Hello everyone,
A little while back I set up a small tent for the purposes of doing some experimentation with some the various plant hormones. Specifically I wanted to do some experiments around using Indole Acetic Acid and Naphthalene Acetic Acid for the early promotion of a good fibrous root structure, Cytokines for the promotion of thick vegetative growth, Triacontanol for the promotion of shorter, more branched plants and Methly Jasmonate for the triggering of a stress defence reaction to boost the plants natural defences, i.e THC.
I have set this tent up as a RDWC, simply because it’s fast and I get full access to the roots and I also have a control of sorts in another tent with a similar setup. I am vegging these under 150W of 3500K Samsung strips.
For my nutrient schedule I am using
Veg
Half strength for the first week
1.94g per litre of Maxi bloom with an additional 0.8 grams per litre of Calcium Nitrate in Veg and 0.5 g/litre of soluble kelp, stepping up to 1g in the last week of veg.
Flower
1.94g per litre of Maxi bloom
1g per litre of soluble kelp ( I have only used Sargassum and Laminaria sp. kelp while omitting Ascophyllum nodosum, as I didn’t want to pollute the experiment with the large amount of Cytokines Ascophyllum nodosum kelp contains)
4ml per litre of 8%f Fulvic Acid
8ml per litre of 12.6% potassium humate.
PH 5.6 - 6
Apart from leaving out the one type of kelp, this is my normal schedule, depending on the plant I might up the Maxi bloom a little latter in flower.
All of the hormones mentioned above fit into the category of PGR’s, however all of the ones above are naturally derived rather than synthetic and have been extracted from various organic sources.
The two plant strains I have chosen to test this on are a Pyramid Seeds Tutankhamen, and a Cindy 99 that was originally from Brothers Grim but has long since been inbred, back crossed, femanized and generally messed around with. That said it reliably has that rotting sweet pineapple fruit smell and it’s a cracker.
The first experiment I have conducted was for Triacontanol. This was administered to the plants as a root drench when they were 10 days old. They received 0.25 mg per litre of root solution, dissolved in Polysorbate 20 and left for 30 mins before flushing. I learned that Polysorbate 20 is an awesome foaming agent. Make sure you turn off your air pump or you end up with foaming tubs and foam everywhere.
Here are some images of the result at 4 weeks. The dosage I feel has obviously been too high, with the Cindy being particularly effected. They are not at ALL like I would expect at this stage in a DWC setup so there has been some stunting of growth both above and bellow. Normally I would expect nearly double this growth in 4 weeks.
I did stuff their roots around at the start so I probably lost a good week of growth. However what is VERY apparent is that for predominately sativa strains these are both incredibly bushy and well branched. Far more that they normally would be at this age and size.
This is a Cindy, It has been tipped once at the sixth node. In this pic there is some evidence of some slight sulphur deficiency wich has now been corrected. If you know this strain you will know it doesn’t normally look like this at 4 weeks.
This is the Tutankhamen. It is a much more vigorous plant, but this one is much more bushy than normal. It’s still been slowed down some, but not as much as the Cindy.
This again has only been tipped once at the sixth node so secondary branching appears to be significantly higher with the triacontinol treatment than it normally would be.
I should add too that I have defoliated both of these reasonably aggressively to expose the increased branch tips to more light, this likely will have slowed some growth as well but it’s difficult to say exactly how much. This is a reasonably normal practice for me to compensate for less canopy penetration by the strip lighting I use so there is nothing new here. i.e. this is not the cause of the growth type that is visible.
Anyway… I will keep posting updates on progress. I will most probably give these another 2 weeks of veg before I flip, any comments, feedback, tips or pointers are welcome.
Leaf application is the other approach but getting a consistent dose is even more difficult that way.
For scale the tubs are 30 litre, so about a foot high.
