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[MEGA]Community Growing advice, tips, tricks, & experiences Part 4

No need to keep it to PMs- as long as you both keep it civil, I'm sure the discussion would be interesting to lots of people.
 
Putting a clone outdoors

So, a friend of mine bought a pretty large clone, roughly 18", at the local cannabis club yesterday. He was wondering if he was to place it outside today, Sept. 7th, would he be able to yield anything off the plant? The strain in some type of indica and my friend is located in the San Francisco Bay =D
Could you push the harvest to late late October? The summers here come late and there shouldn't be any "cold" weather until mid November at the very earliest. I said cold in parenthesis because it is pretty much goddamn paradise here and the weather doesn't really change, 50-80 year round.
 
This belongs in the grow section.

However, yes you can place it outside, but you didn't say what strain it was. If it's an indoor strain you won't get as good results since it won't have been bred for that environment and things like mould can be more of an issue.

Unless you want to be watering it every couple/few days, you need to prepare the soil in the ground by removing all weeds/grass and digging it over with a mattock or failing that, a garden fork and shovel. Add some garden compost (not potting soil) or well rotted manure and then place the rootball in and water. Preferrably use some mycorrhizal fungi and a mulch (can be bark, wood chips or whatever, as long as it's deep enough).

You also need to protect from slugs and animals like deer or rabbits. To protect from animals surround the clone with something like chicken wire and fence poles.

I suggest you actually read up on growing because you're more likely to end up killing it than not if you don't have some basic knowledge of growing. Also I would grow more than just one solitary clone since there's a fair chance it could just be a waste of time
 
Okay so heres my situation.

I wanna LST my high grade plants. I just vegged my bagseed plant for 3 weeks under 400W CFL and its now in the third week of flowering. I can already tell if I get a half ounce Im gonna be lucky.

I wanna try LST and Pruning. I always top my plants but I never pruned. Last time I LST I honestley didnt get what I expected. I did the snake pattern thing and the yield was medi-ocore. Whats the best LST, and pruning methods? THANKS!
 
80mg said:
Okay so heres my situation.

I wanna LST my high grade plants. I just vegged my bagseed plant for 3 weeks under 400W CFL and its now in the third week of flowering. I can already tell if I get a half ounce Im gonna be lucky.

I wanna try LST and Pruning. I always top my plants but I never pruned. Last time I LST I honestley didnt get what I expected. I did the snake pattern thing and the yield was medi-ocore. Whats the best LST, and pruning methods? THANKS!
Click to expand...

Although there is an element of speculation here, I am pretty sure the reason your yield was 'mediocre' was because you didn't use a proper light. Whilst you can squeeze some growth out using CFLs, flowering your plants under them is maybe not a complete waste of time, but lets just say I wouldn't bother. T5s are much better for vegging, but really the best type of light is an HID lamp such as an HPS. I've just been growing seedlings for about a week or so since germination under a CFL and even in this time they've become leggy. So really to get nice squat growth and decent growth a 250W HPS lamp would be miles better, but for flowering I wouldn't contemplate using anything less if I had a choice. To be honest I don't think any training will dramatically improve your yield with that sort of lighting technology. If you want to improve your yields I also would consider vegging for longer, and use a tehnique called screen of green (SCROG) which makes use of a screen. That way you'll be able to grow along one horizontal plane and get all the foliage even closer to the light, taking advantage of the inverse square law which will increase your yield dramatically and allow you to grow with far fewer plants.

By the way, topping is a form of pruning.

edit: I'd just like to emphasize how god damned useful a 250W HPS lamp is. Forget the MH in veg = shorter, stockier and better yielding dogma, HPS is more efficient and gives out more lumens and yields far better. I like to use HPS all the way through until the last two weeks of flower when the trichomes are bulging with resin, during which time I switch to a 1kW MH which has more UV and improves the psychoactivity of the buds just before harvest. I would use a 150W CFL maybe for the first couple of days after germination and then switch to the 250W HPS lamp, and increase the power to 275W, then 400W, then 440W (switchable e-ballast) then a 600W lamp and finally a 1kW lamp in flower. This is the most efficient way to grow for me, but in general going from start to finish with a 250W HPS lamp and then a 600W HPS would be best (or arguably just a 600W HPS from beginning to end).
 
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Hi all just a quick question about photoperiod in relation to genetics.
I have read a bit about sativas being better suited to growing in equatorial regions with a 12/12 photoperiod. Has anyone here tried to grow indicas or hybrids at this lattitude? What are the results like? Does the plant start flowering as soon as it reaches physical maturity?

