re: GrowLEDHydro 300W LED vs. 400W HID Demonstration
Excellent work SS!
I also believe that this is a testament to what was earlier being touching on, care/environment vs nutes. Understanding that the CRFs clearly do a great job, the fact remains there are many more additives(nutes) that could have introduced during this grow. But instead more concentration of care was taken and the result is clear. Nature surely knows how to produce great products with proper environmental conditions.
That's what I'm seeing also. These CRF's are very advanced products, yet they sell for a fraction of typical bottled nutes, they won't burn your plants, and they reduce labor, so I'm down with that.
One common finding in several articles I've read comparing different ways of using CRF's is that the largest plants were grown by supplementing with a liquid fertilizer every second or third watering, so that's an option, but that's the nice thing, it's an "option". The plants on this grow just got CRF's and a couple of waterings with kelp extract, and they developed just fine.
You can "just add water" and grow nice plants, or you can supplement them also. I'd keep total ppm's in mind however, as even though the CRF's run at relatively low ppm levels, things will add up, especially if your grow room temps are high.
There are some other quality time-release ferts that you can mix into your soil such as Fox Farms Marine Cuisine, which makes me hungry just typin' it, lol.
The lighting "race" is interesting. The LED light produced both the heaviest(286g) and the lightest(201g) plant with an average of 244.25Gs/plant. Whereas the HID light produced an average of 232.25Gs/plant. A 12g difference, this is looking very close so far.
The clones were genetically identical, but not as uniform as I had hoped. That's mostly because I rescued those 8 clones from a mom that was dying of stem rot, which is quite romantic when you think about it, but I took as many cuts as I could and two of them were small and disadvantaged.
The runt clones are the two in the back right corner of each tent. I split them up, and put one in each tent, thinking that I would cull at least one plant from each tent, but then decided to grow all of them out.
The runt in the HID tent is HID 1 and went 211g, and the runt in the LED tent was LED 4, and went 201g, so we don't even have to throw them out of the lineup to compare yields, which is cool.
It will be interesting to see, if one side has more water content then the other resulting in much different dried weights and of course, overall smoke/taste/quality.
I could have staggered their watering schedules prior to harvest to keep both groups at the same level of moisture, but I just didn't think about it.
Dry weights can be more accurate and consistent if you use a fixed percentage to estimate yield, such as 25% of wet weight, but since I'm using small hygrometers inside the jars to directly measure the moisture content in the buds, I get good consistency that way.
thank you Nine Leafer
