Humboldt Seed Organization Autotron does HSO UK Cheese - Hydro, COB

[Olde School Player]

I'll have pic's; my phone died the night before I left so I took my real camera. But still need to find the time to download them to my desktop so I can pick a few & post.
Will be watching for pic's of your girl.
I'm guessing mine has another 30 days to finish. If those buds start fattening like I think they will, this is going to be a good one!!!

 

[NorthernLights_420]

I did a dwc my first grow with indica dominant hybrids. Low yield due to many mistakes I made. Started off with root rot. Battled for 2 weeks and won but stunted growth and extended my grow. I flipped them to 12 and 12 about a foot tall all of them. Defoliated all fan leaves off at week 3 in budding, may of had light leaks and lost my light a few times so it disturbed the light cycle. Ended up with nanners, pollen and seeded whole crop. Chopped it all at 8 weeks and they were no where near ready. Trichs were clear and buds did not fatten yet. I fucked myself by taking bad advice online. I learned from my mistakes and am trying autos in dwc my 2nd run. Single 5 gallon buckets. 2 four site General hydroponics air pumps and general hydroponics Flora series with 0ppm ro water, calimagic, hydroguard which I'll never go without and also floralicious in both cycles and liquid koolbloom in budding. 1000 watt old school magnetic switchable ballast with air cooled hood. Run mh for late veg and hps flower. Use my t5 high output light for seedlings and early veg til roots are established well. Then I flip to mh. When preflowers start showing I'll switch to hps. Starting with northern lights auto by royal queen seeds, and pineapple express Auto by barneys farm. Using rapid rooter plugs and Wi-Fi box to germinate inside a Tupperware container. Still waiting on my first two seeds I ordered. Then also ordering a AutoUltimate from I believe Dutch passion, I want to add one more auto strain but not sure what strain yet. Looking for a fast finisher for my fourth plant. Kinda wanted blueberry auto but want something that flowers faster, also kinda want to try Blue Dream`Matic or gorilla glue auto both by fast buds.

 

[HSO-Mark]

Well that light flip to 12/12 has definitely helped to induce flowering, I've had a chat with a few guys around the office and this can occur. Sometimes the "auto" gene fails to activate at the traditional 4-6 weeks window and can take up to 70-80 days to start blooming under 18-20 hours of light. Thankfully this is quite rare (1-2% chance)

So glad the light flip has started the bloom stage. Nice job on defoliation and lots of bud sites showing which are going to explode in the coming weeks

Looking really good my friend and thank you for the continued diary update

I'll be back in on the next one mate

Kind regards

Mark..

 

[Autotron]

Here's some pics of her from today. She's still stretched a bit and is an absolute beast, but I can see the buds starting to fatten up as well. She currently stands about 35" tall and 32" wide(from farthest bloom tips). There are still some fan leaves on the lower periphery that I need to remove. If you look closely, you can see that many of these fan leaves have super long stems as they reach out for light. She is literally touching all four walls of my 4'x4' tent. She's still on the early bloom solution and seems to be doing fine. She is drinking plenty and I have noticed the PPMs climb to about 1200 after she's gone through a bit of the solution. I have been replenishing with both extra solution and plain water. pH has been dropping a bit(as low as 5.5) every few days, but that's probably due to her drinking so much. I keep her topped up and adjust pH every day or two. It never falls out of acceptable range, so I'm not too worried.

@Olde School Player , I do want to stick with the one COB, but I have been thinking about adding just a bit of additional light, as she has gotten so large and I'd hate to see her not achieve her full potential. I don't want to put down the cash for an additional COB, but I have been thinking about adding a couple 45w(true wattage at plug is ~34W) LED panels(Amazon product) that I have for side lighting or at a 45 degree angle to supplement the COB. Do you think it would be worth it to add these? I've never actually had the chance to use them. I want to keep my electricity usage low and not purchase any new lights. I have a 400W and 1000W MH/HPS adjustable ballast(50/75/100%) that would allow me to add anywhere from 200 - 1000W of supplemental lighting, but I'd rather not use it. I'm still going to do bit more defoliation, but I'm hesitant to do much more LST. I feel like the footprint of the COB isn't big enough to reach any branches that get stretched out along the perimeter of the plant.

