The morning stretch

So i ordered some seeds Super Duty Fruity, which looked amazing. picked up an 600W HPS with parabolic reflector. Got a couple bags of top soil. Germinated my seeds 8 out of 10 sprouted (regular not feminized), and have been putting them in make shift pots, well 2 liter 7-up bottles. I Figured i'm just sexing them and checking to see which one i want to be the mother. So I wasn't planning on growing it to size till next cycle, and i wouldn't need to take up much space.

In an attempt to keep the load down on my circuit till i move some appliances around i was just putting the potted plants (6 of so far into the window. which is where my problems began. i was pretty excited the first day it was a beautiful ~5cm stalk looking all healthy with water leaves. Day 2 it grew another 5-8cm but still looked healthy so i figured i would just setup the light and be done with my stretching problem. Now starting Day 3 they can't even support themselves. maybe 18cm in length and fallen over. Still very healthy looking aside from the obvious troubles.

So I'm curious what would be the best course of action here? the couple things i was thinking was to either dig a deeper hole in their current pots, and shove them down, transplant them into bigger pots that would facilitate lst methods better, or give them some support.

each way i think i'm risking the plant and i know if one of them dies it's going to be a loss of a female, just the way it always seems to work out, males never seem to die no matter how hard you try. I have some room to add more dirt but not enough to make a real difference, once i find my memory card to my cam i'll take a few snaps and post them so you can see my dilemma.

similar happened to me. either repot burying the stalk a good way in, u can do it till around an ich from ur first set of leaves, the little tiny one that appeared inside the seed case( think there called cotelydons or sumthin). or if uve got room in ur current pot fill more soil in . support them with sumthin , ised toothpicks and theouter pastic cover of old pens. get a fan, this will help massively , the constant air will cause them to build up quickly, its like pumping iron. get ur lites on and as close as possible. i did all of the above and my plants are all good. smallest is 3' and tallest is 4.5'.only problem is ur lights gonna be hot so an extra fan blowing between the light and plant tops mite help along with good exhaust ventilation. best of luck buddy

sweet thanks bud, thats exactly what i wanted to do. but i wanted to hear someone else think the same thing first. I got a fan on it currently medium size blowing on low keeps the bulb from getting too hot, and gives the plants a gentle breeze. for exhaust ventilation i'm just using an open window, for the time being at least. i'll improve on that at some point, when i'm more motivated or something forces my hand, probably the latter.

do you think it's safe enough to just pull them up? or should i use a trowel and pull all the dirt surrounding the plant aswell. i don't want to damage any just forming root structure.

germinate - transplant - compact fluorescents (so you don't destroy them with 600w of hps stretch) for a few leaves - hps

cfl are great for small plants tight nodes no heat little power consumption. no reason to run hps

pull them up??????????????????no man just tap the pot all round and knock the ass of it a bit to loosen it then just dig a large enuff,slightly deeper hole in ur new pot and just sit it in, tamp it down gently and cover with some more soil. just put ur hand over the top of the pot with the stalk between ur fingers and tap the bottom, its a lot easier if the soil is dry.the whole thing should just pop out.

i know i said pull it up, but what i meant was stick like a paper towel roll down through the dirt around the plant and grab the plant and containing dirt that way. i'm not really sure how fast the root structure fans out. but i'll just cut out the bottom of the 2liters and drop the whole lot into the new pot then remove the 2liters walls. i found my memory card so here are the before pictures. i'll post the after here once i get off my lazy ass.

dbo yeah i wish i had some cfl's currently but thats going to have to wait for a bit.

I dunno dude. - here what I would do

pull it up like yowu ere going to- knock all of the dirt off. prepare the new space by leaving about 2 inches of dirt off of the top

do this carefully place the roots and coil the stem and get dirt in there careful nothing snaps here and then the roots are higher up the stem is just coiled around in the dirt and the leaves are lower down.

cfls are like $2 or $3 at the grocer!

so i transplanted 1 which didn't work out so good, the top few inches of dirt pulled the root structure out of the lower dirt clump that didn't want to give but it looked intact so i'm crossing my fingers. coiled the top of one, coiled the top of 1 and put it under a small layer of fresh soil, and put a new germ in dirt for a control. I also raised the plants so they were no more than 2 feet from the bottom of the reflector.

i'll take some more shots in a couple hours so we can see what has transpired.

So here are some updated pictures so you can see the changes for better or worse.

this is the control that i planted yesterday, so we have some idea of what the natural growth should be.


here is the plant that was transplanted right after i put it in it's new home.


the same plant today ~1/2 through the light cycle


one of the plants that was coiled


here is another one of the coiled plants from the black pots first the before and then the after



So there it is both methods i think worked superbly well. thanks to both of you for your help.

if i remember i'll post a couple more pictures showing the results over a week or so.

well i'm not really sure what happened to my last post, so lets try this again. the plants are looking much better, you can't even tell they were stretching to begin with. the plants i coiled the stalk on i didn't pull up just coiled the stalk a little and put some more dirt over it. the control plant is beautiful now at a little under 48 hours in the dirt. it has a nice strong stalk, and not a want to stretch in sight. here are a few images so you can see for yourself how it turned out.

transplanted into a bigger container and a little cockeyed


same plant after 24 hours


a before shot of the plants i coiled the stalks on


and what it looks like after 24 hours


so what have we learned? too little light is far worse than no light at all. I won't be setting my seedlings in the window anymore, just using the lighting setup from now on.

i should also mention that the one i transplanted, the dirt sorta came out in two portions and the top portion pulled the roots out. so for the shock the plant went through, i think it made an amazing recovery. if i didn't know what had happened i never would of guessed.

Thanks to both of you for your advice it really helped get this under control quickly.

so here is an update on how things are going with the stretching problem. it seems that moving to the hps has done the trick, and both coiling the stems and transplanting yielded pretty equivalent results, so i can't really say one method is better than the other. here are some picks starting with the control plant that i forgot to put in my last post.

control plant after 24 hours.


control plant currently.


transplanted plant currently.


coiled plant currently.


happy growing everyone