First attempt at a 24-hour "Martian Method"

Here are some pictures from my setup.

There is one of the "Martian night" of the red and far red light sources and one of the daytime, which is all of the night lamps on plus all of the day lamps on. If you can't tell, the red incandescents are right in the middle, between the pairs of solid red LED lamps.

There is also a picture of each of the plants individually. The first is HDF, the second is Cheese and the third is Bubba Kush.

The cheese has some root problems (it tends to lean over when unsupported) and the BK was flowered to determine sex, re-vegged (with all the flowers cut off), and then flowered again, which probably explains the slow/sparse flower development. Both were also tending toward re-vegging after an earlier "night light" experiment and the cheese is super stretchy because of some daylight experiments. If they start flowering fully, I will take that as a sign that my light timing and quality are at least reasonable. If not, I'll go from there. :-)

As a note, I am fully compliant with all my state laws in this matter. There are plenty of criminals out there to catch, but I am not one of them.

Nice mother... My plants r under a 400w HPS 12/0 and 200W of red incandescent 0/12 for a total of 24 hours light schedule now and they are coming along nice. This Martin Night lighting is awesome I must say.

Mother, NICE! Very theatical. The extremeness scares some people, but you're obviously not one of them.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dogznova

Nice mother... My plants r under a 400w HPS 12/0 and 200W of red incandescent 0/12 for a total of 24 hours light schedule now and they are coming along nice. This Martin Night lighting is awesome I must say.

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DOG, mothers results showed vegging indications from the same type Artificial Darkness (AD) spectrum and schedule (as I sadly expected, luckily she's twisted like me and she appears to enjoy it as much as I). :thumbsup:

So, from what you have provided for yourselves (MOTHER!), 12HPS/12RedInc would be expected to act fairly similar to MOTHER's (WILD) 24/12RedInc run, given that they have (nearly) the identical AD spectrum and schedule.

I hate the moral burden of watching you wonderful Techies pushing this envelope, but you are already producing significant data, and every piece of it takes you (and EVERYONE along with you) closer to the Grand Prize, which is the optimum synergy of EVERYTHING working together (Maximized results).

Incredible efforts, excellent work!

Way to go MOTHER. And you to DOG!

Way to attack that puzzle!

Gotta go.

Take care, Sal.

Dog: yes, definitely keep an eye on re-vegging as I saw it after about 5-6 days (2-3 days of 24h, 25W RedInc light, bumped up to 50W after 2-3 days), but only on the two plants that were not as far along with flowering. They sprouted flowers after the first 2 days, but then began to re-veg. It seems they were sensing nighttime, but not a long enough night to stay in flowering. The plant that was further along seemed to benefit from the extra Far Red (seemingly faster bulking), but I'm not sure how that would have played out indefinitely or if it was really faster than normal, as I have no way to measure that.

You have been doing Red and Yellow nightbreak experiments, yes? What are the details of what you've found? (Of course I read the other thread, but putting it all here and in greater detail I think will help us both along)

Specifically (and of course, if you don't mind):
- What colors did you use?
- How long were your night breaks?
- What morphological effects did you see? Less stretch, correct? Faster/slower/same rate flowering? More/less/same amount of flowers? How about the leaves? Any changes in size/number/color/etc.? Anything else?
- How about general, qualitative "growth rate"? Did your plants seem to show anything there?
- What are your guesses about what your experiments did to your plants' night clock?

I've read, re-read, and re-re-read all of Sal's clues and comments, and I think I'm understanding the process much better now, even with the little data that I have.

Sal: yes, I'm definitely a comfortable risk-taker as long as I'm risking something I'm willing to lose, and some small crops are definitely something I'm willing to lose if it gets me further along in being able to grow better in the future. So definitely don't feel any sort of guilt if you see me walking right into a pitfall that you've already overcome, because I fully expect to mangle some plants in the process, and that's fine by me. As long as I get to understand what my mangling is doing, and how to get around it, I find it rather fun. :-) I always have been and always will be an experimenter at heart. At this point, progress is far, far more important than any particular results from these particular plants.