I have a blue PVC sight tube on my bucket and absolutely love it. It's super handy for adding nutes or pH adjustment solution to the bucket(I shoot it into the top of the sight tube with an industrial syringe and blow into the tube to get it into the bucket). It's also super handy for draining the bucket without taking the top off. This came in handy when I didn't want to remove the netpot because of the circulating hose connected to it.

Your Dinafem Blue Cheese looks outstanding BTW! She looks very vigorous and healthy. Keep me posted on how she goes, I'm sure she'll yield super well.

 

[Death The Cultivator]

Here's some pics of her from today. She's still stretched a bit and is an absolute beast, but I can see the buds starting to fatten up as well. She currently stands about 35" tall and 32" wide(from farthest bloom tips). There are still some fan leaves on the lower periphery that I need to remove. If you look closely, you can see that many of these fan leaves have super long stems as they reach out for light. She is literally touching all four walls of my 4'x4' tent. She's still on the early bloom solution and seems to be doing fine. She is drinking plenty and I have noticed the PPMs climb to about 1200 after she's gone through a bit of the solution. I have been replenishing with both extra solution and plain water. pH has been dropping a bit(as low as 5.5) every few days, but that's probably due to her drinking so much. I keep her topped up and adjust pH every day or two. It never falls out of acceptable range, so I'm not too worried.

@Olde School Player , I do want to stick with the one COB, but I have been thinking about adding just a bit of additional light, as she has gotten so large and I'd hate to see her not achieve her full potential. I don't want to put down the cash for an additional COB, but I have been thinking about adding a couple 45w(true wattage at plug is ~34W) LED panels(Amazon product) that I have for side lighting or at a 45 degree angle to supplement the COB. Do you think it would be worth it to add these? I've never actually had the chance to use them. I want to keep my electricity usage low and not purchase any new lights. I have a 400W and 1000W MH/HPS adjustable ballast(50/75/100%) that would allow me to add anywhere from 200 - 1000W of supplemental lighting, but I'd rather not use it. I'm still going to do bit more defoliation, but I'm hesitant to do much more LST. I feel like the footprint of the COB isn't big enough to reach any branches that get stretched out along the perimeter of the plant.

I have a blue PVC sight tube on my bucket and absolutely love it. It's super handy for adding nutes or pH adjustment solution to the bucket(I shoot it into the top of the sight tube with an industrial syringe and blow into the tube to get it into the bucket). It's also super handy for draining the bucket without taking the top off. This came in handy when I didn't want to remove the netpot because of the circulating hose connected to it.

Your Dinafem Blue Cheese looks outstanding BTW! She looks very vigorous and healthy. Keep me posted on how she goes, I'm sure she'll yield super well.

View attachment 945830 View attachment 945831 View attachment 945832 View attachment 945833 View attachment 945834

She is looking great! Add some quantum boards for more light?

 

[Olde School Player]

Here's some pics of her from today. She's still stretched a bit and is an absolute beast, but I can see the buds starting to fatten up as well. She currently stands about 35" tall and 32" wide(from farthest bloom tips). There are still some fan leaves on the lower periphery that I need to remove. If you look closely, you can see that many of these fan leaves have super long stems as they reach out for light. She is literally touching all four walls of my 4'x4' tent. She's still on the early bloom solution and seems to be doing fine. She is drinking plenty and I have noticed the PPMs climb to about 1200 after she's gone through a bit of the solution. I have been replenishing with both extra solution and plain water. pH has been dropping a bit(as low as 5.5) every few days, but that's probably due to her drinking so much. I keep her topped up and adjust pH every day or two. It never falls out of acceptable range, so I'm not too worried.

@Olde School Player , I do want to stick with the one COB, but I have been thinking about adding just a bit of additional light, as she has gotten so large and I'd hate to see her not achieve her full potential. I don't want to put down the cash for an additional COB, but I have been thinking about adding a couple 45w(true wattage at plug is ~34W) LED panels(Amazon product) that I have for side lighting or at a 45 degree angle to supplement the COB. Do you think it would be worth it to add these? I've never actually had the chance to use them. I want to keep my electricity usage low and not purchase any new lights. I have a 400W and 1000W MH/HPS adjustable ballast(50/75/100%) that would allow me to add anywhere from 200 - 1000W of supplemental lighting, but I'd rather not use it. I'm still going to do bit more defoliation, but I'm hesitant to do much more LST. I feel like the footprint of the COB isn't big enough to reach any branches that get stretched out along the perimeter of the plant.

