First Grow: DR40 Grow Tent, 150 Watt HPS, Hempy Bucket, White Widow

The first pic is of new growth from a top that I "topped." You can see the two new tops coming up in place.



Here's one of the overall bushiness...



Right now I have about ten tops on this plant. There is another node developing at the bottom of one of the stems, but I don't think it will make it into flower. It's really low and is growing rather slow, so I'll get cut since the canopy will drown it.

She's in the dark right now... Tonight I'll go ahead and start the new light cycle and new nutrient regimine. Before I put the clone in the dark, there were ten developed tops and two smaller ones coming in.

Alright... So time for more pictures. I figure I'll throw in pictures of my LA Confidential clone as well (she's two weeks older and grown under the exact same conditions).

First the White Widow Clone, which now has ten mature tops and was just put into flower yesterday.



And now the LA Confidential LST Grow... About 16 tops that will make it after the final cut, which will take place at the end of this week.

how old are your plants

The LA Confidential is now four weeks old, and the White Widow is two weeks old. I picked them up as clones from a spot in Oakland. Just planted two more Dream Queens (aka Green Crack) in one-gallon pots and am going to throw them in there with the White Widow since she just started flower. The clones were ten inches tall and so and quite mature, so I'm seeing how it goes if I throw them in hempy and go straight to flower (seeing if a four/five plant SOG with these pots are possible).

The LA Con and WW were also pretty mature clones, but I vegged them for about two weeks so that I could train and develop more tops. Both the LA and WW were from the same spot, the DQs were from another.

The DQs were less stressed and were in seemingly healthier condition, but had less mature root systems.

And here is the White Widow half-way through her first week of flower. She's got ten developed tops already, with two more coming in that may catch-up pretty soon... So I imagine I'll have around 12 mature tops before I go in and clean up the remaining foliage and trim.

any updates?

So Im definitely subscribing to this bro. I'm doing sortav of the same kind of grow you've got going. I'm growing in a dr60 and I've got one red dragon and two Dutch passion perplex going. I'm veggin with a 105 watt cfl and I've got a 150 watt hps but I really wanna get a 250 watt cool tube. I'm doing hempy too and it's so freakn simple to do. Mine are only 2 weeks from seed now.

I've got one question though. Do you think lst'n them takes alot longer for vegging? At first I was just going to do a normal grow but now I'm trying to decide between scrog and lst.

jguy21 said:

So Im definitely subscribing to this bro. I'm doing sortav of the same kind of grow you've got going. I'm growing in a dr60 and I've got one red dragon and two Dutch passion perplex going. I'm veggin with a 105 watt cfl and I've got a 150 watt hps but I really wanna get a 250 watt cool tube. I'm doing hempy too and it's so freakn simple to do. Mine are only 2 weeks from seed now.

I've got one question though. Do you think lst'n them takes alot longer for vegging? At first I was just going to do a normal grow but now I'm trying to decide between scrog and lst.

Click to expand...

I definitely think LST takes a lot longer... I vegged the LA Con clone two weeks and the White Widow only about a week and although I understand they are different strains, I "think" I can see a difference in being patient and vegging the extra time with LST. Honestly though, the good thing about LST is that you can flower when you want to... With scrog you "should" wait until your screen is about 60-70 percent full (or so I've been told) if you want it to be really effective. For me, that would have meant at least another two weeks of veg time for both of the clones since it would have meant allowing another 20 inches of growth just to hit the top of the net (6" bucket + 6" clone first planted). With the LST I was able to fill the same canopy space without having to wait for the initial growth so perhaps I saved some time-once the plant was bent over all of the tops seemed to start to develop at an equal pace. In the case of the white widow, the areas that I topped didn't seem to catch-up to the rest of the plant till the actual top of the plant was bent over quite a bit.

But I'm sure someone could confirm this, I bet a scrog would yield a bit more... So depending on how much more, you could actually be getting more smoke in "less" time. Sure it would actually be longer overall actual time, but the extra smoke might be a considerable gain and last that much longer. Many different ways to grow and try to optimize. Just wish I had all the time to try them all out.

