URGENT plant spacing question please help

ok so i'm two weeks into my first grow, and i'm concerned i may have too many plants for the space... will someone with experience flowering out Grandaddy Purple clones (or a similar pure indica) let me know what to expect?
i have 9 plants in 3-gallon pots pretty much filling a 34x40" floorspace, i had 12 in the beginning (which was wall-to-wall). so basically these plants have a square foot each. i've been hearing that GDP "bushes out" and that my 10" plants will be like 3' tall and 2' wide after flowering. do i need to take 3 more out? they ARE topped...
i was planning to go to 12/12 after a sunday blackout, so naturally i want to get whatever plants i need out out so that they can continue vegging outside without being confused by removal in the middle of flowering.
to make a long question short, around how big will a 10" grandaddy clone be by harvest if i flip it now? topped once, 3g pot, 600w hps. thanks!

If they are going to be switched to 12/12 soon you should be ok. Have you thought about lst'ing or a screen to spread them out? At the stage you are at right now, you could tie the upper portion of the plants to face away from the crowd and they will face back up in no time. They look like they we be ok though- even if you did nothing and just let them go.
But... if you put one or two outside now, you could more from those plants than the whole room provides- just of the outdoor quality. Good for big dubies.

its gunna be close man, I would LST them right now and/or during the first week of flowering, easy LST method take some clothes hangers and form like a U and hook the tops of the plants on the end and push them into the dirt so the tops are like flush with the pot - they will recover in only a few hours and the side branches will become the new main tops but your old tops will still form tops you probably should do either that or you could put a screen in there and start doing scrog

If you do nothing and let them go like thats its going to be a close call if you cant raise the light any

I don't know about that exact strain's growing characteristics, but I have found that in general it isn't worth crowding your growspace just to have more going. When they get bigger/older an overcrowded room will hinder light penetration as well as restrict air flow, increasing the chances of getting powdery mildew.

Looking good btw

from looking at the pic i think id pull 2-3 out .im the type that packs plants in tight then i bend ,tie,whatever i have to do so the plants get light but your plants are looking bushy and the 3 in the back i cant even see. i dont think a 600 will penetrate all that bush and there gonna get at least a 1 foot taller and prob alot wider. id also trim alotta what u have on the bottom off so the plant puts its energy towards flowering the tops your not gonna get a lot on the bottom with very lil light GOOD LOOK

nice, thanks for the info folks. yeah i can raise the light another couple feet if need be, and i have a pretty big inline fan, although it is going through a lot of ducting. mold was one of my concerns for sure chomps, because the canopy is so dense. but my plants look really strong and vibrantly healthy so i hope their resistance to that kind of bs is reasonably high... they're in a nicely controlled environment.
a really interesting thing just happened also... have done no investigation into this whatsoever, but the plants are sitting on steel racks and i set a couple of blown speakers (with really large magnets) on these racks. a short time later i noticed that they seemed to have perked up noticeably, especially the 2 front corners where i had set the speakers. now it could have been my imagination, or a completely ineffectual response to the magnetic fields, but the difference struck me and no other variables had changed. odd!

i dont think your speakers had anything to do with it but ill lmao if i see someone post a pic of there plant with tons of lil speakers around it saying they read somewhere speakers make ur plant grow better

its gonna be close man. but if you flip em now you will be aight

Stinkmeaner said:

its gonna be close man. but if you flip em now you will be aight

Click to expand...

What he said ^^^^ get them flipped spread them out a bit, and lower your light to stop any stretching that occurs during first week or 2 of flower once stretchin phase stops then lift your lights goin to be close thinking you might be burning your top buds if you dont do it that way

I think if you leave all the plants in you will be ok, maybe train four main branches each plant or get a screen. Will be compact in there and you'll want to keep the plants short and bushy so flip now. Also if you do take a two or three out i don't see this being bad either and probably get more bud to each plant. Now dose look like a good time to flip em as you will get a couple weeks growth before full flowering as well. Nice plants and set up, if i had that space and a seperate veg chamber i would utilise the space by adding a new plant from the veg chamber every week and taking one finished plant out every week. You got space for nine so with a strain that flowers in 8/9 weeks you will get a plant every week approximatly. With plants at every stage of flowering you will have small plants that dont take up much light or space and bigger plants that do. This will give more light and space to the bigger plants, if you want to pack out a grow with nine plants this way would be most effective and allow greater light penetration to the canopy. I do this and works out nicely for nine plants whereas if i grew in the same space one grow at a time with all plants at the same stage i would only get 5 in max and the yield would be the same for every plant in both situations reguardless. Sorry just random thoughts of mine.