I appreciate all the support and suggestions. When I was growing real crap, from not giving it enough attention to actually dial in the environment, I thought that if I could get it to look good; stay green, have dense, well formed buds, that the quality smoke would come on it's back. It's hard to believe that such beautiful plants could just be duds, losers. Well, idk, and no one else seems to be able to tell from the pics, so I've gotta start somewhere. The only problem with blaming it on genetics is, it seems very hard to be certain you have good genetics until you've grown them out to harvest, and there's a lot of room for them to get screwed up along the way that might have nothing to do with the seeds, but the grower. Generally, everyone I ask says that under- or over-watering would cause other signs before just wiping out the smell and potency of otherwise great looking plants, and nutes aren't a huge issue, if you're using a good ph/ppm, so the only thing it could be is genetics, but even that is grudgingly accepted, not proclaimed as a sure thing. One guy did say he had the same issue before he pheno-hunted.
Anyways, I've got the clones from my buddy, and I got a $50 pack of 10 reg seeds from another grow store. The guy there and a couple customers were all in my little help session, and say these are great seeds. So I got a 10-pack of some that have a bit of do-si-dos in them, which was something I really liked smoking. I'm gonna pop all of them, along with 4 freebies, check for males, and send all the girls to flower after taking a clones from each. In the meantime, I'll be cloning the plants that my buddy swears by, and those will be in the same run. Hopefully something will be impressive.
My buddy also said to ideally ditch the LEDs for HPS, like
@Noone32 said, but I just spent close to $2000 on these lights a year ago, after researching which ones were good. These have the same par value as the HPS, as far as my research showed, so what's so much better about HPS that it's worth tossing my current lights, and adding more heat to my grow, that then has to be dealt with? I still have a 600w HPS that I use to veg (I have to keep it at 75% dim, or it pops the fuse), but I really like how the mars hydro right next to it has performed all summer. What is the negative about LED? My reading says the main difference is HID spreads wider, while LED penetrates deeper, but that full-spectrum LEDs have just as good quality of light, and even starting to get extra boosts from ir, uv, etc.
As far as the watering, I think I went into pretty good detail of my watering technique in post #34 of this thread, in case you missed it. I used to be active in the Megacrop thread with Emilya. I've read Emilya's post, and others, and use them as a base for my watering regimen, but I seriously doubt many growers follow it to the letter, and most commercial facilities use automated systems that are unable to imitate this watering style, so while ideal under certain or maybe most conditions, I can't believe that a slight deviation could cause drastic effects. I'm looking to upgrade to a drip system once I can get a successful run, so what then?
At this point, after all the people I've asked, and all the feedback, I feel like it has to be the seeds. My bud is a big way off from what it should smell like, and it has to be a big mistake or a lot of little ones to make such an effect. Since not many and not very drastic changes are suggested in most cases, I think the only big thing to change is the foundation of it all, the seeds. I'll keep trying with the wetter and dryer watering, but I'm not expecting much to change until I get some new plants in there. I do have a few new strains going into the next run, in a couple weeks, but they were all bought from the same seedbank, and I only popped one seed of each, so I'm not counting on anything great.
