HELP! questions for the experienced grower

[TheKnow2Grow]

Hello all,

Im currently on my second/third grow and all is well so far. Let me give you some backround info.

My frist grow went ok, i ended up having to harvest a little early becuase i noticed what looked like mold (brown, web-like growth) forming on the tops of all 3 colas of my ladies. The buds would peel right off the stem and were brown and just ugly looking. I got around 2.5 oz though and I was content.

Right now im running a scrog for my second grow. I LST'd a clone of the first grow and put it under a screen. I just switched it to flowering today. The plant is taking up about 40% of the screen but i anticipated the streach will fill out the screen to about 70%.

I have a few questions and im hoping somebody can help me out.
1: Why did my plants become "moldy" at the tops during the end of my first grow. The temps seemed ok around 75-83 on average and the humidity around 35-50. Im not sure about the pH but i do feed my plants with tap water and i think that its slowly killing them.


2: I have 2 clones in small grow cab and they are growing alot faster than i thought. I want them to be ready when my scrog ends but im not sure if ill be able to time them right. Is there a way i can postpone the growth of these two? So that they are still alive but they are just "frozen" at the size they are at?

Any help is apreciated, thanks and happy growing!

 

[sero!]

for number 2 research ¨supercropping¨, for number one i´m not sure.

 

[green_farmer]

Number one question sounds like a mold I have seen called "botritis" I think? By the time the mould is at the stage that you describe, the entire inside of the bud is gone. Breaks your heart, however, once you know about this and why it happened...

It happens outdoors too, but only in very persistent wet conditions - it was a major cause of fails the last season here locally after 3 weeks of constant rain.

Inside, usually caused by lack of ventilation, and buildup of heat and moisture.

Increase your air into/out of the room, and put a fan or two over the plants...

Hope this helps

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

I have a few questions and im hoping somebody can help me out.
1: Why did my plants become "moldy" at the tops during the end of my first grow. The temps seemed ok around 75-83 on average and the humidity around 35-50.

You have an exhaust fan AND a circulation fan?

Im not sure about the pH but i do feed my plants with tap water and i think that its slowly killing them.

You might want to consider a pH test kit or a digital meter. Checking the runoff pH will help identify the combined pH of your soil mix, water and nutes. Are you using town water? If it has chlorine, you can let it sit 24 to 48 hours in an open container before using. If it's chloramine, evaporation doesn't help. If your problem is water quality, you may have to consider another source.

2: I have 2 clones in small grow cab and they are growing alot faster than i thought. I want them to be ready when my scrog ends but im not sure if ill be able to time them right. Is there a way i can postpone the growth of these two? So that they are still alive but they are just "frozen" at the size they are at?

You could reduce light intensity and cut nutes to 1/4 strength. Your plants might not remain pristine but they'll be fine when you're ready to rock.

 

[green_farmer]

The temps seemed ok around 75-83 on average and the humidity around 35-50. Im not sure about the pH but i do feed my plants with tap water and i think that its slowly killing them.


2: I have 2 clones in small grow cab and they are growing alot faster than i thought. I want them to be ready when my scrog ends but im not sure if ill be able to time them right. Is there a way i can postpone the growth of these two? So that they are still alive but they are just "frozen" at the size they are at?

Any help is apreciated, thanks and happy growing!

Yes, what DiscoBiscuit said above.

Another option is to practise your cloning skills on these clones until the next grow is ready to commence...maybe you know someone who would appreciate them...or you can pick out the very best growing clone to keep... and this way keep the plants powering...and you can always cut the plant back before you put it in flower, if you need too?

I used to do that and it helped with getting the plant ready for the SCROG too...my next grows were/are always the mothers - also, if you have a discreet big backyard or an outside area, (and depending on climate) maybe you could throw the extra clones outside into the winter (if you are n hemi) and see what they give you after 8 weeks...that's what I do still sometimes and it can be very worthwhile sometimes....

 

[Dr Dog]

i would guess you are not watering properly

Your roots died, the medium turned moldy and that got spores to the damp plant, especially the area with the most heat

Just a guess, seeing no pictures and with very limited info

 

[TheKnow2Grow]

actually poor watering sounds like it could be it. I have to admit i got kinda time consumed near the end of the grow and didnt water them enough. When i felt the tops of the colas around the buds it felt very dry and crispy almost, defiantly not healthy feeling though.

