As I finish my current grow (Day 60 from seed) of my first 4 autoflowers, I have decided to try and adapt my grow to a perpetual cycle.
Currently running 2 FastBuds Girl Scout Cookies and 2 Oasis Berry Blue, one of which is ~10 days behind the other 3 plants as a seed failed to grow and was replanted.
I definitely went too far with LST'ing these plants (my first in a long time), and two of them flowered prematurely after I bent their stems over too far and more then likely pulled the roots from one side of the seedlings. The BerryBlue that is behind the others was not lst'd as aggressively (learnt my lesson), and is the largest best plant at this point. Going forwards I am grommeting the grow bags to provide better tie down points and will be focusing on tying down the branches over bending the main stem horizontal. The GSC looks amazing, but I believe would have gotten bigger if I hadn't overdone it, I'm guessing yield will suffer but quality won't.
Today I planted a single Purple Punch from FastBuds.
This grow is more about quality and seeing what I can grow in organic soil, rather then about quantity. I have run hydro grows that produced well but require a lot of finicky maintenance. I chose this grow over an external reservoir DWC 4 plant system as a low stress highly interesting option. So far I have been monitoring the soil PH but don't need to, and I water without runoff aiming to keep the soil just barely moist before the next watering for the bacteria; colonies to thrive. I notice with these grow bags vs plastic pots, the soil dries from the outside in rather then top down. I will be applying a layer of mulch to keep in the humidity now that I know I can control the temps and humidity well enough to hopefully avoid insects. I have a large watering can that I fill and let sit between watering's to dechlorinate, and my water ph is ~6.5 from the tap.
I am currently running 1000w in a 4*4*7 tent. I have an old glass cool tube which I have modified to take two bulbs, one in each end. Running a 400w MH Hortilux Daylight Blue and a 600w EyeHortilux Super HPS. Planning to leave them both on for the whole cycle, 20/4.
Cooling wise I am running a 400 cfm vortex fan which dumps straight outside. I have a passive cold air intake that is hooked to a window to take advantage of canada's winter air temps, in the summer this will use air conditioned air from the house, Currently temps set to 27C and the fan only runs for a minute every ten-fifteen minutes, and its less and less as winter gets colder. I have a small 150cfm fan that I could use as an active cooling but so far haven't needed to. InkBird controllers for the humidity and temp. Two oscillating fans move the air arround.
With the new grow every two weeks I will plant an auto seed aiming for a 3 month cycle of 6 plants.
I like autos (fanboy) but was having to admit that simply swapping to 12/12 in an indoor tent at 30 days with photo period genetics would be a more reliable grow.
Perpetual grow leverages the abilities of the autoflowers to coexist at different maturity states under 20/4 light.
It will provide me with 6 plants at different stages of growth to look at (i find myself staring at these far more then I thought I would, they are just so interesting). I am betting that with the organic soil and only 90 days, these autos will mostly remain small and wont cause problems of shading, but I can always use stands to adjust them to similar canopy heights. I will be using LST to grommet tie downs that I am putting arround the growbag edges to shape the plants low and bushy inside their bag's footprint.
I will build a small drying box that can hold a single plant at a time, rather then delaying new grows due to the tent being needed for drying.
Humidity will be uniform for the entire grow, but I will use humidity domes on the seedlings and keep the RH at 50% to avoid mold issues during flowering. The VPD will not be perfect, but won't catastrophically affect the grow.
How do people do time lapse with hid lighting? Do I need to set timers to turn off hid, turn on fluorescent and then take the picture? Is there a filter I could buy that eliminates the horizontal scanning lines?