Reserva Privada Kosher Kush - Mainlined LED soil grow - Flowering

Hi Everyone,

decided to document my second grow (link to first grow in the signature)

my setup:

Secret Jardin dark-room grow tent (80cmx80cmx160cm)
2 x 200W 11-band Diamond Series grow LED
1 x 75W Magnetic Induction light @ 6500K (for Veg - to be replaced by a 25W UVB light)
2 x Reserva Privada's Kosher Kush in 2 20L (5gl) AirPots. ready-made soil mix (something similar to BioBizz light-mix).

food:
BioBizz BioHeaven
BioBizz Biogrow
BioBizz Alg-A-Mic
GroTek MonsterBloom

seeds were planted 68 days ago, and were Main-lined according to this excellent guide by nugbuckets:
http://www.growweedeasy.com/main-lining-technique-nugbuckets

one of them, Main-lined to perfection, now has 8 colas, almost even in height, might have to do some supercropping to even things out even further.
the other one had a little mainlining accident and now has 6 colas instead of 8. both looking very happy and healthy. see pictures below.
im gonna keep them in veg for 3-4 more days before tying all colas to the net and flipping the switch to 12/12.

would love to hear any comments or suggestions you guys might have.

here are some pics.

DON'T let them get too tall before flip! Especially in a tent. These lovelies LOVE to stretch. I'm using a very low profile big wide hood for my 1000w hps and I always have to super crop if I let them veg too tall. I run out of headroom for the light in the tent. You many have to do some good lateral bending still.

Love this strain. And the love shit loads of bloom boosters in my experience. Really hardens up last 3 weeks, but sticky very early too. Responds well to defoliation in flower. I've gotten up to 12z of really awesome high grade from 1 plant with this strain.

Best wishes on yours.

Fishyhead01 said:

DON'T let them get too tall before flip! Especially in a tent. These lovelies LOVE to stretch. I'm using a very low profile big wide hood for my 1000w hps and I always have to super crop if I let them veg too tall. I run out of headroom for the light in the tent. You many have to do some good lateral bending still.

Love this strain. And the love shit loads of bloom boosters in my experience. Really hardens up last 3 weeks, but sticky very early too. Responds well to defoliation in flower. I've gotten up to 12z of really awesome high grade from 1 plant with this strain.

Best wishes on yours.

Click to expand...

thanks for the reply Fishyhead,
i flipped to 12/12 last night, so this is day 1 of bloom. was waiting for the net to fill out nicely before finally making the switch. i think i should have enough space even if they triple their size.

12oz from 1 plant is fucking incredible, you're getting my hopes up here. since im using LED, i would settle for less, but that's a good starting point

also got a question,
I have bio-bizz BioBloom and TopMaxx, and i also got GroTek Monster Bloom, which would you recommend i should use? maybe start with BioBizz, and switch to MonsterBloom at a later stage of flowering?

thanks for your help.

Hi Everyone,

Day 4 of flowering is over, and things are looking great.
both plants have started to show that they're indeed girls, i turned off the LEDs and tried to take some pics with my cellphone camera, so i hope you'll be able to see the beginning of 2 white pistils on each of the plants.

after turning on all of the LEDs (red spectrum for flowering), the temps went a bit higher, +2c, so i think the soil dried up much faster than usual. soil was really dry yesterday morning, and im used to watering just once a week.
so last feeding was yesterday, earlier than usual, 3ml/l Bio-Grow, 3ml/l BioHeaven, 2ml/l Alg-a-mic, 1ml/l Bio-Bloom, 1ml/l Topmaxx, everything is looking healthy and green.
the carbon filter along with the ONA gel seem to be doing the work. it's starting to smell pretty bad inside the tent, but outside there's no trace of it. hope it stays that way.

posting some pics, should be getting more interesting from now on.



as usual,
would love to hear comments or suggestions.

thanks

Hey Peoples...

first 2 weeks of flowering are over, so here's a quick update:

the little bitches are stretching really bad. more than doubled their size since flipping the switch.
I moved my LED panels all the way up to the top of the tent, and hope the stretching period is over.

i've decided to do a little experiment and supercrop one the plants to manage the canopy and maker her dense, while letting the other one grow wild (only adjusting her under the net). you can totally tell the difference between them already, the supercropped one has much more growth shoots and bud sites, while the other one has just 8 fat main colas. attaching some pictures.

the one on the right is supercropped:


a pic of my entire setup:



also added some CFLs at the bottom of the tent, figure it cant hurt:



buds are starting to form



my feeding schedule is: 3ml/l BioGrow, 3ml/l BioHeaven, 2ml/l BioGrow, 1ml/l TopMaxx every 5 days.
after the 3rd week of flowering i will throw some Grotek Monster Bloom into the mix.

so to conclude, things are looking great. not a single deficiency or any other problem so far, knock on wood.
will keep updating. feel free to comment, or advise, especially if you're familiar with this strain.

thanks!

