150w HPS Club and Resource Guide......

[StupidBoy]

Other thing, as you can see on the pic, hairs are getting amber color already, but buds are still very small. I don't know what to think about it... Any thoughts, please?

What you're seeing is normal flowering cycle. Your plants primary objective is reproduce itself. Just like your woman is only fertile for a few days a month, a calyx is only viable (able to be pollinated) for a week or so at most. After that, the hair dies and the calyx swells weather it was pollinated or not. The plant will keep making new calyx w/hairs until close to the end of the flower cycle. This will happen slower, and w/less frequency if she's pollinated because she will spend more energy on making seeds than making more flowers to be pollinated. Hope that helps

 

[J23]

Thnx StupidBoy. I'm maybe a little paranoid since this is my first grow...

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Very frosty, J23. Nice and green as well. 900ppm depends on your meter model. On a .5 meter, 900ppm is ~1.8 EC... pretty strong. 900 on a .7 meter is closer to ~1.3 EC.

Once your runoff strength exceeds what you're feeding, you can plain water the next round. This reduces the need for large runoff amounts when flushing.

 

[BongDaddy]

Wow, a couple of my plants are showing sex after only one 12 hour dark period. Pistils on one and balls on the other. One of the male bananas had actually opened, so it must have been there a couple of days and I didn't notice. Odd that it happened when I was on 24 hr lighting if that's the case though. I'm not too worried about anything being pollinated by it though. It was only one sac and it was on the first day of flowering.

It was the Blue God that turned out to be male, so I don't mind if I get a couple of seeds from that. All the others that I'm sure are females are way too early into flowering for it to hurt much. The worst part about it is that I didn't sex it before cloning so 5 of the plants you see in the pic I posted above have been culled. The horror! No big deal really though. The positive I'm taking from this is that I learned that Blue God clones really easily. Good to know since cloning seems to be the most challenging part of supplying myself so far.

 

[Pipedream]

Over the years, I've had my plants show their dominant sex at the strangest times. They often do it during their vegatative state before the system ever gets flipped to 12/12, and in rare cases, when they are just a few weeks old. And while I usually grow from clones, when forced to use seeds, I've been very lucky in that my favorite sativa strain, that I've been growing for many years, has the tendency of the females showing a full week or so before the males.

Regards to all and my best thoughts and prayers out to those with family and friends in harms way of this week's terrible storms in the south.

One Love, PD

 

[thinkin]

A Peek

A Peek

nearing the finish

frostiness is impressing!



but the lack of bulking up is dissappointing

interesting to note.. this bud is almost only light by the t8. 150 hps light is barely touching it.

 

[kilacaLIbud]

^digital ballast alwasy bulks my plants up . i dunno why .. but it does ..

 

[BongDaddy]

Over the years, I've had my plants show their dominant sex at the strangest times. They often do it during their vegatative state before the system ever gets flipped to 12/12, and in rare cases, when they are just a few weeks old. And while I usually grow from clones, when forced to use seeds, I've been very lucky in that my favorite sativa strain, that I've been growing for many years, has the tendency of the females showing a full week or so before the males.

Regards to all and my best thoughts and prayers out to those with family and friends in harms way of this week's terrible storms in the south.

One Love, PD

Thanks for the reassurance PD, I now know to keep a close eye on things even BEFORE I flip to 12/12, especially with strains I'm not familiar with. I've never grown that particular strain before, so I didn't really know what to expect.

The one bagseed that I flowered and then re-vegged after harvest has vegged out nicely, but it hasn't stopped putting out pistils. It isn't outright flowering, but every node has a couple of hairs. Even the clones I took from it are doing that. I can't really see that as being an issue, or at least I hope it isn't. Both the mom and clones are back on 12/12 lighting (today being day 5 of flowering) and they *seem* ok.