I have a blue PVC sight tube on my bucket and absolutely love it. It's super handy for adding nutes or pH adjustment solution to the bucket(I shoot it into the top of the sight tube with an industrial syringe and blow into the tube to get it into the bucket). It's also super handy for draining the bucket without taking the top off. This came in handy when I didn't want to remove the netpot because of the circulating hose connected to it.

Your Dinafem Blue Cheese looks outstanding BTW! She looks very vigorous and healthy. Keep me posted on how she goes, I'm sure she'll yield super well.

I understand your hesitancy to perform more LST - your canopy has already outgrown the coverage of a single COB. But if you can get more light to the canopy, the additional LST will help greatly. If you already have the blurples, by all means add them. Can't comment on their quality as the Amazon listing has no technical specs, but any extra light should be helpful at this point. Two of those will use more watts than your single AutoCOB but I think you can most definitely use them.
The question is spacing, how / where to hang. If you can do a 45 degree hang at each side of the tent, with the lower edge (closest to the tent) a couple of inches beyond the outside edge of the plant, and 6" above the edge plant canopy, I think that will be most beneficial. Those are really small LED's - if the picture is accurate I counted 15 rows of 15 or 225 bulbs. At 34 watts-at-the-wall, that's only 0.15 watts per LED so their intensity will be minimal. You're going to need to get that close for them to help. Sidelighting? No, you need top lighting with the spread of that girl.
Keep your COB centered, but lower it to 12" as well. As big as your girl is getting you're going to need all the light intensity you can muster to keep her from fox tailing & ending up with loose fluffy buds. Don't worry about lowering the light, just do it by a couple of inches a day and watch for any light stress. The plant will harden quickly if it even needs any time to adjust (probably not). @HemiSync has run his COB's as low as 5" from the canopy with absolutely no signs of stress whatsoever. I run my 325W actual at 14 - 16" and my plants love it. Just watch your ppm's - and remember, less light means less nutes can be absorbed. So if ppm's keep increasing, reduce your percentage of water to nutes.
An interesting thing with my plant, while I was in CA for six days my ppm's dropped significantly using early bloom formulation at 75%. But since I went to mid bloom, ppm's have started climbing (not too uncommon when veg is finished) so I've had to reduce my nute strength to 58% (7 gallons of nutes mixed into 12 gallons of water). And that's with six time the light you are using. So don't be afraid to go lower if the ppm's tell you that's what she wants.
I think your girl has had enough early bloom formula, and to discourage any more vertical growth I'd replace nutes with mid bloom but drop it to 50% (mix 2 gallons of nutes into 4 gallons water & save the remainder for top off).
If those buds don't start stacking up & filling in the internodal space after these changes, you have a big decision to face... loose buds or HPS. That plant in a 4X4 tent should flourish under a 400W bulb, ESPECIALLY if you have a cooltube reflector. If not, just ventilate the crap out of the tent & keep[ the light up at 15 - 16". She will fill out then.

Will check back, good luck & keep at it!

 

[HemiSync]

@HemiSync has run his COB's as low as 5" from the canopy with absolutely no signs of stress whatsoever. I run my 325W actual at 14 - 16" and my plants love it.

This is true, but remember the circumstances, it was the single main cola of a photo plant that we very slowly lowered the COBs down to it after it was well developed. My current grow my girl is, like yours, 14-16 inches from 5 AutoCobs now that she is in full bloom. I can actually say that ALL my buds this time are the same distance from the lights. :smoking:Stop by and take a look.

 

[Autotron]

