First LED grow light test

Very impressed so far with the small plant, however it's beginning to look suspiciously like Amnesia haze all except the fact that it's small and fat rather than tall and thin... Large plant is certified not white widow at this point, however I can't complain because it's looking beautiful and although it's a pain to deal with two strains at once (nutrition requirements, watering quantities and flowering time to name but a few differences) I can't wait to set them on fire and inhale the fumes. Definitely do not under any circumstances waste your time using any calmag product in the nutrient solution! Just don't. Get yourself a spray bottle and make up a foliar feed. Every single time I've added calmag to nutrient solution it's only ever made the problems worse and never better. Each time I've had a random spike in run off EC it's always been directly after adding calmag of various producers e.g. canna, shogun, Vitalink etc. I guess it solves the lack of calcium and magnesium, but in the process locks out other nutrients and they just get left in the grow media and just get washed out in the next feeding. Also don't believe the whole "don't foliar feed with the lights on" Chinese whispers, never hurt any of my plants and ALWAYS solved the problem. The whole myth comes from UV light breaking down the minerals which are found in the foliar spray which only happens to specific minerals and only in direct sunlight. You're not going to get a sun tan from a grow light no matter how long you decide to stand looking at your plants, so indoor growers just ignore that part. Also it is true that the stomata are fully open closes to sunlight and sunset, but the plant still has to perform respiratory functions during the daylight hours since it takes in carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. The stomata are more open during the day since the plant is performing much more energy intensive operations it needs more oxygen and more carbon dioxide than during the night, and hence when lights are out is in fact the worse time to spray your plants....not to mention the fact the lights are off so there's less heat to evaporate the remaining standing water on the leaves and it's more likely to cause a mould problem. Moral of the story, literal minutes after a foliar feeding the colour of the plant changes for the better, during light hours where the plant is actually performing the work needed to actually use the nutrients you have just provided. Anyway moving on, but first, I'm never using Calmag in the nutrient solution ever again 😂 In the end a drip feeding system was acquired to save some time, and I was getting irritated trying to feed the large plant since the root mass is so big that the watering would just take forever. It was like pouring water through a pillowcase, more than about 20ml per second and it would just start spilling over the side of the pot. Even with the drip feeder on there are some pockets of standing water appearing on the surface 😅 Nutrient solution concentration is now being reduced slowly, and also dropping the pH back to 5.5-5.8 so that when the pure water flush starts the media is buffered a little low so it doesn't immediately swing above 7. The tap water here is above 8 pH which is quite annoying because it requires quite a bit of citric acid to bring down.....but there's my next moan. Never had any problems with Citric acid, always worked well and yes it's biodegradable so over the course of a few hours the pH does rise in the nutrient solution, which is actually a benefit in my eyes because you can use that pH swing to good effect and bring the pH of the grow media and therefore nutrient uptake right through the optimum range of all nutrients needed by the plant...not to mention when used in foliar sprays to set the pH, it protects against mould and nasty weed destroying critters, and not to mention it is beneficial to terpene production. Not trying to turn this into a lecture, just fed up hearing garbage repeated over and over again that's actually of no benefit when it's portrayed as the cure. Next time out I'll be using 20L pots again, definitely didn't expect these cheap LEDs to do this good (backed off to 75% dimmed because they were too bright on 100%) which is why they're only in 12's, I thought 12's would be more than enough, turns out I was wrong. I'll probably cut down the tall plant with the white widow, and flush it together with it. Since I don't really know what strain it is at this point I'm not too bothered about it reaching full maturity, although it would be nice to send it to the end and see what it actually is, I don't want to use up the whole tent for only one plant that i might not even like in the end. You may notice I've only done very minimal defoliation and the white widow is incredibly bushy. Well I removed basically everything that wasn't directly or one node away from the nearest flower site, and that's definitely helped with bud development up until this point. Maybe doing a lollipop helps get better buds on some plants but I'm absolutely certain it would have ruined this one. I'm not one to break my own solar panels and then wonder why my TV won't turn on.