Code Name: Waves of Green (WOG Experiment), posting allowed

CONCEPT

Grab a sheet of paper. What's the area? 8.5 x 11, probably 93.5 in^2, right? Okay, great. Now punch it.

Smack the thing dead center, and it will crumple. The area hasn't changed. We know it's still 93.5 square inches. On the other hand, these 93.5 square inches are occupying LESS lateral space than they did before. We can take the crumple, lay it over another sheet of paper and see it from a bird's eye view. The crumple and the sheet have the same area, although the crumple takes up way less space left-to-right and up-to-down.

The screen of green approach is a technique which involves the placement of chicken wire or some 2" fencing above the plants during the vegetative or flowering stage. When the girls grow, they push up into the screen, dispersing themselves along the plane of the fence, thereby maximizing the (lateral or sideways) canopy area.

However, as the lateral surface area increases, the buds will stray further and further away from the light source, eventually rendering them immature, below size, or just plain dead. Instead of a flat plane (screen), a variable manifold (waves of lovely sensual ladyflowers) allows for a greater amount of surface area to be confined within a smaller space.

The waves are created through a series of supercropping techniques. Bending, cracking, FIMming, and pruning set the stage, followed by this thing I'm going to call the "tuck it all" (TIA) approach to the final phases complete the manifold and should allow for the almighty holy grail of the farmer...HIGHER YIELD, in more ways than one.

THE EXPERIMENT

Four groups:

1. The control: Ebb and flow hydro with 24 plants distributed evenly in 12 3 gallon buckets using a 3-part nutrient formula with a calmag supplement and some root enzymes

2. ST: Control plus stress training. Only maximum number of plants possible in 6 or 12 buckets, bent and cracked as cloned starts planted in hydroton, arranged in a flower pattern from overhead (photos to follow).

3. Mesh of green: (2) plus the introduction of a variable manifold mesh. Taking the screen and contorting it to the point where the waves are being forced by the mesh, as opposed to being created from scratch through stress training.

4. Screen of green: basis of comparison. (1) plus the ScrOG that we all know and love.

I'm starting with (2) because I believe this will be the highest yielder. In time I hope to go down the entire list, but this will have to do for now.

Criticize me!

Thanks in advance.

30 starts, 26 mango kush, 4 afghani kush. Firmly rooted, about 1 month old from cutting.

I bent them uniformly by hurling a blanket over them, and then arranged them into a pentagon in each bucket. I was warned against using such a high number of girls per bucket, but I need to find my maximum.

Equipment is a hydroponic ebb and grow with 1000W switchable.

Woah, that was fun. Now that our waves are beginning to form, we get to some serious tucking around...

I was misinformed on nutrient concentration, so my high PPMs caused a little burn. These girls are tough though, and pulled through. I'm pretty tough too, so we get along well.

I'm a little confused about a basic concept. If you are increasing surface growth area through cultivation of an uneven canopy - are you going to be using multiple points of lights (multiple grow lights) to avoid the shadowing that would occur around the higher points of the canopy?

Just was thinking that the concept sounds good if it were outdoors under an evenly pervasive sun sitting thousands of miles away - but indoors with a single artificial light having to be so close to the plants you are going to have major bright and shadow differences that rapidly increase exponentially the further you go away from the light laterally. Enough so that I would think it might cancel out the desired benefit of an increased surface area... unless you increase the number of lights... but doing that sort of defeats the purpose of the experiment if you were looking to maximize efficiency/space in the first place.

Just thought I'd throw that out there for your consideration, I could be completely wrong - but I always like seeing how experiments turn out. Keep it updated!

SableZen,
As I was reading the experiment I was thinking the same thing, but you were able to write it way more elegantly, so thank you for being constructive not critical as many people are.

Senseisense,
Good luck with the experiment the only way to really know is if you try it.

I definitely don't want to discourage the experiment - just was running with the concept presented and a possible short-fall. But for all I know, a few well placed CFLs and reflective surfaces near the periphery may *efficiently* overcome that possible concept flaw. I don't have enough indoor growing experience to even guess. It's a cool experiment in any case and want to see how it goes.