 

[oddis90]

The one bagseed that I flowered and then re-vegged after harvest has vegged out nicely, but it hasn't stopped putting out pistils. It isn't outright flowering, but every node has a couple of hairs. Even the clones I took from it are doing that. I can't really see that as being an issue, or at least I hope it isn't. Both the mom and clones are back on 12/12 lighting (today being day 5 of flowering) and they *seem* ok.

From what i know, the pistils are a sign of maturity which mean that the plant is ready to flower. Clones are mature enough to flower as soon as they root so thats why they would show pistils in veg stage too.

The pistils make em reek a little more too

 

[thinkin]

up close and personal with Rezdog bud

up close and personal with Rezdog bud

kila- thanks. all about getting close to the light. or just more light. last run same light same strain = Donkey Ds.

murphy's law is in full effect. girls just started to to sag! final bulking up has begun. no amber.

I know many have grown awesome looking buds.
But after a bunch of grows and a lot of research and dailing in, by far these are my best results.
usually tris only on buds and not fan leaves.
This time everything is coated.

upclose look at a bud


Forgot exact strain name. Rezdog diesel X kush
all with 150 hps and t8s
bigger isnt better. its all about the conditions.

 

[BongDaddy]

Nice pic thinkin. For some reason it reminds me of a fuzzy peach.

 

[thinkin]

flush

flush

Thanks Bong Daddy

updated picture of skunk frostiness

day 1 of flush




1 week left

 

[IwannatokeNbone]

yoo buddy i hope u get your 5 oz's, looking foreward to seeing your numbs, very interesting stuff.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

 

[guest 77721]

Looks like a nice cab build. I hope it does you proud!

I recommend 2x intake area to exhaust area for passive systems. Your system has some extra capacity built in seeing how you're running at minimum speed on the fan.

You might have add to the intakes later on if you start to run warm as the weather warms up. Just keep it in mind for later on.

I've got a couple of plants just starting to flower. My latest cab mod is to add mixed spectrum lighting with a 150 HPS and 2 x 42 w CFL's.

Thanks for the input BGT, and don't worry, I don't take it as ball bustin. I'm always open to suggestions that would help with better results.

I have a few more pics of the cab in an album I made:
https://www.icmag.com/ic/album.php?albumid=29129

That intake you can see in my post above is one of two. I have two 3" passive intakes and one 4" active vent. That makes about 12% more intake than vent. According to redgreenery's Ventilation 101 tutorial, a minimum of 10% more intake than vent can work, so I'm right at that threshold there. It's been running constant for over 24 hours now with no temp issues so I think it'll be ok.

Fortunately the cab is in my basement so ambient temps are never higher than mid to upper 60s. If it does become an issue though, I can enlarge the lower right intake to 4". For now I'm trying to conserve space so I'm going to see how it works out. My vent fan is a 161 CFM vortex fan on a temp-controlled speed controller. It hasn't run above minimum speed yet and temps haven't gone above high 70s in the cab.

The reason the intake in the pic above has a couple of elbows running into the cab is because where I have the cab, there's only about an inch or so clearance on the outside on the left side, so I had to bring the light trap inside. Those ducts are painted flat black on the inside. I now have a shelf over it, so I can put stuff there without worrying about bumping the ducts around and it only used 4" of the vertical space.

Most of the plants in the pic are female, but probably not all of them. Half of them are clones of a bagseed that I flowered and had great results with, so I re-vegged it after flower and took some clones. It actually cloned really easily too, I wish I knew what strain it was. It's some indica heavy variety (or maybe pure indica). It tastes amazing and really puts you on your ass.

The rest are some Blue God and Indica Diablo clones, gender unknown as of now, as well as a couple of Vancouver Seed Bank Indoor Mix beans that I germed, gender also unknown as of now. If all the unknowns end up being 50% female, then probably 3/4 of the plants in the pic above are female. Most are in 1L (1 quart) milk cartons. They fit in the cab really well and I'm hoping they'll work out well for a perpetual SOG situation as time goes on.

