First DIY stealth aeroponic cabinet grow, SOG

ok fuck it, 19 inch plant, im flowering. they will go into 12/12 tonight

plants look good today, 20 inches tallest plant. I rearranged the lighting and ducting for the final FINAL time today, so that the light can be in it's final flowering position at the top of the cab. The 20 inch plant was showing leaf curling again due to heat stress, so the light had to go up. I rearanged some clones today, i now have 6 of the rooted hydroton clones vegging with the jiffy pellet clones. They all look great.
Mother plant looks good, 12 soil plants look good, sacrificed mother clones showing roots and looking like 95% rooting. I am so happy with soil cloning, hydro cloning can lick my balls.

plants looking great today. Can't wait to start seeing real flowers come out. The damn things are huge, they range between 8 and 20 inches tall, so i have a "good" spread to see what height i need to aim for in the future to get a harvest i can work with. I'm worried about the stretch cause one plant is 20 inches freaking tall, but what can you do. Ill just bend over the tops or something i guess, none of the plants are near the heat of the light so heat stress should no longer be a problem. Also, it's been freaking cold here so the cab has been running at 20 C for a few days. Cant hurt to be swapping to 12/12 just as the temp drops lol, even though i certainly didn't plan that.
The vegging DWC plants are looking great, new root growth and the start of new leaf growth. Seems like the jiffy pellet plants are doing fine in their watery home, and no leaking of the soil or anything like that. These pellets were sterilized at the beginning by being hydrated with boiling water, then cooled. Mae sure that there is enough hydroton in the bottom of the netpot if you're going to do this method of cloning, because too low would have soil sitting in the water, that would probably be a recipe for root rot.
Mother looks great, all the vegging soil clones look awesome. We should be good to go on this whole scenario.

pics! woot!

Lookin good 'demo'.
You should end up with a nice row of colas at the end of this.
Looks like I got here just at the right time.
All the best mate.

thanks man, nice grow you've got there too, i'll be whatching

lol i love this one plant in a coke bottle. It's an original mother plant that ended up runty cause it's pot mate was much larger much faster. Poor little bugger got rootbound. I retired that mother a little while ago and repotted this plant into it's coke bottle home. I found it room in the flowering chamber under the hps, and it's EXPLODING with growth lol. I so want to cut it's little branches for clones, but i don't need any right now lol. So it's being left in the flowering chamber to flower. We shall see how long the soil flowering takes compared to the aero.
Moved the aero plants arround today. I had trouble with res leaks, there were holes in my plastic layer from the lid scraping it over and over. This is a much harder problem to solve then i anticipated since the platic is under the reflectix, under all the freaking plants. End result, i had another lid i was going to recut into a res lid anyway, so i cut all the netpot holes out, recovered it in new plaastic and reflectix ad then transfered all of the plants to this new res lid. Not easy, and took forever. I decided to rearange the plants too, the big ones are arround the perimeter and the small in the center. Trimmed some fan leaves here and there to allow for a little more light to the lower canopy and changed the nutes. They are looking awesome, showing the change in the growtips from leaf to flower. I can't fucking wait, these plants will be so bomb covered in weed.
The lower chamber vegging plants are doing excellent. Both the peat and strait hydroton clones have substantial root growth, and they are all showing new growth. Now i juswt have to hope that they get big quick, cause i only have about 50 days before they need to be halfway done flowering for my cycle to work. This first cycle might be 40 or 50 days insteqd of 30. Depends. The only variable i don't know is how fast the plants will grow under the cfl's. The last peice of the puzzle lol.

The soil plants are doing great, topped a couple this morning. Roots on all the dying mother plant clones, and my remaining current mother has TONS of excellent cloneable branches. I need some more soil and peat pellets; i want as many rooted plants as possible so i can plant em outdoors in may!

Sounds like you've been busy.
It's almost impossible to go into the grow area and have nothing to do.

looking great still. transition to flower continuing. good amount of growth on the vegging plants, i think they'll be big enough within the time frame under the cfl's in the dwc. Should be good to go.

