New to tents, best way to arrange plants?

This is my first grow with a tent and I'm wondering how best to position the plants. Jam them as close together as possible under the light, or spread them out so the plants themselves are farther from the light but the leaves that are under have more intense light? 600w in a 48x48x80, 4 plants in 5 gallon buckets, soil. I'm about two week in from the flip, so running HPS now.

Tl;dr: inverse square of lighting vs penetration through vegetation?

I did some research but I'm still unsure.

Jammed up from a few days ago:

Totally depends on how you will train them. That's why you train right, to make it easier to penetrate the bottom? Some people lollipop or scrog and then get no bottom popcorn regardless.

as vitamin said its about the way your trian them , i suggest your put a scrog net in there and next week when the stretch is finish , cut all bud sites in the lower part of your plant to avoid popcorn. and then focus on your canopy , making it even like a flat screen. and you probably will get the best yeild that way.

This^ some scrog growers exclusively wait till flower to put on the screen if its a stretchy strain. Since you are already in flower the best is to scrog it. If you don't want to train though, mash them together IMO. You will see them act just like real flowers and twist amongst themselves attempting to get to the light but it could be a jungle quickly! I would also suggest defoiliting at day 22 if you want to keep the popcorn, just remove the fans covering the bud sites

vertical growing or colosseum type is an option for future runs in that size tent... in fact it looks like you might have enough extra room in there to do it now.

you could put up netting on the walls and put each plant in the center of each wall. Then take the plants and spread them out like a candelabra against the netting and use the netting to secure them.

like this



pics taken from another site, they are not mine. BTW the width of the wall in the second pic is less than the 48" that you are working with.

you don't have to weave them through the netting or anything. i understand if it seems intimidating but think of it, all the plant mass would be spread out against the wall and the 600w would be suspended barebulb in the center, vertically; casting its light equally to all parts of all 4 plants. Inverse square of lighting vs penetration through vegetation doesn't get much better than that, as the light is essentially equidistant from the tops and bottoms of all 4 plants.

it looked to me in the pic that you had some space from the plants to the walls. if you were able to spread the plants out wide and flat against the wall, like a candelabra, then i believe you'd have enough space in there to just drop the bare bulb into the center of the tent with a fan on low blowing upwards from underneath...

i know it sounds complicated, but maybe look into it for your next grow!

look into it, it may appeal to you...

Use smaller sized pots and put them in a "G" pattern...."G" is for green...someday when the plants are bigger, and you open that tent of yours all baked seeing a big green "G" you will have a big grin on your face.

Thanks, everyone! I was thinking about going vertical next, it just seems like the best way to use the light effectively. I was thinking of taking the reflector off and just hanging the cooltube right in the center. That would also eliminate headroom issues. Although 80" is pretty tall, it's easy to outgrow that.