My Perpetual SOG Cabinets are Finally Finished!

[petemoss]

Hi eclurker, stick around and pull up a chair for the harvest in about two weeks!
Only two plants at first, then more in the following weeks. Gotta fill this cab with Budzzz!

Too many clones and not enuf flower cabs! I've been a busy beaver churning out clones by the dozen. The flower cab is beginning to fill out and should be full soon. Wish my lazy friend would get his cab finished so I can get rid of some excess clones.


Those new clones all went in at 3" and will start about a foot from the light. I hope I can control the distance between new nodes by keeping the light a foot or less from the tops.

 

[CC Rider]

thats awesome your gettin such fat colas with such small containers....grreat work!

 

[bud_me]

Lookin good man. I'm glad you decided to go with the bubbler cloner, I've been using those for the past year with 95% success rates, only 5% goes to my negligence. I like the SOG though, lookin damn good.

 

[Thundurkel]

Looking good bro! I'm glad to see another grower getting great results with the good ol DrBud style cabs with 20oz bottles cuz they give me a awesome supply of quality smoke...

 

[petemoss]

Thanks for stopping by, guys! I'm really enjoying this grow. It's my first soil grow and I'm thankful that my mistakes have not stopped me from getting some nice plants and fat buds.

CC Rider, the bubble cloner didn't cut it for me, unfortunately. After ten days, not a root bump, so I put the clones in small cups of coco where they will stay until I see some roots. I had the bubble cloner on a heat mat and maybe that was my problem. Someone pointed out that heated water holds much less oxygen than cooler water. I'm back to pure perlite in a dome which seems to be working.

Thundurkel, I've been following your pioneering cfl grow and benefited from your experiences with the Urkel plants. Thanks for stepping up to the plate and showing us followers the way! Before I put a clone into the flower cab I make sure that she has a good root mass -roots all the way to the bottom of the bottle. Once in flower, I keep the HPS light close to control the stretch and keep node spacing tight. A little different than Doc does it with CFLs, but I like the compact structure and absence of bare stems. I'm also switching to larger 32 oz bottles which require less frequent waterings.

 

[K.J]

Great grow, great cabs! I'll be watching this for sure as I will be using a 250w HPS in the future too.

 

[petemoss]

A 250 HPS works great in a cab! It won't penetrate very far when hung over a normal canopy, so what you can do is shape the canopy around the bulb! Put the taller girls around the outside and the shorties in the middle like this:



EDIT: What a dummy I am! I've always had problems taking pix under HPS lighting. They always come out funky and photo-enhancing makes them worse!
Turns out all I had to do was to force the flash to fire. Amazing what you can learn when you read the manual

 

[BlueBerryBlazer]

Hey petemoss,
Nice, heathly looking plants you have there, what ya feed'em
"Vitamin Water"? lol,,, J/K,,, what strain/strains are you running???


And how in sams hell did you get your girls to flower all the way at the bottom like that??? Good shit man!

 

[petemoss]

Hi BBB,
Welcome to IC! The strain is Legends Ultimate Indica (LUI). A few years back, this was a popular med strain for pain. I'm using DrBudGreenGenes' method to grow many budsicles in a perpetual SOG. It's the latest craze and I had to try it!
Read some of his threads and you will see what I'm trying to do. This picture by DrBud is my favorite and summarizes his approach in a nutshell:

 

[Avant-Green]

Hey petemoss,

Great looking cab, and those plants look to be just one nice solid cola... Are you using 100% coco? or are you doing a soil coco mix? Whatever you have going on it looks like your getting some really good results. How often would you say you have to water them? Sorry for all the questions but a sog coco style seems like a cool idea, my only worry would be that you'd have to water everyday so it would something you'd really have to be there for every day. Thanks for any info.

A.G.

 

[ThisBuds4You]

WOW

WOW

Thanks for the kind words Mr.Bitti and repuk. I'm slowly getting my cloning skills back. With the heating pad, roots popped out after only nine days in the perlite boxes! After weeding out weak, sickly clones I ended up with 20 rooted or rooting clones. They are here in their bottles and cups next to the bubble cloner. I'm going to screw in some more CFLs and veg these new clones until I see roots at the bottom of the bottle before throwing any into the flowering cab.



The flowering plants are still filling in and are in their 3-5 weeks of flower. I'm having some yellow leaves starting from the bottom of the plants and working up to some middle leaves. I flushed until runoff was not too acidic and now they are all back to their old DrBud diet. A few have stretched to nearly 20" and I wonder if the bare stems will get filled by harvest next month.