Day 9 of flowering, plants still look great. flowering plants aren't stretching too much in this first week of flowering, im lucky my strain seems to not stretch a lot, and since one of my plants is almost as big as it can get, im lucky.
the vegging DWC plants are looking awesome, substantial new growth, a lot of branching that had to be trimmed away and tons of healthy white roots.
new set of rooted jiffy pellet clones on the right hand side of the system. they won't be in the aero system for about 80 days or so, so lots of time for them to get bigger.
changed the aero res to flowering nutes today, and cleaned the rooting dwc res too. Upped the nutes in the vegging res, they can handle 1000 now with the roots they have.

i have 15 rooted soil plants right now. Running into trouble cause some of them are in such small pots they need watering daily. just need it to be spring so i can grab a bunch of compost and soil for free from backyard



took some pics with a crappy webcam i have, gives the general idea if not great images.

day 10 of flower, plants looking awesome. I love the anatomy of weed plants, so interesting and intricate. The way it's leaf structures just become flowers is crazy! I'm really enjoying just looking at these plants lol.

the vegging plants and newest clones are both looking awesome. The jiffy pellet system has given me no trouble so far, and i can't forsee any problems in the aero system so it looks like i have a set cloning method. Jiffy pellets to hydroton lol. I never would have guessed at the beginning i'd end up in soil! lol!

I'm also very happy with the growth on these plants, considering they are under cfl. I was worried they would grow too slowly, but clearly in veg at least cfl works great. I have about 200 W of cfl in there really close to the plants, and they are loving it. Technically these vegging plants should be started on flower in 10 more days. We'll see how big they are, but if they have doubled or something i may consider flowering them just to get my cycle going. I think they will be smaller then i want , but not by a lot.

the mother and 15 vegging soil plants are doing well. I need it to be spring so i can steal dirt from the ground!

day 14 flowering, great flowering progress on the aero plants. I am running into alight space issues lol. The tallest plant is 30 inches at least now, and although they aren't showing very much stretch at all they are developing lots of little flowers all over. Moved the plants arround a bit to allow for more space, and i altered the ventilation again, again to give them a little more room.
The vegging plants look great, lots of grwoth, im having to clip their growtips all the time. One of the clones has become a little bush, and i haven't been trimming it because it has no main branch lol. we shall see what i do with it.
The soil clones look great. It's all going well. Pics later today i hope.

Look forward to the pics mate.

day 17 of flowering, the stretch is slowing down thank goodness, clearly i let my largest plants get a couple inches too tall as they are now touching the top of the cab. im lsting them to the sides and just generally fitting them in just barely but it makes changing/checking the res a lot harder. Next time i will aim for 10-12 inches at flowering, going for 22-25 inch plants after the stretch. those pics are a couple days old, the buds are much more developed by today. ill try and get some more pics today with the gf's camera.

Lookin good Demo. This is where things start getting exciting in a grow.
Glad to be here for it.

day 18 of flowering. lots got done today, and for the record i am clearly a genius.

so the height problem for a couple of my plants has been nagging at me and today i hit on an unbeleivable solution; flip the lid. Im using a roughneck tub for the res, and it's lid's top is at least an inch and a half above the top of the res. flipped upside down, not only have i gotten rid of all the leak issues and thus the plastic rapping of my res, but it also gained the plants like three inches of space. The largest one, which was pushing against the top of the cab is now happily sitting in the air again.
I also swapped the vegging plants rez's. One of them is large, the other is small, and the vegging plants are getting big enough now that they needed more space, so they are now in the small res gaining them 2 inches at least. It looks like they will indeed be big enough to start the flowering cycle on them within a few days. That way, when i harvest in 32-42 days they will allready be 30 days into flowering, allowing for my perpetual cycle to begin. I dread having to undo their roots; they are a tangled fucking web, but next time i think i will simply put ziplocks with large holes to let water circulate arround the roots when they are young to encourage them to stay as seperate as possible.

