first time growing autoflower, topping and LST
- Thread starter JCHK
- Start date
Billy the Mountain
Well-Known Member
I'd let it go a bit longer, as there's still plenty of white pistils that haven't turned orange and receded.
It wouldn't be a travesty to harvest it as is, you've shown more patience than most
It wouldn't be a travesty to harvest it as is, you've shown more patience than most
those white pistols are new, and grow for1 week or so..
Billy the Mountain
Well-Known Member
Yup
ElmerS
Active Member
Those look fantastic to me!!! but I am just starting my first grow in 35 years...
ElmerS
Active Member
MONSTEROUS!!! BEAUTIFUL!!!
The photos below were taken very close to harvest time for each grow. Of the three grows, one grow as a photoperiod, two were autos. I've done about half a dozen grows since I starting growing in 2021 and all plants are topped and are LST'd, to varying degrees.
Which is which?
A
B
C
Answer:
Two are autos, one photo.
The photo labelled "B" is a photo of a photo; the other photos are photos of autos.
ponics42o
Well-Known Member
Here's a cool picture for you guys
Front left is no lst or topping
Back left is aggressive LST and no topping
Front right is lazy LST and no topping
Back right is 1 topping at 4th/5th node?
All are pretty good results IMO..but look at the aggressive LST one..sooo many bud sites on it and it's just massive, 2x bigger than the others. I can fill the whole 4x4 if I wanted to.
This is my first grow so I wanted to experiment, so far I don't think you can really go wrong.
It's good you're thinking light that but, if you're using seeds, you can't control for individual variability between the seeds. In my photo "C", there are two plants. The plant on the left took up about 20% of the frontage of the tent and its yield was about 20% of the plant on the right. Same strain, same seed packet, same res, etc. I've given up on trying to get two plants to play nice - for whatever reason, I always ended up with one plant dominating the others and resorted to all kinds of tricks to try to even out the canopy but I just gave up and now grow one plant per grow.
The plants in all photos were LST'd but some ended up > 4' tall. Those were autos. Plant "B" is a photo (chemdog) and it, too, was topped and LST'd but it only grew to about 28". Why's that? Because I LST'd it into a scrog net shape so it was 3' wide and 2' front to back. The was a lot more LST'ing than the other grows so it grew out instead of up.
"I don't think you can really go wrong." - you're way ahead of me when I was a newb! It took me a couple of grows to realize that, unless you d*ck things up, you will end up with a lot of cannabis. Having said that, however, there are some simple steps that you can take to significantly increase crop yield and quality.
Check out your photo - you might want to deal with the height difference in the plants in the tent. Light intensity changes very quickly as the distance between the light and the plant canopy increases. Assuming the plant in the back left is getting 800µmols of light, the front row will be about ½ that. Light falloff is brutal!
What to do about it? First, spend $25 on a lux meter. Then you can cant the light to try to even out the amount of light falling on the plants. You'll have to drop the light maybe a couple of feet to match the drop in the height of the plants.
The other thing to do is to "supercrop" the taller stems. I won't try to describe it because there are videos and how to's on how to do that.
Between super cropping and canting your light, you will be able to get a lot closer to an even lightcast on your plants and you'll end up with "a metric shit ton" as my Canadian college-mates would say.
If that's of interest, I'm more than happy to provide more info. If not, that's fine, too. You're growing in hydro and my experience has been that the complexity of setting up a sound grow environment is well worth the trouble. After 5 or so grows, I grow one plant that fills my 2' x 4' tent and I expect at least a pound from a grow. Just give it lots light, go easy on the ferts, and then leave it alone and you'll end up with a large, high quality crop.
What's a "sound grow environment"?
I knew you'd ask!
Below is a graphic I snarfed from a video by Dr. Bruce Bugbee (watch his YT vids):
Plants need chemicals in the "Sufficiency range". That's it. More chemicals ≠ more growth. More chemicals tends to cause problems. All we're trying to do is give cannabis the 18 chemicals that it needs in the "sufficiency level". And then leave the damn plant alone.
Congrats on the grow. A couple of tweaks to get the light situation squared away and you're going to be rolling in cannabis.