Flowering log / Picture log

cut an intake hole in the grow cabinet today. I wasn't comfortable anymore with the temps sitting at 82 degrees. Mostly because one of the taller stems had the edges curling upwards, a sign of heat stress. I think it can stay at it's current position with the new intake in place.

It's a 20" box fan just like my exhaust. It was on clearance today at target for 10 bucks!!! couldn't pass it up.

I posted this in basic grow also but here are some pics of my big plant.

I'm having problems getting direct light to the main stem/the side shoots. It's been LST'd to hell and back and am wondering what else can I do aside from pruning some of the leaves.

I don't want to prune but I don't see any other options. If anyone looks here and has some ideas please let me know.

Pic 1: Side view of the plant entirely
pic 2: overhead view of the plant.
Pic 3: Me parting open the plant from the side.
Pic 4: Me parting open the plant from the top (sort've).
Pic 5: Bonus Macro shot of one of the tops of one of my smaller/medium stems. 12-13 days in 12/12 now.

Just an update. With the new intake I put in yesterday my temps at the tallest stray branch/cola is 80.3 degrees, about 2-3 inches down it's staying at a nice breezy 75.

Very pleased with the results. I went ahead and raised the other smaller plants to just below the height of the stray cola on my big plant now that I know it's safe temperature wise.

I watered my plant last night. Before i only had to water about once a week in my tiny cardboard box setup but it looks like here with the bigger room and HPS beaming down on the plants it looks like the evaporation rate is higher.

This morning I woke up to check on my plants and they look like they just exploded in growth over night and perked up. They were definitely rootbound. I'm going to be transplanting my biggest plant from a 3 gallon to a 5 gallon pot. I'm hoping this will help the branches stuck under the top foliage to stretch a bit.

I'll probably have another picture update Saturday or Sunday Evening.

Moved big bertha from a 3 gallon pot to a 5 gallon pot this evening shortly before lights went out.

The 3 gallon pot was just about as deep as the 5 gallon one (due to it being a square pot). Because of this I wasn't able to put any soil beneath the plant when I repotted; only on the sides was fresh soil put in. Hopefully this still helps. I only used promix. I chose not to use any fox farms ocean forest on recommendation of psteve since it's loaded up with lots of Nitrogen.

I know this will add a couple of weeks onto my flowering time (1-2 weeks) but a few other members said she needed to be repotted and I had already been contemplating doing it.

Hopefully this will allow the plant to stretch a little more so the cola's beneath the canopy can get some light.

The bigger pot did not really give me any additional LST room.

Bummer :(

The other plants are really growing fast though. I just transplanted them recently (2-3 days ago) and they look like they're already back in full force. This seems to have been the case with all my transplants so far with this grow. Perhaps something to do with allowing the plant to get a little rootbound before transplanting. Who knows.

Pictures coming saturday/sunday evening.

Going to start using molasses and sweet at the next watering. I will have 1 plant that I will use neither on just for comparison/test results.

Also don't know if anyone counted the visible flowering tops in the overhead picture but there's 26-27 cola's (you can't see the rest of the budsites beneath the top sites but trust me they're there.) in that picture.

Overall there's probably about 35-40 colas total on this plant. Hopefully it all comes together like I'm hoping and I get killer yield. I can't wait to see what the dry weight yield is on this plant come harvest.

Not sure if I'm going to post pictures this evening. I just spent yesterday and today flushing my plants.

They were having some odd issues that were coming off as heat stress but the temperature 8" away from the bulb was 80 degrees. Most of my canopy is about 16-18" away right now.

After flushing one of the pots I found the initial run off to be at 5.7!!!! :wtf:

I flushed the 3 gallon pots with 3 gallons of water where the ph stabilized at 6.5 (they had just been transplanted 4-5 days earliear from 1 gallon pots so I figured this was good enough).

My big plant, it's initial run off was at 5.2!! YIKES!! I don't know how this plant was even growing.

I've flushed it with 15 gallons of water but the ph is still at 6.1. I will probably run 3 more gallons through it and hope to hit 6.3-6.5.

I should've flushed long ago and this was my mistake. The plants were just showing such good growth I decided to go as long as I could without flushing.

I'm going to give them a few days and then do another mini flush (going to water half of their pot size) then I'm going to immediatley follow the flush with a heavy watering with 1/4 dose nutes.

I've drilled holes into the sides of the pot to help them dry out faster so I can get back to my normal watering schedule.

Sorry, hope to have pictures wednesday or as soon as they show improvement; whichever comes first.

It's odd though, despite the fact that my PH was so low my plants were still growing pretty fast. These plants are pretty hardy and seem to be able to take alot of abuse.