Is it possible that you could grow these strains (for example a NL hybrid) all year round with short life spans and small yields? Extreme temperatures wont be a problem as the area I have in mind is at elevated altitude and has year round temps of 27C and medium to high rainfall. It is almost exactly on the equator so has very little seasonal variation in photoperiod.

Does anyone one have any advice on outdoor planting times and potential problems for indica hybrids at this lattitude?
 
justsayknow said:
Hi all just a quick question about photoperiod in relation to genetics.
I have read a bit about sativas being better suited to growing in equatorial regions with a 12/12 photoperiod. Has anyone here tried to grow indicas or hybrids at this lattitude? What are the results like? Does the plant start flowering as soon as it reaches physical maturity?

Is it possible that you could grow these strains (for example a NL hybrid) all year round with short life spans and small yields? Extreme temperatures wont be a problem as the area I have in mind is at elevated altitude and has year round temps of 27C and medium to high rainfall. It is almost exactly on the equator so has very little seasonal variation in photoperiod.

Does anyone one have any advice on outdoor planting times and potential problems for indica hybrids at this lattitude?
Click to expand...

Mods: I wanted to post up a graph. I clicked on the image icon button and pasted the URL of the jpeg image (http://www.gardenscure.com/420/imagehosting/5145247d4a7415130b.jpg) but it kept saying 'invalid url'. Why won't it work?

Anyway, please copy and paste http://www.gardenscure.com/420/imagehosting/5145247d4a7415130b.jpg into your browser justsayknow. This graph applies to all growers at all latitudes. Essentially in an equatorial region you will have two harvest seasons, as indicated on the graph. Most strains flower after 60 days and need to become sexually mature before this happen if growing from seedlings. If growing from clones, they will already be sexually mature and will flower immediatly, however yields will be low. For this reason you would need to take many many cuttings if you didn't grow them under lights indoors for a period of time vegetatively and this is why I would start indoors. The regional weather will effect when and where you can grow so you need to take this into account as well. You need to find out when the rainy and dry season is if you can.

I would grow sats or sat dom strains if you can. Mind you it would be cool to have two mixed indica/sativa grows per year. I would add that I've never grown in your region of the world and am using my own knowledge rather than personal experience to answer your question.
 
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Cool thanks for the response. That chart is a little hard to read but I will see if I can magnify it later.
I will use seed so hopefully it will be approximately two months growth and then flower (I wont have a reliable power supply or access to equiptment to grow indoors.) I wont bother growing sativa either as there will be plenty of that available locally.
There are two monsoons so the plan is to germinate around the start of the first monsoon and for flowering to finish before the second. I guess there will be a slight seasonal variation in photoperiod also so I will see if I can work it out and use that to my advantage. The latitude is 00.16 S so it will be a very small variation but I should take it into account.
 
Artificial Emotion said:
Mods: I wanted to post up a graph. I clicked on the image icon button and pasted the URL of the jpeg image (http://www.gardenscure.com/420/imagehosting/5145247d4a7415130b.jpg) but it kept saying 'invalid url'. Why won't it work?
Click to expand...



the icon contains the wrong code....you'll have to put the image tags on yourself...the engineers are working on the problem..




5145247d4a7415130b.jpg
 
justsayknow said:
Cool thanks for the response. That chart is a little hard to read but I will see if I can magnify it later.
I will use seed so hopefully it will be approximately two months growth and then flower (I wont have a reliable power supply or access to equiptment to grow indoors.) I wont bother growing sativa either as there will be plenty of that available locally.
There are two monsoons so the plan is to germinate around the start of the first monsoon and for flowering to finish before the second. I guess there will be a slight seasonal variation in photoperiod also so I will see if I can work it out and use that to my advantage. The latitude is 00.16 S so it will be a very small variation but I should take it into account.
Click to expand...

All you need is a handful of 20W energy saving CFLs from the supermarket. They cost pennies. The only other thing you might need is a couple of PC fans and a box, which could be cardboard.

ps thanks papasomni, I should have known that.
 
Hey guys, sorry I've been away so long, been pretty sick and had surgery, ended up having to have it twice, as they fucked up the first time...
I've got 2 plants Im about to harvest (55 days into flowering), I have two O.G. Kush Plants (clones) and they are showing some weird symptoms on the leaves, seems like they have weird, necrotic lines running through some of the leaves veins. (only on the O.G. Kush)

Ended up buying 10 more femmed Northern Lights seeds,
Going to try germinating 4 of them in a few days.

