New Grower First auto after 22 year break!

[The Iconoclast]

Hey man, looking good so far. I grew this strain awhile back, they can get big, nice smoke. There's a grow journal somewhere and on the Seedstockers website.
If it was my plant, now is the time to start defol, but depends how you want to shape her of course, how much head space do have?
I'm not convinced playing with the spectrum is an exact science, and certainly not when it comes from a led seller lol, I would give 100% of the full spectrum at this stage. She should start to grow 3-5 cm daily about now.
Which GH feed line are you using?

Howdy, you know I think you're right after all everyone's going to have different quantities in their lights anyway. I've duly put it back up to 100% on all three. I think I'm a little spooked about the compact stature of this plant.

With the light at the very top, I have 130 cm from the bottom of the LED to the base of the plant, if I get the light at maximum height and I keep the top of the plant 24 inches from the LED then I can grow the plant to 75cm. Currently it's 12cm hight. I have begun some mild LST with rubberised wires. I'm just using the standard Flora range, using all three to recommended balance, running at 580ppm but the water starts off at 130.

Funny you should mention the defoliation because I've been wondering whether I should get two of these top fan leaves out of the way. What do you think? At the moment I keep tucking them under.

 

[Tony21]

Haha man, those green ropes look very familiar maybe we can buy in quantity and get a good price

Again, if it was my plant, I would remove the leaves marked now and then from here every fan leaf when they are 8-10 cm, especially the ones growing inward toward the main stem. I marked a small one as a future goner in a couple of days or so. She's gonna look crappy for a day but that's part of the game. Leaf tucking is just a waste of time I think
You topped the plant so its gonna get crowded in the center, and the plant responds to defol with a vengeance, so once started it's ongoing pretty much to the end.
I supercrop instead of topping to keep the center open, but that makes tall plants, I think this strain can go to 1,8 - 2 m if allowed, so with hydro and your headspace, LST and some pruning is the way to go I think. And with a single light getting an canopy is the deal,i like to grow big Xmas trees but I have 2,2 m headspace and use COB's, 22 in the flower tent so I have more flexibility.
I rarely leave the tents without a handful of leaves and some broken branches, whatever catches my eye.

I use FloraNova as base at recommended dosage but I've stopped measuring years ago unless there is a problem and there hasn't really been any yet. Sometimes I back off a little, it's all in the eye

Here's some shots of some seedstockers amnesia I have going at the moment

Yeah I have to use the green ropes on top too or there will be a lot of belly flopping :smoking:

 

[The Iconoclast]

Nice. Thanks for the encouragement, I only used to grow photoperiods and always clones, I'd just grow to about 15cm then switch to flower and they'd grow to about a 1.2m with heads that were 3-4 inches in diameter, although the stems were very spindly so I'd come in one day and it would be broken from the weight and I'd have to suspend them. It's not ideal because of course one has to contend with budrot which is why I installed a massively powerful exhaust. So I'm used to going in and severely pruning but I have no idea at all yet what I should do with an auto.

I've attached three more shots above to give a better idea of scale. I will be removing the leaves you suggested. I have some screens made up if I need to do put one in. Although I'd be pleasantly surprised if I have to screen of green these.

Here's some after shots. All the old memories are coming back. I'd go in to my grow room and prune the living daylights out of them once I knew what they responded to.

 

[The Iconoclast]

I've just discovered I can gaff tape the green ties to the top of the cover so I can manipulate it better. So here's the final result plus a shot of the under canopy where you can see that this is going to be a very gnarly tough little critter. Got no idea what it's going to do now. However strangely enough even though I topped at the 4th node and removed the lowest node leaving 3 pairs, somehow or other maybe the magic cannabis elf, but there appears to be 4 pairs of shoots! The first two nodes are practically on top of each other!

 

[Tony21]

Very nice work and can't say I would have done it differently. In a couple of days you couldn't tell.
Yeah, she could do with some stretch. I keep the lights about 60 cm high at this age and let them grow up to the light. I use 2 x 75 w until about 5 weeks old in a 60x120 when they go in the flower tent.
This is typical 3 weeks old plants the small grow tent, and yes, they've already been plucked a bit

this is about 5 week old in the 120x120 grow section, you can see the younger ones in the back

And about 45 days, these 2 is stuck for now,, because there's no space in the flower tent yet, poor planning by the girls hahaha

By that age there ain't many true fan leaves left, I like to grow buds rather than silage haha

This is the whole grow kahuna

 

[The Iconoclast]

@Tony21, it's very difficult to get a sense of scale. For me the light distance is dictated by the LED I'm using, the viparspectra700PAR has the fans in between two banks of lights so separately to the heat stress issue is the fact that there will be a dead spot if the plants are too close. Vipar recommend 28" for the right spread, but I think 24" which is what they are now are works well in my 3 x 2 space. I prolly won't update for a while (famous last words!) but here's a shot of my set up. Where I am is going to start getting very very warm by next month, but the sideways exhaust of the Viparspectra PAR series has caused me to organise my grow spot to suit.

