LED vertical scrog

I thought I would start a new thread on vertical scrog. I will be using LEDs to light it.

Here is a picture of one of my scrogs done with LEDs.



Here is why I do vertical scrogs.

First is plant limits. I only have so many plants that I can run so I run big plants. I dont flower them till they are over 5 feet tall. And I like them more around 6 feet tall. Shorter if they stretch a lot and taller if they dont.

Second I like to mix strains. Since I am running bigger plants I get a lot of the same type of bud. So I like to mix them to get variety. I can mix stretchy plants with ones that dont stretch as much. This is because I can tie them back to the screen if they get to close to the light.

Third it is just easier to look at. I like the fact that I can stand in front of a plant and look up and down the entire plant. Much easier than bending over or kneeling down to look under it. And more likely that you will see any problems quicker.

Last it is easier to work on. I can stand in front of it and work on the top or I can sit on a bucket to work on the bottom. Plus there is no reaching several feet in to the plant to do what you need to do if it is flat on the floor or a table.

Now there are some draw backs.

One is it takes me a lot longer to get the plant to the size I want. You assume a lot of risk if some thing goes wrong in that amount of time.

Second it is a whole different type of growing and takes some skill to do. Nothing that you cant learn though.

OK lets look at the set up.

In my vertical scrog thread I go over how I build my screens. It is nothing difficult to do. Just click on the link in my signature and you can see how they are built.

When I ran around a bare bulb the tops of the racks are held together by a piece of pipe. These pieces keep the racks from falling over when the buds develop.

Now with the LED I am running flat against the wall so I can not use these pieces of pipe to hold the racks up. To keep them from falling over as the buds gain weight I had to come up with a different way. What I settled on was a eye screw in the wall and some clips. I just clip the rack to the eye screw and problem solved.

The next thing I had to do was figure out the lighting.

I designed and built these lights. Each one is 192 watts.



They are easily connected together with angle aluminum. So I can run one two three or more together. I can also turn one on and off by unplugging it. This means I dont have to fill the entire wall. I can run one plant or more.

I hang the from the ceiling on some black pipe. This allows me to slide the light away from the plants when I want to work on them. Or if the plants get bulky I cant move the lights away a little.



The light clips to a ring nut connected to a piece of PVC pipe that slides on the black pipe using a ratchet hanger.



Here is a picture of the parts needed to hang the light.



Now like I said the light is running at 965 watts.

Next is the room set up.

I am using the same rooms I use in my vertical scrog thread. They are 5x7 and 8 feet tall.

On the left side is a vent pipe going out of the room to a fan and carbon scrubber. It changes the air over 2 times per minute.

On the right side is my air intake.

In the center between the two is a fan mounted above the door.

You can see the fan just barely clears the lights and the slide bracket. I will also put a fan on the floor. You can see it to the left in the next picture.

Later I will get some pictures up of the plants I will be running.

The strain I will be running will be Hammerheads S-1 CBanana. It will be a straight run of three plants. It is very popular and so I can do all three of it and not worry about having ton much.

Real nice work!

I have just finished tying the first plant to the screen.



Here it is before I savaged it.



Here is what I trimmed off.



This plant was overgrown and trimmed to branch out. So a lot had to be discarded.

Here are the next two to be tied to a screen for this run.

It took me 45 minutes to get the first plant tied to the screen and trimmed up.

Lets talk about that in a little bit of detail. I like to take a bunch of the plant off when it goes into flower. I like to do this because it causes a in balance between the foliage and the roots. The plant will want to rebalance itself out. To do that it will need to grow the foliage back that it has lost.

So the trick is to focus that growth where it will produce the most buds. Not just any buds. We want quality buds. Those dont come from weak branches or all along a branch. They come from the branch tips of good sized branches.

With that in mind when I trim I will trim any branch that is not at least 1/4 the size of the branch it comes out of. I also will trim any bud sites along that branch and leave only the last bud site.

Lets look at a branch. We will look at this branch.



Now this next picture will show the lower part of the branch has the bud sites removed. The bottom two branches show this.



This next photo shows the branch taken from the bottom right in the picture above. Look closely and you will see all the nodes except the very last tip node are gone. But all the leaves are still there.

I left the leaves because they will feed the growth that the plant will do. Which is just that last growth tip. Most bud sites have just one fan feeding them this branch tip has about ten. Which bud will be bigger? The one with one fan or this one.

Did you every wonder why the buds by the main stem never develop? It is because that one fan is not getting much light because it is shaded. That will not be a problem when you have this many leaves feeding just the tip.



Now lets look at the top of the branch. There are a lot of branches that fit the criteria of at least 1/4 the size of the branch it comes from. But in this case they will shade each other. And I only get one fan per bud site. So not what I want.

In this case I will select a decent sized branch about four nodes down from the tip. I will take all the buds sites to just the tip of that branch. I also like to do one on the other side of the branch as well. You can see this in the picture below. Notice I left all the fans above the two lower branches.

OK so now you have a trimmed branch what do you do.

We need to tie it to the screen. I like to use tomato clips. The are quick easy and reusable. They can be soaked in a cleaning solution or run in the dish washer.

