New Grower Question

[MzSiroz]

Hello Tokers,

I am a new grower. I purchased Nirvana's Blue Mystic and Bubblelicious Autos, but with that came 10 free mystery seeds. As I do not have much room for growth, Is there any way that I can shorten a regular seed if I grow it?

Can I shorten the veggie stage of a regular plant so that it doesn't grow beyond a certain height? I wouldn't want it to grow beyond 42 inches as my tent is 56 inches and Im using LED for lighting

Thanks in advance to all helpful replies.

 

[Ripples]

Look up SOG (Sea Of Green) and ScrOG... Below is a link... Scroll down to ScrOG section...


How to Grow Cannabis - Everything You Need to Know!

 

[TokinElf]

also look up LST,, theres alot that can be done to keep a plant short,, while it is also possible to shorten the veg time,, or even skip veg all together,, ive seen a few people around here starting seeds on 12/12 and going straight to flower

 

[Papageno]

I have 2 Blue mystic auto fems from Nirvana going right now. They are sleeping. When the light comes on I will go take some pics and measure the height and post it here for you to have as reference. Mine started blooming 7 inches out of the soil. They never got very tall. I tried 2 different pots to see if it mattered so one is a bit taller for that. And the one in the shorter pot sprouted later and has always been a bit shorter and behind anyway. But I will pull them both out and take some pis so you can see what they will get too roughly. I did some LST on the bigger one. Neither are all that tall but I had a bad cold snap happen here I wasn't ready for so for probably a week or more they were in too cold and dry of an environment. So they could get a bit bigger. Mine are nearing completion. This is my first Auto grow so I am not certain.


I took these 2 pics last night...

 

[Papageno]

I trained the bigger one like this a while ago...

After a few weeks it looked like this...

 

[MzSiroz]

Thank you Everyone for your information.
VillageIdiot, I look forward to your updates. I have been hoping to run into someone who was growing blue mystic.

 

[Papageno]

So just a bit of explanation. I did screw up a number of things and I think I could have at least 8 inches taller at this point. These are my first autos and I would use a different soil next time. I am tossing in a handful of bud pics so you can judge the age to help estimate the final height. The one I showed trained above is the bigger one on the left and is about the same height after training from the slower one that came up late and never caught up...also in a smaller pot. I was originally going to see if the pot size mattered but that one never caught up at all, not even close. From the soil they are about 21 inches.

I can say I am rather disappointed as I had no idea they would be so short. But they will probably come out decent. I just wasn't ready for them to start blooming so fast and had a problem with my grow space. It is my first time with this type of bulb and hood and adjustable ballast so I have been constantly messing with the height of the hood and the setting on the ballast. I was growing other plants next to them and one was all messed up from the moment it came above ground so I was doing things like backing off the light for that one which impacted these buggers. This is only the second time with this new tent and we had a freezing snap come through I was not prepared for. I was trying to run my fans low during that time and wasn't paying attention to the humidity which dropped way low for a few days and stunted growth early on. So they could easily be taller.

Hope this helps. Let me know if there are any other questions.

I did just add a super tea yesterday so who knows they may just take off on me...we can only hope.


Best of Luck!!!

 

[MzSiroz]

Hey VillageIdiot! I think your plants look pretty good and would be ecstatic if mine come close to that on the 1st try. What soil did you use and how big were your pots? Also, what day are you from germination?

 

[Papageno]

I been growing a while so I am not easily impressed and I normally just pine over what I could have done better...until it drys and cures...then I forget about it...LOL

Before I started these I got on here and asked this question about pot size. I got some varied feedback. Some say 3gal is enough some say 5gal is the most you need. I feel kind of odd growing in less than a 5 gallon pot but that is just cause I never grown something so small before. I was going to do an experiment and grow one in 3 and one in 5 and one in a 7 or 10 but ended up just doing 2 seeds as I had other seed I wanted to try. So I did a 3 and 5. Unfortunately like I said one came up way faster and has always been way stronger and farther ahead by at least a week. But even then the stalk of the one is way better. You can see from the training pic earlier that I bent the thing over in half and it is the same height as the slow one. I even had to plant the slow one in the final pot like a week later. So I figured I would just tell by final weight but that one has always been smaller and weaker so this is just a bunk test and meaningless. It would have been interesting to have put the faster one in the smaller pot to see what happens.

I would basically never grow a plant in smaller than 5 gallons personally but I would never grow in a small space again either. It really depends on the space. I recycle and re-compost my soils so I don't care about using a big ass pot and wasting some dirt. I am an engineer so I like to over build. I have run a lot of experiments on soil blends and pot sizes and I prefer to put plants in a final pot that is so big that the roots can always keep growing throughout the grow. There is some science to that actually. But that is a different topic. If you know what you are doing I am sure 3gal is fine but you may get root bound and then you need to know how to push the plant beyond the natural root mass if you want it to keep growing.

As far as soil goes I went real basic with this one because I have never done one like this and didn't know what to expect and I knew it wouldn't last long. I used my standard blend with no frills or anything special. For my bigger normal plants I do a lot more special stuff but again I wanted to keep this one simple. So I used 1/3 precomposted steer manure (like $2.50 from Home depot), 1/3 perlite and 1/3 Fox Farm Froggy blend soil.

Throughout Veg I added Silica and Cal mag. I did one shot of Veg nutes that I should not have done but I had it mixed up for some other plants and added it anyway. That was some Advanced Nutrient pH perfect sensi grow I had left over from my last DWC run. I have twice added a super tea I make that has everything the plant needs plus a bunch of blooming stimulators. I did that once about 3 weeks ago and once again yesterday. I also once again added some pH perfect sensi bloom again left over I had again mixed up for other plants but I am done with that stuff for this grow. Like I said, yesterday I added a pretty good dose of super tea so I will just be adding water and sugars for a while and see what happens. I think it may be time to add some Cal mag again. After taking those pics i trained out the smaller one since it was out so I will be adding some silica again for that too... but this late in the grow it probably wont make a difference anyway.

They are getting along. I keep thinking 2 more weeks and then more white pistils keep coming. So this may not be done for a bit.

I have 3 more of these seeds left. Next time I am changing the soil. What I put in is for a longer grow than I need for these guys. I want some more control and less "just sit back and add water" for this type of plant because it just goes so fast. I feel that auto fems are actually a more complicated grow than normal seeds because in a normal grow you can follow simple techniques like use a super soil blend and just add water. For these guys they mature so fast you need to be in more direct control of the nute mix in the root zone. So next time I am going to do basically the same but instead of 1/3 Steer manure I am cutting that in half and going to add in 1/6 coco fiber. That still keeps me at 1/3 soil and 2/3rds soiless so I get the benefits of both. Easy pH control and good organic nutes with great microbes and easy control of humidity and additives with top notch drainage for healthy root ball.

So basically normally I go with a stronger longer acting soil organic blend with a compost part I have not discussed for my bigger pots for plants I SCROG. But for these quickies I am scaling it way back to more of soilless type grow so I can change the nute profile in the root zone more easily on demand. That way when they start blooming at 7 inches I can keep up with the changing nute requirements more easily.