The back of the LED is a steady 40ºC as is the front at about 6", the exhaust on the side blows out the same temperature warm air. Outside the grow area currently it's 25ºC. So I've removed one plastic 'wall' of my room and I have a fan blowing across the top of the plants which are maintaining the outside temperature of 25. In the empty space above the grow light it's also steady at 25. The warm 40º exhaust blows sideways out of the tent. As I have a wall open into a larger room I can control the humidity by simply leaving a door open or not. This means I do not need any exhaust system which suits me at the moment. None of this would be possible if this was not an auto. I cannot believe how much easier everything is with an auto and not having to keep a light tight room with all it's concomitant problems.

P.S. lights have been turned down to their absolute minimum in order to take this shot. This video seems to point out that there's a lot of 'unnecessary blue light' in the Vipar however it's all speculation until I can do a side by side, which is not possible for me. Ultimately thought it's really all about the genotype. although this is only a cheap vipar it still has a vaguely similar balance of RWB.

EDIT: P.S. I'd like to add my 0.02c worth on the concept of the plants reaching up towards the light. I've seen that mentioned a few times and that just doesn't make any sense to me at all. It's not like water where it is conceivable that roots will have ways of sensing nearby water and searching for it. Light is different, a plant cannot sense how far away the source of a light is, a plant can only sense light that is actually falling onto it. Similar to how we see starlight, it might seem that our eyes somehow reach out to see the star but as far as we are concerned that may not even be a star there any more, yet we still see it because the light it emitted is still on it's way to us.

Now a plant *can* sense the direction of a light. It does this by hormones where are produced in the apical meristem of the growing tip. It actually senses the darkness and not the light. The darkness causes hormones to travel down the stem on the side that is dark and that causes the cells to either grow, or swell I can't remember which but when they get bigger on the dark side it causes the plant to bend towards the light. As far as I can tell light distance is simply a function of light spread and light/heat stress.

 

[Tony21]

This is a good write up about phototropism https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130528105946.htm

They definitely stretch towards ideal light levels, read PAR levels, that will provide the optimal saturation.
I sometimes use tomato planters like this to make tall stems, and then fill up with 170 cm or so of coco to see if makes any difference in growth due to increased root system, and it makes watering easier

In the last pix you can see the pot front right.
The yellow thingie is a DLI meter. I have 3 of those and an Apogee MQ-500 quantum meter.
All those plants were started at the same time, but although it might look like strong growth compared, it doesn't really make a difference down the road to I think and it nicks some headspace.

In the last pic you can also see in tried 2 different light sources and eac running 65 w actual or so.... The COBs do better but needs to be kept higher or they'll fry the seedlings

Nice comparison chart, efficiency is a misleading number, I want to know what the efficacy is, how much of the light emitted is within the PAR range and LED sellers absolutely refuse to tell this unless tortured or something. Stating efficiency is just cherry picking irrelevant numbers I think, blowing a smoke screen haha

Everybody wants your wonga any way they can get it

 

[Tony21]

Btw https://www.lumigrow.com/customer-story/dayton-valley-aquaponics/

 

[The Iconoclast]

All part of the fun. Basically the article was saying the same thing, that the plants 'move' towards the light they do not grow towards the light. They grow. They move. If they grow and move together it may look like they are growing towards the light.

I found the lecture I was referring to, starts at about 14 minutes in. https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4auf599ukpyws7/47 Form and Function In Plants 2.mp3?dl=0

 

[The Iconoclast]

Btw https://www.lumigrow.com/customer-story/dayton-valley-aquaponics/

Interestingly there was a link on that page to increased terpene production, which is what the earlier link I posted to suggested could happen if they get a heavy dose of blue at the end. So I'll definitely be trying that. What I am a bit concerned about is that according to the spectrum I posted earlier the Vipar, seems to have almost twice the value in intensity of the red rather than being equal. A proper spectrum analysis on this light would be useful as it does have a slightly different balance of diode. This is what made me wonder if perhaps too much blue is causing this plant to be so stocky. But it's early days yet, I shouldn't be so persnickety with just a single plant and my first auto grow! But I guess it's what guys do, over analyse everything ;¬)

PS, my own anecdotal evident does suggest that a bigger root system, at least in expanded clay, does make a difference. My very first plant 25 years ago was a California Redbud clone someone gave me, it was an unrooted seedling in a 4" Rockwool cube which I buried in a huge tub filled with expanded clay and draining to a recirculating reseviour. I got 8 oz off that plant. Which is amazing that it even lived as I had a 400W Son T Agro burning down on it from a close distance from the start!

But wait there's more, this seems to be giving some valuable information shows that the spectrum I posted earlier may not be reliable.