Damn, these LUI have pretty fat buds! Thick stems too. The one above needs a bamboo stick for support.

Beautiful man, absolutely beautiful! Love the cab, love the buds. You're doing a great job, keep up the good work! BTW, loved that SCROG you did a few years back, that was wicked!
--
TB4U

 

[petemoss]

Avant-Green, I started with DrBud's soil mix and gradually replaced most of the peat moss with coco. The mix holds more water than pure coco but still needs to be watered every day once the plants get bigger. Right now I have the time to hand water, but would like to rig up an automatic watering system -flood and drain or top drip.

TB4U, thanks for the kudos. The buds are turning out bigger than I expected for a first attempt. Most of the plants have good bud development in the middle and bottom but those plants received plenty of light because I only had a dozen plants for several weeks. As plant density increases, I expect less lower bud growth. I don't want to go up to 16 plants per sq ft. When they get packed in that tight, the buds aren't pretty anymore and it would be a PITA to handle so many plants daily. Besides, only two or three plants a week is enough for my personal needs. Say TB4U, you also grow LUI I see. Next strain for me may be Apollo 11, though I really got those for a SCROG. There are just so many new strains out there! I don't want to waste time with untested genetics and will stick to stable, well known producers such as LUI, A11 or AK47.

 

[petemoss]

The flower cab is finally full! I added eight more clones tonight. That makes a total of 30 flowering plants, all LUI from four different mothers. That's about all I can handle on a daily basis. Hand watering is getting to be a chore. I found some Sterlite underbed storage boxes to use for a E&F and will play with those for a while.

 

[ThisBuds4You]

Man, so impressive! I'm super jealous!!! Those ladies are lookin extra heavy, I can't wait till your harvest! When are you due to harvest your first round anyway? What nutes are you using? I think you said FloraNova, but I could be mistaken. Anyway, got a cab construction question for you. Is there any reason in particular you blocked off the filter and put it on that shelf? Do you think you could've left it in the cab with the light? My second cab will be very similar to yours, but I wanted to leave the filter in there (just strap it to the ceiling). Good growing bud, I'm so fuckin impressed!!!
--
TB4U

 

[K.J]

ThisBuds4You: I think the reason is that on most homemade filters (not sure if this one was or not) have carbon dust falling out of them and you really wouldn't want that on your plants.

If it's a commercial filter, I think most of them have good pre-filters on the canister that keeps the carbon inside, so you might be able to put one of those directly into the room.

 

[petemoss]

The filter is on a narrow shelf that is open to the flower chamber, not closed off. Same as hanging from the ceiling. Fan is also screwed onto the top of the shelf and is less noisy than screwed to side or ceiling. The prefilter on the Can 2600 is to keep dust from clogging the layer of carbon when air is sucked through. If you use the filter as a scrubber, meaning you push air though it, the prefilter can be removed and placed inside the hollow core of the filter. Then the air is "prefiltered" before hitting the carbon layer.

 

[petemoss]

Too much stretch

Too much stretch

You've seen my good plants -continuous buds right down to the soil line. Now here are some that stretched too much. The first three plants from the left are one week in flower. The went into 12/12 at 3". The fourth plant from the left is nearly three weeks in flower and nearly finished with her stretch. She went in at 2" and is now over 17" tall. The plant on the right is five weeks in flower. She went in at 4". Note the big gaps between buds. My cat is helping me trim some fan leafs LOL


I'm trying to keep the node spacing tight by keeping the light close to the tips and also by keeping nighttime temps warmer. They say that a big difference between daytime and night temps contribute to stretching. Looks like I wasn't very successful with these plants! Even though I kept the light close, the young plants shot up between the second and third nodes - a big ugly 3"-4" gap. Have to find a way to stop this! The third small plant was just topped at 8" as punishment for growing too fast and also to make a two-headed top bud. Maybe that will help the yield.

 

[hoosierdaddy]

Looking real fine, pete!

I always wonder about the tight node spacing thing. Some of the best buds I find are the secondary buds, just below the main tail. It has been my thought that these buds are not crammed up in with the rest of the main tail buds, and it allows them to see more light throughout their lives. (shrug)

 

[repuk]

petemoss, those shots in different stages of flowering taught me a lot!! it's a very useful image.

Have you thought on lining the cab with mylar? that should spread light more evenly than just white... it's 95% reflective and avoids hot spots...

 

[K.J]

The prefilter on the Can 2600 is to keep dust from clogging the layer of carbon when air is sucked through.

Yes, that's what its main role is, but wouldn't the pre-filter also help keep any carbon dust from entering the grow room directly?