Shov Winter 2013-2014 Sativa Grow

Outstanding Shovelhandle, those are beauties! Man, they look huge to me, my little "stumpies" wouldn't reach those girl's knee's. Lol
Cuttings....My cuttings the first time vegged about 5 weeks. The second one's vegged about 4 weeks and are almost done now. The next ones had 4 weeks Veg, and the ones after that will have gone 12 weeks. That will be interesting, I may have to rethink that one.
Anyway, for what I'm trying to accomplish with "little" girls it would seem a 4 week Veg is great, but I may try going 12/12 right after I pot up from cuttings just to see.
Mama plant is going 12/12 too....She is a freakin' outta control bush! She is 28 inches wide and only 16 inches tall. She is pretty well tied and topped for height, but I will have to thin her first or the middle and lower will never get light.
She is my new HPS/CFL test Girl. :smokin:

man this looks like art! the bottom one kind of looks like a hawk or an eagle with its wings spread out.

Plants are all doing well. Some seem very close to harvest but the harvest will be staggered as some plants are still putting out pistils like mad and one is a long way off yet. One plant will still be getting nutrients and the rest just water or molasses water.

After the cold weather we are having a thaw and rain causing flooding. And we're going away for a week this Tuesday. So I had moved all the plants onto the floor for more headroom, now I have to put them back up on 12" blocks of Styrofoam and set up the sump pump. It's not automatically controlled so you have to babysit it. We have a house sitter who will be around a bit as he took vacation time from work. This morning the water has yet to reach the level to need pumping. I'm hoping this continues for the week. I would bet that some plants will be harvested as soon as we get back. I left (2) two gallon watering cans full for the sitter to water one time in the middle of the week. That will have to do it as I don't want to rely on him to determine when and how much to water or feed.

Sounds like you got it covered, awaiting smoke report, have fun this week.

Headin'... 6:00am flight to Newark and then four hour flight to Punta Cana. See you all in a week.

Saw you back on, home now, look ok. Keep pump running? Have fun on trip, hope so. Smoke any good bud, besides yours?

back home. got in 12 am. been busy as hell catching up with everything. I am exhausted. I'm going to burn a joint in a minute. First smoke in over one week.
I checked out the plants, they are doing great! big, dense buds. I can't fit my hand around most of them. This is a least sativa phenotype.
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Bottom most buds are extremely frosty. I checked trics of the couple of plants that look the most ready, not many new pistils but the trics are growing long and filling up, clear with some clear/ambers. but not ready. This haze is a very long flowering strain. The slowest one I'd guess is an 18-20 week finisher.
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They are in week 15 since germination. To update, the first batch of seeds to germinate were topped, the second, about a week later I just supercropped them. They are a perfect height for my grow spot and the 5 gallon pails. I can't imagine if I had just let them grow or if I had vegged them for a month or two. Not to mention, I'd still be at least a couple of months from harvest.

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You're back! Hope you didn't have to dig your way in. Hope you were lucky enough to have this artic blast miss you, or maybe it hasn't made its way up yet, as we're just now getting the tail end.
-- Plants look great! You've got a good house sitter. Thank god he/she didn't over water! Now its time to rest up from the vacation! :)

Thank you, Cat!

I frequently check my grow area at night to make sure the lights are out. Tuesday night I saw that some of the lights were on! I don't know how long the plants were getting 24 hours of light instead of 10.5 hours I was away for a week. I didn't give the house-sitter any other instructions but to water once with four gallons of pHed water. He did say that he noticed that the lights were on at night, which they should not have been. So Wednesday morning I changed out the bad timer (I use two timers). I hope the plants do not react to the extra lighting for a few days.

I also watered with molasses water and changed the (4) grow spectrum T5HOs for (4) bloom spectrum tubes. Also since the cold spell has been in effect, -10ºf this am, I put a heater on a timer in the grow area to go on an hour after lights out until lights on. Then I realized that the electric heater elements do put out visible light (they glow orange/red in the near infrared spectrum) so I arranged the heater as to not shed light on the plants. The temperature this am was a bit warmer, 60-65º for a low temp. I'll increase the thermostat to run a bit warmer next night. This will only be as needed until things warm up from this deep freeze.

The plants are doing very well, heavy buds and lots of long trichomes. Both the topped plants and the super-cropped plants are from 24' to 36' in height, perfect! I arranged them in stadium formation (two shortest plants in front row, then thee taller then the four tallest) with the reflectors on the appropriate angle. I found a couple of little bud pieces yesterday when I was cleaning up and put them on the hood to dry. I have a low tolerance so it's hard to tell much of anything, but I got a good buzz from the first 2 hits.

The plants are maturing at various rates from a plant with no new pistils to plants still packing on layers of pistils. I'm considering harvesting the first plant in a few days to a week from now. Although I've had a number of comments on growing this haze strain on 12 hours of light right from germination (now 10.5 hours), I'm convinced that the grow is going better than it would have If I had tried to veg them for any period of time. I'm way ahead of the time schedule to harvest, the electrical demand is much less and the height of the grow is manageable. I will do this again for sativa heavy strains.

Very nice shovelhandle, those are some BIG buds! You are running 10.5 in flower? There was some mention of that from Weezard awhile back, Indica strains and equatorial balance with light and time. I may have to try that, looks like it's working for you! :thumbsup:
I found with my stumpy Indica strain that going to 12/12 right from works just fine....and like you said, cuts about 2 weeks to a month off the turn.
You and Mama having timer trouble reminds me to keep a close watch on mine.