I should be able to get some clear pictures in by tomorrow afternoon.
I may not be as active in this thread as I was, but I'm not sure.
I'm still pretty sick even after the surgery I went through and feel pretty crappy.
Hopefully that will pass (and quickly because I didn't get any pain killers due to my Opiate addicted past)

Thank you to all the mods , Chainer(I know your a mod but you helped me out quite a bit), and AE you've done too much to even mention. Papasomni, PB, and to who ever else has contributed to keeping this thread moving when I wasn't here, I do appreciate it. and, again, apologize for leaving unmentioned. Hope all is well with all of you BLers. Keep it up.


-Edit-
Forgot to mention, took your advice for outdoors AE, I ended up having an area about 4ft X 20ft to use for growing, I fenced off that area to keep the dogs out, and I dug holes about 4 feet deep and 3 feet wide, hopefully giving the plants MORE than enough room for their roots to grow, I put about 7 bags of Fox Farms Ocean Forrest, so that the soil out there now is about 1/3 Foxfarms soil, added about a cup or two of kelp . Made sure everything was evenly spread and plan on vegging the OG kush plants for another few weeks, and placing them outside in October, letting them flower, seeing how they do. (I've been letting the plants stay outside for about 12 hours a day, (only bring them in at night because they are young and I wanted to veg them a bit more before flowering, right now we get about 14 hours of daylight) and I really do see the difference you had spoken of AE. Plants do seem to love the sun much more than artificial light.
Seems like Ive had more luck flowering indoors though so far.... Hopefully those two plants Im about to pull up soon are better than my last outdoor harvest (which wasn't bad , just wasn't a favorite either, though I do notice, my outdoor plant has MUCH more flavor than any of my indoor plants. kinda wierd.)
 
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Sorry to hear you haven't been feeling well. I hope you get better!

When you say you bought 10 feminized NL seeds, what breeder are they from?
 
I have never grown the same plants, HOWEVER, I have had many houseplants and a garden and with the gnats and the discoloration, it almost looks like root rot from too much water or insufficient drainage. You can put peat moss or gravel something that drains well in the bottom of your planter so that the roots dont stay wet all the time. There are also, all natural insecticidal soaps that you can use, which are safe for "vegetables" in addition to replanting.
 
Hey guys n gals

Got a new snap of me plants.They could be doing allot better :\ those god damn bugs have taken over and now i think there starting to damage the plants.....Big big mistake using manure ahwell live and learn.......Im thinking of just budding these and get what i can and just re start over without manure and proper fertz....I have also been givin some decent seeds not a "name strain" but a very nice heavy indicia plant......I have tryed natural pyrithione and flushing them but have had no success what else could you guys recommend?I have been told putting child play sand onto the plants base and underneath the plant n to stop watering em for a few days n that should get rid of em.....will that work?

heres a pic: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/718/dscf2914p.jpg/
 
^ Manure in containers is a no no IMO. It is possible to get away with using small amounts of sterilized manure, but it's so risky I wouldn't recommend it. You seem to have realized this though.

Pyritione? I wouldn't use that!

What bugs are you having trouble with?


From what I can see from the photo which isn't great (is the lamp on?) they look as if they need a good feed. I'm not sure though, as it could be a lockout problem or something. Let us know what the bug is and then I'll be able to help. I assume that it's a fungus gnat problem from what you've said though, so if that is the problem, I think the quickest, most effective way of dealing with it is using ant powder containing pyrethrin. Don't worry, it's safe, and probably an easier, cleaner and more effective solution than using a sand mulch which can have it's own issues like salt deposits. Don't stop watering if they need a drink, however make sure you use a wet/dry cycle without allowing them to wilt.

In future I would recommend using a pre-made medium from a company such as Fox Farm. Unless you've have a good working knowledge of soil science and understand how the different components of a medium interact, it's just not worth risking it. Companies like Fox Farm do all the hard work for you, so why not just buy their growing media that you know is cost effective and works well?

edit: also those plants look too big for those pots. Do you not ever pot up? I think potting up is quite important, even if you only do it in a few stages.
 
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Here's a tip (from my last indoor grow) for a growing medium (cant tell all, it's a secret) I grow in empty 15 gallon
potatoe bags (yeah, the net kind) half of the medium is made up of garbage bags full of felled hardwood leaves -
which are dried in the oven, at 200 degrees (killing all bugs, bacteria) 2 hours. after dry break into mulch w/ clean
hands. The other (lightweight) material consists of perlite, high grade potting soil & very coarse (sterilized) sand
A shallow kiddie pool makes an excellent container I will also say this medium requires a daily watering
method and the roots require alot of B-12 (along w/ other favorite fertilizer) bi-weekly ph testing is a must -as with
all growing. As I stated, it's just a tip... adjust as you see proper I've had excellent harvests w/ hundreds of healthy
buds, from my favorite pruning technique (weighing down certain internode branches) but thats a whole different thread...
 
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