You have an exhaust fan AND a circulation fan?

Yes i do. To give alittle bit more info. I am running a 250 watt MH/HPS light with a reflector and a 170 Cfm inline fan. My room is about 80 cu ft.

Yes, what DiscoBiscuit said above.

Another option is to practise your cloning skills on these clones until the next grow is ready to commence...maybe you know someone who would appreciate them...or you can pick out the very best growing clone to keep... and this way keep the plants powering...and you can always cut the plant back before you put it in flower, if you need too?

I used to do that and it helped with getting the plant ready for the SCROG too...my next grows were/are always the mothers - also, if you have a discreet big backyard or an outside area, (and depending on climate) maybe you could throw the extra clones outside into the winter (if you are n hemi) and see what they give you after 8 weeks...that's what I do still sometimes and it can be very worthwhile sometimes....

I was thinking about planting it outdoors but it think it's much to cold to do that now(although it would be nice to have some purple colored buds ) Becuase this grow im only using one clone id like to try to use 2 this next grow so i want to do all i can to keep them both alive. Ive actually only cloned 3 so far but ive had a 100 percent success rate. All i did was clone late in flowering and i put the cuttings in a bottle of water. They sprouted roots and i just planed them in some starter mix. Maybe im just lucky

You might want to consider a pH test kit or a digital meter. Checking the runoff pH will help identify the combined pH of your soil mix, water and nutes. Are you using town water? If it has chlorine, you can let it sit 24 to 48 hours in an open container before using. If it's chloramine, evaporation doesn't help. If your problem is water quality, you may have to consider another source.

I have a pH tester but its just one that you stick in your soil and wait a minute for the reading. I used to water with distilled water but that got expensive buying a couple gallons a week. I then tryed to leave the town water out for 24 hours and I didnt see any problems for a while. But then i started to get this rusty look on some of the sun leaves and i did some reserch. I decided it was cal/mag deficiency and I fed them that for a while. It slowed the problem but didnt stop it. If anyone has any input into that im still trying to figure out if its my town water or what.

Also, does anyone know what would happen if i just let the clones grow in the solo cups that they are(just some starter mix and perlite) in till they cant grow anymore. Would this make them stay as they are or would this cause problems for their root system?

Thank you all for the replies, if anyone else has anymore please respond!

 

[Hundred Gram Oz]

Did you have any dead leaves laying around? Mold loves to grow on these, not dry leaves btw

 

[TheKnow2Grow]

Did you have any dead leaves laying around? Mold loves to grow on these, not dry leaves btw

My plant had some dead leaves, and i did have some laying on the ground. I plucked some off the plant but not all. If i had some lying around how could that create mold to the colas?

Thanks for the reply

 

[LadyLargely]

Hey mate, cool to see another ScrOG grower. Before I go giving you tips on the hallowed and slightly misunderstood technique I'll give you a quick run-down on my own ScrOG work to show what I do with them:



I go full-blown ScrOG with stems woven into the screen, complete with horizontal colas:

These last shots where just taken today. Just a little under 1 month from 12/12, prolly got another 5-6 weeks to go.


Anyway, on with the advice.

Crispy, under-watered plants covered in a thin brown fuzz sounds like powdery mildew and it is a common if not particularly resilient mold. Its presence is encouraged by lots of dead and drying plant material. Do a better job of keeping the plants free of dead leaves. ScrOG makes this problem worse, there is little tolerance for buildup of dead matter under the screen.

You could also be having pH problems. What kind of nutrients do you run? Tap water isn't automatically a problem. Microbially-active organic grows like I run actually love crappy high-PPM tap water. However its bad for pH buffing if you run artificial salt/mineral nutes. Your soil chemistry is entirely dependent on what you put in it. Oxygen-boosted organic grow buckets like mine require zero maintenance to keep pH stability, even when the medium is very dry or very wet or when using high nutrient dosages. Most other nutrient schedules and grow styles are not this way and some preparation and scheduling is needed to keep the chemistry happy all the way to the finish.