Hi mother and sal. I just got back from my uncles house were he is doing the experiments. He was at first was using 2 red cfl's 15w each and 1 yellow cfl 15w for 15 min's during the dark period of flowering. Just to see if it worked and it did so off and running he went. Then he went to 1 hour then 6 hours... lol then 12 hours of martin nights. He started the first 15 min night break test about 3 days after switching to 12/12. As far as what days he added more light to the martin nights I'm not sure. The plants continued to flower as normal from what I could tell but the stretching was about half of what it normally is in the first 2 weeks (my uncle liked). About 3 or 4 days ago my uncle took out the yellow light because he wanted to add more red. The yellow light IMO did not take the plants out of flowering but it's his house lol. So the yellow test is not accurate IMO. AS far as the red goes he seems to think these plants can't get enough red. So he switched to 25w red INC and put 200w in there and from the results I am seeing I agree with him 100%. I am not sure if it matters much but I was slightly off on the light schedule. It's as follows. The 400 HPS is on 11 hours and off 13 and he says he's running the 200w of red INC 12 hours on and 12 hours off so the plants are actuly getting one hour of natural darkness. This much I can tell. These plants are definitely not coming out of flowering. OMG I have not seen this much improvement since we change from dirt to hydro. As far as SIZE goes and resin production again I've not seen this many poppin heads since I flowered under the Procyon led light. I will check every other day but unless I'm missing something all I see every time I go there is a lot more buds :). These plants are going to be through 3 full weeks on fri and I think they will be the fattest I've seen at 3 full weeks with this verity in many years indoors:smokin:..

I will take some pic on fri and show you.

Dog:
Your uncle sounds like and adventurous fellow... Do you think he'd be willing to try the nightbreak experiments again? I think you would get a lot of mileage out of re-introducing the Red fluoros back into the night cycle, while keeping the 200W of incandescents in place. It would help you to understand the interaction of Red and Far Red during the night cycle.
The main thing you'd have to keep in mind is that (from what Sal says) the Red:Far Red ratio tends to decrease over the flowering cycle (less Red and more Far Red as the plants mature), so if you re-introduce Red fluoros you'd be working the opposite direction. Meaning, if you can convince him to do it, take it nice and easy. The RedInc lights have both Red and Far Red, but more Far Red overall, so you wouldn't need much Red fluoro light to shift the balance to a Red dominant one. Sal said that he uses a final ratio around 1:1.

I guess that's one advantage to my having plants from three different stages of flowering in one space, I get to see the effects of different ratios on the different stages. In fact, I think I might keep that going while I'm experimenting. :-)

Hi mom, The red cfl's are more red orange and some seem to be more red then others if you can imagine that. It looks to me that the red cfl party lights are very inconsistent.
Some look really red some look red orange (not sure why). The red to far red ratio in the red INC's is what? Based on what my eyes can see it looks like red INC's have more 660nm in them then red cfl's do. Basically next time he is going to run red cfl's the first two weeks of flowering (just because they have a little less far red light for the stretching issue) Then gradually switch over to red INC's witch have a lot more 660nm and far red then red cfl's have. We are still trying to figure out how much light and time to give the plants during the flowering martin night. My uncle has been working with the same strain for the past 8 years now so he went all in because if it's not going to work all in then he will be able to spot it quickly. So far so good. I'm sure there is going to be a happy medium. How many watts how long the martin nights etc. Because at some point I'm sure there is overkill like too many watts or too long of martin night light. Unfortunately their is not enough room to re-introduce red cfl's at this point unless he takes out some of the red INC and right now I'm sure he's not going too... Sorry.:( He say's the plants like it better under the red INC more 660nm. Time will tell.

Glad to see you decided to do a grow log. I'm excited to see what comes from it. Sounds like salmayo's ideas are pretty groundbreaking and I'm sure the more the merrier when it comes to trying new ideas!:hippy: I'm subcribing to this grow log with pleasure.

Dog, no worries if your uncle is happy with the results he's getting, he should stick with it! Experimentation can only go so far if you are on a schedule. :-)


I made a few modifications to my setup. First, I swapped the LED bulbs that were combo red/blue with solid red ones, so all eight LED bulbs are solid red now, and to counterbalance the loss of blue, I swapped the 2700K CFLs with 6500K, so during the daylight hours it still looks like high noon in there. :-)

The cheese and the BK are still vegging, so I took out one of the incandescent bulbs. I think (hope?) this will help encourage the plants to flower. If not, I might reduce Far Red to nothing and/or introduce some complete darkness at the just before the start of the day cycle...

So right now, I have:
12h:
2x 42w 6500K CFLs
4x 13w Red LED bulbs

24h:
4x 13w Red LED bulbs
1x 25w Red incandescent

Sometime in the future I intend to rewire (again) to have all eight LED bulbs on 24h and have only the CFLs go on and off for daytime, but before I work on intensity I will have to figure out how the balance works. :-)

Pondering...
(Same as Dog) I wonder if running 4 Red LED bulbs and 1 red incandescent would affect the plants differently than 8 Red LED bulbs and 2 red incandescents. Of course the ratio is exactly the same, but how would the doubled intensity affect the time clock of the plants?