My first grow: KC33 in soil under 400w MH + 1000w HPS- comments please!

Growing in 1.5'x3'x4' room
--I have two adjacent rooms with same dimensions. The plan is to half half veg, half flower. Going to fim the plants when ~4 sets of leaves have grown.

Planted on 1/6
Lights: Under 400w MH since planting (for heat AND light)
Will flower under 1000w HPS (Thats a LOT of light for such a small room!)
Medium: Miracle gro soil
Nutes: None yet

The story so far:
Seeds germinated with paper towel technique. I messed it up. See here:
Paper towels dried during germination. Are my seedlings going to die?
Planted seedlings later than ideal, planted with tops out of soil as those first immature leaves were already formed.

Day 14 in soil:
I had the lights on 18/6 cycle, but due to the cold temps (76 day, 50 at night) I switched to 24/7. Lights maintain temps at nice 75F. I'm going to have to find a solution for 12/12...

3 plants doing well, 1 plant growing significantly slower than others.
1 seedling appeared on 1/19 to my surprise.

These photos are from today, day 16 in soil. The plants had a slow start, but are slowly but surely rebounding!

Fimmed 3 largest plants today. I ate the little clippings, and could detect a tiny bit of the THC taste. Though maybe it's wishful thinking. Did not get high from it though.

I notice the nodal growth is pretty strong. It's almost like the leaves in the nodes are growing in fully, even without fimming or topping. This growth is not occurring solely in the top-most nodes, either. It seems that every node (particularly on the largest plants) has a set of small leaves growing from them. See pics 3, 4 below.

These pics were taken on 1/25. I am currently away from them...can't wait to see what they've done in the past 2 days!

I also started fertilizing with some miracle gro 20-30-20 (I think that's what it is anyway). I just happened to have this large box of it sitting around the house, so I figured I'd save money and use this. Dissolved 1/4 TSP into 1 gallon (this is the on-box recommended concentration for supplementing normal watering solution).

I did not fertilize the newest, smallest plant (bottom left in first photo).

Also, I did not fim the second smallest plant (upper right in first photo). This plant is growing at a snails pace, and all it's leaves are considerably smaller than any others.

Lastly, I added soil to all pots to the level of the initial leaves (forget what they're called. the VERY first leaves to appear).

So it seems almost ALL of the nodes are growing into tops! The plants are still very short, but at all nodes, there are leaves coming in. This started before I fimmed, so I'm wondering if the shock I put the roots through is contributing to this...If my fims worked out correctly, this should put me at 6-8 (more?) tops per plant, and I've only fimmed once!

Maybe this is normal though, and maybe the new growth will stop eventually? I tried to illustrate it as well as possible in the photos below.

Here we are at Day 23. The small plant looks like it will never catch up right now. It is a lighter green than the others, too.

Anyway, 1 plant is growing ultra-dense and is quite a bit larger than the others. The seedling that had a late start is growing in very nicely. I am wondering when would be ideal to start flowering. I have less than 2' of vertical space, so I will probably do SCROG.

Can you start training for scrog during flowering? My plants are still very short, but they all have at least 6 "tops".

thats alot of light for only that amount of plants. you could grow probably 10 or 12 at least. maybe you should clone off one of them and grow the clones .it will set you back like a few weeks though

i think the scrog needs to be done during vegging.from what i understand you actually have to train the plants into the screen so it would be benificial to do that during vegg. could be wrong though.im still learning about the scrog myself so do some research. if your lights are further away than 20 inches dropp it down to 20 inches above the plants. that might speed up growth a bit. i would definatly vegg for atleast a month more befor flowering buts you could start now if you wanted. just depends on how big you want to let em get!!

cool i havent planted mine yet coz they are outdoor plants

Mighty_boosh said:

cool i havent planted mine yet coz they are outdoor plants

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what I read. The lady at the shop said she did an indoor gro with success, too.

I am leaving the two smaller plants under the 400w MH 18/6 cycle for now to let them catch up a bit. There's some basil, chives, and dill to keep them company.

Flowering the 3 largest plants.

Man, this 1000w HPS is HOT! Currently monitoring temps closely...

I'm going to start tying the tips and training them to lean over. I can't remember the name of the technique, but this way the plants will be sideways, exposing as much of the branches to the light as possible. Now that I'm seeing how hot this HPS is, I'm definitely going to need to keep these short!

I do have a vortex fan that has not been hooked up yet. I was most concerned about the odor, that might be the next move if I can't keep temps down.

So what exactly is fim? Im a little familiar with topping but not quite sure how to do it or when to do it. Could you give me a bit more info on these two different things to get more colas?

Here is a link (found it by google) that will tell you all you need to know.

How-To : Fimming and Topping made Easy - Grasscity.com Forums

Yes, I know it's not rollitup material, but it's a great schematic, and will tell you all you need to know.

Personally, I fimmed at the 4th node according to someone's very informative post here. I cannot find that thread currently (search function has much to be desired.)

Good luck with your grow, and I wish you many colas!

I now have the vortex fan up and running exhausting hot air. Haven't resolved the issue of it's loudness yet. That will be a job for another day...

Got one of these to adjust fan speed:
Harbor Freight Tools - Quality Tools at the Lowest Prices
It works perfectly, and has cut noise down significantly. I'm running my fan at ~80% and it's perfect, keeping my grow room at a nice 85F.

Thanks for stopping by. Good to hear some positive reinforcement!

Here are the latest photos...

1: 2 smallest plants still vegging.
2: My flowering babies!
3: My most dense plant--if you look closely, you can see there are well over 10 tops (including all the branches)
4: One of the other flowering plants, close up. Note how there is a branch coming out of every single node, all the way from the bottom.

Is this amount of branching normal? I can't say I've seen any other plants on this board that have branched even from the first node...I could be wrong! Perhaps it's because this is an outdoor strain?

Here are my 3 plants that are on a 12/12 cycle.
I accidentally flipped off my timer for one day, so actually day 4 was 24h light. Then I switched back to the 12/12. Hopefully nothing will become of this flub.

Here they are. Not showing sex yet from what I can see. Plants are growing great!

Note how one of the plants (photo 3) is growing just as much horizontally as vertically.

Here are some close up photos taken with my camera looking through a magnifying glass. The HPS makes things look washed out. The detail's there, though.

Still no sign of sex!

Quick update:
I think I see ONE ball on ONE plant. Will monitor closely for developments...

More importantly, I underestimated the importance of keeping the room warm during the dark cycle. When I transferred the last two plants to flowering (4 days ago), I turned off the 400w MH they were under. This was serving a dual purpose, as it also warmed the entire grow area during the dark cycle. Anyway, "night" temps dropped from 65 to 50 when this happened, and my plants are NOT happy!

Growth for the past 4 days has been thin, and the newest leaves are small and spindly. Overall, the plants look worse than they did just 2 days ago!

Needless to say, I have turned the MH back on for warmth purposes only. Well, I stuck some chives, dill, and basil under it so as not to waste that light completely...I'll keep you posted. Live and learn, right?

This update I'm showing off all 5 plants.

First up:
The wide-load. I'll call her Bertha.