As for your stretchy sprouts, supercropping is indeed an excellent solution. Don't be afraid to start early. I do it to my plants from their earliest days as seedlings and the only result is zero stretch, huge nutrient uptake ability and dense bud formation:



Good luck

 

[TheKnow2Grow]

the powdery mildew sounds exactly right. I did have some dead leaves on my plants. Thanks for all this it helps alot to understand what i did wrong.

Also, i did my scrog differently. When i looked it up it said to just pull the stem underneath the screen not weave it through. Two days ago i noticed somone did something about weaving and i thought i completely messed up my scrog. I did some research and i saw discussions of to weave or not to weave. I think for this grow im going to continue what i have and for the next one im going to weave and see what results i come up with and see what works best. I saw that the weaver's said that scrog is misunderstood these days. Im guessing when you weave it maximizes your light and increases your yeild, correct? If i weave though do i have to start with my largest gal. pot becuase i wount be able to transplant half way through?

The Nutrients im using are the Fox farm line with fox farm ocean forest.

Ill try to get a camera and post some pics of my grow soon.

 

[LadyLargely]

Yea, pictures are a huge help with diagnosing complex issues like this. Doesn't sound like anything serious though, you should get it fixed and be running optimally within a single iteration. I was just posting in a thread by a guy that's been trying unsuccessfully to grow out of a space for two years. This kind of repeated failure that continues despite all efforts to make it right is known as Bad Room Syndrome

Happily, you don't sound nearly so bad off. Sounds to me like you just need some clarification and refinement on your training techniques and a little work on getting your feed/watering schedule down to a science.

FFOF is great soil and some of the best bagged ganja-growing equipment out there. Left all by its lonesome though and it doesn't 'hold' water very well. You might consider adding things like vermiculite and Soil Moist water crystals to make your watering schedule less high maintenance.

I take it you're using Fox Farms salt nutes? Tiger Bloom and all that? If so you need to get better at monitoring your soil chemistry. Acquire a pH testing kit along with CAL-MAG and some kind of pH down. You're going to want to test the pH before and after feedings, monitor the change and buff the pH as necessary to get it back to a desirable 5.5-6.5 range.

It does sound like you've slightly missed the point of ScrOG in your execution of it. It is a much misunderstood technique. I just had a big discussion with a bloke about the purpose of ScrOG:

Glad to see you are interested in ScrOG. As an old OG oficianodo and a religious practitioner of ScrOG I see the technique as a bit of a lost art. It seems many more attempts at horizontal gardening are just a cannabis plant with a screen in the middle, and not true ScrOG.

"True Scrog" I think is the practice of literally weaving the stems of your cannabis plant into a screen. As such:



A comlete weave 'cycle' requires three adjacent holes in the screen. Up through one, down into the next and then the plant grows itself back up through the third and final one. For this reason I prefer hexagonal screen. I consider the epitomy of cannabis-growing screen to be galvanizd two inch hexagonal poultry net. Cheap, strong, flexible, stays out of the way and because of the coating tends not to 'cut in' to cannabis stems.

Repeated success with this process basically requires the use of supercropping. Basically s/croping is just pinching the stem gently between your fingers, rotating it slightly till you feel it give way a bit and make a little crushing sound. This allows you to bend even thick uncooperative stems into whatever position you need. If you attempt true ScrOG without this technique you are just going to KINK your stems, killing off all the growth above the break.

Its a bit of trouble for sure, but there are benefits to be had if you use them. One of the biggest benefits is being able to take advantage of your lamp's light sphere. Every lamp/reflector combo has a different pattern in which it distributes light. I use foil-taped over-driven floros, so mine looks like this:


cross-section of my lamp

A very mild, gentle, parabolic curve. Because of this my ScrOG setup is truly flat. Or mostly. It also has a gentle (but negligable) downward curve. This is the original configuration for ScrOG grows. Because it became so prolific it is popularly thought that all ScrOG grows should be flat. Not True. The flat ScrOG only helps if you have flat light. I do, most people don't. Let's look at GB420's lamp configuration:


cross section of GB420's lamp

Cool-tubed HPS. This throws off a much sharper parabolic curve. Because of the reflector it is a bit 'deeper' straight down than it is off the sides.

