How much longer should i veg?

5 gal pots

I’m going to flip the front two with the back two because they’re actually older than the larger girls in the back but the seeds are a couple years old and I didn’t store them properly so they’re a bit runty.. seem healthy enough though, so I’ll see them through.
I figure about a week then flip, I think they’re big enough now but I want the lower nodes to stretch a bit for cloning.

I was just curious about what yall thought would be ideal timing for optimum yield.

Those look like slow growers. A few weeks more veg easy.

@StoneDHedgE

are you talking about the front two or all of them?

All. You got 5 gallon pots. Use them. One more top and 2-3 more week veg.

Agree with stonedhedge. For increased yield, id top at least once more and preferably twice. I usually do a minimum of three or 4 before flipping. Typically will result in 12-16 main tops and increases yield nicely. I prefer to allow the top site to gain some length before snipping for additional strength to offset the strain of lst. It's important to keep the canopy as even as possible as well.

Nice looking plants. Add more light and they'll be really something.

There is an almost linear relationship between PPFD and yield. Light is the only way that plants can generate food (glucose) that's needed for them to grow. Your plants have a small number of large leaves which is a characteristic of plants that are not getting the maximum amount of light.

Shape your plants so "no photons are hitting the floor" and lower the light until you have at least 800µmol on your grow, preferably 1000µmol.

Re. topping - I've seen no research that indicates that topping, in and of itself, increases yield. The increase in yield will occur because topping tends to make the canopy flat and with a flat canopy, the average PPFD will tend to be higher than with an uneven canopy.

The plant below was vegged under an LED veg light, topped, and LST'd. The crop was looking really good until bud rot hit about two days before I planned to harvest.

That plant was at 800µmol by day 30 and went to 900-1000 after day 47.

View attachment 5403491

Such a nice huge place and only 1/5 is used i feel like it would be cheaper to buy then to pay that powerbill....

Do some lst fill that space get more plants or bigger pots.top a few more times aim for at least 8-16 tops per plant.

If you dont want to lst buy a scrog net and just fill it.

How long have you been veging?

I appreciate all the responses

I will give them a few more weeks probably 2 or 3 at least now that I’ve thought about it. My original plan was to mainline with 8 tops each but I punked out because of how stunted the older two are. I didn’t want to stress them that much. I’ll continue to LST and lollipop.

The reason I only ran 4 is because I am trying living soil for the first time and I didn’t want to waste over 30 gallons of soil and seeds if it doesn’t work. It seems to be going well but I’ve got some nute burn for sure so next run I will mix my soil at least a week before I plant the seeds in the final pot.

as far as the light goes, I don’t have a meter to test the efficiency. I have the pots chart and it’s brand new from the manufacturer (spider farmer) and it draws 750ish watts from the wall. I have it turned up to 60% I will crank them up today to 80%!

the larger plants popped out of the ground march 31 and the smaller ones about march 25

I’m going to take clones from the wedding cake. (The larger two). And I have five Runtz feminized seeds from MSNL for the next round. I’ll probably germinate in a 2-3 weeks

GanjaGreg. said:

5 gal pots

I’m going to flip the front two with the back two because they’re actually older than the larger girls in the back but the seeds are a couple years old and I didn’t store them properly so they’re a bit runty.. seem healthy enough though, so I’ll see them through.
I figure about a week then flip, I think they’re big enough now but I want the lower nodes to stretch a bit for cloning.

I was just curious about what yall thought would be ideal timing for optimum yield.View attachment 5403138
View attachment 5403137

Click to expand...

Did you top at the very first node? How old are these?

About a month old, I let them grow to 5-6 nodes and topped to the 3rd node.

GanjaGreg. said:

I appreciate all the responses

I will give them a few more weeks probably 2 or 3 at least now that I’ve thought about it. My original plan was to mainline with 8 tops each but I punked out because of how stunted the older two are. I didn’t want to stress them that much. I’ll continue to LST and lollipop.

The reason I only ran 4 is because I am trying living soil for the first time and I didn’t want to waste over 30 gallons of soil and seeds if it doesn’t work. It seems to be going well but I’ve got some nute burn for sure so next run I will mix my soil at least a week before I plant the seeds in the final pot.

as far as the light goes, I don’t have a meter to test the efficiency. I have the pots chart and it’s brand new from the manufacturer (spider farmer) and it draws 750ish watts from the wall. I have it turned up to 60% I will crank them up today to 80%!

the larger plants popped out of the ground march 31 and the smaller ones about march 25

Click to expand...

You could download the photone app and calibrate it to your specific light specs. It will get you close on PPFD and DLI. iOS requires a $6 payment to unlock the full spectrum mode. For Android it's already unlocked.

GanjaGreg. said:

as far as the light goes, I don’t have a meter to test the efficiency. PPFD I have the pots chart and it’s brand new from the manufacturer (spider farmer) and it draws 750ish watts from the wall. I have it turned up to 60% I will crank them up today to 80%!

Click to expand...

750 watts - would love to have that in my 2" x 4'

Spider - oh, yeh, I see the orange end caps. Spider came out with the 7000 enhanced about two years ago and that light has a really nice PPFD map. Is that the light you have?

(checks the Spider site)

Yeh, a big motha'. That light will really crank out the photons so tread carefully. I found their recommendations here and they're erring on the side of caution - from a yield perspective, max yield comes from getting as much light on the plant as it can handle. Manufacturers will "never" tell you that because there's nothing but risk in saying that - you'll get a good crop at 700µmol (their recommendation for veg) but, if they tell growers to crank it to 1k and they get light burn, Spider will never hear the end of it. That's my theory about it; I don't have any particular knowledge about it but I know that companies that want to stay out of trouble will understate rather than overstate.

Re, a phone app - only if you can calibrate it against a known source. I tested Photone back when it was called Korona and it failed. I tested it again a couple of years ago and it was 16% high. I use an Apogee but I also have owned a couple of Uni-T lux meters. If you can dial in your phone+software and if you want to schlep your phone in a tent and if you don't mind putting on the kludgy little sunshade that Photone requires when using iOS, you can save $27. And then you'll have to recal when you get a new phone.

If you can't tell I don't think much of phone+software, I'm having a bad keyboard day.

A phone+ software can be spot on or it can be very wrong. In contrast, the $32 Uni-T ships with a 5%± variance and, the way I put it, it's as inaccurate as an Apogee so it will work very, very well for the vast majority of growers. I've attached a document I wrote about converting lux to PPFD. Most lights can use 0.015 and looking at the spectrum for the SE7000, that should do well but 0.0147 might be more accurate since there's a fair amount of blue in the spectrum. Either will get you close enough to start.

Lacking a meter, if you're at 80% power, a hang height of 12" should give you about 720-1020µmol, based on the numbers in their non-CO2 flower recommendation. That's a jump from where you are now so I'd be inclined to start at 16", check the plants, drop to 14", check the plants, etc.

That's the key - we can toss around numbers but it the leaves start to taco or turn side ways so they're turning vertical to the light, then you've gone past their max.

HTH.