Cheers to all of you for your warm & gracious welcoming!
A420er:
Thanks, buddy. Glad to meet a fellow old timer. How could we ever be too old to grow the very best plant on this earth? Its very existence is incontrovertible proof of the Divinity of our existence!
Yea, the fan leaves...Well, I am seriously considering starting a thread about it. Unlike you, I do not share the belief that there is ever any reason to let those leaves get so large as to shade the nodes & growth below them.
Like most of you, I truly enjoy marijuana-pornography. I love looking at photos of the plants...and about 95% of what I have seen here at AFN and at Overgrow and Grasscity appals me. All that stretching that goes on due to lights being too high above the plants and all those HUGE shade leaves just makes me sick. So much wasted space!
There are 2 kinds of growers: Commercial & Personal.
The Commercial growers are obsessed with quantity and the Personal are concerned with quality.
You have to decide which one you want to be. If it's Personal, then you need not want to have large plants---unless you can afford higher wattage lights.
The Commercial growers can afford high wattage lights but most of us Personal growers cannot.
The Commercial growers can afford large growing spaces---like entire bedrooms or lofts, where-as most of us Personal growers only have small growing spaces.
So, for the Personal growers who only have a small or tiny grow space and can only afford small lights like LEDs under 300 watts or non-LEDs under 400 watts, it behooves us to maximize our yields. This means avoiding wasting any plant space. It means growing plants that are under 2 feet tall, and preferably no taller than between 12 - 18 inches. It means rather than growing plants with sprawling branches, we grow plants that are one big donkey-dick bud or one main donkey-dick with a few lower-branched smaller buds.
I usually begin removing shade/fan leaves after the 3rd set of 5-fingered leaves have established themselves. This means, I begin removing the 4th set of 5-fingered leaves (and all the others that come after them) as & when they get large enough to shade the growth beneath them. I have NEVER killed a plant nor hindered its growth by doing this. This allows the light to reach the nodes and stimulates new branch growth. By keeping the light as close as possible to the top of the plant, the new branching will not become sprawling but will aid in the production of one big bud once the flowering process begins. This is an ideal way of growing Autos if you only have a small grow space and a relatively small light (like 90 - 240 watts).
I started growing pot in 1979 in the San Jose area of California. I started with bagseed Colombian Gold and never did bring any of those sativas to maturity. We just didn't have enough sunlight for them even though we had mostly sunny days every day throughout the summer. Those Colombians wanted more than 14 hours a day. They wanted something in the region of 18 hours!
In the Autumn of 1980 indica began to appear on the commercial market. We called it "sinse" for sinsemillia. Most of it was being grown in the California counties of Santa Cruz, Mendocino, and Humboldt. As the years went by, the sinse became skunkier & skunkier. Those California skunk plants were almost Autos in and of themselves. They certainly began flowering a hell of alot sooner than the sativas from Mexico & Colombia. Naturally me and my friends began to only grow skunk. We had some great success.
In 1989 I bought my first HPS. It was a 250 watt. This is when I began to grow One-bud plants about 14 inches tall. As I said in an earlier post, I learned from 'R' in High Times about removing shade/fan leaves and have never looked back.
I am a relative newbie with LEDs. I bought my first one, an Evader UFO 135, in December 2012. I only have a tiny grow space and an even tinier budget, so I cannot afford a bigger light (although I am on the verge of getting an Evader 240). Even if I could get a much bigger light, say, a 400 or 1000 watt, I could not afford the electricity.
I am still in the experimental stage with my 135 UFO. My first crop pleased me because I had 15 small Lowryder plants under it and was able to begin harvesting their mostly red-hair tops at the 6 week mark. Their lighting was 20/4.
My 2nd crop was a failure due to a cold-weather, no heating, stunting.
8 days ago I began my 3rd crop. 4 Lowryders. I will start a grow journal and hopefully be able to upload photos with my Toshiba camera.
Question:
Am I a micro-grower?
If I am, I will start a thread about Shade/Fan leaves in the micro-grow section. I will copy what I have written in this thread and perhaps add a bit more detail.
Peace!
.
:group:
