New Grower First auto after 22 year break!

[Tony21]

Haha, I remember my first grows and all the different ways .... I've stopped thinking and analysing, it's a slippery slope lol
The video is by KIND led without any independent verification and peer review, other than the comments, so use at your own discretion.
I used to run Viparspectra and similar too, when I switched to cobs my perception is that I saved about 50 % on power. And spending power on active ventilation is so yesterday I think, maybe not stone age but pretty close
As for best spectrum composition, the right cocktail as the bioradiance guys call it over on the other thread, the technicals are above my pay grade, the practicals looked like this

I don't see any difference with pot size, I've used everything from 30 l Airpots over XL autopots to Aquafarms and such, now I use cheap pond netpots and a flooded tray, much easier that way and I'm a lazy person, very lazy

 

[The Iconoclast]

That looks awesome and fun. Hopefully when my first buds are ready amotivational syndrome will kick in and I'll stop obsessing ;¬)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/...1411/amotivational-syndrome-and-marijuana-use

Here's some temperature readouts. It's 27 in the house, the outside of the grow room is 28 and the inside walls are 28, the plant itself is 26 with the fan blowing over the top, and the top of the root container is 34 so it looks like it's time to cover with white plastic. The fans are exhausting at 39.

The 26 degree on the leaves is after I moved the light down to 20".

May as well put a Day 24 update in.

Edit: I just had a look at Day 23 defoliate and I'm barely believing that this is two days! (I think the day 23 shots should have been day 22)

 

[Tony21]

Haha man, you pulled the trigger, yeah that's amazing for 1 day ain't it, she's rocking already man, now you gotta keep up with her, how's your jitterbug
I wouldn't worry about your temps, I have up to 43 c on top in the summer, obviously not ideal, but they can handle it.

 

[The Iconoclast]

That's good to know, because it's going to be 35-40 C here pretty soon for a couple of months. I was thinking about a grow tent and putting it in my room which has split air con, but that would be a PITA. So I'll just leave em where they are. At the moment it's a sort of a Shallow Water culture because the pump is so strong that there's a constant 1cm pool of water on the bottom of the top container and the roots are spreading into it. I'm still going to put an airstone in next week even though I prolly don't need it because that's the kinda guy I am.

 

[The Iconoclast]

This plant is very stocky which may or may not be due to the predominantly blue and white light it had for the first couple of weeks. This is making it difficult to LST all I can do is to slowly try and get the main stems to grow away from each other. I'm thinking that if it keeps up like this I may have to scrog it, but that depends on how it grows over the next week. I ended up taking off some inner pointing undergrowth as @Tony21 suggest might happen.

Nevertheless all looking good, no sign at all yet of any sex signs (apart from the leaves which are fluttering alluringly with future promises of fun). I'm picturing myself in my rubber ducky and electric trolling motor tooling around the local bay while I test out my Firefly2 at X-Mas.

My instinct is to go into this plant and so some serious trimming at this stage but I am holding myself back as my only experience is of a genotype and phenotype that are utterly different to this stubby auto flower.

here's a couple more shots of day 25 plus after watching every relevant video on youtube as probably everyone here has, I found last night a channel that has some surprisingly intelligent and somewhat unique videos. Particularly this is the first time that I've seen it pointed out by anyone anywhere that PAR values are highly suspect because of two reasons, 1 PAR meters have different ranges, and 2 they do not in any way at all tell you anything about which part of the PAR they are reading. IOW, you can get a high PAR with a shite spectrum.

Check it out, he's quite a funny guy too.



Edit: For my own record let it be hereby announced that one of my free seeds finally sprouted, yay. It's a white widow non auto, a 1/4" straight root emerged and I have planted it into a 1" Rockwool cube with a hole just deep enough to hold the tiny root and the seed at the surface, which was then placed into a very high quality seedling raising mix with trace elements and then covered with a very light covering of soil. I did plan a month ago to grow this as a normal photo period for the next grow but I have been converted to the easy care no fuss auto way of life so I'll maybe just keep this in a pot instead of planting in the garden and see what happens, it's two months till the days begin to shorten. I'll be doing two hydro Think Big autos next grow.

 

[The Iconoclast]

Earlier when I said I topped at 4th node and removed lowest node for three pairs, I believe that I in fact topped at the fifth node and removed the lowest node to leave 4 pairs which explains my earlier confusion.

I'm adding another photo because I've just done some more LST to open her up a bit and also to keep all the tops at the same height. So we're on day 25 now.

 

[Tony21]

I see leaf clawing, that's a sign of too much light and I think the reason she stays short and dense. I would raise the light, and she will stretch. Give her 3-4 days and you'll see her spread out. Patience man, patience.... it's only been 4 days hahaha
Good move on the inner growth, I would have done the same.

