Two Tents

Lucidite This is my sixth grow and I’ll move to a more perpetual system. I’m going to use two tents. The new smaller tent will be for veg. I’ve set up my old Mars 120w ‘blurple’ LED. I’ll start by doing simple LST in this tent as well. Then I’ll move them into the existing flowering tent at 4 weeks and start scrogging them into the nets. Until now I’ve used one tent to grow for 12 weeks, drying for 1 week then leaving a one week gap before setting up again. 14 weeks. Now I will overlap grows by 4 weeks and have 8 weeks between each grow. But I’ll also harvest each plant in stages, starting at ~9 weeks. This way I will also be harvesting 3 out of every 8 weeks. That is the plan anyway. Another change I’m making this grow is to go down from 4 to 2 plants in bigger pots. I’ve just put a Green Gelato and a Northern Light in to pop. Just a 2 week overlap this time. Update: after 4 days both seedlings popped up. I’m liking the straight into soil approach. 100% every time I have tried it. Just got to be careful about the watering in the big pots. I’m going to have to find a way to start the training process. I’ll start with simple LST in the veg tent. But when I move them over to the flowering tent I want the two plants to train around each other in a circle. I’ll go a little up the sides but only where I run out of room. I won’t send any vertically up the sides either. Then at 7 weeks in I’ll plant the seeds for the next crop in the veg tent. 6 weeks in each tent would be the optimum time frame. But I don’t want to leave them too long under the weaker lights or have too many problems training them.

Lucidite Just the second week in. I’m starting the root juice in the feed. The two plants are making good progress. The third leaf nodes are there already. The temp has been high because two tents are running side by side. So the humidity has probably been a bit low at 40% RH for this stage. I want to get much better control this time. I’d like to aim for 25-30c and >50% while in veg. Then down to 20-25c and 40% in flowering. I will do this with de/humidifiers and by changing the point that I extract the air from each tent. I’ll switch the ducts between higher or lower venting holes. I’ve noticed that if you pull the air out the top the tent is cooler. If you pull it out from the bottom of the tent the air is warmer. I just harvested from the flowering tent, so I will shift these plants into it this week. Then I’ll LST as early as I can to get the plants into shape before they hit the scrog net. In a few weeks time.

Lucidite I’ve moved the plants into the flowering tent at three weeks in. Next time round I’ll leave them till four maybe even five weeks in the veg tent. I’ve started simple LST. Just bending the main stem as much as I dare. I’ve started to track the temp and RH inside and outside the tent. I want to be able to control it better so I need to know it better first. Nothing much else happening.

Lucidite Started the flowering nutes. No sign of flowering happening yet, but I expect I will see it in the next week. The plants have hit the net and I’m starting scrog training. I’m expecting the stretch to kick in soon. Really not a lot going on otherwise.

Lucidite Lots of training this week. Only two plants instead of four. So I havee room this time. But they are already getting close to filling the net. They are also trained quite low. I pulled them down early. I’ll have even less room to lollipop them in the coming weeks. But no big stem snaps this time round. I can just see signs of flowering coming through. Little pistols here and there. I’m calling it a flowering week. I’m expecting the stretch to happen now. I’ll switch from 18/6 to 20/4 on the lights this week onwards.

Lucidite Still training at week 6. The Gelato is definitely stretching. The Northern Light seems to have slowed down a bit already. But it has more bud atm. The Northern also has had a bit of calcium deficiency I think. Brown spots on otherwise healthy leaves. Nothing major. I’ve upped the calmag in the feed and it looks like it isn’t happening on any new leaf growth. The ph has been holding steady at 6.5 but after the last feed it went down to 5.5. I’ve been putting ph down into the feed and measuring at 6.5 before feeding. From now on I will measure It from the soil instead. I’m getting used to dealing with the small space in the stealth tent. I just managed to do a big defoliation and lollipop on both plants. The real bad news is that I’m out of supply again. The last crop I did (Stealth Banana) had great overall quality but poor quantity. It was around half the weight of the previous crop (Tidy Scrog). This time I want to get the best of both.

Lucidite The plants are well into their stretch. Especially the Gelato. The canopy has raised by about 10cm at least in the last week. The extra room, with only two big plants instead of four, looks like it is working out. The trunks are thicker than ever. I can see advanced roots creeping out the bottom of the fabric pots. The tempurature has dropped and I haven’t been running the heating. I think this may have impacted the size of the buds at this stage. The Northern looks to be at the same stage as last grow (Stealth Banana) but the Gelato buds are still tiny. I might not get my 9 week perpetual cropping. The only other issue this week was a mistake I made. I said last week I would take the soil ph as the true measurement. But I still need to measure it before I feed them. I didn’t and overdosed them mid week. I had put too much ph- in to one feed. The soil dropped to 4.0 ph for two hours until I realised and quickly flushed the last feed out.

