Potentially big harvest

a friend of mine is allowing me to run his grow for him at his house so this is a huge opputunity for me to grow a lot of dope for free basically!
Here's a list of the space and equipment available:
-1000w Hps (1)
-1000w MH (2)
-400w mh (1)
-Fans (variety of sizes)
-Pots (5 gallon, or milk crates)
-3 seperate rooms (possibly 4)

This grow is going to be prurely commercial so we want to bring in as often and as much as we can. I was thinking the best way would be to grow SOG, with moderate LST. Just not sure how many plants to grow and what the best way is to start setting up a SOG. All the rooms are ready to grow in, except we need a heat source in one of the rooms, which is the room we plan to flower in, simply because it has the best sealage(?) from outside light. With the lights available how many plants should I clone/veg/flower per room and with which lights?
What do you think about cloning with the 400w MH, vegging with one 1000w MH, and flowering with a 1000w Hps along with a 1000w MH?
My partner has great success every year with his outdoor grows and mild with indoor, however with what I've learned from being on here about harvesting, training, and lighting, we would like to yield 3lbs per harvest.
What do you think is the best way possible to come close with what I have to work with??

Thanks!
-AllStar

If you have 3 rooms use 1 for moms & starting clones, 1 for vegging clones, and 1 for flowering. Just start a batch every week to eventually have a perpetual harvest of a few plants at a time to keep a constant flow and not have tons to trim at once. End up harvesting say 10 plants a week instead of 100 every 8 weeks if you have room for 100 plants (in a SOG). I don't think you need to LST with a SOG, in fact you want single cola plants. You should cut off all the lower branches that don't receive light so it focuses all its energy on that top bud. You shouldn't veg long at all before flowering in a SOG, just enough to get good roots and a few inches tall.

Thanks for your reply, just slightly confused about something.
How many plants would I be flowering at a time in the flowering room? And would it be with both the 1000w MH & HPS or just HPS. If i understand what you mean correctly, I would have let's say 30 plants in the room at a time, 10 plants that are 7-8 weeks, 10 plants that are 5-6, and 10 that are 3-4 weeks or freshly flowering. These numbers are rough because I really have no idea what the best amount for which lights is.
Thanks again!
-AllStar

How about vegging in the room that needs heat? If you veg for 24hrs, the light will provide the heat.

Yea I was thiking about doing that. Would I be better to veg in that room with 1000w MH, and flower in another with 2000w of MH and HPS?

Does anyone else have any ideas for me? I'm really curious as to if it would be beneficial to flower under 1000w hps and a 1000w mh, and if so how many plants can I expect to harvest?
Thanks again!

AllStar

Dude, i have 1 1000w hps and it fills a room 4.5' x 4.5'. Right now i have about 15 plants in there.

Flowering under both would, i think be better. light = buds. more light = more buds!!!

Definatly use the HPS for flowering and MH will help but ideally 2 HPS's would be the best. but i don't see any problems m8 having a MH will help, just make sure they get even light from both (move them around) else ull find half have nice big buds and the others arnt as big. hope this helps m8
the skiing arab

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HPS has red light (2000 - 3000 Kelvin) and so resembles late summer light, good all round, but best for flowering. MH usually neutral/blue/cool white light 4000-6000 kelvin, which is lunchtime daylight, good all round but best for veg. and not perfect for flowering.

With what you've got, I'd go:


Veg: -1000w MH (1) -400w mh (1)

Flower: -1000w Hps (1) -1000w MH (1)

Clones: couple of flourescents

Maybe even add the 400w to the flowering, depending on circumstances and number of plants.
I'd definitely put most light in the flowering room.

Check this dude out, he has similiar equipment:
http://boards.cannabis.com/showthread.php?t=87140

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Anathema is right on.

In response to other bits...

First of all, what experience growing do you already have personally? Just curious where you're coming from; do you have good success rates cloning for example... makes a lot of difference in how you set things up.

For a perpetual harvest using the 3 lights you have, put 1xMH1000 in your veg room.