So using the clips I clip the branches to the screen. I need to spread the plant out on the screen. To do this I bend the branches where I want them to be.

Some times they snap instead of bending. To help stop this I snap the inside of the branch. This is simple to do. Place you thumbs on a branch or where a branch was. These branch sites should be next to each other. Then just give the branch a twist till you hear a snapping sound. If you do it right it will leave the outside undamaged.

The out side is where the food comes up the branch not the inside. Now to get the branch to bend you may have to do this to several adjacent bud site on a branch. Once you do this it should bend fairly easy. If it dont try snapping it again or doing more bud sites.



In the above photo you can see the black tomato clips I use. You can also see a pretty good bend in a larger branch. This branch was not very pliable.

Also notice the branch coming off at the top of the bent branch. I like to save a few like this to fill in the screen. Other wise I have a mess of 2 or 3 foot branches with just one growth tip. I dont like to save the branches on the inside of the curve though. They will have to just be bent over the bent branch in most cases and will require extra clips.

So where do I like my branches. If you didnt guess by looking at the above picture most are in the center of the screen. If they all run along the edge the center would be bare and they would be crammed into the branches coming from the plant next to it.

Now you are saying OMG you just took all your bud sites and you wont get any thing at harvest. Well that simply is not true.

Here is a picture of the last harvest I just did this week end where I stripped every bud site but the last one. All these colas are done like this.



So in case you are wondering here are the weights of these colas.
8.61
8.63
11.04
14.29
15.14
17.2
19.0

And all these grew from just one bud site.

Here is the tip bud from the biggest cola.



Here is what the 19.0 gram cola looked like before I trimmed it and weighed it. It is sitting on a 14 inch pot tray.



So for most plants this will work. There are a few that will not grow in flower. One is Golden Goat. If you do this you will seriously harm your yield. But for most strains this works.

Now lets look at another reason to trim all but the last bud site. It will give you bigger buds to trim which will make your trimming much easier. It will give you larger buds that are worth more.

Look at this picture and tell me which was easier to trim. The one on the right had two nodes left and the one on the left had five.

OK I need to get back to tying off another plant. If you have any questions ask away and I will try to answer them. But I will leave you with this picture from a past very LED grow.

Thanks for sharing 1 of your setups Ickster…..Like I`ve always said.....many waysta skin a mule.....Awesome job of exploiting your legal plant count to the max.....big bitches that need stitches after you operate on their ass....

Keep it comin my buddy...you da man....and thanks for your time....

Peace....DHF..... …….

Subbin in...You're full of good ideas.

DunHav`nFun said:

Thanks for sharing 1 of your setups Ickster…..Like I`ve always said.....many waysta skin a mule.....Awesome job of exploiting your legal plant count to the max.....big bitches that need stitches after you operate on their ass....

Keep it comin my buddy...you da man....and thanks for your time....

Peace....DHF..... …….

Click to expand...

I might as well since I tell people how to do it. Now they can see how it works threw a 10 week flower period.

hayday said:

Subbin in...You're full of good ideas.

Click to expand...

Thanks I try. I learn so much all the time and realize how little I know. lol

i know this guy named berry who is really interested in vertical led gardens,i will make sure to let him know your thread is here!

unclefishstick said:

i know this guy named berry who is really interested in vertical led gardens,i will make sure to let him know your thread is here!

Click to expand...

That is fantastic. Then I can be in the cool kids club.

I took some more pictures while I tied up the second plant. These pictures show more of the bending to put the bud sites where I want them.

You dont need to be afraid of bending your plants. Most will bend fairly easy. Some need the stem twisted a little like I posted before. Very rarely do I run into a plant that with a little manipulation I couldnt get to bend. Like this picture shows. I did a full loop with this branch.



Some times a branch will be to tall for the screen and I will need to shrink down the height. I just bend it back and forth to take some of the height.

If you look in this next picture to the left of the blue line you can see I did it to this large main branch.



This next picture shows the same branch as just above before I bent it up. It is to the left of the blue line. Notice to the right I clipped all the branches on the left side of another main stem. I did this because I knew I would be bending the branch on the left.



Just dont be afraid to manipulate the plant the way that is best for you.

The room is now in flower. All three plants are tied up to screens.



The plants are in 5 gallon bags of straight coco coir. Because coco tends to get fungus gnat. And these plants have a few flying around. I treated each plant with crab shell and mosquito bit. The crab meal I believe feeds the nematodes in the bits so I have a healthy colony to wipe out the gnats.



I also set the fan up in the back of the room on a pot riser. This will keep it out of any water on the floor.



Lastly I tag the plant closest to the door. The tag has the day they went in, when stretch is over and I can trim suckers, and the day they are done. It is on both sides of the tag. The tag is just a half 3x5 card with holes punched in it for a tomato clip to hold it in place.




I will be back tomorrow to add more. And answer questions if there are any. Right now it is time for bed. I have to get up in seven hours.

Nice thread interesting good job Ichabod Crane

Thanx for sharing. I’m well into a vertical grow using 10) 4’ LED tubes in an identical configuration as yours so I have more than a passing interest in your system. Here to learn!



One day I’ll have enough posts to edit my pix!!