I understand your hesitancy to perform more LST - your canopy has already outgrown the coverage of a single COB. But if you can get more light to the canopy, the additional LST will help greatly. If you already have the blurples, by all means add them. Can't comment on their quality as the Amazon listing has no technical specs, but any extra light should be helpful at this point. Two of those will use more watts than your single AutoCOB but I think you can most definitely use them.
The question is spacing, how / where to hang. If you can do a 45 degree hang at each side of the tent, with the lower edge (closest to the tent) a couple of inches beyond the outside edge of the plant, and 6" above the edge plant canopy, I think that will be most beneficial. Those are really small LED's - if the picture is accurate I counted 15 rows of 15 or 225 bulbs. At 34 watts-at-the-wall, that's only 0.15 watts per LED so their intensity will be minimal. You're going to need to get that close for them to help. Sidelighting? No, you need top lighting with the spread of that girl.
Keep your COB centered, but lower it to 12" as well. As big as your girl is getting you're going to need all the light intensity you can muster to keep her from fox tailing & ending up with loose fluffy buds. Don't worry about lowering the light, just do it by a couple of inches a day and watch for any light stress. The plant will harden quickly if it even needs any time to adjust (probably not). @HemiSync has run his COB's as low as 5" from the canopy with absolutely no signs of stress whatsoever. I run my 325W actual at 14 - 16" and my plants love it. Just watch your ppm's - and remember, less light means less nutes can be absorbed. So if ppm's keep increasing, reduce your percentage of water to nutes.
An interesting thing with my plant, while I was in CA for six days my ppm's dropped significantly using early bloom formulation at 75%. But since I went to mid bloom, ppm's have started climbing (not too uncommon when veg is finished) so I've had to reduce my nute strength to 58% (7 gallons of nutes mixed into 12 gallons of water). And that's with six time the light you are using. So don't be afraid to go lower if the ppm's tell you that's what she wants.
I think your girl has had enough early bloom formula, and to discourage any more vertical growth I'd replace nutes with mid bloom but drop it to 50% (mix 2 gallons of nutes into 4 gallons water & save the remainder for top off).
If those buds don't start stacking up & filling in the internodal space after these changes, you have a big decision to face... loose buds or HPS. That plant in a 4X4 tent should flourish under a 400W bulb, ESPECIALLY if you have a cooltube reflector. If not, just ventilate the crap out of the tent & keep[ the light up at 15 - 16". She will fill out then.

Will check back, good luck & keep at it!

I just had the utility company guy over today in my basement for a scheduled visit, so I moved her upstairs out of sight. This gave me an opportunity to really get a closer look to her all around and in the light of day. I really noticed how thin and long many of the branches are. I even had a few along the periphery flopping right down horizontally. She has always shown some pretty long and stretchy internodal growth too. Far more than any other plant I've grown under MH/HPS. It leaves me wondering how much of this is due to genetics and how much to light strength. I'm definitely resolved to rig up a couple of those LED panels today or tomorrow at a 45 degree angle like you recommended.

I've been keeping my COB much lower the whole time than other folks usually do, so I'm surprised to see so much stretch on her. I have been keeping it at 12-14 inches away from the top for the most part. Any lower and I can see that the perimeter is not getting enough light and it's like a spotlight in the middle.

I think I'm going to do a bit of pruning on her tonight to remove some of the satellite branches along the perimeter that are floppy from stretching and will never produce much. @Olde School Player , do you think that's OK to do at this stage or will it cause too much stress?

Gonna mix up a brew of 50% mid-bloom brew like you recommend as well.

 

[Olde School Player]

@Autotron Shouldn't stress her at all. Removing the weak lower branches is something I routinely did with my photoperiod grows and it only helped / never hurt.
I think you're already using Si, and have fan circulation on her, which are the best two things you can do to encourage healthier infrastructure growth. Pruning the weak ones is all that's left.
Genetics? Hmmmm, possible, but Humboldt usually grows healthy branches. And my Blue Cheese is related to yours somewhere in the woodpile. All my bets are that she outgrew the light you had available.
Only other thought - I hesitated because I have never had to do this before, until I remembered our strains are similar. I mentioned earlietr, I completely eliminated ALL Flora Grow from my formula. I was getting too much deep emerald green coloration on all my leaves. And it's pretty well known that too much Nitrogen can inhibit bud formation and encourage loose buds. So I think it would be worth a try for you to do that as well. Go to 50% strength but eliminate the Grow. Can't hurt!!!

Do you recall what degrees Kelvin color rating your COB is? 2900? 3500?

 

[Autotron]

Hey @Olde School Player, mine is the standard 3500K AutoCOB. I popped in a couple of those LED panels. Let's see if that helps. I couldn't get them to 45 degrees, so they're at like a 55-60 degree angle and as close as I can get them to the plant without wobbling or swaying. I also mixed up a new brew of mid-bloom solution at 50% strength, minus the Grow formula. Let's hope this makes a difference. I noticed a couple days ago that she was still stretching and growing, which is going to be an issue. May have to bust out the HPS if this continues. Perhaps the increased spectrum of light from the LEDs will help. She's 68 days old today. My plants generally finish in 70-90 days, so she's way far behind from where I want her to be. Hopefully this pays off with increased yield at the end. Fingers crossed.