Since i had not updated in a long time, except with recent picture's, ill go ahead and give a small rundown on the life of these plants
Sprouted: 03/12/2007
Veg Time: 18 days
Flowered : 04/01/2007
Current: 05/21/2007
I started out with a ebb n flow system, and i ended up turning it into a flood and drain type system, the flow system worked fine until i realized it wasnt wetting the enitre 4 inch rockwool cubes. probobly easily fixed with some added inline drippers - but why give myself a headache? so i crafted a small tray out of another rubbermaid storage container, filled it with hydroton and transplanted, they took pretty well. I orginially had 5 plants, i cloned all of them, 1 each, tagged with numbers. The clones took abit longer to take than i was used too, but i got one rooted and it was the daughter of a mother, i ended up with 2 females, and 3 males. the males were executed pretty quick. I built a small flood system in my veg cab for my new clone, that would be a mother for my next crop, she grew to outrageous proportions within the next 3 weeks..
The widow flowered well, stonger than i'd ever seen before, superior genes = superior plants. of course if you do things right, which obviously i have done, except for one incident (dont laugh, you know its happened to you too! if you grow hydro anyway..), one day, i cleaned out the res, filled it up. put the pumps/air stones in, everything was perfect, put my plants back where they belonged, and left the tubes out, pump plugged in. This was the beginning of those first hot days of spring/summer. The tubes were not in the proper place for about three days unnoticed... never saw any water all over the floor or anything...
A day later, day 4, it got hot, real hot. about 101F to be exact. and they had'nt had water in 4 days - in hydroton. Thankfully on this day i said what the hell, i hadnt had so much as a slight discolor on any leaf thus far, and now i had lots of damage, leaf damage, and unknown root damage, but i found, and fixed the problem immediatly, the resivor was EMPTY... explain that.. heh, i've stopped asking myself how this happened, and why i never expeirenced a flood... surely one feeding would have emptied the resivor onto the floor. Maybe some higher power saved my ass - as i said i stopped asking questions, just thanking my lucky stars i didnt flood the place. This will never happen again! The plants came back nicely - and somehow my pump was not burned out...
They are eating a whooping 2500 ppm right now - somehow - i did not mean to feed them this much. they finally started taking up morewater and nutes, and tipped the ppm scales up - they had'nt done this to me yet, but i fixed accordingly - it read 3000 ppm when i took a check. I've been a bit lazy latley - i havent even phed it, but the nutes i'm using are doing a great job at that for me anyway, i will have a new ph wand to make it easier for me soon. BTW, i'm flowering with fox farms big bloom, tiger bloom, and grotek's monster bloom pkbooster 0-50-30, which is a really cool "black" powder, fun to watch dissolve into the water, it's like a growing evil cloud in the water if you just dump it in and don't stir quite yet.
Anyhow, i plan on flowering 10 weeks, or 70 days. that schduled date is 6/09/2007, but i will be watching the trichomes, as it is these plants have grown beautifully and i wish i had more/better pictures for you guys at vegitative stages.
My mother plant got too big, so i cloned her and potted her from the flood system to soil, shes doing great. (dont have room in the closet for her in the soil much less room for another small system to maintain her, and i just couldnt kill her), she's in a large 5 gallon bucket, she should use it well, she's flowering now. Will also be nice to see how she does in soil next to hydro, a good comparison. She is in miracle grow soil, i will probobly hit her with bloom nutes right from my resivor next water(yeah i'm crazy but i bet you she eats it and keeps trucking.2500 ppm). Waiting on her clones to root now, so i can regrow her to have my next batch of clones after my big widow girls are complete.
I had really hoped to keep the height down, but i failed miserably at that, they are as high as i can have them, the lights at the cieling, about 3.5 feet high. they were topped, and have multiple tops near the lights, if you check the pics youll see how many large tops i have for two plants.
cant think of much else now... if anyone is interested im free for questions, i know alot of people order nirvana white widow and want to know how it grows. it grows GREAT.