Lucidite The stretch is over now. Pulling the plants right down has stopped them hitting the lights like they did last time. I’ve added a UVb lamp. The Northern is right where it needs to be. The necrosis on the leaves seems to have stopped after I increased the calmag. They are getting fatter and stickier. The Gelato has tiny bud still. There are a lot of them though. Maybe the plant is spreading its energy out across t them too much? I have two weeks left to feed them before the flush date. I might up the feed just for the Gelato. Since I have a new crop growing in the veg tent (Perpetual Pie), that would mean mixing three different feeds. I guess I might have to. I’m at 800ppm this grow but I have gone all the way to 1200ppm on other grows.

Lucidite I’m not happy with the way the Green Gelato has turned out again. It spread out fast across the scrog. The last two where also big spreaders. I greedily left a lot of early bud growth on it. But not many of them have really fattened up. I’ve seen much better grows of this strain on other diaries with less, but bigger buds. I don’t have anymore of the GG seeds but maybe that strain just doesn’t suite my compact setup as well. I’m pulling the plants right down. I’ve just started a new diary (Fruit Salad) with a Fat Banana auto, also from RQS. The last two of these I grew, in the same setup (Stealth Banana) where probably the best two plants I have ever grown IMHO. The Northern Light in the back is more compact and at about the right stage. No worries. Dropping to two plants from four was a test of quality over quantity. So far I don’t see a benefit. There won’t be enough of it to last. My next configuration in this tent will include two crops. Perpetual Pie with two 5 gal and & Fruit Salad with two 1 gal pots). I want less potential colas with bigger buds. So I’ll need to spread with the scrog net, but remove more shoots before they grow too big. I’ll just start feeding with pure water from now on. A slow flush. No big dump of water. Another switch to find out what the difference is. You see, I cropped a few grams from each plant to see how they where. Both are young and brighter, but strong enough for week 9. The NL has a couch-lock feeling already, which I am expecting from this strain. But the vape taste before flushing is not nice.

Lucidite Started feeding with just pure water this week. At the same time the buds have really fattened up. The Gelato buds are still a bit smaller than I would like. They may not have lengthened out but they have swelled up. I’ve been taking a bit of the grow every day. So far 2/3oz dry weight. Pretty good at +9 weeks. I can’t see there being more than the 6oz I got off my last grow (Stealth Banana). 4-6oz. I’ll do one big crop and dry at 11 weeks and see if there is anything worth keeping through till 12 weeks. Otherwise the tent gets cleaned out for the next two grows (Perpetual Pie & Fruit Salad). Then I’m thinking about one each of a Gorilla Cookies, Strawberry Pie and a Northern Light. All in 3 gal pots. Let’s call it Three Sisters.

Lucidite The buds are looking ripe. The pistols are all turning brown. The trichomes are cloudy and amber. The leaves are all slowly being eaten up by the plant. Time to harvest. So I cut the whole lot down. I got estimated dry weight of 2oz Green Gelato and 1.7oz Northern Light including what has already been cropped. The Northern has well developed medium sized buds. It took up 1/3 of the tent. It has about ~20 stems supporting it. The Gelato had mostly smaller buds. Plenty of larf. It had 40+ stems trying to support buds. I realise this is way too many now. I’m going to prune for 12-16 for the next 5 gals. Maybe 9-12 for any 3 gal and 6-9 for 1 gal pots. This approach will allow me to fill the tent with more soil again. I realised already that bud quantity is directly related to soil quantity. This time I had less quantity, which I expected, but not automatically with more quality, which I wanted. The next time I’ll have two 5 gal and, soon after, two 1 gal pots ( Perpetual Pie & Fruit Salad) in the flowering tent. That should be about 36 stems, which I make as roughly half what I let grow in the same space with these two plants. Ideally each stem would hold at least 4g dry weight each. Any more weight would then put me in a position to finish one grow while still having stock from the previous grow. I can do longer cures. I can build up some supply.

Lucidite The plant spread quickly just like last time too. It took up too much room but only grew small buds. But the strength is still there. I’m growing in a 70cm high space. I think I need to find smaller plants.

Lucidite Not really what I wanted this time. I went with only two plants in bigger pots. I wanted to stop the crowding. But it didn’t massively help. Trimming is what is going to help more. LST is exposing all the growth sites. But there are too many now. Next grows I’m going to have more soil in each tent but less bud sites. I’ll have 4 pots in each tent. But I’ll try to keep ~50 bud stems in the flowering tent. That ends up being 12 on each plant.