OK so it's 3am, and I'm up waiting for the Portugal Uruguay game. It's been a hard slog watching the tournament as most games are at midnight or 4am, but it's been worth it, there's been some great football.
I decided to spend some time with the girls and stake them out..... they all need to spread out a bit, and at 1 month old, they are just starting to flower. Now's the time to expose as many tops as possible before they go into stretch. The other option to staking is to remove leaves, but I prefer this method.
I started with the White Widow XXL.... the biggest and healthiest plant in this run.
This is her before, on day 28....
.... and after staking out all the long stemmed lower branches....
A close up shows those stems bent out at almost 90°, but the tips and side branches recover very quickly and start growing upwards again. A low stress supercrop!
Then I did the other Dinafem, the Blue Amnesia XXL. This plant is a bit shorter, and more bushy. A stake out was really needed not just to expose all the tops, but also to get some light and air in.
This is her on day 28....
.... and after today's staking out.....
and from above...
A close up shows how I bent out the branches....
The Glueberry OG is another squat, leafy plant. I've been really tempted to cut a few leaves off, but resisted the urge and now she's staked out..... because she was a bit shorter, I used soft wire to hold the bent stems down by hooking them to the holes in the sides of the Airpot.
Before, on day 28....
.... and after some training of the lower side branches....
.... and a close up.....
Finally the Night Queen..... slowly recovering from some kind of lock out issue.
I had a bit of a dig around to find the causes of yellow tipped leaves, and one theory is light burn, not heat stress.
According to Grow Weed Easy, Light burn usually causes yellow leaves at the top of the plant directly under the grow lights (though it can appear on older leaves that have been exposed for a long time).
With light burn, often the inside veins stay green. Yellow leaves won’t fall off or be plucked off easily, unlike a nitrogen deficiency where leaves fall off on their own. I found this to be true.
Light burn is often mistaken for a Nitrogen deficiency which makes wilting yellow leaves. Nitrogen-deficient leaves fall off on their own, while light-burned leaves are hard to pluck off.
A Nitrogen deficiency creates yellow leaves at the bottom of the plant as the Nitrogen is sucked out of the oldest leaves to feed the top of the plant.
On the other hand, light burn produces yellow leaves at the top of the plant under the grow lights because the leaves have worked too hard and/or too long from the light being too close. The leaves aren’t able to keep up with regular plant processes.
They also said that Light burn is very common with LED grow lights with just read and blue diodes, without any diodes in the green spectrum.
Bearing in mind I have my lights on for 24 hours a day non stop, and that these LEDs are very powerful, I'd say this might be the problem...... I haven't adjusted the height of the lights since they were seedlings, so perhaps the high intensity of the Skyline 400 was too much for the Night Queen?
I dunno, but when I saw all 4 plants showing signs of yellow tips this morning, I had to act fast!
I cranked the lights up for all 4 from 1ft to 2ft above the tops.
The Night Queen is not looking brilliant, but she is growing and flowering....
She's not very big, but most of her stems are clumped together in groups of 2 or 3, and I thought it would be good for her to spread out a bit with a few stakes, and maximise what pitiful harvest she has in store for me.....
Here she is now.....
That's it for now, gotta get back to the Uruguay match, they're up one and it's almost half time!
