perilite as well.
I really think it was living in my rez only, so now with DTW there seems to be no issues.
You know, this plant is very frustrating, or maybe I should say ‘biology’ or ‘horticulture’ in general. Why the heck cant things always have the same cause and effect? Preferably a very obvious, easy to detect, cause and effect?
So, are you mixing your nutes as needed for each watering or do you have a rez that circulates or?
Is the water coming from a well or RO or city water?
Are you doing sterile or any bennies etc?
What nutes this time around?
Sorry for all the questions. I know its probably hopeless, but Im still trying to look for commonalities/differences that might have some relevance to the brown crap
I’m happy to answer any and all questions @anon32470837… Cannabis-related anyways
I mix nutes in a 5-gallon bucket, which stays outside of the tent on the cold concrete. I water out of that bucket to 20% runoff. Runoff is then discarded. The bucket lasts me anywhere from 2 days to a week, depending on the number of plants in veg and their size.
The water is city water. In the summer it is about 20ppm, in the winter is is 0ppm. The city uses chloramine for disinfection. I’m assuming standard, negligible concentrations.
No bennies, no sterilizers, just nutes and city water.
Right now I am running, in veg,
2-part Green Planent Dual Fuel (as per chart)
Potassium Silicate (as per chart)
Green Planet Vitathrive (Vitamins B + hormones, similar to superthrive, as per chart)
Calmag at about EC0.2
I think the recirculating nature of my previous DWC system gave algae the chance to take hold. Now that I le the substrate get a little dry, and do not recirculate anything, it seems that it simply does not have the time to establish.
When i did forget to empty the runoff bucket for a few days, I clearly saw brown/mustard/green algae starting to grow. I am thus 100% positive that I have it in the grow room, but rootzone conditions are such that it cannot grow.
As much as I want to go full hydro without the use of any medium, I am starting to think that our soggy and infections PNW conditions here might be more conducive to coco.
we’ll see what comes up.
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