I Feel like I Discovered My Child is Retarded

I am in my first grow and am very curious about my plant's progress. I have looked around at other grower's pictures of their plants (similar strain and similar growing stage) and have this sinking feeling in my stomach that my baby girls are retarded. I was hoping that either you can confirm my plants retardation or give me some advice to make them happier.

A little background
Strain: White Widow
Veg time: 2 months
Nutes: 3 part flora
Additives: Diamond Nector /Canna Bloom/ Pk 13/14 / Snow Storm Ultra
Flowering Week: End of week 6
PH: Our water is very high like 8 or 9 so we have to fight to keep our PH down to a 5-6
Lights: 400w HPS + 125w CFL for popcorn buds

We have been feeding our plants 2/3 recommended Flora solution + Diamond Nector for the first 4 weeks of flowering (1000ppm to 1100ppm). Then we added canna bloom and PK for week five (1000ppm). For week 6 we cut back the nutes to 1/8 and added 2/3 Snow Storm Ultra (725ppm).

From veg, our plants have been MUCH MUCH bigger than Sensei seed said they would be. around 120cm from veg. They are now 165cm (they stopped growing thank god). We had to supercrop them and even boost our ceiling a little to keep them from shooting through the roof. We have also had some timer problems. In week 1, 3 and 5, our pump timer erased it's data giving them 5 hours drought on the Thursdays of those weeks. We also had 2 problems with our Light timer --the light burnt the timer out giving us 9 hours of extra light on one day in week 1 and again in week 4 for only 2.5 hours.

So my questions are: will the problems and the setup we have drastically retard our plants? Can we do something to make the buds beefier? Or am I just being a worry wort and the plants will thicken up in week 7-8 and I should harvest in 9 or 10?

Here's a video of our plants:
[video=youtube;SEeLSYA_c-A]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEeLSYA_c-A[/video]

,am dont worry those bitches still have a while to go

man*******

well sativas take much longer to flower.

but you should know that high plants are not good for anything with 400w HPS. It's much better to keep them low and use your light better like this.

Thanks for the welcome!

About the lights--- We really didn't expect our plants to sprout the way they did. In veg, we have a 400w MH. They kept growing like crazy. We topped them in veg. I think our problem was that we were told to wait for the plants to begin alternating before we flower them. That took about 2 months and by that time they were 120cm. Now with our next batch, we are LST and supercroping our clones to keep them small, but even that isn't stopping our particular strain of White Widow.

What do you recommend for the lighting? A 600w or something larger? We knew our plants were over sized, that is why we added the CFL to the lower branches to try and encourage lower growth --which is working great as you can see in the video. Do you have any recommendations for keeping our veg plants short or in our case, even stunted?

Also, about the timer malfunctions --- do you think those 3 instances of 5-hour droughts really messed up our crop in terms of progress and yield?

Thanks for all the help guys! -- I've been reading posts on this site since the beginning of my grow!

600 watt hps gives of wayyyyyyyyyyy more lumens than 400 mh or even a 600 mh

ohh sorry I though you said you were using a 400 mh to flower... why dont you put both your mh and hps ontop of them for the rest.. I would

it's a matter of penetration - no matter how many watts you have, artificial light loses intensity exponentially with distance. So there's really no point in growing tall when you can grow wide.

the ultimate method for max light usage is the scrog of course, whether you actually use it to make a carpet of popcorn buds (which eventually yield more weight per grow than a single phat cola, they say), or just as something to tie your plants to so you can grow good sized colas but control their height and location, scrog is definitely the way to go. it's also real fun, like a computer game.

there's also an even better method called v-scrog. It actually allows you to use height and is easier with sativas - but without losing a single lumen to distance or dead space. look it up

Yea we wanna start a scrog - but we have a height problem in veg. Our strain likes to grow tall --- right now we're supercropping our veg, reducing nutes, keeping the lights as close as possible, topping, ect, but nothing seems to slow these monsters. We only have 1 flowering room and 1 veg room so we need to keep our stuff vegging for 2 months at the least while we wait for our previous harvest, which gives our plants tons of time to grow big (not what we want it to do). We're thinking of building a second grow room so we can cycle every month -- but that takes money.

Pics of Veg:


Ideally, we'd want to flower them now, but our flowering plants aren't done yet. Any advice?

here's an idea - grow 12/12 from seed. lots of people do it. it means your plant will flower at 15-30cm tall and reach no more than 2 feet or maybe a little more depending on strain. but you get it much more easy, AND the big bonus - you can change your veg room into a second GROW room, that is, have 2 cycles going at once, PLUS it's a perpetual - you can always plant, clone and seed, take plants in and out whenever you want. it's hard to scrog with a perpetual, but it's possible, if you keep things ordered. you can also LST just as well. but keep em short, and keep your canopy as even as possible. this will provide better yield.

will also solve your problem you asked for advice about - just start flowering them where they currently are. much better than keeping food from them to keep them short, that's kinda harsh man! )

Can you flower with an 400w MH or should we get another HPS? We currently have 1 400w HPS, 1 400W MH, and 1 125w CFL (veg bulb and a flower bulb). I like your idea, just gotta hash out the logistics.

not recommended. you'd wanna get a another HPS for that

"I feel like I ***Discovered*** my child is retarded" WTF Dude/Chick? How can you compare a fucking plant from bagseed to your own little sperm that got big in the vaj, then came out in the hospital and now is retarded? Twisted minds. Fucking flame me if you want, we can see how far this goes. Sounds like the kettle is calling pot black again

ChronicObsession said:

"I feel like I ***Discovered*** my child is retarded" WTF Dude/Chick? How can you compare a fucking plant from bagseed to your own little sperm that got big in the vaj, then came out in the hospital and now is retarded? Twisted minds. Fucking flame me if you want, we can see how far this goes. Sounds like the kettle is calling pot black again

Click to expand...

I ain't gonna flame ya. I don't have children -- so I guess I don't REALLY know what it feels like to have a retarded child. I love my plants: a lot of hard work and effort. And when I saw all the other pretty buds from other growers and compared it to mine, I really felt that mine were retarded ----and in essence, my plants are my kids.

PS - not from bagseed but from cannabis cup winner. Don't insult my retards --- that's my job