Makes it great for learning on your first grow.

:jointsmile:

PH of my main plant is up to 6.4 now. Going to start watering all my plants with distilled water ph'd at 6.8.

Hopefully that will enable me to get to the end of flowering before I need to do another flush.

ahh.. I love the smell of dank when I walk into my apartment. It's just strong enough to be a faint smell in the air that you only notice initially upon walking in.

Luckily for me I live in a very small complex and we don't have regular maintenance men or visits from people doing work on the apartments.

However I will have to do something about the smell soon. I just don't know what. I don't think my box fan would work very well with a carbon filter on top of it.

I may try to see if I can get away with air ionizers of some sort.

On an actual plant note; my plants are looking great. The smallers ones that were flushed 2 days ago have most of the leaf curl out of the leaves. I suspect another 1-2 days and they'll all be completely flat again.

The main plant in the 5 gallon pot still has some curl in the leaves. It's hard for me to say if they've gone down or not yet but I believe they have. Another 1-2 days should tell me if the plant is good to go.

I plan on giving a 1/4 dose of nutes/bloom booster next feeding and give it a serving of molasses + sweet ph'd at 6.8.



ps: does anyone use any air ionizers (like ionic breeze and the like)? I'm curious how well they grow. I thought about buying two. One by my bedroom close to the door that leads to the living room and another one by the door in the living room that leads to the bedroom. that way I have two ionic breezes back to back to filter what the other doesn't catch. Really I'm only concerned with the smell getting to the living room.

I wish this wasn't shunned upon by our society. I think the smell is fantastic.

looks great man , those last pics are one healthy looking mama!!!
dont know about ionizers mate sorry

man what a craptastic week this has been.

1. Had to flush all the plants.. pain in the ass and time consuming.
2. HPS bulb goes bad after only 2 weeks!!!! Had to buy a cheap replacement ASAP.
3. Burned my hand on ballast. You really don't know those things are hot until your hand is right next to them. I accidentally smacked my hand against it while installing my carbon filter I made.
4.Went to check room Temps about 1-2 hours after I installed said Carbon filter on the exhaust Axial Fan (box fan) and an A/C filter on the intake fan (also an axial box fan)to help reduce light leak and the temps jumped only from 78 degrees 8" away from the canopy to 82 degrees 8" away from the canopy.

Oh that's not the crap part. Upon backing away from the cabinet I manage to spill 3/4 of a brand new bottle of sweet. I haven't even gotten to use it yet let alone open it. I have no idea how it just spilled open.

5. Girlfriend doesn't seem to understand the meaning of "please do not turn on the lights in the bedroom" and now it looks like 2 of my plants are having problems flowering from what I'm guessing is light leaks. They have a few pistils here and there but overall they just aren't progressing like the other 3 plants. Now that I've sort've remedied the light leaks I'm going to give them about 2 weeks to see if they start kicking out some pistils and swell a little bit.

Pictures will come this Saturday. Despite the holes I drilled in all the pots my soil is still moist. I'm hoping they are dry enough to water again by this weekend.


Update I'm sure most people will enjoy. I have about 10-12 colas right now that are about 1-1.5ft long (these are side shoots that turned into main colas.) and has budding all the way from the top down to the main stem!

Then I have about another 15 colas or so that have budding going down for 8 inches or so. This is just on one plant.

My other 2 plants that are looking healthy look like they're going to have about 8-12 colas each that will probably have at least 1 ft of buds on them each by the end of harvest.

I'll take pics. They haven't progressed much since I flushed them but I'll take a pic or two of the foot longers. Looks like it's going to be pretty decent yield my first time out.

From 6 plants I'm hoping for 10-12 oz. For 3 plants I'm hoping for 8oz or a little less.

My big plant that has 30+ colas. I've calculated it and let's say that each cola only yields about 1/4 oz dry weight. That would still be about 7.5 oz dry. I'm being conservative and will be happy to get 3-4 oz off that one plant.

However this is my first grow so I'm not really expecting much. Mostly because I don't know what to expect at all as far as yield goes.

despite what alot of people have said I went ahead and trimmed about 10-11 *KEY* leaves on the plant.

Key being that they were blocking ALOT of light to the middle area where I could be getting some stronger budding/pistil growth.

I don't think people truly understand when I tell them that there is literally no place for me to tuck or LST to anymore.

I'll be doing minor pruning occassionally. Maybe 1-2 leaves once a week or so just to get more growth to the lower portions. However I don't want to get too carried away as I do know that the leaves are the plants storage area for food basically. However my plant has so many damn leaves on don't think the 10 I cut off + 1-2 weekly will harm it at all.