Lots of stuff happening over the past 3 days. Lots of plant growth (as to be expected), some box maintenance, and some heat and odor issues.
Let's start with an update on the plants. Here's the group:
Here's A:
Here's B:
And finally C:
As you can see, they're all getting to be very bushy and they're starting to get some height, particularly in the last few days. I've had to lower the plants a couple of times.
When you look at B, you'll see a couple of unhappy leaves on the lower left-hand side. The last time I watered (3 days ago), with the 1/4 nutes, B just wasn't high enough and some of the leaves were touching the soil. They got some of the water on them and I fully expected to see some burning as a result. I plan on trimming those leaves.
I'm at the point now where I have a series of decisions to make.
The first decision is when I switch over to flowering. I was originally thinking 4 weeks. However, the growth of the plants over the last few days has me a bit worried about height during the flowering process. If I were to flower now, I could probably get away with some leaf trimming along the way to allow light to penetrate closer to the bottom and that's about it. If I wait another week, I'll likely get bigger buds, but I'll very likely have to do some training (as I've mentioned before I'm thinking LST).
That brings me to the second decision, which is tied to the first. I'm not sure when I should start the LST. The plants are just now starting to get some height so I actually have something to try bending. However, the stems are VERY thick, so I don't have a lot of flexibility to work with. I could start bending the very tops and just keep on top of it every day to get a bit of sideways growth.
The next decision has to do with topping. I'd like to try topping all 3 plants, but I've read conflicting information about when I should do it. Some stuff I've read says to do it while still in the vegetative state, while other stuff says to do it a week into flowering. So, which is it?
As you can see, the plants are VERY bushy. Should I perhaps be trimming away some of the leaves to allow the light to penetrate a bit deeper?
I've done a bit of maintenance on the box. The lights tend to droop down a bit because of the weight and the fact that the box is not perfectly vertical (it has a slight angle to it). In order to gain a couple extra inches I made some shims and stuck them under the bottom of the fixtures. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of the shims, but I did take a picture of the fixture once I put a piece of silver duct tape over the bottom (to keep the shims in place).
You can't tell, but I managed to get the lights almost perfectly horizontal, which gave me about 1.5 inches of extra space for the plants.
I also started work on a hood for the fan. I have to get it painted and installed and once complete I'll post all of the details.
Heat is starting to be a big problem. The heat is now very easily in the high 80's/low 90's. It doesn't seem to be affecting the plants right now, but I definitely want to address the problem. I'm thinking of finding a piece of plexiglass and installing it right under the lights as a heat shield.
Man, the plants are getting shhtanky. I'm going to take a look at
this filter setup and see if it might work for me.