Cali Cajun Indoor Grow #2: Chemdog

Greetings all, I'm just starting up my second indoor grow. Five days ago I popped four feminized photoperiod Chemdog seeds into Jiffy Pellets. By yesterday evening all four had sprouted. I'm starting them in a small 2' x' 2' x 4' tent under CFL's, and when bigger will continue to veg them under an HLG 135 watt quantum board. I will be growing in organic soil. When I flip them, they will move to a 3' x 3' x 7' tent under an HLG 260 quantum board. Here's a few pics of the current veg tent setup - haven't setup the LED light or exhaust fan at present. Without the exhaust things are running a bit warmer than in the flower tent.

Newbie question: I'm not particularly mechanically inclined so not sure if this is a good or bad idea. To save room in the tent, I was wondering if I could rest my exhaust fan on the roof of the tent without securing / attaching it to something? The fan weighs 8 pounds.

Seedfinder.eu shows Chemdog (greenhouse seeds) heights from other indoor growers ranging from 80-140 cm (31 to 55 inches) finished height after stretching between 100 to 200%, so you should have enough room in your veg tent with the fan/filter inside the tent if you plan on going into flower when they are less than 16-18" tall. The three indoor growers put them into flowering when they were between 12 and 15 inches. I wouldn't rest the fan on the top of the tent because I wouldn't want it supported by the tent material.

One option to mounting externally is to leave the fan inside the veg tent (figure 3 feet of available vertical height when the QB is at its highest point right below the fan) and top the plant once or twice so that the growth is spread over multiple shoots rather than one main shoot, and then move to flower when they are no taller than 16-18 inches from the soil (this should give you 6-8 inches of clearance between the tops and the QB when using a 5 gallon pot right before you move them to flower).

Thanks ZerS - you're right that I should have enough room for vegging with mounting inside the tent and that's what I've done in the flower tent. That's probably the easiest / safest thing to do.

Roots began popping through the Jiffy Pellet netting on two of the seedlings this morning, so I transplanted them into Dixie cups with a little coco coir. I also took a couple of cuttings off a Gorilla Glue clone so I can experiment a bit with trying to self-polinate with colloidal silver or silver nitrate. The exhaust fan is now mounted inside the tent.

All four seedlings now have their second set of true leaves. When changing the water on my cuttings yesterday, I accidentally didn't place one back into the water properly and it was very droopy this morning - I'm not sure I'll be able to save it but will give it a try. If not better by tomorrow I'll take another cutting.

Seedlings are growing nicely, and finally got the HLG quantum board up. Question: it's a dimmable unit, should I run at lower intensity while the plants are still small? I currently have it running at full steam 18" above the seedlings. The temp in the tent has already gone up about 6 degrees from where it was at when I was running CFLs.

The roots have reached the bottom of most of the solo cups, so I'm about ready to transplant to 1 gallon pots and a mixture of coco coir and super soil.

Transplanted all seedlings to 1 gallon pots - nice healthy root development on all of them to the bottom of the solo cups; all were beginning to poke through the bottom drainage holes. The two bigger seedlings leaves seemed to be drooping down a bit this morning - possibly the new light is too intense? Per previous post, should I dim the light somewhat, or place more than 18" above and move down over a few days??

Cali Cajun said:

Transplanted all seedlings to 1 gallon pots - nice healthy root development on all of them to the bottom of the solo cups; all were beginning to poke through the bottom drainage holes. The two bigger seedlings leaves seemed to be drooping down a bit this morning - possibly the new light is too intense? Per previous post, should I dim the light somewhat, or place more than 18" above and move down over a few days??

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What kind of HLG Quantum board do you have? I have the HLG65 which js at 65 watts, and I had mine 12 inches from the light.

Who bred your Chemdogs?

DankTankerous said:

What kind of HLG Quantum board do you have? I have the HLG65 which js at 65 watts, and I had mine 12 inches from the light.

Who bred your Chemdogs?

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I'm vegging under the HLG135. I purchased the seeds from Marijuana Seeds NL (https://www.marijuana-seeds.nl/chemdog-feminized); they unfortunately don't seem to list the breeders on their site like some of the other seed companies do. I just sent them an email to see if I can find out.

The first day I placed them under the HLG135 the two largest seedlings seemed to be trying to get away from the light (the leaves were pointing down, and half of the bottom fan leaves were actually resting on the soil). But by the next day they had returned to normal and seem to be handling the light just fine.

Cali Cajun said:

I'm vegging under the HLG135. I purchased the seeds from Marijuana Seeds NL (https://www.marijuana-seeds.nl/chemdog-feminized); they unfortunately don't seem to list the breeders on their site like some of the other seed companies do. I just sent them an email to see if I can find out.

The first day I placed them under the HLG135 the two largest seedlings seemed to be trying to get away from the light (the leaves were pointing down, and half of the bottom fan leaves were actually resting on the soil). But by the next day they had returned to normal and seem to be handling the light just fine.

Click to expand...

Did you get the V2 HLG135?

DankTankerous said:

Did you get the V2 HLG135?

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Yup, that's the one I got. It seems to be working great in the small space.

A little over three weeks in - strangely, the two largest plants experienced a bit of a growth spurt right after topping (the larger one went from 5" to 6"). One in the back has a bit of yellowing on the bottom leaves - anything to worry about or possibly the roots just haven't reached the hot super soil yet? I've got an equal mix of super soil and coco coir, with the super soil at the bottom of the pot.

Four weeks in - a bit droopy after this morning's watering. The largest plant is now 6.5" tall.

Nice grow bro looks good I got 2 260w hlg kits 1 v1 1 v2.... got some pineapple chunk, Bruce banner going, here is my Bruce I got a journal going check it out if you want bro

Love the way your grow is looking

Cheers

#cancanngrow

Week 5 - tallest plant is now 9.5". I'm beginning to harvest the plants in my flower room, so soon these will be moving into that room.

I wasn't paying enough attention to these poor little plants while harvesting, and two of them developed some yellowing of the bottom leaves which then spread towards the middle of the plant. I thought it might be a nitrogen deficiency based on what I read, but posted a thread in the Plant Problems group and someone said they thought it looked more like it might have been an environmental issue. I'm not sure if the yellowing was heat related, but I did let the LED get too close to the plant tops, and they had some twisting / tacoing to get away from the light.

I moved the light up and have been monitoring for a few days - things seem to have stabilized / started improving. I was running out of room in the veg tent for the light (it was getting pretty close to the exhaust fan) and first run all harvested, so today I started transplanting and moved the plants into the flower tent. I ran out of coco coir and the local garden / hydro shops didn't have any in stock, so waiting to transplant the other two plants until my order comes from Amazon. The roots I think looked pretty good, other than a little browning towards the side of the container. I'm moving from plastic pots to fabric pots for the rest of the grow - I think I'll probably just stick with 3 gallon pots for this grow, as my roots for the last grow never took advantage of the extra space in the 5 gallon pots.

Week 7 since popping seeds - plants are not showing any new yellowing of bottom leaves since moving into the flower tent. Yesterday I finished transplanting the last two plants into 3 gallon smart pots and am doing some LST to even out the canopy. All plants are showing female pre-flowers / pistils; I'm thinking about flipping sometime next week. Temperatures are starting to come down; making it easier to keep things under control in the flower tent than on my last grow.

Frack - I'm still getting the hang of LST and always seem to take it just a bit too far. In trying to coax one of the girls to grow in a different direction, I managed to snap one of the bigger colas - third time I've done that on this grow. I managed to save one of the other colas from the previous accident, and THINK I managed to get this one. Clumsy fingers...