Only reason I put this up here for feedback, and I got it. Hit it! Burn it! Stress it! Other weed metaphors that will apply to the tests of theories!



Thanks! Your brutality is appreciated.

I got super distracted by my mixer. In response to your concern, that's where the "tuck it all" comes in. I have one more "megapost".

I think the only thing that will go wrong with this project is that I'll abandon the control group (1) because I'm forever experimenting, lol.

OK, so you were a step ahead of me. Great minds.

On one side, you have the "look but don't touch" perspective of flowering. Many sources that I've read tell me to leave well enough alone. Well, I just can't.

Most notice that when they go out of veg, there's a curious habit of the water leaves to obscure the flowers beneath. So what do you do? If you cut it, you just eliminated a very large source of future nutrients and you lose yield. If you leave it, the flowers below don't get as much light. So TUCK IT!

What I do is find the center of the leaf fan and sight it with my head. I then take my evil crooked mad scientist finger, pushing it very very very gently in the center, placing it behind the originating stalk. Unfortunately, this isn't for everyone. As your fan swooshes through the leafies, they will become undone. You have to do this regularly, about 3-5 times per day, until the girls get used to it. Once in place though, you'll find that the outstanding leaves prevent the low points from getting blocked out.

<flips out tri fold grandpa wallet of kid photos>

1. the project as a whole, taken a few days ago. The back left corner is the closeup of photos 2-4. Most of this is au natural...long before my morning tuck.
2. pre Tucked
3. partially tucked
4. completely tucked up

Note the bowing on the fourth photo...All water leaves! You can already see when contrasting 2 and 4 how those crests avoid the troughs.

I like the sounds of it so far. Scribed.

Sounds really good. Sort of like the parabolic grow (where you have a flat dish reflector and you curve the plants under it). Except you have more than one parabellum.

Ive always wanted to have a box, drop a 400w light in the middle with no reflector and grow short plants directly under it, then have a mesh lining around 3 walls (or 4 if you can get in still somehow) and have plants growing all up 3 walls, and also below. When i think of optimized growing i dont want anything in my grow room to see light except leaves. Any light hitting the floor is light that should be hitting a leaf ya know.

To help out with this grow you could put some cfls in the dips also, just as supplemental for shadows. They would still be getting the HID light too!

prot

SUBBED

Or my idae to fix shadows entirely: Do a slant down towards the middle from boths sides like this --> \/

Here's an update from the previous grow. We're about halfway into flowering.

There was a small spider mite infestation that came in from the clones, but I did a light soap spray, and it seems contained. The clones have fully recovered, and there is still no signs of webbing on the main floor (pictured), even when the water is applied.

Humidity was a problem for about a week until I added a dehumidifier. No signs of mold have appeared though, and the room is now down to 40% ambient, 50% medium.

Ah, this has a second page. Yeah, I tried to get as low in the center as I could. The ideal was more like a bowl with spikes on it punched in from the underside.

Strange glitch...editing the original post with all four attachments doesn't seem to work well, so let me do two per (new) post, starting here. Sorry about that...

We start in the left corner working our way over at this point. The goal at this stage is to have a pile of "stalagtites" at varying depths. Ideally they should be at the same length.

Here's the same section only with elevating the angle. Sorry for the flood. I think I have the crappiest ISP in the known world.

Well, it looks like there have been some hiccups...

Spider mites spread from the clones to the grow room, and were treated immediately. Most of the clones didn't make it, but the growth in the corner where the mites started looks fine.

To add insult to injury, now the hydro system is malfunctioning, most likely due to a siphoning issue on the ebb and grow buckets. The brain bucket keeps dumping everything, and it's a constant battle to keep the humidity down.

This strain is tough though, and appears healthy.

Keeping on track:

In the final phases of flowering, when most of the leaves start packing in or falling off, the tucking should be no longer necessary. At this point, I'm allowing the space to free itself, especially with one week to flush remaining.

Here are some of the pics that failed to upload on the last run in.

Many fuzzy flowers to you.