Hey all!
update #5, friday, dec 13th (friday the 13th!), 12/12 - day 20.

not much to report here, been using the same feeding schedule, with the minor exception of lowering Biobizz BioBloom to 1ml/l, and supplementing with grotek MonsterBloom.
all is looking great, so ill spare you the stories, and go straight to some pictures:



have a great weekend ya'll

Looks great MotJ. I'd probably not waste the electricity on the cfl's unless they were within inches of bud sites. They just don't penetrate much. They wont hurt anything other than adding some heat to the tent. But the return on investment will be minimal that far away. There is a more efficient way to get full penetration with the LED's. But you already know what I believe in there.

Edit: I'm totally unfamiliar with your nutrients so no comment on that. If it was my grow, I'd be using AN BigBud in both liquid AND powder forms as a bloom supplement. But I grow hydro and really, tbh, kill everything in soil.

Fishyhead01 said:

Looks great MotJ. I'd probably not waste the electricity on the cfl's unless they were within inches of bud sites. They just don't penetrate much. They wont hurt anything other than adding some heat to the tent. But the return on investment will be minimal that far away. There is a more efficient way to get full penetration with the LED's. But you already know what I believe in there.

Edit: I'm totally unfamiliar with your nutrients so no comment on that. If it was my grow, I'd be using AN BigBud in both liquid AND powder forms as a bloom supplement. But I grow hydro and really, tbh, kill everything in soil.

Click to expand...

good point on the CFLs Fishyhead. i got 2 65W 2700K CFL and placed them between the LED panels, very close to the canopy. and as for the light penetration, opposed to the popular opinion about defoliation (don't), im trying it out on 2 colas out of the 6 on the one of the plants. no better way to learn but to actually try it out.
post some pictures soon.

thanks for your help

Hi All...

12/12 - day 28. my girls were raped.
after spending countless hours on reading about the pros and cons of defoliation, and after stumbling upon this article from hightimes.com, http://www.hightimes.com/read/30-more-yield-indoor-pot-grow-advice, and some other great articles online, i decided to give it a shot.
most old school veteran growers, like jorge cervantes, and several other RIU celebrities, have a very strict opinion about defoliation (they also tend to make you feel like an idiot for asking, like i saw in several threads), but when you see picture proof, like this one here:http://www.growweedeasy.com/marijuana-defoliation-tutorial or this one https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=174163 and a few others i've seen, it's hard to argue that this method doesn't work.
so i decided to go crazy on both plants and plucked almost every large fan leaf. some of them were huge and really fucking heavy(!)
the impressive bushy plants i had up until yesterday, became a bunch of flowering sticks, like the ones in the article above. but light penetration IS much better!!!
hopefully, they will turn out to be like the plants in that article.

posting some pics of the carnage

Hello good people of RIU,

it's day 36 of 12/12, day 31 of flowering, and all is good...
the girls are looking gorgeous after 2 defoliation sessions. now i just Pluck them as they grow.
Buds are starting to get fat and frosty, and the smell inside the tent is amazing.
my current (and final) setup includes 2 x 200w DS LEDs, 2 x 65W 2700K CFLs and 1 25W UVB reptile CFL, cause why the hell not?!

feeding schedule is 4ml/l Bioheaven, 3ml/l BioGrow, 3ml/l Alg-A-Mic, 3ml/l BioBloom, 1ml/l TopMaxx and GroTek Monster Bloom at about half strength, every 5-6 days.

the stalks on both of them are about the width of a quarter, they look like small trees





and some bud pics:

















feel free to comment and share your thoughts.

peace.

Looks great MoJ. I might have set up a few rungs of string and bent the taller branches to widen but still cover the light area. Thus allowing you to lower the light for deeper penetration. Deeper penetration = thicker, harder, lower buds. But it still looks great. It's all part of the learning process I suppose. I'm still working on optimal heights & widths. I'll get there. My latest grow, I've taken about 11 oz (dry) from and letting probably about 6 oz maybe more firm up with more time under the light. All of which is mid-lower bud from 3 plants. Not my highest yield but really really good quality.