Feck... the one thing im worried about is how the lower part of these plants doesn't seem to be filling in. But that's the way my previous run went too i guess; they were little stics with a bud on top and then they filled in all over. Im not , in truth, worried yet, just surprised to have seen so little growth down the plant.

There are lots of pictures coming. just need to wait on the gf to get home, upload them and send them to me.

day 19 of flowering, and i guess the vegging plants on the bottom are going into flowering on saturday so they are 30 days along when the current plants finish. Memo to all DWC growers, if you swap your res out and the plants all start wilting and you cant figure out why, check the stupid temperature. I accidentally put the vegging plants in a 50F res yesterday, causing immediate wilting that was scary as hell. Figured it out in time though, and i just boiled some of the solution they were in and then added that back before mixing and replacing the plants in their now 62F res. Im going to have to rig up some sort of lightproof covering for the left hand side of the bottom of the cupboard, so that the right hand side can have lights on during the 12/12 period of flowering.

got some pics today from the gf ! So, we have two shots of buds, then a shot of the whole system, notice the lid of the res cleverly flipped upside down to increase growing space. On the bottom level of that picture, the two res'z are now swapped arround, ie the chort one is on the left with the tall plants on the left and the tall one is on the right with the short plants. Then a shot of the remaining mother with its plethera of cloneable branches. Then a shot of some of the dirt plants that are growing steadily waiting to be placed outside in the spring. Gonna go out to the cottage, get me some dead fish, dig a bunch of holes and plant them on top of dead fish: they should be enormous by fall. The last pic is of the vegging dwc plants in all their glory. They are gonna be flowered starting saturday, and i expect a bit more stretch from them since it's under 200w of cfl, not 400w hps. They are sort of 6-9 inches tall at the moment, and they have about 17 inches in that bottom chamber to grow in. If they hit 17-18 inches then i think they will be ideal in the upper chamber. Of all my plants, the ones that are about 18 inches now are covering themselves in buds the quickest, and they fit the space well as well. Since 9 or so inches of growth seems to be what i can expect out of my strains clones in the 30 days they have for recovering and vegging, unless the really tall plants i have this run are substantially better producers, im going to stick with under 20 inch plants from now on.

Lookin good Demo.
That's an excellent perpetual set up you've got going there.
That mother looks beautiful and healthy too.
Well done all round.
Looking forward to seeing those buds progress.

so day 22 of flowering, 3 weeks in now and they are starting to bud up nicely. Saw trichs for the first time a couple days ago, now most of the plants are frosting over. They are going to be awesome, i can feel it.

I finished the bottom chamber flowering setup, ie i installed a light blocker for the left hand side. Basically the right hand chamber is now light proof, and the left one will have it's lights off a.t night just like the top flowering chamber. In 30 days when i harvest, these ones will be halfway through flowering and will be moved up to the HPS aero chamber.

The vegging clones have put down roots, but they are looking kind of sickly for some reason. These clones were taken from a dying and clearly nutrient poor mother, so even though they rooted i was skepticle they would turn out. I may cut some more, 60 days till they need to be almost halfway done flowering . I think ill cut some that are 4-5 inches long instead of my normal shorter clones since that will decreaase the veg time i need.

so day 22 of flowering, 3 weeks in now and they are starting to bud up nicely. Saw trichs for the first time a couple days ago, now most of the plants are frosting over. They are going to be awesome, i can feel it.

I finished the bottom chamber flowering setup, ie i installed a light blocker for the left hand side. Basically the right hand chamber is now light proof, and the left one will have it's lights off a.t night just like the top flowering chamber. In 30 days when i harvest, these ones will be halfway through flowering and will be moved up to the HPS aero chamber.

The vegging clones have put down roots, but they are looking kind of sickly for some reason. These clones were taken from a dying and clearly nutrient poor mother, so even though they rooted i was skepticle they would turn out. I may cut some more, 60 days till they need to be almost halfway done flowering . I think ill cut some that are 4-5 inches long instead of my normal shorter clones since that will decreaase the veg time i need.