Thanks for checking out my journal 1grower.
Harvest is done! :yummY;
I will have weights next week sometime.
Now that this harvest is done,
what did I learn? 
First, I want to talk about defoliation. I've always been a big advocate of this technique. 'Back in the day', we all removed the "sucker leaves" or shade leaves. After getting back into growing again, I think I've taken it too far. I will continue to defoliate during veg growth, but I'm unsure about doing it in flower. This crop I think I was a little late (started around day 22 and it took a week to finish), so that could have had an impact. It may have been my fault, but in this next grow, I will probably not defoliate much, if any, after flipping to 12/12. While each of the 3 strains responded a little differently, I felt it added too much leaf material into the flower clusters. I think the HPS plants responded better then the LED plants. I know some growers here use LEDs and defol, but I'll have to do a little more experimenting with this. This kinda leads into the second topic...
So what do I think about my LEDs?
Honestly, I'm not impressed. The plants directly under the lights did OK, but they have a pretty small footprint and the penetration was definitely less than my 750W HPS. Maybe 5W diodes would work better? I'm actually a little undecided about whether or not I want to invest in more LEDs now. I haven't made the decision yet. I'm waiting to see how the buds look after they dry. They do feel denser. Even the popcorn seemed to have more substance to it. I can absolutely confirm the denser nugg characteristic of LED growing. Unfortunately, I can also confirm the smaller nugg trait. We'll see how the weights compare. There are way too many variables to make a direct plant vs plant comparison worthwhile. Instead, I am just testing the density difference. I will compare the weights of 1 quart of the plants from each (HPS and LED). This should be a valid comparison as I will try to grab only the main tops. The plants under my LEDS were the smaller clones to start with, but they just didn't seem to develop as well as the HPS plants.
I'm still likely to buy more LEDs, I'm just not as ready as I was. I've got ~6-7 weeks until I will really need more lights, so I have time to think about it. I'll be moving one of my LEDs back to the veg area to try again. Based on the penetration I was seeing, they might be OK vegging short plants. They just burned the tall mothers in my vertically challenged veg area by being too close.
What's next?
Starting my 2 cycle split flowering room today. I'm going to flower out my old mothers and replace them with fresh ones.
The next "phase" in the basement is building out a veg area. The flowering room is going to have one side hydro and the other side soil. Each side will be staggered ~5-6 weeks. I will have a 'perpetual' system, but it will also, sort of, be 2 separate alternating systems doing entire lifecycles (clone, veg, flower). They will share the same veg area. It should work out well. I plan to veg my hydro plants using net pots in flood and drain trays. These trays will also work great to catch the runoff from the soil pots as well. I haven't yet settled on counts yet, but I'm leaning towards 3 2'x4' trays with 8 plants each. This will give me 24 plants on each side of the flowering room.
I will be running a couple experiments in this grow as well. Obviously, this will be sort of a test for me to flower in soil. I haven't done this for a long long time. My outdoor experiment last year came out mediocre at best. At least they made it to the end, so I'm optimistic I'll at least not kill them.
You guys might see me asking lots of soil questions.
I have one set of mothers that are the same genetics. I will be doing another LED experiment with these 2 plants. Similar to this last run, I'll have both LED and HPS, but this time I will only have one LED in the flowering room (one is going to veg area). The difference is I'm going to separate them. Last time I tried to gain the benefit of putting all the lights together. This time I will be putting space between them so the plants will only be growing from one light source. I have 11 mothers to flower, so there will be 2 under the LED and 9 under HPS.
I'm also going to try and avoid defoliating during flower. This 'experiment' has not had a lot of thought yet, so I'm undecided on details. I just know I will be trying something different from the last round.
I've got a lot of work to do still, but the hardest part is over. I need to look into some sort of mechanical trimming solution. It took 12 days to finish harvest. Granted, there was a full day of waiting for room on the drying rack, and I work, so it was just a few hours in the evenings during the week. I did pull 2 all nighters trying to get as much done as possible. I'm pretty tired.
I have some things to share related to the washing, but I'll save that for another post. I want to include pictures with a little bit of a how to. I came up with a reasonably efficient process I thought I would share. I also have some thoughts about my strains I will share, but some of those thoughts are still being resolved in my mind.
OK, Dave's not here but I'm looking for Hiker.
Open the door, I got the stuff with me! Oh wait, I'm not Dave, I'm Hiker! 