Nice find that video, explains spectrum composition very well. That's why something like the asentek passport or similar is needed, http://www.dvinfo.net/article/production/lighting/review-lighting-passport-spectrometers.html

My Apogee is only good for spot measurements and it can calculate actual DLI, that's it. But the price of the Passport ... I know a guy who's got one, and we were just discussing spectrum composition the other day haha, heres a screenshot from the asentek just a shame the passport won't tell, it doesn't know haha

There's also this at the moment, dunno, make up your own mind https://www.autoflower.org/threads/...ht-your-plants-have-been-missing.67679/page-2

 

[Tony21]

https://www.wur.nl/en/Research-Results/Themes/theme-food-production/photosynthesis.htm

 

[The Iconoclast]

I'm not too worried about that small amount of curl, I've seen people suggest that too much fan can cause it, which causes to much moisture loss, which could also happen if they get too warm, which is I suppose why heat stress could come into it when they are not hot. I've moved the lights a bit further away, 23" which is probably the ideal level in order to illuminate the area I'll need when they're bigger. They don't need that much area illuminated yet which is why I had the light more like 19", but I don't really think it's such a big deal. I've just spent a few hours getting more detail on pH meters, but you know, my gut says all this spectrum obsession and additives is not that important, compared with the actual genes.

I say this because the first plant I ever grew when I knew nothing was the healthiest plant I've ever seen anywhere, period. It was grown from start to finish under a son t agro, which was the go to light in the late 90's. I had it in a shower recess in my bedroom and I'd squirt C02 into the keyhole but it prolly leaked out before it did anything. Next I was only growing Dutch Hope also under Son T Agro from start to finish. Now we have all this spectrum obsession.

I'm a sciencey type of guy and I need to see logical reasoning. The way I see it, light or EM radiation in the visible part of the spectrum has no colour at all. Red light is not red, blue light is not blue. Light has no colour, nothing has colour, colour is a phenomenological emergent property of the brain. All photons everywhere in the universe are the same, they just have different wavelengths and the shorter wavelengths contain more energy. They have no other special property other than the properties that are due to the wavelength. If you want to bounce a photon off an object then it needs to be smaller than the object for example.

As far as I understand, (and this is just my understanding, I'm not claiming to be right) plants need energy. They get this energy from the the fusion of hydrogen into helium which produced amongst other things, the photons that hit the plant, these photons are ultra high energy gamma rays, and as they take about 40,000 years to get from the centre of the sun to the surface, along the way they kept losing energy from colliding with free electrons. The light reaction makes ATP which is the battery of all living cells. Now the em radiation needs to have high enough energy to kick an electron out of an atom but when the pigments absorb a photon it kicks an electron into a higher orbit which then drops down and emits the photon at a lower energy, usually in the infra red, chlorophyll molecules keep passing these photon around like a hot potato until finally the electron acceptor molecule can capture the electron and use it to split up a water molecule. The ATP produced is then used to power everything including the main game of building sugar.

What I'm not sure of is, do the various pigments in the leave need specific wavelengths, or can they take what they need and dump the excess as heat? I don't know, but I am trying to find this out. Just for my own interest.

Now when I think about all this, I have to ask myself, why is it that a continuous spectrum is necessary. I don't know. I'm trying to find out. Basically I think that the entire dope industry is cashing in on us stoners, especially us guy stoners who live for this analytical bollox. I know I do.

Albo Pepper does a great test on red white and blue light on lettuce and even the red is a bit stretchy which makes sense because it has less energy, but apart from that I was amazed to see the amount of growth on the pure blue and the pure red light which probably both had only a couple of different wavelengths each. In other words even with just pure blue or pure red light I'd they didn't do too badly. So when we have lights with 12 bands as well as 7500K and 3000K I do have to wonder if the completely continuous black body type of radiation that comes off the sun is really and truly necessary. I don't see why it would be. I can see that different energy wavelengths are going to affect different molecules in the complex cannabinoids but this constant striving for ultra perfection is more an obsessive hobby than anything really important.

Now you seem to be saying that moving the light further away will act like a carrot to a donkey as it tries to reach it but I just don't buy that. Assuming that heat is not an issue I know the vipar at 24" is putting out about 700 micro moles in the centre and at 18" maybe 900, but that's not too much for them.

Having said all that, I've moved the lights up and turned the fan off for the moment. I'll check them in the morning before the light comes back on, and try and ascertain if it is the fan or the heat build up in the leave which is causing too much evaporation, but you have already said that they can take 40ºC so why would it be heat? Before I put the fan in there was always little pools of water on the leaves when they overlapped which is not there now leading me to believe that this curl could very well be from too much evaporation caused by the fan. Maybe they just don't need any fan on yet until they get a bit more busy.

Anyway a chap's gotta do something to pass the time, there's only so many times a day that one can stare at one's plants. Although I have not discovered that limit yet!



Micro guy also does a spectrum test which is equally interesting.



BTW these purple cobs seem to be very interesting...

http://www.arcturusgrowthstar.com/tag/growthstar-scorpion-cob-led-grow-light-review/

BTW this regarding this video on aeration. Mind => Blown

 

[Tony21]

I agree with everything you say, except that plants won't stretch toward an optimal light level.
I think that most led sellers tend to cherry pick the documentation for whatever hardware they're selling, very selective and evasive they are when asked questions, and if that doesn't work, then try telling you off as a scientific dumbass haha