Having twice the HPS wattage is preferable, because flowering plants get big....but if you plan to use the second mh1000...

Put 1xMH1000 + 1xHPS1000 in the flower room.
The plants that just came out of veg can go under the MH and you move them across the room so they finish under the HPS.

If you want to harvest 5 plants per week on a perpetual cycle, with a standard 60 day flower time, you need to plant to have 35 sexed plants plus 10 unsexed plants in the flower room at all times.
The formula is 7n sexed plus 2n unsexed, n being the target harvest-per-week number, and assuming a 50%male cull.

That also means that you have to start at least 10 plants per week from seed or 5 as clones, again, assuming 50% males and 100% survival rate.

I think you should start pretty small and get a bunch of practice under your belt, and make sure that you have no security worries before going commercial. But that's just me and I'm stodgy like that.

Thanks for the replies everyone!
FYI, as little experience as I have doing this, the grower I'm working with has been growing for a long time outdoors and is just getting into the indoor scene. So although we're both fairly new to the indoor set-up, he is experienced with taking clones and feeding etc, so we should be able to make this work between us. So from all the replies, so far this is the idea I'm getting from you all, hopefully I'm not confused.
- Clones under either 400w MH, or fluoro's in one room.
-Vegging clones and mothers with 1000w MH in another room.
-Then in the next room will be the 1000w MH and the 1000w HPS.
-stinkyattic: you said to just move the plants across the room from the MH to the HPS. Does this mean I would start with say 15 plants in the room for we'll say 4 weeks under the MH, then when more females are ready to flower, move the first group over to the HPS and put the new ones under MH. This would be like a SOG within the SOG, correct? (lol) Or like you said, put 5 plants in a week and just move them a row down, with every week harvesting the 5 plants in the last row of the HPS lighting? If I'm putting 5 plants in the room per week and taking 5 out, this means I will roughly have 45 plants flowering under 2000w of light at any given , correct?
-Another thing, I'm not sure I understand what you meant about the males and the little formula thing you gave me so if you could explain this again I would appreciate it a lot!
Thanks everyone for reading this post

-AllStar

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The clones will die under 400W, unless its yards away.
The male formula thing, if I may be so bold, is that if you're running from seeds, roughly half will be males.

I'm so jealous of everyone who has the space for these set ups...

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by AllStar

put 5 plants in a week and just move them a row down, with every week harvesting the 5 plants in the last row of the HPS lighting?

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Exactly right except that you put 10 plant in a week and cull approximately half of them at the end of that week because they will be male, or just sorta lame and runty, that's kind of what the little formula gets at...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AllStar

If I'm putting 5 plants in the room per week and taking 5 out, this means I will roughly have 45 plants flowering under 2000w of light at any given , correct?

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Yes, and of those, you will not know the sex of the 10 youngest at any given time.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AllStar

-Another thing, I'm not sure I understand what you meant about the males and the little formula thing you gave me

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It's kind of explained as the answer to your first question, but once you start getting clones in there you can ignore that aspect... and for a true SOG you are definitely going to have an easier life using clones!!!!

Switch one of your MH bulbs out with a HPS conversion bulb. You'll defnitely want to be getting more bud rather than vegging plants.
Do 2 flowering rooms, one vegetation room. If you want more square feet ouf of your lights I highly reccomend getting a light mover. Exhaust fans, nice healthy mothers and a good cloning/propagation setup will make your life alot easier.

Thanks again everyone,

Anathema mentioned earlier in the post that for commercial grows LST isn't favorable with SOG. I was always under the impression that LST pretty much always gave more bud in the end, please clarify this with me. :)

-AllStar

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LST doesn't mean "Slow Stress Training", it means "Low Stress Training", e.g. although it is stressful to the plant to be bent, it's lower stress than topping, super cropping, etc etc etc.

Pro's usually say that SOG gives a larger yield all in all, like annually or over a given period of time - not because they yield more than ordinary, larger plants, but because thier turnover is quicker.

LST allows you to get your lower side branches as large as the main cola/stem.
I find it easy and fun, and you get thick, bushy plants.

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