ScrOG is all about taking advantage of the individual quirks of the light you happen to work with. When I say "take advantage" it helps to understand the INVERSE SQUARE LAW:

There are a lot of maths, but for us it means this; As you get further away from a lamp the energy delivered to that location drops EXPONENTIALLY. So having the buds 8 inches away from a lamp instead of 4 isn't half as bad, its worse by a whole order of magnitude!

So! In a perfect world we would try to fit all of our nugs into our own unique light sphere somehow. ScrOG is an attempt at doing this.

GrowBox420:

I've seen/helped build a couple of compact grows based on 150HPS tech. A configuration I've seen used with great success is this:



Sorry, it was a quick job. Off to the right is the door and thus your room.

The idea here is not just a curved ScrOG but an Asymmetrical Curved ScrOG. Don't mount your cool tube bang in the middle. Push it towards the back and angle it slightly so that it throws towards the doors. This lets you get a curve in your screen without fucking with accessibility.

The problem with a curved ScrOG in a cab like yours that isn't asymmetrical is that you have a 'backside' to the curve. This essentially makes the underside of half your screen completely inaccessible.

Going asymmetrical, especially with dimensions like yours (space wider/taller than it is deep) allows you to capitalize on much of your avaliable space without sacrificing ergonomics. You can reach the underside of the whole screen (very important for pulling fan leaves under and general training, making sure dead matter doesn't hang around and cause mold).

So! ScrOG is all about making the most of whatever light you've chosen. Sometimes that means a flat screen, sometimes it means a curved screen, sometimes a vertical screen and sometimes a combination of all three. No shape of ScrOG is 'wrong' so long as it works to take advantage of the given light.

Your understanding about 'pulling through' the screen is not entirely off. The screen is there for that too. You should be using it to pull fan leaves underneath the screen to keep them out of the way of the buds. All you ever do is pull leaves and shoots through the screen, under or over depending on what you want to achieve with that part of the plant. It is for this reason you want a nice, wide screen with big holes in it. Years of experimentation have lead me to 2 inch hexagonal poultry net, I've never felt the need to move on from it.

The whole idea is to just keep the foliage organized. It allows you to keep all of your buds on the 'canopy' level instead of having many layers of them.

This is a huge benefit to yield when using certain lights. I refer to these lights as Low Intensity Discharge; LID. LID lamps lack penetration, their light isn't strong enough to push through the upper foliage of a plant in order to make it down to the lower stuff. I would call these sorts of lamps LID:

Floros (any kind; T5/T8/T12 tube, CFL, doesn't matter)
Small HIDS (HPS, CMH, or MH sized at or below 150 watts)
LEDs (of any kind)
cold cathode

All of these lamps lack real penetrating power. Growing a plant underneith them in the conventional shape will only yield you good bud on top. Any buds lower down on the plant, shaded by the upper foliage, will be lackluster at best. Small, fluffy and low in potency, they are deeply dissatisfying to behold. By using ScrOG we eliminate this lower bud. If done right a good ScrOG rig leaves us with nothing but 'canopy'. The buds from a good ScrOG plant are absolutely uniform in quality. The whole pile smokes the same from start to finish, every nug on the plant is 'head stash quality'.

And that is the true nature of ScrOG. Maximum quantity and quality of buds in a minimum amount of space. If you want to learn any more about it, ask questions about specific stuff, just shake me down. I'm easily one of the biggest ScrOG proponents on this site, been at it for years, seen many gardens based off it. Always happy to help a fellow gardener embrace the Screen Of Green!

 

[TheKnow2Grow]

haha thats funny i didnt know you posted that, that is the exact thing i was looking at when i thought i did my scrog wrong. And your the one that said it was a bit of a lost technique. Well im glad i didnt completely screw up. The screen is defiantly helping some of the lower nodes become part of the canopy. I started to trim away some of the lower foliage that i know wount do anything today. In about 20-30 days ill probably do the rest. Ill Defiantly try to get some pics though.

EDIT: your scrog grow is looking great by the way!