Thanks Fishyhead,

i took your advice but applied it a bit differently.

rather than reducing their height by bending them, i simply used some dental floss to move them aside, effectively placing and dedicating an LED panel for each of the girls, and creating some vacancy in the middle of the tent (between the 2 panels). i then could lower my 2 65w CFLs (and the UVB CFL) way below the canopy without burning anything, and providing MUCH more light to the bottom of the plants, as you can see in the pics. mostly the parts closer to the middle of the tent. seems like the most efficient light setup for what i got.

as usual... sharing some pics of the joy Happy new year!!!

Looks ok. Check your heat near the cfl's. They appear a bit lanky to my taste, but as you gain experience you'll likely start using more training methods and really learn how durable and responsive these plants can be. Keep up the good work.

Fishyhead01 said:

Looks ok. Check your heat near the cfl's. They appear a bit lanky to my taste, but as you gain experience you'll likely start using more training methods and really learn how durable and responsive these plants can be. Keep up the good work.

Click to expand...

lanky indeed :/ they stretched like a motherfucker first 3 weeks of bloom.i did snap the branches (supercropped) one of them during veg, and first couple of weeks of bloom, and they seemed to recover extremely well. but after 2nd week of bloom, they didnt recover very well, and stayed, well... snapped. the dental floss now helps supporting the problematic colas.

other than that, im enjoying a relatively smooth ride. so far, i havent had any of the problem i ran into on my first grow (deficiencies and such).

i guess you learn with experience.

do you think it could have helped managing height if i started with the defoliation much earlier, say during veg, or at least as soon as i switched to 12/12?

appreciate your help. youre my sole subscriber

Going into flip we always want them fully leafed out. I never defoliate during stretch unless it's towards the end and they are getting too tall. KK loves to stretch, so flipping them at the right height with a tent is important. 13-15" seems good. I bend during veg and stretch all the time. But I also made a pvc frame inside my tent to use to tie strings across for branch support too. Allows me to manipulate them lots with plenty of super cropping. I set up the pvc w/o glue so I can make extra levels and adjust height also. And it helps prevent some of the "tent suck" from exhaust fan/filter.

Hello to allllllll of my subscribers.
we may not be many, but... i dont know... anyway...

it's day 51 of 12/12, and things are looking grrrreat. only 2 feedings left, one on wednesday, and another next monday. after that, at around day 60 of 12/12, im going to start flushing using Botanicare Clearex for 2 weeks, or until ready for harvest. so it's almost time to start counting down the days.

the buds on both plants are getting fat and heavy, although it seems like the buds on girl are much brighter that the ones on the other... they're almost completely white. barely any green, as you can see in the pics below. it's the one i suppercropped very late in bloom, but im not sure it's related...

feeding schedule is still every 5 days, 5ml/l BioHeaven, 4ml/l BioGrow, 4ml/l Alg-A-Mic, 4ml/l BioBloom, 4ml/l TopMaxx and topping all that with GroTek MonsterBloom every other feeding.

here are some pics i took earlier today with the LEDs off



they look like cauliflowers

















so whatcha think?

ok, you have some serious bleaching going on there. Your led's are too close. That's why those bud tops are bleach white. Wish you had shot a pic sooner.

I run in hydro, so I don't have to take any time to flush per se. But I go by the trichs. I like an upiddy high, so I let only about 5-10% get amber. My last batch went 75-82 days.

I'd really like to see a couple pics stepped away from the plants to gather the effect of your mainline. Where I normally post a guy has an awesome journal going using that method. But they changed the name to fluxing, in an effort to shy away from mainlinings other connotations.

Yup looks like you got a lot of bleaching or what some people like to call for some reason "Hash tips"

Also looks like you got a Sativa pheno? I'm going to pop some kosher kush maybe this year so this thread gives me some insight.
They are a bit stretchy but they look good.

KK is stretchy from my experience.

never heard about bleaching of buds, or hash tips... so i asked google, and it seems like it's something people are looking to achieve, and not avoid.

check this out: http://www.growery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/481860

tried looking at the white buds through a x60 lupe, and it looks fucking amazing. TONS of sticky crystals, ill try to take a photo through the lupe and post it here.

Fishyhead, or anyone else, do you have a different opinion about this? is this something i want to avoid?

any help would be greatly appreciated.