Greetings, Boyz 'n Girls, OSP here. I've been hanging out at another forum for several years doing photoperiod grows & doing my best to help our new growers become proficient at the craft of growing connoisseur-quality weed . So allow me to introduce myself!
I'm an experienced grower (this year celebrates the 44th anniversary of my first grow!!!)
Over the years I did guerilla-style outdoor grows (grew a plant in a tree once
no shit). I took a bit of time off from growing while my son passed through his impressionable years, but once he was out of school I felt the need to get back into it. So, about 16 years ago I got tired of dodging rattlesnakes and helicopters & moved indoors. As this transitioned I moved to 100% hydro. I've traditionally done ebb 'n flood tray multi-plant grows, and experimented with DWC, RDWC NFT and some low-tech / low pressure aero.
Back when I was working hard at growing SOG, it wasn't unusual for me to maintain several mother plants, each under a 65W CFL. This got out-of-hand, so I ended up building a bonsai mother system RDWC system on a 4' wide shelf under three 42W CFL's, alongside a 15 - 30 node cloner in a simple aero system. The bonsai mother system was capable of holding up to (24) mothers (I never reached past 5 or 6 though), and kept the clones coming to feed a perpetual 400W veg SOG into a 600W HID bloom system. Ran like a well oiled machine if I do say so myself.
But this system brought out a hidden weakness in me
- tossing an old-friend / favored strain mother when another came along, and saying goodbye forever to a well researched pheno. So several years ago I picked up a small 2X2X5'3" Secret Jardin tent, with the full good intentions of using it for CFL Bonsai parentals for backup seed making to complement my RDWC Bonsai mothers. Logic being, the feminized seeds would take practically no space, and the pheno would be saved for future use as my tastes requested. Good plan. But, with one of my photoperiod seed orders, some smart-assed inconsiderate breeder
threw in some freebie autoflower seeds, and this eventually led to my downfall.
Next thing I know I'm online-late-at-night outfitting the tent with a 250W HID cooltube reflector, a couple of 170CFM centrifugal fans and a Phresh carbon filter. Before I knew it I've built a 4 gal. Flow n'Gro system and dropped my first autoflower strain - a World of Seeds Northern Lights / Big Bud Auto strain. This was a beautiful strain that stretched well and responded SOOOO well to LST, producing 6.5 oz in 85 days. I'd done some G-13 / Big Bud grows early on in my indoor days, so I felt I was somewhat prepared to judge the resulting auto product. Well, the Northern Lights influence was trippy enough to stand in for the G-13, and the Big Bud influence certainly helped the yield. From that day forward I was hooked.
It's a good thing because I never got around to using the tent for parentals / breeding / backup seed making
Next thing I know, I'm meeting with skepticism everything I'm reading about how great LED lighting technology is. And I'm sitting back smoking a bowl and calling Bullshit on all the wild assed cockamamied claims on how a 5 watt LED can grow 23 pounds of weed in 37 minutes and run so cool that you'd need to run a heater in your grow room during a summertime grow. So research sez, ya won't know if ya don't try. So after deciding I'm not going to shell out a couple of thousand on suspect technology, I ended up with a MARS-II 700 and their new 2'3" X 2'3" X 5'3" tent, and building another Flow n'Grow system to mirror the original HID system.
First LED grow - TH Seeds' Auto Original Auto Original BubbleGum - 11.76 oz in 84 days. Enough to convince my skeptical mind that LED was the way to go? Welllllll, maybe... but not so fast.
I'd previously grown the same strain under my 250W HID, and it did 7.3 oz in 75 days. The bud density, appearance, taste and smoke quality were comparable from both grows. But the HID grow stretched quite nicely during transition / early bloom, whereas the LED grow NEVER stretched. I was worried at first that this would be a shit-yield / fuck all LED lights in the ass, etc., etc. The plant never went beyond 10" tall above the Flow n'Grow net pot. But as it matured, with LST it almost filled the 2'3" square tent, and the yield spoke for itself - 11.76 oz in 84 days.
It actually beat out my previous best HID / autoflower yield of 11.2 oz from GreenHouse Seeds Kalashnikova Auto.
Happy happy happy.
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(I don't think this is working. If this post does not have a budporn pic right above this, someone pls instruct me on how to post a pic on this forum
. I normally host the image on tinypic and paste the url into my thread ???)
So, here I am today. I've
shut down all my HID gear (but kept it for now just in case), and I'm looking forward to fulfilling my wife's medical needs with single-plant autoflower grows. She smokes a LOT, so these damned autoflowers better produce!!! (ha ha).
I've bought a second MARS PRO II Cree-128 with its own tent.
I've put (13) autoflower grows behind me, and you would think that would be enough to know what I'm doing??? Welll, kind of. But the more I learn the more questions I have. I guess it's in my nature to question authority. So I Found this site, been lurking around as I learned to navigate a new forum, and now I'm signing up.
I hope to get some good experienced answers on best strains for yield-per-plant and medical needs.
I'm into a theory that HID's produce better stretch than LED's, and LED's may be better for bloom / bud settings.
I'm still REALLY curious about purported claims that autoflowers don't need the nute strengths that photoperiods may need. The less-is-more theory?
I've developed a lot of growing experience over the past several decades, and I look forward to trying to help out our beginner growers.
So if I can't find it, I guess we'll need to build it.
Or as the venerable Joe Cocker once said,
"I get by with a little help from my friends"
I look forward to seeing you all around the AFN.