 

[BongDaddy]

Thanks for checking in red. I like your lighting setup - looks very clean! I may end up supplementing my 150 eventually too, but I want to make sure my present setup is dialled in before making changes like that. I was so impatient to use it like it is, I only tested it for 24 hours lol Today is day 14 of flowering and so far no major issues. The vent fan has never run above about 1/3 power. Fingers crossed!

Where I have my passive intakes positioned, I'm able to expand one of them to 4" or even 6" if absolutely necessary. It may be ok as is though. One fortunate thing about having the cab in the basement is that the ambient temps are pretty stable year round. It's actually cooler there in the summer than in the winter, since the furnace runs in the winter blowing heat throughout the house. During the summer it's nice and cool and we take refuge from the heat down there. I didn't really plan it that way, but it seems like I lucked out on my choice of setup location when it comes to ambient temps.

 

[unthing]

Latest project, 2 plants and 150 between them.

around 5 weeks 12/12:

and the other, around 5,5 weeks 12/12:

First one is bit taller, but they're roughly about same the same size horizontally.

 

[guest 77721]

I'm operating out of the basement too with good stable tems all year round. My spot is actually too cool in the winter being up against an outside wall with only the hot water tank for heat. I like having the flexibility of the CFL lightbar and the 150. I can swap in or out lights anytime I want.

I recently went on a 7 day ski trip and backed the lighting down to two 13W bulbs during mid-vegetation. Plants looked great when I got home. I'm going on a 3 day trip and next week so the plants will have a few cloudy days while I'm gone.

Thanks for checking in red. I like your lighting setup - looks very clean! I may end up supplementing my 150 eventually too, but I want to make sure my present setup is dialled in before making changes like that. I was so impatient to use it like it is, I only tested it for 24 hours lol Today is day 14 of flowering and so far no major issues. The vent fan has never run above about 1/3 power. Fingers crossed!

Where I have my passive intakes positioned, I'm able to expand one of them to 4" or even 6" if absolutely necessary. It may be ok as is though. One fortunate thing about having the cab in the basement is that the ambient temps are pretty stable year round. It's actually cooler there in the summer than in the winter, since the furnace runs in the winter blowing heat throughout the house. During the summer it's nice and cool and we take refuge from the heat down there. I didn't really plan it that way, but it seems like I lucked out on my choice of setup location when it comes to ambient temps.

 

[BongDaddy]

Cool that you were able to go away for a week and get away with just dialing down the lights for that time. I'm going away for 3 weeks in July and I've been wondering what I'm going to do. Since I'm relatively new to the game, experience-wise, my best option was looking like going to a wick system with a big reservoir of probably straight water. I wasn't too keen on that though, especially leaving stuff unattended for that long. A lot can happen in 3 weeks if you're not watching. I'm not so much concerned about what would happen to the plants, but I'm a bit paranoid about fan failure and/or other fire hazards.

What I've decided to do is to let everything finish flowering before I go, and then just completely shut down while I'm gone. I only need to keep my wife and myself supplied, so I should have enough to carry us through until I get back and get another run flowered and harvested.

 

[Pipedream]

I'm going on a 3 day trip and next week so the plants will have a few cloudy days while I'm gone.

Red - It was so good to read these words of yours. So many newer growers get so involved with how to get every last lumen out of their lighting and gram of growth out of their plants that they forget how things actually grow in nature and react to real-world conditions.

For years I've increased or decreased my lighting as situations required it, mimicking the changes in nature. At one extreme flodding them with every bulb I could jam in and light, and at the other, keeping a cloning-mom alive as a houseplant for several years with only a single 17w CFL as light.

Newer growers need to realize that while your plants may not exhibit much growth, once well established, they can be kept alive and healthy with a minimal of light. The added advantage to doing this is that their liquid consumption drops at the same time, and the need for ventilation is greatly reduced as well.

So plan properly guys and you'll be able to hit the waves for a nice vacation this summer. Or just don't panic the next time you HPS blows and you don't have a replacement readily on hand. Just throw anything in their with them and they'll have a nice cloudy-day break.