So today is the end of the first week of Veg for the White Widow. About eleven tops so far, with a few tiny flower spots showing up underneath. I'll wait till the third week to start trimming up the rest of the bottom third of the plant... Or whatever I don't think will get any light once the stretching is done.

The tiny white hairs are starting to show-up...

Also, I'll be switching over to 3/4 strength nutrients for the next feed. The leaves look healthy and the growth seems to be warranting the increase.

Meanwhile, the two dream queen clones that I planted in one-gallon pasta containers and threw alongside the White Widow are already starting to show white hairs. In fact, it looks quite a bit farther along in flower than the white widow. I was told that these are ready to harvest anywhere from 45-50 days... From the looks of it, that information will hold-up. Half-Strength nutrients next feeding, and will start to fill the res and feed as needed. I've been currently feeding the dream queens a little bit around the roots daily, since the roots were a couple inches away from the res. Just hit a little growth spurt, so I figured the roots are starting to settle down and get close to the res (at least close enough to draw from the moisture).

PICS SOON!!!

Here are pics of the Dream Queens that I am "lollipopping."








And here is the White Widow after a trim...

I'll take some pics of the older Sister... The LA Con clone that is two weeks ahead of this grow. It just finished it's third week of flower and is starting to develop some thc and resin. With two-weeks of Veg and LST she filled the entire foot and a half of space I have in the tent, can't wait to see how it turns out (quality, yield...).

When is the best time to start lst training? My plants are only about 3 inches tall now.

jguy21 said:

When is the best time to start lst training? My plants are only about 3 inches tall now.

Click to expand...

I was told to wait until they have a couple full leaf sets. So once you see fully mature leaves, about two or three, you should be good to go. I think the main thing is that the roots have to be somewhat settled in and mature before you start bending and tweaking. For these plants, I waited till they were about 7 inches before I started to bend them downward.

I actually started using those wire ties to guide the plants along with the strings. It really, really helps manage space in cramped spots and it allows you to redirect the plant growth in different ways.

I'm shooting for getting the plant to grow in a spiral pattern around the pot so I can get a decent amount of tops. I was going to use string to tie em down, but do you think the wire stuff works better?

I would use string at first. The wire stuff is actually kind of a pain to wrap around the stems and the younger they are, the more fragile... That being the case strings work fine. At first I simply bent the plant over sideways. Every few days or so (sometimes the next day, depending on growth) I would make another tie down across the plants (see the early pics of this grow journal).

Eventually the branching growth took over so I had to tie down each individual branch(that was from a new top) and spread it out.

I didn't even get to a spiral pattern. For both of my plants I just bent them over once and let them grow the length of the pot. The LA Con clone ended up with over 20 tops, while the White Widow that I vegged for half as long has about 12. I started with clones and once potted they were aout 5-6 inches. Once I bent the plants over I noticed that the main stalk slowed down in growth, but each node that was below it was able to catch-up. Once they all catch up, whichever "top" is actually the highest starts to grow the fastest (so it ends up being a daily thing with me for LST... Everyday I make adjustments to the ties... I use tape to secure the strings to the sides of the bucket so that I can constantly be re-adjusting the tension on the lines).

Here is a picture of my LA Con clone from a week ago. She was bent downward only once, and the main stalk was only about 8 inches long when I started to flower (although there were seemingly nodes on top of nodes)).

It looks like I grew the clone in a spiral but I didn't... I just grew it the length of the pot and started to space out the branches. This was taken last week, at the end of week three... I cleaned up the remaining bottom of the plant that won't get light. Clipped a few leaves and a few popcorn buds (or that would have been) and used some wire tie to straighten out some tops to get some height out of them.

Overall height is about 13 inches... The bottom eight have been trimmed clean, leaving about a 5" deep canopy.

Nice! I've never lst'd before and all the ones I saw had the spiral pattern going. If I can get 8 to 10 good tops I'll be more than happy.

Im hoping this will get me an ounce per plant for three plants with my 150 watt hps and 105 watt cfls for extra lighting.