ScrOG Time-Lapse Video & Grow Journal

by ogkushog

Quick Grow Snapshot

Strain: 6 x Maple Leaf Indica by Sensi Seeds (where can I buy seeds?)

Grow medium: Hydroponics

  • Rockwool slabs in an ebb & flow (flood and drain) tray that contain the entire rootmass. During normal growth they get submerged in 5 gallons of pH balanced nutrient solution every day. See picture below

Grow Light: mainly 1000W HID

  • Used fluorescent lights for first 2 weeks of vegetative stage, then 1000W HPS for the remaining 4 weeks of vegetative stage
  • 1000W High Pressure Sodium (HPS) bulb in flowering stage

Nutrients or Additives: Pureblend Pro for hydro (Grow & Bloom) and a few CANNA products

Grow area was enriched with CO2. Learn more

  • January 14, 2014: Rooted clones were put under fluorescent grow lights
  • February 25, 2014: Switched to 12-12 flowering light schedule
  • April 26, 2014: Harvest!

Vegetative Stage: 42 days
Flowering Stage: 60 days

Total Time – Rooted Clone to Harvest:
102 days

Final Yield
It’s still drying so stay tuned for the final yield. My last run was 36 ounces.

More About Setup: Rockwool, six plants, 1000W HPS, Pureblend Pro and a few CANNA products, and of course CO2.

The plant roots are sitting in rockwool slabs in an ebb & flow tray that contain the entire rootmass. During normal growth they get submerged in 5 gallons of pH balanced nutrient solution every day. See picture

Learn more about this cannabis grow journal below!

Getting started: Clones

I keep clones in temporarily in an ebb & flow tray so I just top feed and it drains into a bucket.

The roots of a new cannabis clone by ogkushog

The incredibly long roots of a new cannabis clone by ogkushog - cloned in a simple ebb & flow system

I start from clones for this grow, and the official veg time starts after they were rooted. The rooted cuts were taken from the aeroponic cloner and placed under fluorescent lights for two weeks before going in the big tray under the HPS light. Then they vegged for another four weeks before changing to flower.

 

Hydroponic Setup

All the plants are grown hydro, in rockwool. You can see the slabs here.

Plants are grown in Rockwool slabs, then trained under the ScrOG net

I use an ebb & flow tray for flowering as well which can be used with a reservoir and pumps in a recirculating setup or drain to waste.

The plant roots are sitting in rockwool slabs located in an ebb & flow tray that contain the entire rootmass. During normal growth they get submerged in 5 gallons of pH balanced nutrient solution every day.

 

Training & ScrOG Maintenance

I’ve never FIM’d really but did some topping very early on in the grow. I topped the plants in weeks two and three of veg and not much after that, just enough to get the auxins spreading around and starting out the bush shape.

Learn more about FIMing and topping your cannabis plants

Once they reach the net I do a lot more LSTing (low stress training) within the net to keep them trained.

As they get taller and flowers start to form I’ll ‘cross’ train them where I take two nearby colas oriented parallel to each other like | | and cross them using their flower nodes to hold them in place like X which reduces their overall height and helps me even everything out. I also do defoliation on the center of the SCROG closest to the light.

Maintaining the SCROG requires the most work during the last week of veg and the first 4-5 weeks of flower, which usually amounts to 90-120 minutes a day at the beginning of their light cycle. For the remainder of the grow the tending and maintenance times are minimal.

A picture of the cannabis ScrOG canopy - by ogkushog

Here’s a time-lapse moving gif showing what tending the ScrOG looks like

Tending the cannabis ScrOG net - moving gif - by grower ogkushog

There’s six plants there, though since they’re all identical genetics I like to think of them as one big plant.

I tied some twine around the outside to bring all of the outer perimeter colas inwards and create the ‘bowl’ shape I typically aim for with my SCROGs.

Should I use CO2 for my grow to get results like yours?

CO2 enrichment is like putting nitrous oxide boosters in a car, it only makes sense when every other aspect of your performance is tuned and can handle the enrichment. You wouldn’t add NOS to a Ford Pinto because it wouldn’t make a difference and at best would be a waste of money and at worse it could cause problems elsewhere.

Growing marijuana, like many other plants, has to do with the Law of the Minimum which is evident in the statement, “The availability of the most abundant nutrient in the soil is only as good as the availability of the least abundant nutrient in the soil.”

The basic building blocks for your plants are Nutrients, Water, Light, and CO2. At any given moment one of these is the ‘minimum’ (or the scarcest) and creates a bottleneck of resources for everything else. In your case that minimum is the lighting, since that is your least abundant resource. You can give the plants all the CO2 and water and nutrients you want but since your light is the limiting factor all of the increases in everything else will be for naught and can even be harmful.

That’s why you shouldn’t use CO2 with fluorescent lights. CO2 only makes sense when every other aspect of your grow environment can handle it. Once you have HID discharge lighting and your nutrients and watering schedules are dialed in, CO2 will be your ‘minimum’ and your limiting factor for growth, which is the point at which you should start considering adding CO2 to your grow. Until then you’d be wasting your resources.

Learn more about using CO2 effectively in the grow room

 

How do you flush your plants in a ScrOG setup?

I start the flush process 10 days before harvest. Every day I fill up four 5-gallon buckets with unbalanced tap water, and submerge the rockwool slabs for a few minutes with each of the 5-gallon buckets. This pulls the salts out of the rockwool. Over the course of the 10 days, 200 gallons of water goes through the slabs.

I measure the TDS/EC of last bucket of runoff every day and the PPM falls exponentially. The first day of flush the fourth bucket TDS measures ~1400 ppm. By the last day of flush the TDS measures around ~140 ppm, which is within 50 ppm of the tap water I start with.

The measuring allows me to be sure that I’ve flushed as many salts as possible out of the medium. I use unbalanced tap water to flush because in my opinion, any nutrients the plants are consuming at this point come from within the plant’s reserves and should not be coming from the medium. Because of this, the pH of the water is irrelevant since pH only matters when you’re trying to maximize nutrient uptake which is the opposite of what we want during flush.

I also pull off many of the fan leaves when I start flush to encourage the plant to pull nutrients from the leaves nestled around and within the buds to further improve quality.

It’s still drying so stay tuned for the final yield. My last run was 36 ounces!

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